Erusalimskii, Arkadii Samsonovich

Born May 19 (June 1), 1901, in Bykhov, in present-day Mogilev Oblast, Byelorussian SSR; died Nov. 30, 1965, in Moscow. Soviet historian and publicist. Doctor of historical sciences (1948). Member of the CPSU from 1938.

From 1925 to 1941, Erusalimskii was a senior researcher at the Institute of International Economics and Politics, and from 1945, at the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. He also served as a professor at the Institute of the Red Professoriat (1930–32), the Moscow Institute of History, Philosophy, and Literature (1932–39), the Higher Diplomatic School (1939–41), and the history department of Moscow State University (1944–56). During the Great Patriotic War (1941–45) he headed the foreign department of the newspaper Krasnaia zvezda. In his writings, the more important of which have been translated into many foreign languages, he unmasked the aggressive essence of German imperialism. Erusalimskii actively supported close cooperation between scholars in the USSR and the German Democratic Republic (GDR). He was the first chairman of the Soviet section of the Commission of Historians of the USSR and the GDR, as well as a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the GDR (1956). In 1950 he was awarded the State Prize of the USSR.