Lukin, Nikolai Mikhailovich

(pseudonym, N. Antonov). Born July 8 (20), 1885; died July 19, 1940. Soviet historian; academician of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1929). Member of the Communist Party from 1904. Born in Kuskovo (now within the city limits of Moscow); son of an elementary school teacher.

Lukin graduated from Moscow University in 1909 and began teaching there in 1915. He took part in organizing the Bolshevik newspaper Nash put’ in Moscow in 1913. After the February Revolution of 1917 he was a member of the editorial board of the Bolshevik newspaper Sotsial-demokrat. He resumed teaching in October 1918, first at Moscow University, then at the Academy of the General Staff and the Institute of the Red Professoriat. In 1925 he became one of the founders of the Society of Marxist Historians. From 1932 to 1936 he was director of the Institute of History of the Communist Academy, and from 1936 to 1938 he was director of the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. From 1933 to 1938 he was editor in chief of the journal Istorik-marksist.

His main works were devoted to the Great French Revolution (particularly the class struggle in the French countryside during the years of the Jacobin dictatorship) and the Paris Commune of 1871 (the monograph The Paris Commune came out in four editions, and Lukin made use of an entire new group of sources to improve each). A number of his works deal with the era of imperialism and the international workers’ movement of this period (Essays on the Modern History of Germany, 1890-1914, 1925, and others). In 1923 he published the first Marxist textbook on modern history for higher schools (Modern History of Western Europe, 2nd ed., 1925).