Education
1900 graduate Moscow University.
1900 graduate Moscow University.
1905-1906 lecturer for Moscow Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party Committee. 1918-1921 professor, Smolensk University. From 1921 professor, Belorussian University, Minsk.
1937-1956 director, Institute of History, Belorussian Academy of Sciences. 1941-1944 served with S. Lazo Partisan Detachment in Belorussian. Classed Sumerian-Ac- cadian soc as feudal and dated the Hammurapi laws from the presumed repeal of feudal law in Babylon.
Also considered other Ancient Eastern countries feudal (later he termed them semi-pa- triarchal-semi-feudal). 1938 stopped treating these countries as feudal but stressed the marked contrast in their social forms from those of ancient society. In contrast to most Soviet scholars, he considered that all the states of die Ancient East (including the Hittite Kingdom and the Phoenecian cities) were typically despotic societies.
Postulated the thesis that family and rural communities in the East enjoyed exceptional stability and maintained that from Hammurapi to the time of the Grand Mongols (in India) the structure of oriental soc remained basically unchanged and differed from the structure of slave-owning and feudal Europe. Also studied Belorussian folklore and the history of the Russian Church.