Veselovskii, Boris

Born June 22 (July 4), 1880, in the village of Bobylevka, in present-day Saratov Oblast; died May 28, 1954, in Moscow. Soviet historian of the zemstvo (provincial and district self-government) and of agrarian relations, specialist in the history and economics of municipal economy and in regional studies. Born into a noble family.

While Veselovskii was a student at the Moscow Higher Technical School, he joined the Social Democrats. Beginning in 1905 he was a researcher, instructor, and publicist. The most important of Veselovskii’s works on the history of local self-government is History of the Zemstvo Over Forty Years (vols. 1-4, 1909-11). After the October Revolution, Veselovskii worked in the Central Archive Administration, in the USSR Gosplan (State Planning Commission), and in other agencies; from the 1920’s through the 1940’s he was a professor at Moscow University (from 1927) and an instructor at the S. Ordzhonikidze Moscow Institute of Engineering and Economics. Veselovskii elaborated questions of the economics of the Soviet municipal economy.