Fyodor Dmitrievich Ashnin (January 19, 1922 — October 12, 2000) was a Soviet and Russian linguist, Turkologist, historian of linguistics.
Participant of the Great Patriotic War. Graduated from the Military Institute of Foreign Languages of the Soviet Army (1949), then postgraduate studies at the Institute of Linguistics of the USSR Academy of Sciences. In 1958 he defended his PhD thesis "Demonstrative pronouns and their derivatives in the Azerbaijani, Turkish and Turkmen languages". Since the late 1980s, he has been actively and consistently (one of the few researchers) engaged in the restoration of "white spots" in the history of Soviet linguistics during the period of totalitarianism and the fate of repressed philologists. On his own initiative, he started compiling the "Martyrology of Soviet Linguists".
F. D. Ashnin was especially busy with the fate, creative heritage, circumstances of the life and death of Russian scientists with world-famous names: academician A. N. Samoilovich (1880-1938) and Professor Evgeny Polivanov (1891-1938), sending numerous requests to archives, studying interrogation protocols from fabricated criminal cases.
Published in the journal "Bulletin of Eurasia"[1], other publications.
An important result of many years of research was the collective work published after the death of F. D. Ashnin — the book "Repressed Turkology" (2002).
