Bazilevich, Konstantin

Born May 12 (24), 1892, in Kiev; died Mar. 3, 1950, in Moscow. Soviet historian. Born into the family of a military teacher.

Bazilevich graduated from the artillery school and flight school in St. Petersburg, took part in World War I, and was one of the first Russian military pilots. In 1918 he voluntarily joined the Red Army. In 1922 he graduated from Moscow University. He worked in the Historical Museum, and beginning in 1930 he taught at higher educational institutions in Moscow. In 1935 he became a professor at Moscow State University, and in 1939 he was made a professor at the Highest Party School of the Central Committee of the CPSU. At the same time, from 1936 to 1950 he was a senior scholar at the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. Bazilevich’s main works are devoted to the history of the class struggle and to the social and economic history of the Russian state in the 15th to 17th centuries. Bazilevich studied customs books and brought them into scholarly circulation; devoted a series of articles to the history of Russian trade in the 17th century and also the history of postal service; and wrote a monograph, The Foreign Policy of Russia in the Period of the Formation of the Centralized State, the Second Half of the 15th Century (which was posthumously awarded the M. V. Lomonosov Prize First Class). Bazilevich published a lecture course on the history of the USSR from ancient times to the end of the 17th century. He was also one of the authors of textbooks and handbooks on the history of the USSR for secondary and higher schools.