Б. А. Энгельгардт и судьба его воспоминаний. 1940-е – 1960-е гг.
Boris Engelhardt and his Memoirs. 1940–1960

Summary/Abstract: On materials from the Department of Manuscripts of the National Library of Russia, this article examines the 1940s life of a significant person from the beginning of twentieth century, B. Engelhardt. Prior to 1917, Engelhardt was known as an experienced military commander, and as a member of State Duma of the Russian Empire and the General Command of the Defense. During the February Revolution he became one of the most important people of Petrograd for a few days as he held the position of city Commandant in the revolutionary capital. In the years of the Russian Civil War he fought for Whites and then fled the country with Wrangel in 1920. As World War II began, he refused to leave independent Latvia, where he had lived with his wife for a few years. With the Soviet invasion, Engelhardt thus returned to his homeland, where he was immediately jailed and then sent into to exile. Only in 1947 was he allowed to return to Riga. To support himself and his wife, he worked anywhere he could. The couple still did not have enough money, and they were refused in state pension. Despite this, Engelhardt did not fall into despair; he worked until he was eighty years old. In the 1940s, he began to write his memoirs. These include a detailed, second part entitled “Revolution and Counterrevolution”, which he tried to publish in one of the history journals for the anniversary of the October Revolution. The article examines two typewritten versions of his memoirs and several handwritten drafts of single chapters, which show how carefully Engelhardt edited their text over some twenty years. His memoirs in their entirety were never published during his lifetime; only fragments were published in several issues of the "Voenno-Istoricheskiy journal" (Journal of Military History) in 1964.

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