Abstract

The article highlights the contribution of Lomonosov Moscow State University to the advancement of Soviet scholarship and higher education during the 1950s and 1960s. It examines previously underexplored aspects of the University's academic life in this period, including the activities of its dissertation councils. Produced within the framework of the federal historical and patriotic project People's Commissars of the Great Victory, the study seeks to contribute to a scholarly biography of the "commander-in-chief of the financial front", Arseny Grigorievich Zverev (1900–1969), an eminent Soviet statesman who headed the country's financial administration for more than two decades as People's Commissar and subsequently Minister of Finance of the USSR. In order to broaden and update the agenda of Russian historical and biographical studies, the article sets out to illuminate both insufficiently researched and hitherto entirely unexplored episodes in Zverev's life and career, substantiating them with reliable and carefully verified historical evidence. Particular attention is devoted to Zverev's preparation and defence of his doctoral dissertation at Moscow State University in 1959. The article demonstrates that this event provided an important impetus for his subsequent scholarly and teaching activities at the Institute of Economics of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the All-Union Correspondence Institute of Finance and Economics. The study argues that A.G. Zverev, a prominent Soviet statesman, a notable representative of the first generation of the Soviet scholarly intelligentsia, Doctor of Economic Sciences and Professor, made a significant contribution to the study of major issues in Soviet economic scholarship, as well as to the training of specialists and researchers for the country's financial sector. Alongside documents from the State Archive of the Russian Federation and the Russian State Archive of the Economy, the source base of the study includes previously unpublished administrative records introduced into scholarly circulation for the first time: copies of A.G. Zverev's personal files obtained, following an official request by the Federal Treasury, from the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation, the Central State Archive of the City of Moscow, the Federal State Institution Insurance Fund Records Storage Centre in Yalutorovsk, Tyumen Region, and the archives of the Institute of Economics of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation.