Editor of the “Russia” magazine. Biography of I.G. Lezhnev – archival documents and publications

The article considers the archival materials and printed sources related to the major milestones of the professional biography of I.G. Lezhnev, the writer and editor of the “Russia” magazine. Ideological work of I.G. Lezhnev in the first part of the 1920s connected with the issuing of «Russia» – the magazine which belonged to «SmenaVekh» ideological project can be understood through his publications in this magazine, his letters to N.V. Ustryalov published by

M.S. Agurskii, as well as through the resources in the Russian archives. The sequence of events that ended up in the closure of the “Russia” magazine and in deporting its editor, I.G. Lezhnev, “beyond the boundaries of the USSR” are revealed in the documents stored in the funds of the Russian State Archives of the Social and Political History and the Central Archives of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation. Having researched the information found in the documents of the I.G. Lezhnev’s fund in the Russian State Archives of Literature and Art, the author of the present article reviews the professional duties of I.G. Lezhnev – the staff member of the Trade Mission of the USSR in Berlin.

The article reviews the sources describing I.G. Lezhnev’s return from Germany to the USSR, the essential role of his ‘extended membership application’ for joining the Party, his autobiographical and repenting “Notes of a Contemporary” which in many ways have become life-defining for their author; much attention is also drawn to his work in the ‘Pravda’ newspaper and other milestones of his life. The present paper has, for the first time, scrutinized the documents from the private collections, connected with the publication of Lezhnev’s “Notes of a Contemporary” in the USSR.

1. Agurskii, M.S. (1980), Ideologiya natsional-bol’shevizma [Ideology of national Bolshevism], YMCA-PRESS, Paris, France.

2. Agurskii, M.S. (1981), “Correspondence of I. Lezhnev and N. Ustryalov”, Slavica Hierosolymitana: Slavic studies of the Hebrew University, vol. V-VI. Jerusalem, Israel.

3. Kvakin, A.V. (2006), Меmezhdu belymi i krasnymi. Russkaya intelligtntsiya 1920– 1930 godov v poiskakh Tret’ego Puti [Between white and red. Russian intelligentsia in the 1920s and 1930s in search of the Third Way], Tsentrpoligraf, Moscow, Russia.

4. Shestov, L. (2000), “Apotheosis of groundlessness: (Experience of adogmatic thinking)”, Apofeoz bespochvennosti, AST, Moscow, Russia.