Boris Grekov
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Boris Dmitrievich Grekov (21 April 1882, Mirgorod near Poltava — 9 September 1953, Moscow) was a Soviet historian noted for his comprehensive studies of Kievan Rus and the Golden Horde. He was a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences (1934) and several foreign academies, as well as Director of the Russian History Institute in Moscow.
Grekov entered the Warsaw University in 1901 but moved to the Moscow University four years later. During the pre-revolutionary years he researched the economic and social history of the Novgorod Republic. The type of research involved in this work led him to similar studies on a larger scale, culminating in the monograph Kievan Rus (1939), the first of his three works to win a Stalin Prize.
In Kiev Rus (1939), Grekov set out to debunk Mikhail Grushevsky's theory that Kievan Rus' was a predecessor state of Ukraine rather than of Russia and Belarus. He also polemicized with those scholars who saw the economic mainstay of Kievan Rus in hunting and fishing, rather than trade and agriculture. Apart from these basically sound tenets, much of Grekov's work on Kievan Rus appears outdated, insofar as it is steeped in Marxist ideology.
Grekov's extensive research on Kievan Rus provided insights into the economic and cultural development of medieval Russia during the period of the Tatar domination. He summarized these findings in Culture of Kiev Rus (1944) and Russian Peasants from the Most Ancient Times to the Seventeenth Century (1946). But his most lasting work (and the one which is still regularly reprinted) was Golden Horde, written in collaboration with Alexander Yakubovsky and first published in 1937. The second (and now classical) edition appeared in 1950 under the title Golden Horde and Its Downfall.
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- The content of this page derives in part from the Great Soviet Encyclopedia article on the same subject.
