College Assessor Mikhail Butrimovich: The Fate of the Army Official in the Mirror of Military Anthropology

Modern Russian science pays considerable attention to the study of the Revolution and the Civil War, as well as the life of the Army in that period, from the standpoint of personal social history and military anthropology. Researchers today are increasingly turning to the problem of the “little man” - an ordinary participant in those events. The aim of this publication is to reconstruct the biography of Mikhail Aleksandrovich Butrimovich (1880- [1933]), which is indicative of the period, in a problematic vision at the intersection of military history and military anthropology. The reconstruction is based on historical sources the author of the article identified. The analysis of Butrimovich's fate reveals the situation of “former people” in the RSFSR-USSR. Such people included representatives of the command and administrative staff of the Old and White Armies. To achieve the aim of the study, it is necessary to solve the following problems: (1) to describe the tactics and methods of social adaptation of former military officials as part of the Army to the cataclysms in the Russian state and society in the period from 1917 till the 1930s; (2) to assess Butrimovich's behavior in this period; (3) to determine the scientific aspects that an anthropological study of the situation of former army officers and officers during the Civil War and pre-war Soviet society gives access to. The basis for the preparation of the study was a set of unpublished sources from the funds of the Historical Archive of Omsk Oblast and the Archive of the Office of the FSB of Russia in Bryansk Oblast. These are Butrimovich's biographical documents; materials on Butrimovich's being on military and special records in the bodies of the Cheka-OGPU, depriving him of suffrage and restoring his voting rights; materials of the archival criminal case by the OGPU bodies on Butrimovich's political prosecution. The connection between the general historiography of the topic and the issue under study is given. The anthropological approach and the biographical method, based on the genre of the publication, formed the theoretical basis of the study. Particular attention in the publication is paid to the study of Butrimovich's professional activities. The biography presented to the reader is an example of success in a number of aspects of social adaptation to the conditions of the military revolutionary period of 1917-1920 and its consequences in Soviet Russia. According to the results of the study, the author states that, in relation to the considered case, the anthropological vision of the past focuses on understanding the history of mentality, military and political everyday life of the first third of the twentieth century. The work is addressed to a wide range of readers, including specialists who study military history, military anthropology, the Civil War in Russia, Soviet society, and Soviet repressive politics in the pre-war period.

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