The article presents the activity of Academician Artiom Lazarev from the administrative, scientific, and political and ideological perspectives. Based on unpublished archival documents, oral history, and memoirs, the article explores both the public and private biography of the statesman (Minister of Education and Minister of Culture, Secretary for Ideological Affairs of the Central Committee of the Communist Party Bolsheviks of Moldova) and the historian active in the public sphere of the Moldavian SSR and during the early years of the independence of the Republic of Moldova. In the context in which the policy of promoting national elites loyal to the communist regime for identity purposes was recommended by Moscow to the leadership of the union republics that had a population of the same nationality abroad, A. Lazarev's activity in this respect was not treated as anti-Soviet, but only as exaggerated, having a certain impact upon his career. Furthermore, the article addresses the controversies sparked by the works edited by Artiom Lazarev in the field of historical science
Dragnev et al. (Tue,) studied this question.