A Sentimental Bureaucrat: An Attempt at a Biography of the Soviet Scholar Viktor Kolbanovskii (1902-1970)

My research concentrates on Soviet psychologist and physician, Viktor Kolbanovskii (1902-1970). Finishing the famous Institute of Red Professors and working as a neurologist before World War II, Kolbanovskii began a staggering career in the Soviet academia. Starting his career as a neurologist, Kolbanovsky later wrote articles on the problems of school education, sex education for adolescents, the psychology of war, the psychology of religion, the social organization of propaganda and other topics. Disregarding his activities, heavily political in the 1930s, he was not persecuted during the Great Terror, and after the World War II he had access to international literature, could travel abroad and enjoyed institutional support. In my biographical sketch of his life, I consider the formation and work of Kolbanovsky through the perspective of institutional analysis, as well as analysis of the language of self-representation, which the scientist used in texts of various genres.