Academician A.M. Pankratova’s Leningrad lectures through the question notes written by her audience (Leningrad, March 1956)

ed. with preface and comment. by Andrey L. Yurganov

Abstract

This publication introduces a part of the original question notes written by the audience of Pankratova’s lectures. These lectures were given in Leningrad in March 1956 one month after the XXth Party Congress. The question notes are kept in Pankratova’s per­sonal collection in the Academy of Sciences Archive. The previous 2006 publication of these notes in the journal Questions of History, unfortunately, was not based the originals. The issues in that publication were artificially brought together under different headings in a way that does not allow for a reconstruction of any “first reaction”. The question notes presented here are the ones that Pankratova saved for herself. She selected these notes in order to understand the main questions of historical scholarship that she would have to answer in the near future as part of her preparation for a major conference dedi­cated to the 40th anniversary of the October Revolution, where Pankratova was listed as the chair of the organizing committee. This event could be the highest point of her career. It is hard to overestimate the significance of these notes. They are a unique source that it provides information about the attitude of the Soviet intelligentsia immediately after the Congress, and in fact is the first sociological survey of the Thaw, which had already begun by that time.