Pivovarov Yuri Sergeevich was born on April 25, 1950 in Moscow. This academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences is best known as an outstanding historian and political scientist.
Biography
Yuri Pivovarov ( Russian by nationality) was educated at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO), graduating in 1972. In 1981, he became a candidate of historical sciences. The young specialist defended his thesis on the topic of socio-political organizations of workers in Germany. In 1995, Yuri Pivovarov - already a doctor of political sciences.
Since 25 years, the scientist has been working at INION - Institute of Scientific Information on Social Sciences. Pivovarov was the director of this institution in 1998 - 2015. At the same time, he headed the political science and legal department of the INION. The historian gives lectures at the Russian State Humanitarian University and Moscow State University.
Positions and Appointments
In 2001, Yuri Pivovarov was elected president of the Russian Academy of Political Sciences, the Russian Political Science Association . He also spent six years as chairman of the expert council of the Higher Attestation Commission of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation. At Moscow State University, the historian heads the department of comparative political science, which is part of the faculty of political science. He has not only the experience of a teacher, but also an effective manager.
In 2010 - 2012 Yuri Sergeyevich Pivovarov was a member of the Commission, which dealt with historical falsifications that were detrimental to Russia's interests. He also collaborates a lot with scientific journals (“Bulletin of the Archivist”, “Political Studies”, “Philosophical Sciences”).
Fire in INION
On the night of January 31, 2015, a terrible fire occurred in the INION library, which destroyed not only the building, but also a significant part of the library’s unique book fund. The President of the Institute at that time was Yuri Sergeyevich Pivovarov. The biography of the scientist and the head of scientific organizations and institutions in general is similar to the biographies of his colleagues, but the episode with the fire became a unique precedent for him.
The fire killed more than 5 million publications. Losses amounted to about 20% of the library fund, which was considered the heart of the country's humanitarian thought. RAS President Vladimir Fortov called the fire at INION "Chernobyl of Russian science." Because of what happened, Yuri Pivovarov was removed from the leadership of the Institute. In April 2015, leaving the presidency, he was appointed supervisor of INION.
Publications
From childhood, Yuri Sergeyevich Pivovarov, whose parents supported his interest in science, was interested in political science and history. As a professional scientist, in his work, in addition to these topics, he also addresses the issues of Russian statehood and the methodology of humanitarian knowledge. Yuri Pivovarov wrote more than 500 scientific papers. These include 8 on the account of monographs. A significant part of the work of the political scientist is devoted to Russia and Germany.
Also, most of Pivovarov’s research relates to the twentieth century in Russian history. This is due to the fact that in Russia during this period there was a real anthropological disaster. A huge number of people died. Revolution, war, famine - all this the scientist tries to comprehend and generalize in his works. He considers the terrible Soviet terror to be the most ambitious in the history of mankind along with the Khmer Rouge terror in Kampuchea.
Scientific style of the author
Russian thought and political culture are two key disciplines that Yuri Sergeyevich Pivovarov was engaged in and is engaged in. “Married” on theoretical and methodological issues, he does not touch much on specifics. Following the French historian Fernand Braudel, the author himself calls the facts "dust."
In posing questions and trying to answer them, Pivovarov turns to the creative heritage of Russian thinkers, justifying this by the fact that any national thought is a way and experience of collective self-knowledge. The scientist noted that the West is characterized by attention to epistemology and methodology, and in Russia - to historiosophical topics (topics of historical philosophy).
Russian thought
A significant part of the scientific activity of Yuri Pivovarov is connected with the study of the heritage of Russian public thinkers of the 20th century. In the nineties after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the lifting of ideological bans, it became possible to restore the intellectual, moral and aesthetic turn of Russian culture. Yuri Sergeyevich Pivovarov took up this task. The scientist’s family is from Moscow, and in the era of the USSR it was easier for him to get samizdat editions. Now, many forgotten essays have come from the special guards, and there has been unprecedented scope for work.
Soon, Yuri Pivovarov noted that the sudden appearance of a huge layer of literature had no effect on society. The work of the scientist "Russian Thought" is devoted to this problem. The author also called it "the experience of critical methodology." Pivovarov conducted his research on the example of the legacy of thinkers such as Boris Paramonov, Boris Groys, etc. The scientist identified several key problems of Russian thought. First of all, it is the desire of Russian philosophy to be original, using tools developed in the West. The presentation of the wrong requirements for Russian thinkers is another important paradox that Yuri Sergeyevich Pivovarov identified (photos of the scientist are presented in the article). Photographically, he noted the key contradictions of Russian sociology of the XX century.
State nature research
Yuri Pivovarov continuously connected Russian thought with the Russian government. On the pages of his scientific works, he proved and is proving that these two phenomena have related similarities. This feature in particular has led to the fact that our state has always been different from Western European states. The author raised this problem in his work “Russian Power and the Historical Types of its Understanding”.
In all the main languages of Europe, the term "state" means approximately the same thing: "state", "Staat", "stati", etc. It appeared relatively recently - four centuries ago. This happened after the European Reformation. Then came the “Constitutional state”, in which the choice of religion became the personal affair of each person. So the foundations of European democracy were born. The metaphysical and religious were moved beyond the social. This is due to the fact that the main subject in Western constitutions is a citizen, society and nation.
Pivovarov Yuri Sergeyevich biography, whose nationality and career were continuously connected with Russia, was able to formulate the main inconsistencies of the Russian state with the above European principles. There was no separation of the concepts of sovereignty and property. In Russia, in the 19th and 20th centuries, power was associated with the right of ownership to the whole country and its inhabitants. The key cataclysms of Russian history flowed from this, as well as tsarist despotism and Soviet totalitarianism. This is the key thesis of Pivovarov's scientific work on Russian statehood. For example, it can be traced in the author’s collection “The Last Death in Serious”.
The influence of fiction on politics
Studying the history of the Russian state and society, Pivovarov touched on the importance of fiction and philosophical literature in their formation. As an example, the scientist reevaluated the results of Leo Tolstoy's work. In his novel War and Peace, he created a new reality and personality types that ultimately determined a new perception of life in Russia in the second half of the 19th century. Tolstoy called the system of such artistic myths “real Tolstoyism” (as opposed to the religious teachings of the classic).
Fedor Dostoevsky is another myth-creator of this order, whose work was investigated by Yuri Sergeyevich Pivovarov. The "children" of the writer are his novels, and in them, among other things, the Russian revolution is predicted. We are talking about the "Brothers Karamazov" and "Demons." Pivovarov compared the characters of 1917 with the creation of the imagination of Dostoevsky.
The dependence of domestic policy on foreign
The bibliography of Yuri Pivovarov contains several works on the political culture of Russia (including the monograph Political Culture of Post-Reform Russia). This also includes lectures and journalism of the author. One of the key questions Pivovarov asks is the relationship between the external and internal dimensions of domestic politics.
For five centuries, Russia has steadily increased its territory, solving various global tasks (for example, the problem of access to the seas). The existence of many neighbors and opponents with common borders has led to regular wars in any historical era. Because of this, foreign policy has always strongly influenced and dominated domestic politics. This pattern has long interested Yuri Pivovarov, who devoted many pages of his research to it.
Denial of historical laws
Yuri Pivovarov considers the Russian political and legal culture to be “power-centric” (while, for example, the western one is “anthropocentric”). In Europe, everything starts from a person - there he remains the measure of all things. In Russia, power is at the center. This is a tradition. She can hide and mimic, but still remains in the public consciousness.
Interestingly, Yuri Pivovarov in his lectures denies the existence of solid historical laws that would be immutable truths. Instead, there are traditions. The difference is that the latter can change, since the historical process is open in its properties. Contrary to the laws of the Brewers, it also sets free human will. For example, it was the actions of people that led to the October Revolution in Russia (and not economic, social, and climatic conditions).
Power and church in Russia
The difference between the Russian state and the Western European Brewers also explains the medieval connection between Russia and Byzantium. Having adopted Orthodox Christianity from the Greeks, the Eastern Slavs cut themselves off from the rest of the Old World. First of all, they found themselves outside the Latin world, because church Latin served then as an instrument of interethnic and scientific communication.
The scientific activities of Yuri Pivovarov to some extent affect the topic of relations between the state and the church. The scientist believes that the question "who has the most resources" plays a decisive role in their correlation. In other words, whoever is more influential intervenes in the agenda of others. In Russia, in practice, this led to the fact that the state began to influence spiritual life. The Orthodox Church has never been so independent as, for example, the Catholic Church in the West. The fusion of spiritual and secular power influenced the further development of the institutions of Russian society.