В.В. Струве и Государственная академия истории материальной культуры в 1932–1933 гг. (по материалам рукописного отдела научного архива ИИМК РАН)

Вестник древней истории. 2022. Т. 82. № 3. С. 715–735.

Ladynin I. A.

The article deals with the activities of Vasily Struve, an Egyptologist and Assyriologist and the founder of the Soviet research of the Ancient Orient, at the State Academy for the History of Material Culture (GAIMK) in 1932 – the early 1933. During that period Struve advanced the theory of the slave-owning mode of production in the Ancient Orient (based on the Near Eastern evidence). Archive documents of the GAIMK show that a task to develop a theory of the slave-owning formation was received by this institution in the early 1932, and that Struve’s employment there (at first part-time) was connected with it. Minutes of the GAIMK section for the slave-owning formation show that in 1932 the attitude to Struve’s ideas about the dominance of slavery in the Ancient Orient changed from rejection to an increasing loyalty. The section’s work on the theory of ancient slavery was intensified by a special task of the GAIMK authorities after Stalin coined the notion of the ‘slave revolution’ in his famous speech of 19 February, 1933. After that, Struve put forward a number of new hypotheses on the class struggle in the Ancient Near East and proposed a special lecture on Ancient Oriental slavery for the GAIMK plenary session in May 1933; ultimately this lecture was scheduled for a separate special session. The documents considered in the article leave no doubt that Struve’s work at this theory was subordinated to a pre-defined task; it clearly reveals reactions of the scholar to the current ideological changes.

Keywords: советская историография, slavery, soviet historiography, рабовладение, Древний Восток, History of the Ancient Orient, Струве Василий Васильевич, Vasily Struve