Polevoy started his teaching career in February 1944, teaching history first at Sverdlovsk School of Music, and later at the History Department of Ural State University. In October 1945 Boris Polevoy was finally able to enter graduate school at the History Department of Leningrad University, working on a dissertation on the history of the US foreign policy in the mid-19th century, and teaching classes at his department. His advisor was the famous Russian historian Yevgeny Tarle.ĭuring the campaign against the " rootless cosmopolitans" in 1949 he was accused by the university ideologists of designing his US history course in a politically inappropriate way, and being influenced by "American capitalist literature", and fired from the department. He was sick and unemployed for a long time, re-entering gainful employment only in November 1952, when the Soviet Navy's Office of Naval History ( исторический отдел Главного штаба ВМС) hired him as a senior researcher. But he lost that job too, when the entire Navy Ministry was abolished in 1953. It was then, in 1953, that the unemployed historian started conducting research of his own in Russian archives, studying the history of Russia's expansion into the Pacific Region - the provinces now commonly known as the Russian Far East - during the 17th through 19th centuries. It remained the area of his interests for the rest of his research career. The next year (1954), he became affiliated with the Russian Geographical Society - an affiliation which also continued to be important for him for the rest of his life.ī.P. dissertation only many years later, after which (in 1970) he was invited to join the Leningrad Branch of the N. Miklukho-Maklai Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the USSR Academy of Sciences. The years of his work at the institute, which lasted until his retirement in 1997, were the most stable and productive period of his career.
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