It is very difficult to write about a friend and like-minded person who passed away in the prime of his creative powers, did not complete many of his plans, but left the kindest memory of himself as a teacher, scientist and person.
Sergey Mikhailovich was formed as a young specialist in the history of the Near and Middle East, successfully studying at the Faculty of Oriental Studies of St. Petersburg (Leningrad) University. The Leningrad Turkological School of the 1960s and 1970s was characterized by a rich and fruitful life. This was the time of creative maturity of his teachers and mentors A. N. Kononov, Yu. A. Petrosyan, A.D. Zheltyakov, A.D. Novichev, S. I. Ivanov, S. G. Klyashtorny and others. The tradition of Leningrad Turkologists was monthly seminars on Dvortsovaya Embankment under the leadership of A. N. Kononov and Yu. A. Petrosyan.
Sergey Mikhailovich was distinguished from most of his peers by his desire for a deeper understanding of socio-economic processes in Asian and African countries and revealing their connection with general trends in world development. This interest led him to the Department of Economics of Modern Capitalism at the Faculty of Economics of Leningrad State University, where he completed postgraduate studies and successfully defended his PhD thesis on the importance of economic assistance to developing countries as a characteristic feature of modern neo-colonialism. Teaching economic subjects helped the young assistant develop the analytical research skills that made his subsequent work stand out so much.
S. M. Ivanov returned to the Department of History of the Near and Middle East Countries of the Faculty of Oriental Studies as an associate of its head, Professor A. D. Zheltyakov. Both of them supported the revival of university Turkology, the introduction of new disciplines and new research topics, and the expansion of the department's relations with colleagues in Moscow, Baku, Yerevan, and Tbilisi. Since that time, close business and friendly relations have been established with the Department of History of the Near and Middle East of ISAA Moscow State University, with the Turkish sector of the Institute of Oriental Studies and other scientific and educational groups in our country, which were based on the project "Essays on the History of Russian-Turkish Relations". Sergey Mikhailovich has always been deeply concerned about the fate of Russian Oriental studies, including Turkology. He was far from indifferent to what paths his students would take and how much they would manage to preserve and multiply the traditions of the Russian school of Oriental studies. Thoroughly engaged in the economic history of the Ottoman Empire, he also taught fascinating courses on modern Turkey. It was surprisingly easy for him to show a retrospective historical past of Turkey and explain the features of its current state. His doctoral dissertation, devoted to the distinctive features of the functioning of the Ottoman Empire as a peripheral component of the world economic system, struck with its novelty, sharpness of problem formulation and originality of their solution, rich in factual saturation.
At the Faculty of International Relations, Professor S. M. Ivanov intended to carry out a set of studies that reveal the relationship between national, regional and global principles of world development. This topic was mentioned in his lectures, special courses, and recent articles published during his lifetime.
In real life, he was a perfect example of the St. Petersburg intellectual. He was characterized by high demands on himself, decency, delicacy, exceptional conscientiousness and loyalty to the traditions of the university, where he spent more than forty years. A man of science, a talented personality - this is how many people knew Sergey Mikhailovich. He certainly left a long and kind memory of himself. It will remain in us: his friends, colleagues, students.
M. S. MEYER, A. A. KOLESNIKOV
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About Sergey Mikhailovich as a researcher of economic history.
He was a brilliant and versatile mind in the study of contemporary issues. He was able to make an analysis of the twenty-year socio-economic forecast of Asia and write knowledgeably about the improvement of the terminological apparatus in Turkological studies (see sb-ki: The East as a subject of economic research. Moscow, 2008; Turcologica. But for me, Ivanov was all the more remarkable as a scientist when I started experimenting with the economics of past centuries.
Think back to the early 1990s: domestic economists are literally obsessed with inventing the privatisation bicycle. The dazedness of the fantasies (from not being burdened with historical knowledge) was amazing. And against this background, Sergei Mikhailovich's report on the lessons of privatization for the Soviet despotism on the example of another despotism, the Ottoman Empire, sounded so good and sobering. It was a very representative conference at the Russian Academy of Sciences.: State property, state capitalism, privatization: lessons of history and modernity. Mat. conf. Moscow, 1991).
The breadth of interests and at the same time the strict foundation of any of the issues studied made Ivanov a highly sought-after author. They are asked to write about foreign trade issues and they respond with jewelry-made articles (see, for example, sb-ki: Russia in Foreign Economic Relations: Lessons of History and Modernity. Moscow, 1993; The Foreign East: questions of the history of trade with Russia. Moscow, 2000). He is offered the most difficult experimental topic for the collective book "The East as a subject of economic research" - historical and economic exercises with fiction. And it turns out that Sergey Mikhailovich already has a close development. As a result, the essay "Eastern literature as an occasion to reflect on the philosophy of economic management in traditional Asian societies, with a projection on the types of transformation, including the theory of international relations"appears. Equally useful for orientalists in a field that they are unfamiliar with is the article by my late colleague "East and West in the History of Economy" by M. Weber (judgments of a scientist and small additions to them", in the forthcoming collection "Foreign East: questions of Economic History in political economy classics".
Finally, about the excellent ability of Sergey Mikhailovich to analyze the peculiarities of the transformation of a single Eastern despotism through the general history of the world economic process, and even interspersed with elements of cultural studies and religious studies. This can be characterized by a whole research line that has improved over time. See how it developed. The 1990s are still an outline of the future holistic picture: articles are written and published on certain features of the transition period in the Ottoman Empire, about a person in its changing economic space (the emerging capitalist way of life in the Muslim ethno-confessional environment). In 2001, two developments were published at once, where quite capacious generalizations are already present. The idea that it is useless to operate with economic and theoretical concepts without knowledge of a particular cultural and economic type and cultural and historical environment is persistently held. We say, the author writes, that bourgeois relations have long been established in modern Turkish society. And at the same time, we wonder why in this society at the end of the XX century "suddenly" there was a gravitation towards common Islamic values its Ottoman past. Then, in 2004, a report was published as a separate booklet for the Genome of the East conference, which, although in a condensed form, thoroughly analyzes the reasons for such different socio-economic destinies of the West and Turkey/The Ottoman Empire. And, of course, all this is most thoroughly developed in the individual monograph of 2005 (see sb-ki: The East in modern Times: economy, state system. Moscow, 1991; Islamic countries and regions: history and modernity. Moscow, 1994; The Eastern World: Experiences of Social Transformation. Moscow, 2001; Russian Oriental Studies in memory of M. S. Kapitsa. Moscow, 2001; brochure Turkish Model of Development: West in the East and East in the West. Mat. conf. Genome of the East: experiences and interdisciplinary opportunities. monograph: The Ottoman Empire in the world economic system (second half of the XIX-beginning of the XX centurySt. Petersburg, 2005).
I know about his unfulfilled plans. I know that he was preparing a course of lectures on foreign economics of the past centuries for the Faculty of International Relations of St. Petersburg University. I know about his desire to participate in the development of the topic "The logic of global social development". But there is also a lot that has been done. Sergei Mikhailovich Ivanov's contribution to the study of the economic history of the East is undoubtedly significant.
A. M. PETROV
* * *
In the early 1990s, I started lecturing on Turkish economics at the Institute of Asian and African Studies at Moscow State University. The first part of this lecture series was supposed to be a course on economic history. Although it was intended to be limited chronologically to the period of the Republic of Turkey, in which I specialize, it soon became clear that it was impossible to explain the economic legacy of the republic without at least addressing the main problems of the economic history of the Ottoman period. Rereading the literature on this range of issues, I again met with well-known and familiar assessments from my student years. The extreme clarity and simplicity of these assessments still left a vague sense of understatement and a more pronounced feeling... boredom.
What a breakthrough revelation in the process of reading and collecting material was the work "Foreign Economic relations of the Ottoman Empire in modern times (late XVIII - early XX centuries)" published in 1989. First of all, we are talking about quite numerous, fortunately, chapters and sections written by Sergey Mikhailovich. And it turned out that the claim that the trade and economic expansion of the West, which unfolded in the Ottoman Empire after the signing of trade agreements in the late 30s-early 40s of the XIX century, became an obstacle to the development of the country, is far from indisputable, " suffers from a certain simplification and, in essence, is nothing else as a kind of "spontaneous anti-imperialism"." The country, of course, bore social and economic costs when its economic life was integrated into the life of the world capitalist economy, but at the same time the internal restructuring of the Ottoman socio-economic structures took place, the state of their "transition" was strengthened, and the prerequisites for the formation of capitalism in the country were created. As it turned out when reading the pen-owned SM. Ivanov, the second head of the work "Foreign Economic Relations of the Ottoman Empire in Russia". the second half of the nineteenth century", not only the high degree of exploitation of the empire's finances by European loan capital led to its financial collapse: the bankruptcy of the Port was a natural result of the involvement of the empire's agrarian, low-productive economy with its backward state forms in the system of international capitalist credit. At the same time, the economic thinking of imperial statesmen was such that gaining access to European markets initially provoked a significant increase in unproductive spending.
The years have not given me a lot of personal meetings with Sergey Mikhailovich, only once I met him at the Turkological conference of the Institute of Oriental Studies. But all the time I couldn't stop thanking him for his new perspective, for the joyful feeling of a fresh reading of the economic history of the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century, from the calm, scientifically grounded, but at the same time benevolent to the subject under study and therefore, obviously, much closer to the truth interpretation of events that his work gave.
Students are also grateful to him for his succinct definitions and well-remembered expressive formulations. So, S. M. Ivanov wrote: "On the one hand, the world market stimulated the development of the structure and volume of production in the Ottoman Empire in isolation from the historical needs of the Ottoman society, and on the other hand, under its influence, the population of the country formed a new structure and set of needs without a corresponding internal production base." Students like to reproduce these propositions in their own way, calling them the "Ivanov formula": "The Ottoman Empire produced what it did not consume, and did not consume what it did not produce."
N. Y. ULCHENKO
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In February 2005, I had the opportunity to express my most positive opinion about the then-discussed doctoral dissertation of Sergey Mikhailovich on a topic unique for modern Turkology- " The Ottoman Empire in the world economic system (the second half of the XIX-beginning of the XX century)", which then, after its successful defense, was translated into a monograph.
As we know, Sergey Mikhailovich has been working on this topic for a long time. Noting in his work that the West had the greatest influence on the economic and social development of the Ottoman Empire at that time and achieved considerable political and economic benefits for itself, the author wrote about the "unprecedented arrays of economic ties" of the empire and their "growing diversity". Moreover, the process became mutually "effective" - Turkey finally gave up hopes of returning "to the gates of Vienna" again, became an ally of the West in the Crimean War, expanded trade relations with the West, expanded cultural and technological borrowing, while Russia was firmly considered the main enemy.
Analyzing the economic aspects of this critical, "last" period of the once powerful world empire, Sergey Mikhailovich drew the most complete picture of that time, subjected it to a comprehensive analysis, while demonstrating an undeniably innovative approach. One example of such innovation: when we turn to the works of Turkologists on a similar topic, we historians usually come across descriptions of such" symbols " of Ottoman economic dependence as the Ottoman debt that began with the Crimean War, and the capitulation that Europeans clung to until Lausanne. Sergey Mikhailovich expanded the research area of the Ottoman economy as much as possible, considering it both as the most important component of the empire's existence, and as the sphere of its interaction with the external environment, the sphere of culture in which its various types are represented.
At the same time, he showed in detail that these years and decades were the most dramatic in the history of the Ottoman Empire, when this largest power of the Middle Ages tried, but failed at the turn of the century, XIX and XX, to adapt to the existing fundamentally new conditions of world existence and, as a result, was forced to be surrounded by a new dynamic world live out the last decades of their existence in a state of semi-independence.
In the dissertation and later in the monograph, the author analyzed the socio-economic aspects of the Sultan's caliphate state as components of the development of Muslim civilization. With the problem of the interaction of civilizations clearly escalating today, which, according to some historians, has taken the form of a conflict, the fate of a specific and most important period of the "Islamic economy" outlined by Sergey Mikhailovich can be of considerable use in discussions on the problems of civilizational interaction. It is well known that even some modern representatives of the concept of " Islamic economy "in Turkey do not want to refer to the Ottoman experience of development, which, in their opinion, was then" obscured " during the very period that became the subject of Sergey Mikhailovich's study. But in this work, the author puts the question differently - even a huge empire with its rich natural resources is doomed to collapse, regardless of which civilization it belongs to, if its elite is unable to financially and spiritually mobilize society in the name of dynamic and independent progress of the state and society.
The most innovative area of research of Sergey Mikhailovich is the topic "Man and society at the crossroads of traditional and market economic cultures". In it, the author examines " the social and socio-cultural conditions of the emergence of the capitalist way of life in the Ottoman Empire and the transformation of a person of traditional society into a merchant and entrepreneur of the bourgeois type." Rightly noting that our domestic authors have so far "focused on the socio-economic and socio-political aspects of the topic", Sergey Mikhailovich recalls that the true measure of "all things" in each society is "the level and degree of spiritual and material emancipation" of the human person, which is provided to an optimal degree, according to the author, only in civil society.
Let me repeat once again: Sergey Mikhailovich's research, like many of his other works, is a testament to the high erudition, talent and hard work of our colleague, an orientalist scientist who passed away prematurely. This is a great contribution to scientific Oriental studies, to the study of Turkish history.
N. G. KIREEV
* * *
Our Moscow colleagues have always highly appreciated the professionalism of Sergey Mikhailovich Ivanov, the depth of his research talent, originality, boldness, and factual validity of his conclusions. His latest book is " The Ottoman Empire in the World Economic System. The second half of the XIX - beginning of the XX century" (St. Petersburg, 2005) is not just a contribution to the study of the Ottoman Empire, but in many ways a revolution in our knowledge of this period, forcing us to rethink the Ottoman reality and methods of action in the East of European capitalism and the consequences of economic conflicts of that time for the fate of the region.
We remember Sergey Mikhailovich's deep, brilliant presentations at scientific conferences, which are always expected with interest by colleagues, his ability to support other elements of a new understanding of the material, sometimes even timid, but independent and original ideas, and his friendly Petersburg intelligence and delicacy.
Sergey Mikhailovich passed away at the peak of his career, in the prime of his scientific activity. We all hoped that he could become the new leader of Ottoman studies.
Unfortunately, fate decreed otherwise. We grieve, but we are also proud that such a bright researcher, interesting person, and friendly colleague lived in our environment, always responding to any requests for advice and help.
S. F. ORESHKOVA
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