Berelowitch A., Nikulin A.M. “My constant desire is to establish relations between the cultures of France and Russia ...” // The Russian Peasant Studies. 2019. V.4. №4. P. 96-114.

DOI: 10.22394/2500-1809-2019-4-4-96-114

Annotation

In his interview, the French researcher Alexis Berelowitch considers his Russian family roots and the desire to combine French and Russian cultures in his life through different types of cooperation in the Russian and French historical-sociological projects. He first visited Russia as a teenager in a Moscow pioneer camp in the late 1950s, then he worked as a young volunteer teacher of French at the Minsk State Pedagogical Institute of Foreign Languages in the late 1960s, and after that he chose the key topic of his research—the development of the nationalist trend among village-writers in the Soviet Union. Since perestroika Berelowitch has participated in Russian-French scientific projects of sociologists who studied the transformations of public opinion under the collapse of the USSR, and in Russian-French scientific projects of historians who studied the early Soviet period of the agrarian history of the 1920s—1930s. Alexis Berelowitch made a great contribution to the development of cultural and scientific relations between France and Russia as a cultural attaché of the French Embassy in the mid-1990s and as a director of the French Scientific Center in Moscow (2002-2006). The interview pays special attention to his personal memories of such remarkable researchers of the Russian peasantry as Basile Kerblay, Moshe Levin, Viktor Danilov and Teodor Shanin.

Keywords

Peasant Studies, perestroika, Russia, USSR, France, university science, Kerblay, Levin, Danilov, Shanin

About the authors

Alexis Berelowitch, University Paris — Sorbonne (Paris IV). France, Paris-5, Rue VictorCousin, 1.
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Alexander M. Nikulin, PhD (Economics), Head of the Center for Agrarian Studies, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration; Head of the Chayanov Research Center, Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences. 119571, Moscow, Vernadskogo Prosp, 82.
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