The First Director: F.I. Chudnovsky and the Creation of the Siberian Financial and Economic Institute in Irkutsk, 1929–1931

The article reconstructs the history of the emergence of the Siberian Financial and Economic Institute (SFEI) in Irkutsk in 1930, placing it in the broad socio-economic and historical-educational context of the era that researchers called the period of the "great turning point in higher education." The period when higher education, being reshaped to solve the problems of accelerated industrialization, having embarked on the path of "practicalization," the acquisition of in-demand professions by students in a short time, underwent reorganization according to the industry principle. The "branching" of higher education (education according the particular field) affected not only technical areas of training specialists, but also economic ones, giving rise to planned, trade (exchange and distribution), accounting and statistical, and, finally, financial universities. In the latter case, a whole network of such educational institutions was formed in the USSR, one of the "links" of which was SFEI. In the course of creating their reconstruction, the authors turned to documentary materials deposited in the personal file of F.I. Chudnovsky, who acted as the organizer and first director of the institute, which was only recently discovered in the archives of the Baikal State University (the successor of the SFEI). Archival materials allowed not only to establish many facts of his biography, but also to reconstruct the sequence of events associated with the establishment of the institute.