To the 80th anniversary of the birth of Academician S. D. Skazkin On October 19, 1970, a prominent Soviet scientist, academician Sergei Danilovich Skazkin, turned 80 years old1 . S. D. Skazkin is an outstanding Marxist historian. His research interests are very broad and multifaceted, both in terms of the problems of his work, and in terms of the diversity of countries and peoples whose history attracts his attention. For more than 50 years of scientific and pedagogical activity, S. D. Skazkin not only created his own research school, but also opened a number of new and successfully developing areas in Soviet medieval studies, which is his main specialty. Problems of agrarian history occupy a central place in the research of S. D. Skazkin. Making critical use of the best of the heritage of the Russian bourgeois school of agricultural historians-Luchitsky, Kovalevsky, Savin, and others-and creatively applying Marxist-Leninist theory, S. D. Skazkin posed and solved a number of important problems in the medieval agrarian history of Europe. Already in the lecture courses of 1935-1938, and later in the textbook on the history of the Middle Ages (parts I and II, ed. 1939, 1956, 1966), S. D. Skazkin gave an analysis of the agrarian system of France and Spain, which remains important to this day, explaining why in the former there was an alliance of the bourgeoisie with the peasantry, which provided the triumph of the great bourgeois revolution of the late eighteenth century, and in the second, the peasants robbed by the feudal lords largely became hereditary vagabonds, beggars or military mercenaries who shed their blood in the aggressive European and colonial adventures of the Spanish dynasty. In the history of the early Middle Ages, S. D. Skazkin developed the question of the ways of transition to feudalism directly from the primitive communal system. As a result of his research, dogmatic ideas about the supposedly obligatory passage of all peoples through the stage of a ... Читать далее