Interview. 17 September 2020. Moscow, Tverskoy Boulevard

At the request of the editorial board of the journal Slavic World in the Third Millennium, the eldest researcher of the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Leonid Ianovich Gibianskii (born 1936), recounts his life. Leonid Ianovich graduated from the Department of Southern and Western Slavs of the History Faculty of Moscow State University in 1960 and began working at the Institute in 1966, when he commenced a graduate course there. He is the prominent specialist in the history of Yugoslavia and in the problems of international relations in contemporary Central and South-Eastern Europe. The principal lines of his investigations included the history of Yugoslavia during and after World War II, the history of the formation of communist regimes in Central and South-Eastern Europe, the organization of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, and the study of foreign relations and the politics of the great powers in the region in the 1940s and 50s. Leonid Ianovich was one of the first Russian historians to elaborate the problem of the formation of the Soviet bloc, the history of the Cominform, and the conflict between Stalin and Tito using archive materials which became accessible to researchers from the end of 1980s. Gibianski is the author of several hundred academic works, which have been published in many countries all over the world, as well as the organiser of and a participant in a number of international projects and conferences on the Cold War. Leonid Ianovich describes his childhood, his studies at the Department of Southern and Western Slavs of the History Faculty of Moscow State University, and his work at the Institute of Slavic Studies.