Jelena Mikhailovna Shtayerman

Jelena Michailowna Schtajerman ( Russian Елена Михайловна Штаерман ; born September 28, 1914 in Petrograd , † October 22, 1991 in Moscow ) was a Soviet ancient historian who is considered the most famous Soviet historian in Rome in the second half of the 20th century.

Jelena Schtajerman studied at the Lomonossow University in Moscow and received her doctorate there in 1942 under Nikolaj Maschkin . Since 1950 she worked as a staff member in the Old World History Sector of the Historical Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR . In 1956 she completed her habilitation. In her habilitation thesis she developed the research of her dissertation on the crisis of the 3rd century of the Roman Empire in Gaul and North Africa into a study on the crisis of the " slave-holding society " in the western provinces of the Roman Empire. The work is considered to be significant in two ways: firstly, it shows a Marxist interpretation of the crisis, and secondly, it tries to underpin Stalin's idea of a slave revolution as the end of antiquity on the basis of the sources. As part of Joseph Vogt's research project on ancient slavery at the Mainz Academy of Sciences and Literature , the book was widely received and sometimes met with great opposition. In her further studies, Shtayerman devoted herself primarily to the lower classes of Roman society, especially the slaves. Here she was considered extremely competent. Because of this, and because several of her books were translated, Shtayerman became the best-known Soviet ancient historian in the western world. In addition, she was considered a creative interpreter of Roman history from the perspective of historical materialism .

Fonts (selection)

• The slavery crisis in the west of the Roman Empire. Translated from Russian and edited by Wolfgang Seyfarth . Akademie Verlag, Berlin 1964 (review by Franz Kiechle in: Gnomon . Volume 37, 1965, pp. 281–289).
• The heyday of the slave economy in the Roman Republic. Steiner, Wiesbaden 1969 (= translations of foreign works on ancient slavery. Volume 2).
• The agrarian question and the senatorial opposition in the Roman Empire. Universitätsverlag Konstanz, Konstanz 1984 (= Xenia . Issue 11).
• Slavery in the western provinces of the Roman Empire in the 1st – 3rd centuries Century. Steiner, Stuttgart 1987, ISBN 3-515-04942-8 (= translations of foreign works on ancient slavery. Volume 4).

literature

• Heinz Heinen : Štaerman, Elena M. In : Concise dictionary of ancient slavery. CD-ROM delivery III, Stuttgart 2011, sv
• Heinz Heinen: Schtaerman, Elena Michajlowna. In: Peter Kuhlmann , Helmuth Schneider (Hrsg.): History of the ancient sciences. Biographical Lexicon (= The New Pauly . Supplements. Volume 6). Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2012, ISBN 978-3-476-02033-8 , Sp. 1048 f.

Web links

• Literature by Jelena Michailowna Schtajerman in the catalog of the German National Library