Kushner, Pavel

(also P. I. Knyshev). Born Jan. 14 (26), 1889, in Grodno; died Mar. 14, 1968, in Moscow. Soviet government and party official; scholar in ethnography, doctor of history (1947), professor (1959). Became a member of the Communist Party in 1905.

Until 1917, Kushner engaged in party work in Grodno, Riga, and Moscow and was repeatedly arrested. In the February and October revolutions of 1917, he was a member of the Moscow Military Revolutionary Committee and of the Executive Committee of the Moscow Soviet. In the Civil War he fought in Middle Asia, serving as chief of the political department of the Turkestan Front in 1920. In following years Kushner held party and government posts and was a teacher, becoming associated with the Institute of Ethnography of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in 1944.

Kushner studied problems of general ethnography, ethnic geography, the ethnography of the Slavs, and the socialist restructuring of the mode of life and the culture of the peoples of the USSR. For the first time in world science, he worked out the principles for making maps of the features of material culture in their historical development. He was awarded the Order of Lenin, the Order of the Red Star, and medals.