Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures

The period from 1914 to 1945 in the history of Russia is marked with a number of major shocks: World War I, the revolution of 1917 and the following civil war, the establishment of a totalitarian ideological rule accompanied with terror, and the participation of the USSR in World War II (the Great Patriotic War). They all deeply affected the Russian (Soviet) scholarship including Egyptology. The tradition of the earlier, imperial period continued until the early 1920s in the research of Vladimir Golenischeff outside Russia and, briefly, in the work of Boris Turaev and his students. It so happened that this generation of Russian Egyptologists became actually extinct, and the Egyptological school had to be shaped anew in the time of post-revolutionary reconstruction. This process was influenced in the 1920s with what might be defined as “modernist” trends; but a new standing tradition emerged only in the 1930s, largely due to the efforts of Vassiliy Struve. This scholar of a pre-revolutionary breed luckily combined his good training with a grasp of topical ideology, i.e. the Soviet Marxist historical scheme. This meant a greater shift in research towards socio-economic issues, though other themes were not ignored. At the same time, the 1930s saw the beginning of research by Yuri Perepyolkin, whose specific method was developed further in the works of the Leningrad/St. Petersburg Egyptological school in the second half of the 20^th century.