Bakhrushin, Sergei

Bakhrushin, Sergei Vladimirovich 

Born Sept. 26 (Oct. 8), 1882, in Moscow; died there Mar. 8, 1950. Soviet historian. Corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (AN SSSR) (1939) and member of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences of the RSFSR (1945).

Bakhrushin graduated from Moscow University in 1904. From 1909 he was an assistant professor and from 1927 until the end of his life, a professor at Moscow University. From 1937 he also worked in the Institute of History of the AN SSSR (between 1940 and 1950, he was head of the sector on the history of the USSR during the feudal period).

Bakhrushin was a student of V. O. Kliuchevskii and M. K. Liubavskii. He followed the complicated path from a bourgeois to a Marxist interpretation of the historical process. Bakhrushin made a great contribution to the elaboration of a general concept of the development of feudalism in Russia and had a very wide range of scholarly interests—economic history, the class struggle, the history of the borderlands, and the domestic policy of Russia during the feudal period, primarily the 16th and 17th centuries. Bakhrushin was the first Soviet historian to study the formation of an all-Russian market and the history of the Russian merchant class. Bakhrushin’s major research on the history of Siberia, especially on the development of its trade and industry, changed earlier views about the Russian colonization of Siberia in the 16th and 17th centuries. However, Bakhrushin exaggerated the role of trade capital in the economic development of Siberia and underestimated the importance of the state and the peasant colonization.

Bakhrushin did much to further the development of the study of historical sources, historiography, and historical geography of Siberia. He laid the foundation for the Marxist interpretation of the history of Siberian peoples. He was editor and coauthor of the collective works The History of Moscow (vols. 1–2, 1952; 1953) and Essays on the History of the USSR (1953). Bakhrushin participated in the writing of The History of Diplomacy (1941; State Prize of the USSR, 1942) and textbooks on the history of the USSR for higher schools.

WORKS

Nauchnye trudy, vols. 1–4. Moscow, 1952–59. (List of works in vol. 1.)

REFERENCES

Kafengauz, B. B. “S. V. Bakhrushin.” Uch. zap. Moskovskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta, 1952, issue 156.
Zimin, A. A. “Tvorcheskii put’ S. V. Bakhrushina.” Nauchnye doklady vysshei shkoly: Istoricheskie nauki, 1961, no. 2.

A. N. KOPYLOV