Academician Boris Dmitrievich Grekov and Hungary

This article analyses the image of the Soviet academician Boris Grekov and the reception of his scholarly legacy in Hungarian historiography. The study focuses on the period from the second half of the 1940s to the first half of the 1950s, a time closely associated with the processes of Sovietization. Special attention is paid to Grekov’s visit to Budapest and Debrecen between 5 and 17 November 1948, his public lectures, and his meetings with Hungarian scholars as well as political and public figures. For the first time, a body of documents from Hungarian and Russian archives has been introduced into scholarly circulation, making it possible to reconstruct the hidden infrastructure of the visit, including its institutional, political, and organisational dimensions. A separate group of sources consists of materials from the Hungarian press, which allow the author to trace the rhetorical strategies used to construct Grekov’s public image as a “world-renowned historian” and an “exemplary Marxist-Leninist”, as well as the ways in which his scholarly theses were politicised (anti-Normanism, “Russian feudalism”, the “second edition of serfdom”). At the same time, the study reveals the limited long-term impact of this symbolic campaign. A comparison of press enthusiasm, official assessments, and subsequent historiographical practice shows that the image of Grekov, artificially constructed in the late 1940s and early 1950s, failed to take root in Hungarian historical scholarship. In the 1960s–1980s, direct references to his ideas and concepts were rarely found in Hungarian historiography. In this way, the article contributes to the study of the mechanisms and evolution of Soviet intellectual expansion in Eastern Europe, to a better understanding of the relationship between propaganda objectives and academic practices and to an assessment of the limits of the transfer of scholarly models within the socialist bloc.