The Passing of Istpart and Professional Civility

THE DEMISE OF ISTPART’S DUAL mission preceded the agency’s own disappearance into the Lenin Institute. Some locals remained, but for the most part, they resembled what they had been, a mere shadow of the center’s grand plans. Many, including Viatka’s local, ceased to exist. Their end signified the mortality of scholarly standards and professional civility throughout Soviet academic life. The fragile nature of both was already apparent. At Istpart, the traditional canon of scholarship and professional decorum were threatened from the agency’s founding. Ol’minsky and Nevsky had an antagonistic relationship, some historians behaved badly in the spat over Trotsky’s “Lessons