Architect N. P. Nikitin and his book Auguste Montferrand: problem of scientific representation of the history of St. Isaac's cathedral in the Stalin era

The article is concerned with the history of publishing a monograph about the construction of St. Isaac’s cathedral written by a Leningrad architect N. P. Nikitin. The author used numerous unpublished documents from the five archives of St. Petersburg and reconstructed the long process of the architect’s work on the manuscript. In the modern historiography of the history of St. Isaac’s Cathedral Nikitin’s book is criticized as tendentious, and N. P. Nikitin is accused of reflecting the ideological attitudes of the Stalin era. The author set his goal to find out the causes and circumstances of the book’s creation. The book was published in Leningrad in 1939 under the title Auguste Montferrand . The author found the first version of the manuscript under the title St. Isaac’s Cathedral. (History of the Construction) in N. P. Nikitin’s personal archive. In 1938, N. P. Nikitin received a refusal to publish the manuscript in its original form and was forced to rework the book into the biography of Auguste Montferrand. N. P. Nikitin wrote about the decisive role of Russian academic architects in the designing of the cathedral. This thesis was consonant with the Russian-centrist line of the party policy in the 1930s, but later became perceived as conjuncture. The architect wanted to correct his book, but could not republish it. The article is relevant to the modern context of studying the history of historical science in the Soviet Union.