Hi,

My name is Michael (Mikhail) Mints, in the Internet I also often use a nickname Amdir (‘the Hope’ in Sindarin).  I’m a historian, graduated from the Russian State University for the Humanities.  Since 2008, I have worked at the Institute of Scientific Information for Social Sciences (Moscow).

My official autobiography is available here.  Unofficial, but more detailed one can be read here 😉

This website is a typical ‘personal home page’, not devoted entirely to any certain theme, as I tried to collect here all the materials that, I suppose, could be interesting not only for myself (although the most part of the materials deal with various historical subjects, of course).  My main research interest is the preparation of the USSR for the Second World War; my Ph.D. thesis was about the Soviet military-political leadership’s views about the future war in 1927–41.  As I’m the only specialist on the Soviet Union at my department, I also prepare abstracts and reviews on historiography of the Soviet period as a whole; several years ago, I was also writing library-research papers on history of the USA and Canada for a while.  Besides that, I had to learn how to search academic literature in the Internet because my Institute was initially established for analysing new publications on social sciences and humanities, and the lack of new foreign literature in Moscow libraries became catastrophic in recent years.  As a result, I finally wrote a short manual for other researchers, Okhota na knigi [The hunting of books].  I read The Lord of the Rings for the first time in my school years; I haven’t become a specialist in Tolkien studies since then, but several materials on this subject can also be found on this website.

I still can’t manage to update the site regularly, but I try to do it at least from time to time. You are welcome 🙂