Yuri Afanasiev

Yury Nikolayevich Afanasyev (also spelled Yuri Afanasiev; ; 5 September 1934 – 14 September 2015) was a Soviet/Russian historian and one of the leaders of Russia's democratic movement in the late 1980s - early 1990s. He was also the rector of the Moscow State Institute of History and Archives which he transformed in 1991 into the Russian State University of Humanities (RSUH) and led until 2003, making it into one of Russia's most internationally prominent educational institutions. Biography Born in a village in the Volga region, Yury Afanasyev graduated from the history department of the Moscow State University (1957) and defended his kandidat and doktor (doctoral and post-doctoral) dissertations in French historiography, specializing in the Annales school. He did a part of his postdoc studies in Sorbonne in the 1970s. In between his studies, he worked as a Komsomol functionary in Siberia (near Krasnoyarsk) and later as a professor and a dean at the Komsomol educational institution. Since 1983, he was a member of the editorial board of the CPSU magazine, 'Kommunist'. In 1986, he was appointed rector of the Moscow State Institute of History and Archives. During Gorbachev's perestroika, Afanasyev gained prominence as a major critic of the officially accepted narrative of Soviet history, especially of the Stalin era. In March 1989 he was elected from a single-mandate district in the Moscow region to the USSR's newly created legislature, the Congress of People's Deputies. He became widely known for his speeches in one of which he lambasted the Congress' "aggressively submissive majority", as he called it (an expression that became one of the catchphrases of this period). In June 1989, along with Boris Yeltsin, Andrei Sakharov, and other members of Congress, he launched an opposition faction within it, called The Inter-Regional Group of Deputies, and was elected one of its five co-chairs.