Nikolai Nikolayevich Volkov

Nikolai Nikolajewitsch Wolkow ( Russian: Николай Николаевич Волков ; * July 1904 in Simankowo , † March 7, 1953 in Lesnoi ) was a Soviet ethnologist and specialist in the seeds of the Kola Peninsula .

biography

Nikolai Volkov was born in 1904 into a poor farming family and grew up in the village of Simankowo in Kostroma County . He worked as a shepherd without attending school until he apprenticed to glassmakers and stove fitters as a teenager. When he was 16 years old, he attended the communist party school of the local district in Kostroma ( Russian Губернская советско-партийная школа ). After completing this training, Volkov entered the Communist Party of Russia in 1921 . From 1921 to 1922 he completed the nine-month training at the Communist Sverdlov University and then worked as a political agitator until 1926 : first at his former school in Kostroma, in 1923 he moved to Kiev and there until 1924 headed the club of party workers ( Russian клуб совпарработников ), and from 1924 to 1926 he was an agitator of the School for Political Education ( Russian школа политграмоты ) in Sevastopol . In 1926 Volkov was called up for military service. He served in the Baltic Red Banner Fleet and was stationed in Kronstadt (Russia) until 1930 .

In 1928, before the end of his military service, he was able to complete a distance learning course in ethnography at the Faculty of Geography at the Leningrad State University . A few years before him, his later colleague in the field of Sami studies , Vladimir Tscharnoluski , had studied at the same institute . Wolkow first specialized in the Eastern Slavs . After completing his studies and the end of his service in the fleet, Volkov stayed at the ethnographic department of the university and became a doctoral student with the religious scholar Nikolai Matorin . His aspiration was to do research on the Skopzen .

However, Wolkow left the university without a degree in 1931 "due to differences of opinion about the teaching methods". In the following years he served in the organs of the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) and taught at the Communist College for Political Education "NK Krupskaja" (today St. Petersburg State University for Art and Culture ).

In 1935 Volkov was dismissed from the service of the NKVD, and he took up a post at the European Department in the Leningrad branch of the Institute of Ethnography of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (today Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences “NN Miklucho-Maklai ") on. He became secretary of the Finno-Ugrist working group at the institute and did research on the seeds .

From July 25th to September 25th, 1935, he carried out his first field research on the seeds of the Kola Peninsula. The results of this research trip and the exhibits and other documents collected on it became the basis for a thematic collection on the "Building of Socialism on the Kola Peninsula". It opened at the State Museum of Ethnography (now the Russian Museum of Ethnography) in December 1935, on the anniversary of the death of Sergei Kirov , and Volkov became the head of that collection.

On July 16, 1937, coinciding with the planned end of his research work on the Sami in the USSR, the Institute of Ethnography terminated his employment with Volkov, and in the same year he was also expelled from the Communist Party. The official justification was "contact with the class enemy , alcohol abuse together with class enemies and dulling of Bolshevik vigilance towards the class enemy".

In 1941 Volkov joined the Red Army as a volunteer and went to the front. He was injured and spent almost four years in captivity. After his return he was admitted to the Institute for Ethnography again in 1945 and defended his dissertation there on January 7, 1947 with the title "The seeds of the USSR". But only a short time later, on November 7, 1947, Volkov was arrested and sentenced to 10 years in a camp for alleged "anti-Soviet activity".

Nikolai Volkov died on March 7, 1953 in a GULAG near the city of Lesnoi . He was posthumously rehabilitated on August 31, 1989.

plant

The sources describe Volkov as a very good field researcher, and especially his work on the seeds of the Kola Peninsula is of great importance for further research. But both his research on the seeds, as well as his earlier started research on the Skopzen, has only been used since the 1990s, i. H. long after Volkov's death, received internationally.

Finno-Ugric Studies

Although the staunch communist Volkov actively campaigned both for scientific progress and for the improvement of the social situation of the Sami and their integration into Soviet society, his work suffered from the political repression of the Stalin era as early as the 1930s . Later imprisonment in the camp not only led to the researcher's early death. Volkov's condemnation as an "enemy of the state" also prevented the scientific reception of important research results. His monograph in Sami ethnology could not be published during Volkov's lifetime.

In addition to the Sami studies, Volkov also contributed to the ethnological research on the Wepsen and other Baltic Sea women as well as other minority cultures in the Soviet Union.

Skopzen

With research on the religious sect of the Skopzen, Volkov began his career as a researcher. His scientific supervisor, Nikolai Matorin, fell victim to the Stalin terror and was executed in 1936. Therefore, Volkov could not defend his planned dissertation on the Skopzen, which had already been positively assessed.

Fonts (selection)

• 1930. Sekta skoptsov ("The sect of the Skopzen"). Leningrad
• 1937. Skoptschestvo i sterilisatsija ("Scopcentum and Sterilization"). Moscow
• 1995. La secte russe des castrats ("The Russian sect of the castrati"), trans. by Zoé Andreyev, ed. by Claudio Sergio Ingerflom. Paris 1995
• 1996. Rossijskie saamy. Istoriko-etnografitscheskie otscherki ("The Sami in Russia. Historical-ethnographic sketches"), ed. by Lars-Nila Lasku and Čuner Taksami. Kautokeino
• 1996. The Russian Saami. Historical ethnographic essays ("The Sami in Russia. Historical-ethnographic sketches"), trans. and ed. by Lars-Nila Lasku and Čuner Taksami. Kautokeino

literature

• Alexander M. Reshetov: Материалы к биобиблиографическому словарю российских этнографови антропологов. ХХ век . Saint Petersburg 2012, ISBN 978-5-02-038290-9 ( PDF [accessed March 24, 2016]).
• Leif Rantala: Saami studies: Russia / USSR . In: Ulla-Maija Kulonen (ed.): The Saami: a cultural encyclopaedia . Helsinki 2005, p. 363-365 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Nikolai Nikolajewitsch Wolkow in the catalog of the German National Library
• Volkov in the portal "Ethnography of the Peoples of Russia" (in Russian)
• "Volkov Nikolai Nikolajewitsch" in the lexicon "Kolski Sever" (in Russian)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Volkov in the portal "Ethnography of the Peoples of Russia" (in Russian)
2. ↑ Antonina M. Oranschireewa: Работа Академии наук СССР и социалистическое строительство на Кольском полуострове 1920–1935] [1920–1935] . Apatity 2008, p. ?? .
3. ↑ Laura Engelstein: Castration and the Heavenly Kingdom. A Russian folktale . Ithaca 1999, p. 218 .
4. ↑ Laura Engelstein: Castration and the Heavenly Kingdom. A Russian folktale . Ithaca 1999, p. 218 .