Scientifi c Works of the Employee of Samara Istpart Joseph Ilyich Blumenthal

The article is devoted to the reconstruction of the life and work of Joseph Ilyich Blumenthal. The authors provide biographical information about Blumenthal, including his education at the Minsk Commercial School, Petrograd and Samara Universities, and his work as a Soviet employee in the Samara City Executive Committee. They focus on the activities of the Samara Istpart, which was created in 1921. The main directions of its activities in 1922-1924 are revealed: the publication of collections of “Red True History”, the organization of memorial meetings, exhibitions, and the collection of documentary material on the revolutionary movement in the region. It has been proven that due to personnel problems, Samara Istpart experienced diffi culties in solving organizational problems and conducting research. The situation changed in 1924 with the hiring of J.I. Blumenthal and N.N. Speransky, who gave a powerful impetus to the activities of Istpart. An analysis of J.I. Blumenthal’s work at the Samara Istpart, his organizational and research practices, showed that they were organically linked to the implementation of such projects as the collection “1905 in the Samara region”, the two-volume chronicle “The Revolution of 1917-1918 in the Samara Province”, and the reconstruction of the life and work of V.I. Lenin in Samara. The assessments of J.I. Blumenthal’s activities by his contemporaries are analyzed, and his role in identifying documentary material on the history of the revolutionary movement is proven. The authors point out that after criticizing J.I. Blumenthal in the journal “Proletarian Revolution”, he was fi red and moved to Moscow, where he worked on the editorial board of the “Small Soviet Encyclopedia”. The research of J.I. Blumenthal has not lost its scientifi c signifi cance for generations of Soviet and Russian historians studying the revolutionary movement in the Samara region at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.