Abstract: The article is devoted to the history of studying the events of the defense of Tsaritsyn during the Civil War within the framework of the publishing project "IGV", implemented in the 1930s on the initiative and with the active participation of M. Gorky. Based on the documents of the editorial secretariat, which are currently stored in the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History, it was established that a team of three authors was responsible for writing the corresponding section of the multi-volume work: professional historians, students of M.N. Pokrovsky, G.E. Meerson and E.B. Genkina, and a direct participant in the events, one of the military leaders of the Red Army I.F. Tkachev's army. The work of each of the team members is characterized. It is shown what role participation in this project played in the biographies of the authors. The writing of the history of Tsaritsyn's defense is analyzed in the context of the political, cultural, and intellectual processes that determined the development of historical science during the establishment of the totalitarian system in the USSR. As the study showed, writing a work on the history of Tsaritsyn's defense in 1918, sustained in the spirit of the cult of personality, but possessing formal signs of scientific historical research, was an important task, the solution of which was followed by people who held senior party and government posts in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Two of the three authors who did not show Due to their diligence in this work (G.E. Meerson and I.F. Tkachev), they were arrested and shot. For G.E. Meerson, the failure to write the defense of Tsaritsyn could have been a decisive factor that determined his fate. E.B. Genkina, having managed to successfully complete this work, became a recognized authority in the community of Soviet historians.