Plagiarism in Soviet historical science in the second half of the 1940s - 1950s

The study of ethical issues of research activities is an actual problem in historical science. These issues include value orientations and virtues of academics, as well as deviations from norms, conflicts, and academic violations. The paper is devoted to the problem of plagiarism in Soviet historical science after 1945 on the basis of materials from the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS). The article examines the conflicts of Soviet researches: N.M. Druzhinin, T.D. Shoinbaev, L.V. Cherepnin, A.M. Karasik, A.L. Sidorov, A.I. Gukovskiy, L.I. Zubok, I.S. Zvavich, P.Ya. Bukshpan and I.A. Fedosov. The author analyzes the activities of special commissions that considered cases of plagiarism and discusses what the Soviet scholars meant speaking about plagiarism. The commissions' expertise was related to the academic genre/type of historiographical source. The author defines two types of deliberate unfair borrowing: textual plagiarism and plagiarism of ideas. Attention is paid to the issue of punishment for intellectual theft and to the requirements of the accusers. Forming commissions is regarded as a reaction of the research community to ethical conflicts, and the attempt to resolve issues related to the suspicion of plagiarism in academia. The further perspective of the topic is connected with the study of the motivation of scholars-plagiarists.