Historian and political scientist Konstantin Pakhaliuk spoke with more than fifteen Russian and foreign historians about академician Alexander Chubaryan, who for decades remained one of the key figures in Russian historical scholarship and bureaucracy. In 2025, while presenting him with another State Prize, Vladimir Putin said Chubaryan’s work, including his role in producing a unified school history textbook, was an example of service to enlightenment and the search for truth.
Chubaryan became head of the Institute of World History of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1988, and in 2015 became its academic supervisor. Pakhaliuk’s sources describe him as an administrator who knew how to preserve the goodwill of the authorities without moving into open radicalism, while also protecting staff, allowing them to work, obtain foreign grants, and pursue their own subjects.
“For him, the main issue was preserving the institute’s status in the eyes of the leadership and fellow professionals,” one former Institute employee said.
Several historians recall that in the 1990s and 2000s Chubaryan promoted international contacts, invited French historians, and supported new fields of research, including historical anthropology, intellectual history, and gender studies. He is also credited with helping preserve the institute amid chronic underfunding of the humanities.
At the same time, many interviewees see him not merely as a mediator but as a voluntary ally of the state. They point to his role in school and ideological projects, his work on numerous councils and commissions, and his support for Vladimir Medinsky in 2017, when Medinsky’s academic degree was under challenge.
According to participants in the interviews, Chubaryan still tries to maintain an academic tone in his recent public statements, but increasingly repeats official political formulas: he speaks of a crisis of the liberal world order, foreign attempts to politicize history, and places responsibility for the war on the West. Those making this assessment note a sharp contrast with his earlier remarks, when he criticized Stalinist policies and called Soviet actions in the Baltic states annexation and occupation.
Pakhaliuk’s sources differ in their conclusions: some see Chubaryan as a master of compromise who tried to preserve scholarly institutions, while others describe a man who, in exchange for status and influence, helped integrate academic institutions into the production of state ideology.