Academician Boris Dmitrievich Grekov and Hungary

Kovalev, Mikhail (2026) Academician Boris Dmitrievich Grekov and Hungary. RUSSIANSTUDIES.HU, 8 (1). pp. 95-112. ISSN 2677-1640

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Abstract

This article analyses the image of the Soviet academician Boris Grekov and the receptionof his scholarly legacy in Hungarian historiography. The study focuses on the period fromthe second half of the 1940s to the first half of the 1950s, a time closely associated withthe processes of Sovietization. Special attention is paid to Grekov’s visit to Budapestand Debrecen between 5 and 17 November 1948, his public lectures, and his meetingswith Hungarian scholars as well as political and public figures. For the first time, a bodyof documents from Hungarian and Russian archives has been introduced into scholarlycirculation, making it possible to reconstruct the hidden infrastructure of the visit, includingits institutional, political, and organisational dimensions. A separate group of sourcesconsists of materials from the Hungarian press, which allow the author to trace the rhetoricalstrategies used to construct Grekov’s public image as a “world-renowned historian” andan “exemplary Marxist-Leninist”, as well as the ways in which his scholarly theses werepoliticised (anti-Normanism, “Russian feudalism”, the “second edition of serfdom”). At thesame time, the study reveals the limited long-term impact of this symbolic campaign. Acomparison of press enthusiasm, official assessments, and subsequent historiographicalpractice shows that the image of Grekov, artificially constructed in the late 1940s and early1950s, failed to take root in Hungarian historical scholarship. In the 1960s–1980s, directreferences to his ideas and concepts were rarely found in Hungarian historiography. Inthis way, the article contributes to the study of the mechanisms and evolution of Sovietintellectual expansion in Eastern Europe, to a better understanding of the relationshipbetween propaganda objectives and academic practices and to an assessment of the limitsof the transfer of scholarly models within the socialist bloc.

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