Boris Dmitriyevich Grekov

The Academic Case of 1929–1931 saw the OGPU arrest and exile many of the elders of Soviet historical scholarship: Sergei Platonov, Matvei Lyubavsky, Yevgeny Tarle, and others. Caught in the same net, Grekov was arrested in 1930 and held for roughly one month and three days. The immediate charge was that he had served in Wrangel's White Army while in Crimea in 1918–1920; in reality Grekov had no military service whatsoever. But he had been among the Taurida University faculty who welcomed Wrangel's entry into Crimea, and this became widely known in the 1930s, a lasting political vulnerability. Grekov was released on the personal guarantee of Sergei Tomsinsky, director of the Historical-Archaeographic Institute where Grekov then worked, and thus escaped the tragic fate of his senior colleagues. But the experience left a deep mark. According to the Ukrainian historian Andrii Plakhonin, the arrest forced Grekov to make far-reaching concessions during the Stalin purges, compelling him to produce knowledge on order for the regime. In a 2016 article publishing Grekov's case file for the first time, Yuri Krivosheev identifies this arrest as the origin point of the defining contradiction of Grekov's career as head of Soviet historical science: wide erudition and professional culture yoked to schematic conclusions that had to fit the Procrustean bed of the Short Course of the History of the VKP(b). The medievalist Vladimir Kobrin noted how Grekov's works strike the reader by the combination of broad erudition and high professional culture with the schematic nature of conclusions, while A. A. Shennikov observed that Grekov was almost officially proclaimed the father of Soviet historical science, his views beyond criticism for a decade after his death. Arrest, release, and the ideological conformity required to survive: this is the fundamental drama running through both the man and the Soviet medieval studies he founded.

Parallel to his work on Kievan Rus, Grekov systematically investigated East Slavic society under Mongol-Tatar rule. Co-authored with Alexander Yakubovsky, The Golden Horde (1937) was a pioneering study in this field; its revised 1950 edition, The Golden Horde and Its Downfall, became a classic that is still reprinted today. In it, Grekov argued that Mongol domination retarded but did not sever the feudal development of Rus, and that the economic and class contradictions internal to Rus society ultimately enabled the weakening and overcoming of Mongol rule. This perspective married a Marxist analysis to the traditional narrative of the 'Tatar Yoke' and laid the foundation for postwar Soviet Oriental studies and scholarship on the Mongol Empire. Grekov also directed the academic editions of the Russkaya Pravda (1940, 1947), establishing the documentary basis for the study of medieval Rus law, and his student Vladimir Pashuto carried this legacy forward by collecting foreign sources for the medieval history of the Eastern Slavs.

Grekov's masterwork 'Kievan Rus' (1939) was a watershed in Soviet medieval studies. In it he argued that early Rus society bypassed the slave-holding stage, transitioning directly from the communal order to feudalism. Western and some Soviet scholars had depicted East Slavic society as a backward structure reliant on hunting and foraging; Grekov, marshalling extensive archaeological and textual evidence, demonstrated that Kievan Rus was a feudal state built on highly developed arable farming. This thesis stood in tension with the five-stage schema implied by the 'Short Course of the History of the VKP(b)' (1938) and sparked a sustained 'feudalism debate' in Soviet historiography. At the same time, the book directly challenged Mykhailo Hrushevsky's Ukrainian-centric claim to the exclusive Kievan inheritance, redefining Kievan Rus as the common cradle of the Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian peoples. This tripartite model became the official position of postwar Soviet historiography and has remained a fiercely contested issue among Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian scholars since 1991. 'Kievan Rus' went through multiple revisions after its 1939 first edition and saw six Soviet editions by 1953 alone.