Student in white Makintosh

Memory of Yuri Afanasyev

In Moscow, the founder of the Russian State Humanitarian University, Yuri Afanasyev, died. He was 81 years old. At the request of Medusa about Afanasyev, the director of the Institute of Eastern Cultures and Antiquities of the Russian State University, Professor Ilya Smirnov , tells.

Yuri Afanasyev is a historian and politician from perestroika. In 1986-1991 he headed the Moscow State Historical and Archival Institute. In the 1980s, Afanasyev sharply criticized Soviet power and the situation in historical science. In 1991, he was elected People's Deputy of the RSFSR; Two years later, he resigned his authority and left politics. The RSUSU was founded by Afanasyev on the basis of the Historical and Archive Institute in March 1991. He led them until 2003, and then transferred the post of rector Leonid Nevzlin, who, because of the Yukos case, worked in this position for less than a year.

Now, barely became known about his departure, it is impossible to write a deeply thought -out suspended portrait of this outstanding person - this is a matter of the future, possibly very distant. Today you can afford only a runaway sketch, a preliminary study.

He was a major person - and outwardly, and in actions and in the plans. In many respects, he was not like the people of his generation, first of all, an infrequent combination of a figure and thinker. Hoolery, some kind of natural bangbug, unknown from this provincial, a post-war student. Laughing at himself, he once told how he appeared to the Komsomol leader at the taiga youth construction site in white Macintosh and the capital's pins, tightly seized by the very first mud puddle. In general, in recent years, he often returned to his Komsomol youth in conversations, did not judge anything and, simply tried to understand that in his thoughts on the slope of days he originated in that Siberian youth.

The oratorical gift of Yuri Nikolayevich was endowed with nature. His amazing ability to speak in crowded meetings was not killed by empty Komsomol rallies, unlikely to require an excess of rhetorical talents, but the clarity of thought, the clarity of the word, perhaps, were required there.

In the scientific council of the Russian State University, listening, as the rector’s speech, fearlessly branching, hopelessly removes from the original premise, one could experience physical pleasure from the most difficult mental and verbal spiral, which was invariably returning to the starting point. It is easy to guess what impression the performances of Yun made against the backdrop of the wretched tongue of Soviet bons - party and Komsomol.

He versed in people, saw the flaws of their characters, mind, professional qualities, but knew how to put up with inevitable human imperfection, rarely appeared to the Barsky burrows, holding it under the rear of it. That is why Russian State University is the same as it is. Afanasyev built it as an embodied dream of ideal education with a radiant peak - the Institute of Higher Humanitarian Research: S. Averintsev, V. Toporov, P. Ginter, M. Gasparov - but also with ordinary teachers, good only in the profession by ordinary, or even moral qualities not shining.

The story with the advent of Yukos to the university crushed him. There are many riddles in this story, and here there is no place to solve them. Only once, not responding to a reproach, to a slight bewilderment, he said: “I went to the presidential administration to Voloshin, he approved. Where is it higher? " And in fact, as now, wherever you go, the result would be the same.

Fly, Yun and I have been familiar from the late 1980s, when he began to organize public lectures in historical and archive. Closer I recognized him after I came to him with colleagues in the department of comparative cultural studies of the Institute of Oriental Studies in the spring of 1994 to propose to arrange an oriental department at the RSUSU. The decision was made in a few minutes: to create an institute of oriental cultures at the university, to hire us all to work.

In recent years, they occasionally met in his country house. They argued hoarsely. He was deprived of the opportunity to act. But his thought longing for a dispute, the exchange of opinions, was passionate and preferential.

He left, not thinking, having disarmed, leaving us his insights and guesses for thought.