About myself

I was born in 1960 in Moscow into a family of a doctor and a physicist. After finishing secondary school I studied philology in Moscow Pedagogical Institute. Upon graduation of the Institute in 1986 I worked as an archivist in Central (now Russian) State Military Historical Archive in Moscow, and later in the Public Opinion Foundation as a web site translator. I have a wife and two adult children. In my youth, I was extensively involved in printing and dissimenating Samizdat (literally ‘self-published’) books that were forbidden by Soviet authorities. Among them were works by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Varlam Shalamov, Joseph Brodsky, Vladimir Voynovich, Nikolai Berdyaev, George Orwell and many other prominent Russian and foreign authors, who would be published years later, in the times of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika. Through reading those books I became a liberal-minded person.

My interests include genealogical and microhistorical research. In 2002-2004 I did an extensive and exciting research in Russian archives for the British historian Andrew Cook, who was writing a biography of the famous British spy Sidney Reilly (published in Britain in 2002 under the title On His Majesty’s Secret Service.) Two years later after the publication of the English edition, I published a Russian translation of this book (Yauza, 2004). Among my recent works is a translation of the memoirs by a forgotten French portraitist Emile Francois Dessain Quelques souvenirs d’un voyage au Caucase (Some recollections of my trip to the Caucausis), who lived in Russia from 1844 through 1853 and left a collection of portraits of the Russian gentry, now scattered in Russia’s national museums . Among my genealogical achievements was a discovery in Hong Kong of a grave of my Russian granduncle Nicholas Belanovsky, who had fled from Vladivostok to Shanghai in 1922 during the Civil War in Russia's Far East. In the mid-1930s he took part in the construction of a Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Shanghai, the largest in China (closed by Chinese communists after 1962 and turned into a restaurant). I also published an article (Moskovsky Zhurnal, May 2008) about his father, my great-grandfather Alexander Petrovich Belanovsky, who founded in the beginning of the 20th century the first state clock-making school that would later become one of the country's leading technical universities (now Saint Petersburg State University of Information Technologies, Mechanics and Optics).

I am also interested in the history of Stalinism and perestroika (1985-1991) in the USSR.