Genrikh M. Deich Papers

Genrikh Markovich Deich was born in 1913 to a Hasidic Jewish family in the small town of Dokshitsy (modern-day Belarus). Soon after his birth, his family fled to Kharkov to escape the devastation of the First World War and it was there that Deich spent his formative years. In 1932, Deich moved to Leningrad to begin his studies in history at the Leningrad Institute of History, Philosophy, and Linguistics (later incorporated into Leningrad State University). Despite being labeled a "right-wing opportunist" in 1934, Deich graduated in 1937 and returned to Kharkov to teach the history of the USSR at Kharkov State Pedagogical Institute where he began to work on his dissertation on the Time of Troubles. He married Khanna Markovna Rubina in Kharkov in 1939. In 1940, he began to teach Soviet history at Leningrad Pedagogical Institute and remained in the city until his evacuation in 1942. He returned to Leningrad in the spring of 1944 to work in the Central State Historical Archive of the USSR (RGIA, formerly TsGIA), where he helped compile a guide to the archive.

While working in the archive, he noticed an intensification in state-sponsored antisemitism that was reflected, among many other ways, in the excision of all mention of Jews from the archival guide he had helped compile. According to Deich, this campaign motivated him to begin to quietly fight the state’s antisemitism in ways that included covertly gathering copies of archival materials on the history of Russian Jews from the long 19th century.

Deich left TsGIA in 1947 and began teaching at Pskov Pedagogical Institute, where he focused his research on the history of local peasants, Pushkin, and Lenin. On the basis of this research, Deich successfully defended his doctoral dissertation, "The Peasantry of the Pskov Governorate in the 19th and beginning of the 20th Centuries," in 1962.

Dismissed from his position in Pskov in 1960, Deich taught at Novgorod Pedagogical Institute until he was appointed a professor at Herzen State Pedagogical Institute of Leningrad in 1966, where he remained until he was forced into retirement in 1976. His early retirement enabled Deich to delve into his archival projects, and he spent the remainder of his time in the USSR working in the archives, adding to his collection of archival documents, and publishing prolifically.

In 1989 Deich immigrated to the United States with his wife and settled in New Jersey. Here he continued his work on Lenin and Pushkin and returned to projects on the history of Russia’s Jews, and Chasidism in particular, with a renewed vigor. He worked actively until his death on April 28, 2003.