Between sociology and history: complex ways of social theory in post-Soviet Russia (case of one intellectual)

The article is an attempt to create an intellectual biography of Professor Oleg Leibovich, who became an academic mentor to many Perm (and not only Perm) scholars. His biography is both unique and typical. It is unique, because in Russia, there are few peers of Oleg Leibovich who have found the strength and courage to go such a difficult way from scientific communism (albeit a formal one, hiding a living thought expressed in the Aesopian language at that time) through the theory of modernization to the evidence paradigm and theories of everyday life. And it is typical, because it reflects the turns of intellectual quest of all social sciences in Russia over the last quarter of a century. Leibovich is both a historian and a sociologist. Initially, he received a degree in History in the history of the German working class due to Yakov Wolin, and he himself noted the significant influence of Lev Kertman on him. Then, for many years, he found himself in the scientific and professional orbit of the sociologist Zakhar Fainburg. Under his leadership, Leibovich received serious sociological training. Fainburg instilled a taste for social theory in him, and at the department at the Polytechnic Institute, Leibovich acquired skills in conducting sociological research. At the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, he became one of the prominent authors of the theory of modernization and wrote several monographs on the history of the USSR within the framework of this theory. Then, Oleg Leibovich formulated his own approach to the theory of everyday life. Together with his students and colleagues in Perm, he created his own school of everyday life and wrote many articles and a monograph "In the City of M" based on the detailed development of local archives. Thus, Oleg Leibovich occupies a special place among Russian historians as a historian with sociological thinking or as a rare representative of historical sociology.