Oleg Budnitskiy

Oleg Vitalyevich Budnitsky (born 27 May 1954, Rostov-on-Don) is a Soviet and Russian historian specializing in Russian history of the second half of the 19th and 20th centuries. He holds a Doctor of Historical Sciences degree, is a professor, director of the International Center for the History and Sociology of World War II and Its Consequences at the Higher School of Economics, and a member of the European Academy (Academy of Europe, since 2012). In 1976, he graduated from the Pedagogical Institute in Rostov-on-Don with a degree in history. In 1988, he completed postgraduate studies at the Institute of the History of the USSR of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, specializing in historiography, source studies, and methods of historical research. In 1989, he defended his Candidate of Sciences dissertation at the same institute, “The History of the Study of the ‘People’s Will’ in the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries,” and in 1998, his doctoral dissertation, “Terrorism in the Russian Liberation Movement: Ideology, Ethics, Psychology (Second Half of the 19th — Early 20th Centuries).”

Since 1998, he has been a leading research fellow at the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He is a full professor at the Faculty of Humanities of the Higher School of Economics (2014).

Since 2013, he was a member of the expert council on history of the Higher Attestation Commission of the Russian Ministry of Education and Science. On 23 October 2017, he left the council after the presidium of the Higher Attestation Commission recommended not depriving Russian Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinsky of the degree of Doctor of Historical Sciences, despite the negative opinion of the expert council. In Budnitsky’s view, the presidium’s decision created “a dangerous situation for the further development of [Russian] science.”

He is the academic director of the International Center for the History and Sociology of World War II and Its Consequences, director of the International Research Center for Russian and East European Jewry, editor-in-chief of the annual “Archive of Jewish History” (since 2004), editor (together with Prof. T.