Leonid Mikhailovich Kapterev (5 [17] April 1884, settlement of the Nyazepetrovsk Plant, Perm Governorate — date of death unknown) was a historian and local historian, a specialist in the history of the Urals and the Nizhny Novgorod Region, and a prominent figure in Nizhny Novgorod local studies of the 1930s–1940s.[1]

Life and Education

He was born into the family of a forestry official. Kapterev's father, Mikhail Nikolaevich (1841–1914), worked as a forest surveyor, and after the family's move to Yekaterinburg, in the forest administration of the Yekaterinburg Mining District; his mother, Lyudmila Aleksandrovna (1855–1927), was occupied with raising children and running the household.[2] In addition to Leonid, the family included four brothers — Alexander, Konstantin, Nikolai, and Veniamin — and a sister, Lidiya. He received his early education at the Perm Theological Seminary. In 1908 he graduated from the Moscow Archaeological Institute with the title of Scholarly Archaeologist.[1]

From 1909 to 1931 he worked at various institutions in Yekaterinburg: he was actively engaged in studying the Urals, participated in research expeditions, and was a member of the Ural Society of Natural Science Enthusiasts. His acquaintance with Modest Onisimovich Kler, keeper of the museum of the Ural Society of Natural Science Enthusiasts, proved to be the starting point for Kapterev's serious pursuit of local history; his first literary works, inspired by the study of the history and culture of the Urals, were published in 1916–1918.[3] He was the initiator and organizer of the founding of a local history museum in Verkhoturye. All his free time he devoted to self-education, archival research, and travels around the country. Ural local historian V. Biryukov called him an "incorrigible local historian."[1]

Scholarly Works

Kapterev was among the first researchers of the "Dubinshchina" — an uprising of bonded peasants of the Dolmatov Uspensky Monastery in Perm Governorate. The significance of his work was recognized at the all-Union level: in the second edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, the article on "Dubinshchina" lists his historical essay on the uprising as the sole cited source on the subject.[1]

The Nizhny Novgorod Period

In December 1931 Kapterev moved to Nizhny Novgorod — his wife Maria Nikolaevna's hometown. On the advice of historian V. T. Illarionov, with whom he had been corresponding, he approached the Nizhny Novgorod District Geological Prospecting Trust and obtained the position of head of the planning department. In his new posting he turned his attention to local history centered on Gorky–Nizhny Novgorod and became an active participant in a number of scholarly, educational, and public-enlightenment organizations engaged in studying the history, geology, and archaeology of the region. During the Nizhny Novgorod period Kapterev held in succession the posts of academic secretary of the Gorky Institute of Local History and then head of the bibliographic department and history room of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism (1933–1936). Over fifteen years of work in the Nizhny Novgorod Region, Kapterev published the monographs Nedra Gorkovskogo Kraya [The Mineral Wealth of Gorky Region] (1932) and Volga [The Great Volga] (1933), the books V Sinegorskikh Lesakh [In the Sinegorsk Forests] (1934) and The City of Gorky [The City of Gorky] (1934), the historical-economic study Nizhegorodskoye Povolzhye v X–XVI vv. [The Nizhny Novgorod Volga Region in the 10th–16th Centuries] (1939), as well as the articles "Nizhegorodsky Kray pri Petre I" [The Nizhny Novgorod Region under Peter I] (1940) and "Nizhegorodskoye Namestnichestvo" [The Nizhny Novgorod Viceroyalty] (1941).[3][3][1]

In 1946 Kapterev was arrested by the NKVD. His final public appearance was a Nizhny Novgorod Fair delivered at the second municipal scholarly-pedagogical conference "The City of Gorky in the Past and Present" (1946), held to mark the 725th anniversary of the city's founding; by that same time he had completed the second part of his study on the history of the Nizhny Novgorod Volga Region — covering the period from the 18th century to the late 1850s — but did not live to see it published. The arrest took place on 5 June 1946: Kapterev was charged with making anti-Soviet statements about the measures of the VKP(b) and the Soviet government and with "slandering the leaders of the Party and the state"; he was placed in the internal prison of the Directorate of the Ministry of State Security.[3][3] At the time of his arrest, his diaries, personal notes, memoirs, and personal library were confiscated; they were not appended to the materials of the investigation file and have not survived to the present day. This has substantially hampered the study of his biography.[1]

Archival Legacy

Documents relating to the life and work of Kapterev are held in several collections of the Central Archive of the Nizhny Novgorod Region (TsANO): in the collection of personal-origin funds (F. R-5861), the fund of local history organizations of Gorky Region (F. R-993), the fund of the Gorky State Geological Administration (F. R-2305), the funds of political-educational institutions (F. R-2394), the Ministry of Education and Science of Nizhny Novgorod Region (F. R-2732), the Nizhny Novgorod State Regional Universal Scientific Library (F. R-2741), and the fund of the KGB Directorate for Gorky Region (F. R-2209). Among the surviving materials are an autobiography, several photographs, a family photograph with his wife and son Vsevolod, and individual letters.[1]

Sources

  1. opentextnn.ru — Zarubina L.V. "An Incorrigible Local Historian": Documents on the Life and Work of L.M. Kapterev in the Collections of TsANO — OPEN TEXT
  2. tagil-press.ru — KAPTEREV LEONID MIKHAILOVICH — URAL LOCAL HISTORIAN AND WRITER — Kapterev's father, Mikhail Nikolaevich (1841–1914), worked as a forest surveyor, and after the family's move to Yekaterinburg (archive)
  3. kray.yugovalib.ru — KAPTEREV LEONID MIKHAILOVICH — His acquaintance with Modest Onisimovich Kler, keeper of the museum of the Ural Society of Natural Science Enthusiasts, proved to be the starting point for Kapterev's… (archive)