The "Classics": Who Was the First in the USSR to Write the History of Ancient India?

The earliest expositions of the Soviet Marxist view on the history of ancient India date to 1937 and 1941, when the essays of N. A. Kun, "India. IV. Historical Essay. Vedic Period and the Formation of Class Society" in the Big Soviet Encyclopedia and that of N. A. Sholpo "Ancient India" in the textbook "History of Ancient Orient" by V. V. Struve, were published. Meanwhile, a number of articles by R. O. Shor, published in the late 1920s-early 1930s in the Encyclopedia of Literature, especially "Indian Literature" (1930), contains in a scattered form a holistic presentation of the history of ancient Indian society, given in an original manner that had no analogues in Soviet science. Shor's articles were compiled as part of a discussion about state formation in the world-historical process. Shor uses her own reading of this discussion, associating ancient Indian society with the phenomenon of "Asian state formation". This historical concept is based on the fact that the Asian state formation and feudalism were not mutually exclusive concepts, but were chronologically dependent or, occasionally, might even be identical. The rest of Shor's view was formed in line with the traditional ideas of European science on the development of society in ancient India. Due to the fact that conceptually the essays by Shor did not fit into the Procrustean bed of Marxist categorical casuistry, Shor, though she knew Sanskrit, the original sources, and research tradition, was not involved later in the correct" Marxist view of the history of India in antiquity. It should be noted that, in the preface to the publication of Panchatantra (also 1930), Shor reasoned from opposing principles of periodization of the world-historical process.