Home
International Encyclopaedia
of the Histories of Anthropology

Danilova, Liudmila Valerianovna (1923–2012)

Liudmila Valerianovna Danilova (1923–2012) was a Soviet/Russian historian who specialized in the history of medieval Russia and agrarian history, and a Marxist theoretician of history and social evolution. She worked at the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR/Russia for more than half of the century from 1952 onward. Author of two monographs, Essays on the History of Land Ownership and Economy in the Novgorod Land in the 14th-15th Centuries (1955) and Rural Community in Medieval Russia (1994). In the mid-1960s, she was part of the collective group of the department of the methodology of history at the Institute of History, who tried to reinvigorate Soviet Marxism and challenge its Stalinist interpretations. Danilova edited the collection of articles Problems of the History of Pre-capitalist Societies (1968), which received a wide response among historians and anthropologists both in the USSR and worldwide (including Ernest Gellner). Danilova’s heterodox Marxism negatively affected her academic career. Her main work, Theoretical Problems of Feudalism in Soviet Historiography, remained unpublished during her lifetime, as well as the following volumes of the projected “Problems of the History of Pre-capitalist Societies” series.

Keywords: Marxist Anthropology | Theory of history | Marxism | Russia/USSR | Rural Societies | Evolution of the State | Ernest Gellner

Related topical dossiers