Professor of the Kuibyshev Planning Institute Vasily Lvovich Pogodin: materials for the biography

The paper is based on archival materials about the activities of the Kuibyshev Planning Institute of the 1930s. It reconstructs the biography of the Russian and Soviet diplomat, military and academic of the first third of the 20^th century, Vasily Lvovich Pogodin (1870 – after 1937). The study reveals a set of documentary evidence on the diplomatic and pedagogical career of V. Pogodin in the first years of the Soviet power, and determines the features of his pedagogical and party activities in Kuibyshev in 1933–1937. The author highlights a special role of the Planning Institute party committee materials as well as the high school workers trade union in the reconstruction of Pogodin’s biography. The paper emphasizes that Pogodin was considered to be one of the best lecturers of the Kuibyshev Planning Institute and a credible party worker. It is noted that his noble origin, service in the tsarist army and membership in the party of the Social Revolutionaries until 1937 were not the reason for penalties or prosecution by the party or the university administration. As a result, the author concludes that the fate of Vasily Lvovich Pogodin shows an extraordinary character of his personality. He made a brilliant military career in the years of the late Russian empire and became a major general of the Russian imperial army. Then he managed to integrate into the new Soviet system, radically changing the sphere of his activity and having achieved no less outstanding results in diplomacy and education. He became the plenipotentiary representative of the Far Eastern Republic in China, the director of a number of educational and cultural institutions of the Far East, then a professor of political economy in Kuibyshev.