The article analyzes life and career of a Soviet scholar from October Revolution Generation, a prisoner of Gulag and historian of the French Revolution. It investigates how political campaigns and persecutions affected Zakher’s life and career, and analyzes the difficulties that ideological control created for research process in the Soviet Union. The paper focuses on the collision between scholar’s academic achievements, his reputation in local and international research communities, and the treatment he received from Soviet academic bureaucratic "establishment" (university and publishing officials, etc.). The paper utilizes many documents from Zakher’s personal archive, and the author’s personal archive.