Issue ? 30. February 2012

The rule of Great Prince Ivan III in the Soviet Historiography of the 1920 - 1950's

Ph.D., professor, School of Public Administration, Lomonosov Moscow State University.
E-mail: ksoloviov@spa.msu.ru

The article analyzes the views of Soviet historians of the 1920s – 1950’s. on the nature of the authority of the Great Prince of Moscow State in the second half of the XV century. The author comes to the conclusion that the views of historians of the 1920s were determined by traditional understanding of power relations that emerged in the XIX century. The article points out that until the mid-1930’s, most historians accepted the Pokrovsky’s theory of the prince’s power relying on the authority of the Moscow bourgeois strata of the population. In the 1930s and 1940s, a major role in understanding the problems of power of Ivan III was played by K.V. Bazilevich, who pioneered a “class-based approach” to the power of the Great Prince. This position was reinforced in the discussion of periodization of feudalism, which took place in the pages of “The Questions of History”.

Keywords

Russian history, historiography, history, power, Moscow State, Great Prince Ivan III.