Nikolai M. Druzhinin, 100; Celebrated Soviet Historian

Nikolai M. Druzhinin, a historian who was honored for his accounts of life under the czars and the subsequent Bolshevik revolution of 1917 in which he served as an officer in the Red Army, has died at the age of 100, the Communist Party daily Pravda reported Tuesday.

His obituary, appearing on Page 3 of the newspaper, was signed by General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov and scores of historians, writers and politicians.

Pravda said he died Aug. 8 but did not give a place of death.

Druzhinin was the author of more than 150 works, mainly on social and economic life, the history of Russia’s 19th-Century revolutionary movement, and social thought.

Recipient over the years of most of the Soviet Union’s highest honors, including three Orders of Lenin, by the 1950s Druzhinin was being criticized as “incompatible with the ideology of Soviet patriotism and containing important mistakes of a theoretical nature.”

But that criticism apparently did not harm his long-term status as a leading Soviet historian.

Throughout his life Druzhinin specialized in chronicling peasant life under the czarist regimes that preceded the 1917 revolution, and afterwards he documented the early days of Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks as they consolidated their power.

Druzhinin’s work also included research into the history of military science and a number of sketches of Soviet generals during World War II.

Druzhinin was a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and had worked as a history professor at Moscow State University. He also was one of the founders of the Central Museum of the Revolution of the U.S.S.R. in Moscow.