At the end of the summer of the last year of the outgoing millennium, Grigory Aleksandrovich Tkachenko died suddenly. The scientist, teacher and organizer who personified the brightest hopes of Russian Oriental studies passed away prematurely. We have lost a man who is so well suited to the Chinese symbol of the lotus-a knight flower that grows clean out of the mud. At first glance, Grigory Alexandrovich's path to science was long. In 1965, he entered the ISAA at Moscow State University, after graduating, he served in the army, worked in the APN, for a very short time in the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Academy of Sciences, and then taught Chinese at a military university for quite a long time. His career as an orientalist began only after 1984: YVES AN (PhD) - Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences (PhD) - RSUH (Associate Professor, Head of the Department, Organizing Director of the Institute of Cultural Anthropology). In fact, G. A. Tkachenko modestly, selflessly, uncompromisingly and selflessly served science for more than 30 years - all his adult life, starting as a student. Being introduced to science by one of the most fanatical fighters for Marxism in Oriental studies, L. D. Pozdneeva (fortunately, militant communism in her was miraculously combined with the professionalism of an old-school professor), Grigory Alexandrovich did not inherit a grain of the ideological commitment of his first teacher. He was simply organically unable to reproduce the ideological attitudes of his supervisor, nor to fight bourgeois Oriental studies, nor to join the ranks of the CPSU. As a result, after writing an excellent thesis on the most complex and poorly studied monument of the III century BC "Liushi Chunqiu", which actually generalized the Chinese humanitarian scientific tradition of the first centuries of its existence, instead of graduate school, he ended up in the ranks of the Armed Forces of the USSR. A two-year military service was followed ... Read more