Boris Grekov

Boris Dmitrievich Grekov (; – 9 September 1953) was a Russian and 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 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 (published in 1914). Grekov was accused of participating in the White Movement in the Crimea during the civil war, and in 1930, his son was arrested in connection with the "Platonov Affair" and sent to the Solovki Islands Penal Colony. Both of these facts were widely known in the 1930s, and this led Grekov to make wide-ranging concessions to the official ideology during the Stalin Purges and, according to A. H. Plakhonin, to write scholarship "on order" for the regime. At this time, he turned toward the study of Kievan Rus' and became known as an opponent of the Ukrainian historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky, who claimed the heritage of Kievan Rus' primarily for modern Ukraine. His major work, Kievan Rus' appeared in 1939 and was the first of three of his works to win the Stalin Prize. In this work, steeped in Marxist–Leninist ideology, he stressed the agricultural rather than commercial basis of the economy of this polity and argued that the heritage of Kievan Rus' was equally shared by modern Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus.