EARLY MEDIEVAL HISTORY OF EASTERN EUROPE AT THE RECEPTION OF VICTOR PETROV (V. DOMONTOVYCH)

Abstract

The purpose of the study is to find out point of the view of the famous archaeologist, historian, scientist V. Petrov on to the socio-economic, political, ethnic development of early medieval Eastern Europe. The methodology of the study is a comparative-historical method (comparison of historical concepts of V. Petrov and other historians), a method of historiographical analysis (specific content of published and unpublished scientific works of V. Petrov and other historians on the subject) and historiographic synthesis (formation of the general image of the Eastern Europe on the verge of decomposing primitiveness and the beginnings of statehood in the scientific and literary heritage of V. Petrov-V. Domontovich).The scientific novelty of the article is that it first reconstructed V. Petrov’s conceptual vision of the patterns of development of Eastern Europe in comparison with Western Europe in different methodological paradigms. In the 1930s, in the ideological and organizational development of the Soviet model of historical science, V. Petrov creatively used the potential of Marxism in studies of socio-economic history and proposed his scheme of decomposition and formation of feudalism — linking archaic forms of agrotechnics and family forms. In the middle — second half of the 1940s, at the emigration of V. Petrov, in the context of his cyclical “theory of the epochs”, considered the transition of Europe (including the Ukrainian territories) from antiquity to the Middle Ages as an inter-epoch break. In the 1960’s, upon returning to the USSR, the scientist continued his theoretical and practical research in the field of archeology, history, linguistics, ethnography, which allowed him to detail some aspects of early medieval history of the Middle Dnieper region including his latest scientific discoveries. At the same time, V. Petrov introduced the methodological foundations of his concept in a veiled form, adapting it to the realities of Soviet science.