«The Dean of the Medical Faculty, Professor Fleischer, is Always Drunk»: Student “Letters to the Authorities” of the 1920s in the Space of the Russian University Studies

One of the urgent problems of modern university studies as a special direction in historical science, which emerged because of the transformation of the research paradigm, is the expansion of the source field of university research. This issue is especially relevant to the history of the Soviet university corporation, which for a long time relied mainly on sources of official origin and various non-narrative texts in the situation of predominant institutional history of Soviet universities. The sociocultural turn required updating the range of sources used, including such specific documents as students' letters «to the authorities» − a special type of document that occupies an intermediate position between official and personal sources and communicates between students and various levels of the power vertical («capillary» power according to M. Foucault). The collection of documents «Students' Addresses to the Authorities. 1921−1930» edited by A.Yu. Rozhkov (2023) includes 312 documents in 79 archival collections of more than two dozen federal, regional, departmental and municipal archives of Russia, arranged in chronological sequence and grouped by years. The documents of different types (statements, complaints, denunciations, political initiatives, etc.) are united according to their narrative structure (“letter”) and the subject matter related to the process of formation of the Soviet higher school and the place of the student contingent in it. The references allow us to trace in dynamics the situation that developed in the 1920s in the new Soviet university space and Soviet society as a whole, to reconstruct the prosopography of the «Soviet» students of the 1920s, to carry typology of students, realizing both the different degrees of this «sovietization» and other author's characteristics.