Rybakov, Boris

Born May 21 (June 3), 1908, in Moscow. Soviet archaeologist, historian, and public figure. Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1958). Member of the CPSU since 1951.

Rybakov graduated from Moscow State University in 1930 and became a professor there in 1943. In 1956 he was appointed director of the Institute of Archaeology of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR; from 1973 to 1975 he was academician-secretary of the academy’s department of history.

Rybakov began archaeological field work in 1932, with excavations of Tmutarakan’, Chernigov, Liubech, and other old Russian cities. His chief works are devoted to the socioeconomic and political history of the eastern Slavs and of Rus’ and to the history of early Russian handicrafts, culture, paganism, weights and measures, inscriptions, chronology, chronicles, and folk epics.

Rybakov is a member of the academies of sciences of Czechoslovakia (1960) and Poland (1970). In 1964 he received an honorary doctorate from the Jagellonian University in Kraków. Since 1958 he has been a member of the Executive Committee of the International Union of Prehistoric and Protohis-toric Sciences, and since 1963, a member of the International Committee of Slavists. He has frequently represented Soviet historical scholarship at international congresses. In 1958 he became president of the USSR-Greece Society.

Rybakov has been awarded two Orders of Lenin, two other orders, and various medals. He received the State Prize of the USSR in 1949 and 1952.