Vladimir Petrukhin

Vladimir Yakovlevich Petrukhin is a Soviet and Russian medieval historian, archaeologist, and anthropologist. Doctor of Historical Sciences (1994), Chief Research Fellow at the Department of Medieval History of the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and Professor at the School of Historical Studies, Faculty of Humanities, National Research University Higher School of Economics.

He was born in 1950 in the town of Pushkino.

He graduated from the Department of Archaeology of the Faculty of History of Moscow State University in 1972; in 1975, he defended his Candidate of Sciences dissertation there on the topic “Funerary Cult of Pagan Scandinavia.” In 1975–1991, he was a scientific editor in the archaeology and ethnography section of the publishing house Soviet Encyclopedia, and took part in the publication of the encyclopedias Myths of the Peoples of the World, Peoples of the World, and others. In those same years, he collaborated with the Institute of the History of the USSR and the Institute of Slavic Studies, in particular on the preparation of the edition Constantine Porphyrogenitus. De Administrando Imperio.

Since 1991, he has been a professor at the Jewish University in Moscow, teaching lecture courses on the history of Russia in antiquity and the Middle Ages, the history of Jews in Russia in antiquity and the Middle Ages, introduction to archaeology, and archaeological practice. Since 1991, he has been a senior research fellow, and since 1994 a leading research fellow, at the Institute of Slavic Studies; in 1994 he defended his doctoral dissertation, “Problems of the Ethnocultural History of the Slavs and Rus’ in the 9th–11th Centuries.”

In 1991–1996, he worked in the Department of Ethnolinguistics and Folklore, where he was invited by N. I. Tolstoy to participate in the preparation of the ethnolinguistic dictionary Slavic Antiquities (vols. 1–2, Moscow, 1995–99; member of the editorial board). In 1997, while continuing his work on the dictionary, he moved to the Department of Medieval History, and participated in the preparation of conferences and collected volumes such as Slavs and Their Neighbors