Gennady Sobolev

Gennady Sobolev was born in Leningrad on 6 July 1935 into the family of Leontiy Yefimovich Sobolev, a marking worker at the Kirov plant, and Maria Ivanovna Sobolev. His father served as a sergeant in the Second World War and was killed at the front. Gennady and his brother survived the siege of Leningrad because their mother saved them from starvation, an experience that later shaped his work as a historian of the blockade.

He studied at the history faculty of Leningrad State University, graduating in 1959. His teacher was the historian Sigizmund Valk.

After university Sobolev joined the Leningrad branch of the Institute of History of the USSR Academy of Sciences (now the Saint Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences), where he rose from junior researcher in 1961 to senior researcher in 1969. In 1966 he defended his candidate dissertation on Leningrad scientists in the war years of 1941 to 1945. In 1974 he received his doctorate for a monograph on the revolutionary consciousness of Petrograd workers and soldiers during the period of dual power in 1917, and in 1980 he was confirmed as a professor.

Alongside his research he taught at the Herzen Pedagogical Institute and, from 1974 to 1981, at the Krupskaya Leningrad Institute of Culture, where he lectured on the history of Soviet society and on the culture of besieged Leningrad. From 1986 he worked at Leningrad State University, later Saint Petersburg State University, which made him an honorary professor.

His research covered the Revolution of 1917, the siege of Leningrad and the methodology of history. His books included The October Revolution in American Historiography (1979), The Petrograd Garrison in the Struggle for the Victory of October (1985), Russian Revolution and "German Gold" (2002), which set out to separate fact from speculation about German funding of the Bolsheviks and other Russian parties during the First World War, and The Secret Ally: the Russian Revolution and Germany (2009). His multi-volume Leningrad in the Struggle for Survival in the Blockade appeared from 2013, and won the History category of the national Best Books and Publishers of the Year award in 2015. He was named an Honoured Scientist of the Russian Federation in 2007.

Sobolev's first wife, Elena Vladimirovna Soboleva (1933 to 2006), was a historian. His second wife, Alla Aleksandrovna Smirnova, is also a historian. His son Ivan, born in 1967, became a historian with a candidate degree.

Sobolev died in Saint Petersburg on 19 October 2026, at the age of 91. The news was made public that day by Marina Shishkina, a deputy of the Saint Petersburg Legislative Assembly, who expressed condolences to his son Ivan and to his family, colleagues and students. The cause of death was not disclosed, and details of the farewell had not been announced at the time of the first reports.

Sobolev is credited with creating a school of historians of the Russian revolutions and the Civil War, whose members work at universities and research centres across Russia. His blockade history, written by a historian who had survived the siege as a child, and his careful study of the "German gold" question are among his most cited works.