Ivan Vasilevich Luchitskii

Born June 2 (14), 1845, in Kamenets-Podol’sk; died Aug. 22, 1918, in Kiev (?). Russian historian of liberal-populist orientation. Corresponding member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences (1908).

The son of a teacher, Luchitskii graduated from the faculty of history and philology of the University of Kiev in 1866, becoming a professor at the university in 1877. In 1907 he was elected a member of the Third Duma and moved to St. Petersburg. From 1908 he taught mainly at the Advanced Courses for Women.

Luchitskii’s historical research was based on extensive archival material. His early studies dealt with the 16th-century French religious wars, whose sociopolitical significance he attempted to ascertain. He showed that the religious conflict concealed a struggle of estates and classes and that the Calvinist aristocracy in fact aspired to regain its feudal rights. He was the first to take note of the mass peasant movement during the religious wars, although he did not fully reveal its causes.

In his later work, Luchitskii concentrated chiefly on the agrarian question and on the history of the French peasantry on the eve of and during the Great French Revolution. He alleged that even prior to the Revolution most of the peasants owned all the land that they worked, and he erroneously included censives with the French peasantry’s real property, underestimating the feudal obligations associated with the censives. Luchitskii stressed that the feudal exploitation of the peasantry was growing in the second half of the 18th century, as a result of increasing seignorial requisitions and rising land rent. But he did not see that the stratification of the peasantry was linked to the coming of industrial capitalism.