Vasily Struve and Formation of Categories of Soviet Historical Science

Abstract

The article presents previously unknown work by V. V. Struve “Objections and additions to S. Ya. Lurie’s report “Social revolution” in Egypt”. A cornerstone of Struve’s work is justifying that some of papyri sources, namely the Leiden papyrus No. 344 and Hermitage papyrus No. 1116 B recto were reflections of social revolution in Egypt. This opinion was opposed to the point of view of S. Ya. Lurie who believed that these papyri reflected descriptions of popular festivals. In 1923, Lurie presented his paper “Social revolution in Egypt”, presumably in the Palestinian society, challenging a number of experts on these sources. V. V. Struve considered that Lurie had misinterpreted the papyri. The work published below is the earliest evidence of the existence of the concept of social revolution in the Ancient East. The report by S. Ya. Lurie still has not been discovered, however references to it and to a broader context within which Struve’s work was being prepared give grounds to suggest that this idea was widespread in the Russian historiography already in the second half of the 1910s. The concept of “social revolution” was one of the foundations on which the idea of transition from one social-political formation to another as a result of revolution was formulated, as well as the idea about typological unity of these processes for all societies of antiquity. The article contributes to the biography of V. V. Struve, and sheds more light on the history of formation of the categories of the Soviet historical science.