"This man is a very respectable military man": on the establishment of a personal national retirement benefit to V.M. Lermontov
- DOI
- 10.5922/vestnikhum-2026-1-5
- Pages
- 59-76
Abstract
The circumstances of granting V. M. Lermontov a personal national retirement benefit are identified; in particular, attention is paid to the specific features of assigning pensions of this type to relatives of Russian literary classics, his biography is уточнена, and the degree of kinship with the poet is established. The authors of the study are guided by the principles of historicism and scholarly objectivity. The historical and biographical method, based on the analysis of documents of a personal nature, made it possible to reconstruct the life history of V. M. Lermontov against the background of Soviet reality. The main sources include documents from his personal (pension) file, including an application addressed to the editor-in-chief of the publications of the State Literary Museum V. D. Bonch-Bruevich; a petition by V. D. Bonch-Bruevich addressed to the Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR V. M. Molotov; a biography of V. M. Lermontov; a personal personnel record sheet; a mandate of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Caucasian Front granting the right to inspect stud farms and requisition breeding horses; and certificates of wounds. The analyzed materials confirm the fact that documents of applicants for personal national retirement benefit from among relatives of Russian writers and poets underwent preliminary consideration at the level of members of the Soviet government, as well as the emergence of a curator of this process. During the period under study, these functions were assigned to the Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR V. M. Molotov. The study emphasizes that Vladimir Mikhailovich was not a direct descendant of M. Yu. Lermontov; therefore, when pension rights were considered, a greater role was played by his own achievements in supplying the Red Army with horses and in developing stud farms in the North Caucasus. The examined documents confirm the fact of V. M. Lermontov’s arrest in 1931 only indirectly. Importantly, in the postwar period, the fact that an applicant for a personal pension had been subjected to repression in the 1930s did not deprive him of the right to receive a pension of this type, although it may have prevented the assignment of a personal national retirement benefit.