Abstract

Despite a substantial body of scholarship on Lomonosov Moscow State University during the Great Patriotic War, significant gaps remain in our understanding of its institutional functioning under wartime conditions. This is largely due to a historiographical emphasis on the military service and personal sacrifice of MSU faculty, staff, and students, while the university as an institution has rarely been examined in its own right. The exceptional conditions of wartime transformed relations both within MSU and across the wider system of higher education administered by the People's Commissariat for Education, as institutions were dissolved, merged, and reorganized. They also altered the university's relationship with state authorities, particularly through the mobilization of students into the people's militia, the Red Army, and the labor front. These changes prompted the creation of new administrative posts, including special representatives appointed by the rector and individual faculties, as well as new organizational units within MSU, and generated a distinctive body of wartime documentation. The article draws on archival materials from two repositories — the MSU Archive and the Central State Archive of Moscow — documenting the activities of Moscow State University and the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature, and History (MIFLI) between 1941 and 1945. It also makes use of wartime issues of the newspaper Moskovskii universitet (Moscow University). Taken together, these sources shed new light on the activities of individual members of the university community as well as entire MSU departments and administrative units during the Great Patriotic War. In particular, the archival evidence calls into question the view, well established in memoir literature, that the MSU administration lacked direction and that its actions were poorly coordinated. A memorandum prepared by acting rector B.P. Orlov in early 1942 indicates that the university maintained careful records of the whereabouts of its faculty, staff, and students. The evacuation and subsequent re-evacuation were likewise carried out in an orderly and coordinated manner. The loss of a portion of the university's wartime records was due not to administrative negligence, but to a fire in the building occupied by MSU in Sverdlovsk. The article also presents preliminary results of the interfaculty research project MSU during the Great Patriotic War: New Discoveries, initiated by the MSU Rectorate in 2025.