By Vestnik Kavkaza
At the History Department of Moscow State University the fifth scientific readings dedicated to the 90th anniversary of the birth of academician Ivan Dmitrievich Kovalchenko, who is considered one of the founders of cliometrics, were held. He was born in 1923 in Bryansk in a peasant family. Early in the war, being a cadet of Ryazan Artillery School, he volunteered for the front. "I became a historian due to the war”, Kovalchenko said. The war made him reflect on the meaning and purpose of life and try to understand what caused such tragic disasters for mankind, what their role is in the lives of people, and where the place of Russia and its peoples in the history is. Today his memories of the war could be read like fiction.
After the war, Kovalchenko entered the History Department (where then all his scientific and teaching life passed), presented his thesis and doctorate, became a member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, and in 1987 - an academic. It is said that he was a man of enormous capacity for work and believed that the worst kind of laziness is intellectual laziness .
Already in the 1960s Kovalchenko began to use the computers; he is considered the founder of a new direction in Soviet historical science associated with the use of quantitative methods. He founded a school of quantifiers and attracted young scientists, researchers and historians from all over the country, mathematicians, economists for this. Back in the late 1960s at Kovalchenko’s initiative, the Commission of the application of mathematical methods and computers in historical research was formed. He was sure that "in itself, the application of mathematical methods and computers does not automatically improve the essential quality level of historical research. A high level of professionalism is still needed for this".
In 1982, Koval'chenko, due to his associational and synthetic thinking, became co-chair of the International Commission on the application of quantitative methods in historical research; before this, he institutionalized this new research direction in the field of source studies – mass sources studies.
Kovalchenko regarded science as a subsystem of the society and saw the essence of crises in the contradictions that arise between the needs of the society and the possibilities to respond to them; he saw the science of history through the prism of social consciousness, ideology and psychology. He always clearly designated subject and objectives of the study, formulated and argued his evidence and conclusions. This made it virtually impossible to dispute with him. At the set of international symposia he spoke from the standpoint of the Soviet historical science, but he could perfectly see its shortcomings - widespread empiricism, domination of descriptive research methods, disadvantages of historical approaches to modern history, low-level analysis, narrow focus, restriction of access to archival materials.
The works by Kovalchenko are considered classics of educational literature. He called himself a "university man" , because Moscow State Uinversity has always remained his permanent place for search and creative inspiration. It is said that Kovalchenko was an excellent conversationalist, always open for dialogue; he always found time to chat with students, graduate students and colleagues without thinking of his busyness, interests and health.
Kovalchenko initiated the creation of the archeographic laboratory and historical information laboratory at the Department and was the only Soviet historian personally invited to the 1990 Nobel Symposium, where the concept of national history was discussed. "The essence of science is that no one can say the last word in it; a study is a stage in the knowledge of the past”, the scientist said.
