EMIGRANT PERIOD OF LIFE OF THE FORMER MINISTER P.D. KLIMUSHKIN

The article attempts to reconstruct the emigrant period of life of one of the minor heroes of the novel
A. Tolstoy «Eighteenth Year», a native of the Samara province, a prominent figure in the Socialist Revolutionary movement, a member of the Constituent Assembly, the Minister of Internal Affairs of the Komuch Prokopy Klimushkin (1888–1958). Biographical information about P.D. Klimushkin is scattered in many sources, some of which contradict the others, but the least studied until today remains the emigrant period of his life, which began after, «going to an illegal position», Klimushkin left together with the Czech echelon at first to Irkutsk, then to Vladivostok and, finally, to Prague. Studying the «Prague» period, the author of the article found it necessary to divide it into two twenty years – before the Second World War and after it. Special attention is paid to P.D. Klimushkin’s activity within the framework of the so-called «Russian action» in Czechoslovakia, as director of the Russian People’s University and in the «Society of Volga Movement Members of 1918», for the first time information on the personal life of the former minister is systematized, and also highlights his «walking on the agony», which began after 1945 and ended two years before his death, in 1956. Reconstructing the previously little studied period of P.D. Klimushkin’s biography, the author of the article is based on archival documents, publications in Russian and foreign sources and testimonies of contemporaries, among which the most important place belongs to the memoirs of S. Nikolaev «In the first place truth and only truth».