Historian of the Orient in an Era of Change

he was then attributed to the “old” scholars who switched to Marxism. In the mid-1930s the leadership of the USSR strongly pressed on historical scholarship, demanding total transition to the tracks of exclusively Marxist understanding of historical processes. Oriental studies, and personally V.V. Struve, were to ensure the ideological purity of the new texts such as ancient history textbooks for schools and universities. In July 1936 the Department of Social Sciences of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR held a meeting at which representatives of the state power (K. B. Radek) demanded the unification of Oriental discourse. Basing on archival documents and taking into account the scientific and political context, the authors shows what motives guided the actions of both representatives of the party elite and scholarship, divided in the mid-1930s in estimates of how much Marxist Soviet scholarship should be. On the example of discussing the theoretical “purity” of the scientific activity of academician V.V. Struve, the authors shows that the line to create a fully state-dependent academic structure was not quite realized, and even during the period of strong external pressure the social sciences were able to remain in a semi-autonomous state. In fact, the demand for exceptional ideological “purity” of texts turned out to be not so relevant at that time, as Radek (whose political position was unstable) thought, and Stalinist historiography was formed in the parameters of the external Marxization for the “old” historians

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Elite · Historiography · Ideology · Marxist philosophy · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Social science · Sociology · Classics · Historical Geopolitical and Social Dynamics · History · Law · Mathematics · Philosophy · Soviet and Russian History