Yevgeny Tarle

Yevgeny Tarle

Yevgeny Viktorovich Tarle (Russian: Евгений Викторович Та́рле) (27 October 1874 in Kiev – 6 January 1955 in Moscow) was a Soviet historian and academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He is known for his books about Napoleon's invasion of Russia and on the Crimean War, and many other works. Yevgeny Tarle was one of the founders of the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, Russia's diplomatic university.

Tarle was a historian who lived and worked both under Tsarist and Soviet Regimes. He witnessed the whole period in which Stalin remained in power as the “General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee”. The Stalinist era had exceedingly strict ideological pressure on scholarly research in the Soviet Union in science, together with art, literature, education, and all other domains of human culture. Thus, it was inevitable for historians to face that pressure while doing their scholarly works. The secrecy of the regime made the historical study of the Soviet Union, especially Stalin and his era difficult. In the Stalin era the Party’s total control of archives, journals, publishing houses, historians’ appointments, and so on meant that scholarship was entirely subordinate to its whims and dictates. “History was the handmaiden of ideology and politics. The leader and his intimates could manipulate the historical record as it suited them in their struggle to gain and maintain power.” When the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917, Tarle was a successful historian at the University of Saint Petersburg.