Kovalev, Sergei

Born Sept. 13 (25), 1886, in the village of Kuganak, present-day Bashkir ASSR; died Nov. 12, 1960, in Leningrad. Soviet historian of antiquity; doctor of historical sciences (1938).

Kovalev was a professor at the University of Leningrad from 1924 to 1956; after 1934 he headed the subdepartment of ancient Greek and Roman history, which he founded. From 1956 to 1960 he served as the director of the Museum of the History of Religion and Atheism. His main works are devoted to the social and economic character of the ancient world, the study of the classics of Marxism-Leninism on the slaveholding formation, questions concerning class struggle and slave uprisings, the origin and class nature of Christianity, and other subjects. Kovalev was the author of the first Marxist textbooks on the history of the ancient world (The History of Classical Society, part 1: Greece, 1936, 2nd ed., 1937; part 2: Hellinism: Rome, 1936), a detailed course The History of Rome (1948), and school textbooks.