George Vernadsky

Critics While G. Vernadsky's writings about the historical past were based upon solid archive sources, his flight from Russia separated him from original materials of the latest periods. Thus, some critics of early editions were doubtful about certain figures and estimates he made for contemporaneousness, pointing out that some of them were rather a guess than hard evidence. After a new, edition of A History of Russia appeared in 1930, S.B. Clough from Columbia University reviewed it in Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science:

Most serious criticism of the book seems justified by the discussion of the Soviet period. Professor Vernadsky is a Russian refugee and has not been able to throw off an anti-Bolshevik bias. For example, in discussing the Five Year Plan he says, "In some branches the quality of manufactured products fell below that of output before the war by 30, 40 or even 50 per cent". This is obviously a guess: quality of such various goods as are produced in Russia cannot be reduced to a percentage. In his whole discussion of the Five Year Plan he does not take sufficient account of the labor and capital invested for future production, and in citing Five Year Plan statistics he does not state which Five Year Plan he refers to. Moreover, he compares the figures issued at the end of the first year with those of the preceding year when a better picture would have been given if he had compared them with an index number. The last paragraph of the book seems questionable to the reviewer: "At the outset of the year 1930, the New Economic Policy could be considered completely abrogated. There had begun a new experiment in militant communism."

Iakov Lur'e (1968) accused Vernadsky's Kievan Russia (1948) of uncritically recycling Tatishchev information about an alleged commercial treaty that Vladimir the Great supposedly concluded with the Volga Bulgars in 1006, which is only found in Tatishchev's second (printed) redaction of the Istoriya Rossiyskaya, not in his first redaction, and is not known from any other source, but fits neatly with Tatishchev's own mercantilist theories. Vernadsky knew that S. L. Peshtich had written an article in 1946 arguing that there is no evidence of such a treaty, 'but [Vernadsky] neither accepted its conclusions nor refuted them in any way.' Similarly, Vernadsky wrote that 'Tatishchev's data fit well into the general historical picture' about Roman of Smolensk and Konstantin of Suzdal founding schools in the 12th and 13th centuries, even though this is only recorded in Tatishchev's second redaction, nowhere else, and seems to conveniently echo Tatishchev's Enlightenment ideas about the importance of education, rather than reflecting historical sources.

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