Aleksandr Vladlenovich Shubin

Academic background

Aleksandr Vladlenovich Shubin was born in Moscow on 18 July 1965. He studied at the Moscow State Lenin Pedagogical Institute from 1982, completed conscript service in the Air Force in 1984–1985 while still a student, and graduated in 1989. From 1989 to 1992 he was a postgraduate researcher at the Institute of World History of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, later the Russian Academy of Sciences. In 1993 he defended his candidate dissertation under Ya. S. Drabkin, and in 2000 he took his doctorate with a dissertation on the anarchist social experiment in Ukraine and Spain. He has worked at the Institute of World History since 1992, headed its Center for the History of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus in 2001–2015, and has been its chief research fellow since 2015. He has also taught at the State Academic University for the Humanities since 2003 and at the Russian State University for the Humanities since 2007. His research fields are the history of revolutionary processes, socialist thought, communist and anarchist movements, Soviet history, twentieth-century international relations, historical methodology and futurology.

Late-Soviet informal left movement

After leaving the army in 1985 Shubin joined the socialist movement, and in 1986 he was one of the founders of an informal neo-Narodnik circle and a co-author of the current of thought later known as 'communal socialism'. On 8 May 1987 he became one of the founders of the historical-political club Obshchina, served on the editorial board of its journal and was a leading contributor. In 1988 he sat on the coordination council of the Federation of Socialist Social Clubs, took part in organizing the first large democratic rallies on Pushkin Square and the Moscow Popular Front, and was detained by the police in that activity. From 1989 to 1999 he was a member of the Confederation of Anarcho-Syndicalists, and in 1991 he served on its federal council.

Political activity in the 1990s

In August 1991 he helped build the barricades around the White House, sharply criticized the Yeltsin regime from 1992, and in 1993 spoke on 'Radio-parliament' in defense of the White House. He was co-chairman of the Green Party in March 1990 and of the Russian Green Party in 1991–1999. He joined the Social-Ecological Union in August 1992 and sat on its council in 1992–1994, and at the June 1993 Constitutional Conference he secured environmental-rights provisions and advocated limiting presidential power, equality of federal subjects, and the abolition of the death penalty. In 1991–1997 he worked as an observer and editor for the trade-union paper Solidarnost, and from May 1997 to July 1998 he was an adviser to First Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov. His academic and advisory roles include responsible secretary of the journal Istoricheskoye prostranstvo of the Association of Historians of CIS countries, membership of the Russian–Ukrainian historians' commission from 2001 and the Russian–Latvian commission from 2011, and editorship of the Sovetskiye issledovaniya site from 2008.

From the 2000s onward

In 2005 he was elected to the Federal Political Council of the Union of Greens of Russia, and that year he called for a 'Soviet revival' at the Russian Social Forum. From 2004 he was a coordinator of the 'Informatsional' community and wrote its manifesto. He was a member of the Moscow Council in 2008–2010 and of the Left Front Council in 2009–2014; within the Left Front he sat on the Executive Committee from January to September 2013 and was its coordinator from June to September 2013, stepped down from those posts on 14 September 2013 citing the burden of his academic work, and left the Left Front on 1 March 2015. In 2011–2012 he also took part in the federal convention of the Pirate Party of Russia.

Analysis of the Soviet dissolution

In the debate over the causes of the Soviet collapse Shubin treats both the conspiracy account and the inevitability account as extremes. He lists socio-economic crisis, ethnic conflicts and foreign-policy problems among the objective factors, but stresses that ethnic conflicts unfolded mainly on the periphery, whereas the question of dissolution was decided in December 1991 in the Moscow–Kyiv–Minsk triangle. Peripheral ethnic conflicts could have contracted the state's territory but not produced complete disintegration, so the causes must be sought in the territorial core and in subjective factors, the actions of political figures and organizations. In a 2021 interview with Istoricheskaya Ekspertiza he formulated the dissolution as the result not of an anti-nomenklatura revolution but of its incompleteness and inconsistency; that formulation served as the interview's title.