Roman Republican Statehood in the works of S. I. Kovalev

Abstract

The subject of this article is the scientific work of the outstanding Soviet historian of antiquity S. I. Kovalev, related to the history of the Roman Republic and its state institutions. The authors analyze the hypotheses expressed by Kovalev on the most controversial problems of the history of republican statehood and compare them with the theories that existed at that time in Western historiography, as well as pre-revolutionary Russian historiography. The authors refer not only to the works of the Soviet scientist himself, his predecessors and contemporaries, but also to archival materials, namely to the correspondence of S. I. Kovalev with his foreign colleagues. The appeal to the study of Soviet historiography of ancient history is currently becoming more and more relevant among Russian antiquarians, but there is still no detailed analysis of S. I. Kovalev's scientific work in Russian historiography. The authors show the validity of many assumptions made by S. I. Kovalev for the level of development of scientific knowledge in the study of the history of ancient Rome in the middle of the XX century, as well as the continuity of many of its provisions from the hypotheses of the outstanding pre-revolutionary Russian antiquarian I. V. Netushil. In addition, the paper demonstrates the groundlessness of the widespread point of view about the complete isolation of Soviet historical science from the global one.