"WE MUST STUDY AND HONOUR THE SCHOLARS WHO... BROUGHT RUSSIAN SCHOLARSHIP TO THE FOREFRONT": N. S. LEBEDEV'S DEFENCE OF THE THESIS ON V. G. VASILIEVSKY IN 1943

The focus of this article is N. S. Lebedev's dissertation (1943) entitled " V. G. Vasilevsky as a Byzantine Scholar" , which was carried out by the evacuated Leningrad branch of the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences in Tashkent. The author refers to the transcript of the meeting of the Academic Council, Lebedev's biographical materials kept for his thesis (RAS archive), and his publications. As early as the late 1930s, Lebedev had intended to write a thesis on Byzantium and the Mongols, but the inaccessibility of sources and literature during the Great Patriotic War changed these plans. In the end, a historiographical topic was chosen. Given the scarcity of such studies, a research programme had to be developed. Lebedev did not limit himself to outlining the main conclusions of the central figure of his thesis but sought to analyse the factors of Vasilievsky's formation as a scholar and the conditions of the emergence of Byzantine studies in Russia. He also assessed the merits and shortcomings of the pre-revolutionary scholar's work. The opponents who spoke at the debate, namely, V. I. Picheta, S. K. Bogoyavlensky and E. A. Kosminsky, emphasised the importance of the "political moment" of the defence of the thesis and the significance of Vasilievsky for national and world scholarship, paying less attention to the characteristics of Lebedev's work. The historian's conclusions indicate a desire to demonstrate the leadership of Vasilievsky and Russian scholarship in the study of Byzantine history. The research thus served an important ideological function, i. e. to demonstrate the achievements of Russian scholars. By updating the prerevolutionary legacy, the debate serves as a certain marker of the revival of Byzantine studies in Russia, which began in the late 1930s and entered their active phase in 1943.