Russians in Indonesia: Discoveries of Historian E.I. Gnevusheva

Elizaveta Ivanovna Gnevusheva (1916–1994) worked at the Moscow Institute of Oriental Studies (1952–1953), before to join the Moscow State University, where she worked as an associate professor at the Department of History of Southeast Asia and the Far East for over thirty years. She was particularly interested in the life of Russians in Indonesia. Diligently working in archives, she uncovered dozens of Russian names, individuals who found themselves in the Malay Archipelago region by fate and became undeservedly forgotten. This article, using some materials from Gnevusheva’s archives, introduces her research on several of these individuals, including N.N. Miklouho-Maclay (1846–1888), Russians scientists in the Bogor Botanical Garden between late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as Vasily Panteleimonovich Malygin, Ivan Terentyevich Blagov (1881–1943), Alexander Samuilovich Estrin (1889–1981) and his wife Anna Yakovlevna Smotritskaya (1891–1967).