Education
Faculty of History and Philology of the Gorky State Lobachevsky University (1974).
Key facts of his career
He defended his candidate's dissertation in 1980 at the Belarusian State University, under the supervision of Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor I.V. Orzhekhovsky. He defended his doctoral dissertation in 1997 at the Police Academy of Russia.
Main areas of scholarly work
Legal questions concerning the protection of historical and cultural monuments in the pre-revolutionary and Soviet periods, the relationship between the pre-reform judicial system and the administrative-police bodies of the Russian Empire, and the legislative and practical problems of poor relief and charity in pre-revolutionary Russia. Author of more than 300 published journal and newspaper articles, 5 monographs, and 10 textbooks and study guides. Under his scholarly supervision, 31 candidate's dissertations were defended.
Membership in public, scholarly and other organizations
Academician of the Academy of Pedagogical and Social Sciences. Chairman of the Nizhegorodsky Kraeved (scholarly society). Chairman of the board of curators of the municipal scholarly society of students of Nizhny Novgorod. Member of the editorial board of the journal "Nizhegorodskaya Starina" ("Nizhny Novgorod Antiquity"). Member of the Organization of Russian Bibliophiles. Member of the public editorial board of the almanac "Bibliophiles of Russia".
Awards
Laureate of the Nizhny Novgorod city prize in local history studies.
Charitable work
He donated to the manuscript department of the Russian State Library (Pashkov House) 30 handwritten books from the 16th–19th centuries (the Galay Fund No. 865 was established), and to the Nizhny Novgorod Universal Scientific Library — 200 books with autographs of writers and scholars. A personal Galay fund was also established at the Nizhny Novgorod Regional Library, to which he donated rare editions, books with autographs, and journals; a similar fund exists at the Nizhny Novgorod State Archive.
Hobby
Bibliophile.
See also
- Higher School of Economics
- journal "Nizhegorodskaya Starina"
Yury Grigoryevich Galay was born on September 11, 1945, in the village of Chyornaya Maza, Lyskovsky district, Nizhny Novgorod region; he died on November 2, 2012.
The subject of his doctoral dissertation was the activity of state authorities in protecting historical and cultural monuments in 1917–1929, examined in its historical-legal aspect; on this topic he published the monographs "Preserving the Traces of History" (1989) and "Power and Historical-Cultural Values in the Russian Federation, 1917–1929" (1997). The monograph "Preserving the Traces of History" covers a broader chronological span than the doctoral dissertation topic — the protection of historical and cultural monuments on Nizhny Novgorod land in 1917–1941.
From 1974 Galay worked at the Nizhny Novgorod Academy of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, rising from lecturer to professor.
Galay was chairman of the Nizhny Novgorod branch of VOOPIiK (the All-Russian Society for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments) and a member of the board of the Nizhny Novgorod Culture Fund. With Galay as a leading contributor, the reference work "The Nizhny Novgorod Periodical Press (1838–1917)" was published in 1999; in 2007 his collection "Book-Loving Nizhny" was published, devoted to the book culture of the Nizhny Novgorod land from the Laurentian Chronicle to Soviet-era publications. Galay carried out many years of work on a card index of Nizhny Novgorod personalities and published no fewer than a hundred essays on notable people from Nizhny Novgorod; his study of the fate of the descendants of the mechanic I.P. Kulibin resulted in the book "The Descendants of Kulibin" (the research had been published in installments since 1981).