Sergey Fyodorovich Oldenburg (Russian: Серге́й Фёдорович Ольденбу́рг; 26 September 1863 near Nerchinsk - 28 February 1934, Leningrad) was a Russian orientalist who specialized in Buddhist studies. He is remembered as the founder of Russian Indology and the teacher of Fyodor Shcherbatskoy.
Oldenburg's father was of the lesser nobility; his grandfather was a full general in the Imperial Russian Army. During the 1880s while at St. Petersburg University Oldenburg participated in the Scientific-Literary Association of Students, a brotherhood which shared liberal and radical ideals. Here he met Aleksandr Ulyanov as they were both in the inner circle of this organisation. Ulyanov dropped out of the inner circle when he started to plan an assassination attempt on the life of Tsar Alexander III. The attempt failed, and following the execution of Ulyanov in 1887, his brother, Vladimir Lenin visited Oldenburg in St Petersburg in 1891. Oldenburg had just returned from a two-year trip to London, Paris, and Cambridge.[1]
Oldenburg was elected into the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1900 and served as its permanent Secretary in 1904-29. From 1905 he became active in the Imperial Russian Geographical Society.[2] In 1909-10 and 1914-15, he travelled in Central Asia, where he discovered a number of hitherto unpublished Sanskrit texts. He instigated several scientific expeditions to Tibet and Dzungaria, which brought to light a collection of unique Buddhist manuscripts. In order to publish the newly-found manuscripts, Oldenburg launched in 1897 an authoritative edition of Buddhist texts, Bibliotheca Buddhica, which continues to this day.
Oldenburg joined the Kadet Party in 1905; he was a member of the State Council of Imperial Russia (1912-17), and following the February Revolution he served in the Russian Provisional Government as Minister of Education. He set up the Commission for the Study of the Tribal Composition of the Population of the Borderlands of Russia at this time. Unlike his colleagues from the Constitutional Democratic Party, chose to spent the rest of his life in Russia following the Bolshevik seizure of power. Based on his acquaintance with Vladimir Lenin, he was able to develop an alliance between the Bolsheviks and Russian ethnographers, the former being more interested in nationalism amongst European peoples of the former Russian Empire, the ethnographers focusing more on the national question amongst the Asian peoples of the former Russian Empire.[3] Although he was briefly apprehended by the Cheka in 1919, Oldenburg was allowed to run the Academy of Sciences until 1929, when, in connection with the ongoing Bolshevization of the Academy, he was ousted from his posts. Oldenburg devoted the remainder of his life to administrating the Soviet Institute of Oriental Studies, whose antecedent (the Asian Museum) he had been a director of since 1916.
His granddaughter Zoé Oldenbourg became a well-known French novelist and historian.