Boris Lunin

Boris Vladimirovich Lunin was a historian of scholarship, source specialist and bibliographer who wrote on the history of Oriental studies and archaeology in Central Asia. He was born on 18 July 1906 in Geneva into a family of Russian political émigrés (his father was a lawyer). After his grandfather V. I. Lunin was elected to the First State Duma, the family returned to Russia.

He attended a gymnasium in Pyatigorsk, lived in Rostov-on-Don from 1921, and in 1922–1925 was an auditor at the Don Archaeological Institute. From 1923 he belonged to the Don Society of Archaeology and Art History (later the North Caucasus Society of Archaeology, History and Ethnography), served as scientific secretary of its board and worked at the Don regional museum. His first publication was “The Dolmens of the Black Sea Coast” (1924), on an expedition of 1923. In February 1931 he was arrested with other board members of the society and in September of that year released with a suspended sentence. In 1935–1941 he taught at Rostov colleges, and in 1937 he headed the pre-Soviet history department of the newly founded Rostov museum of local lore.

In 1941 he was with the active army on the Southern Front; from 1942 to 1953 he served in the Turkestan Military District as senior lecturer and head of the socio-economic cycle at its military schools, retiring as a lieutenant colonel. From 1953 he was scientific secretary and then senior researcher at the Institute of History and Archaeology of the Academy of Sciences of the Uzbek SSR, and afterwards scientific secretary of the Academy’s Department of Social Sciences. In 1956 he defended his candidate’s dissertation on the Turkestan Circle of Amateurs of Archaeology (1895–1917).

He defended his doctoral dissertation, based on the monograph “Central Asia in Pre-Revolutionary and Soviet Oriental Studies” (1965), in 1966–1967 — reference works usually date the degree of Doctor of Historical Sciences to 1966 — and was made professor in 1970. From 1968 he headed the historiography sector of the Institute of History of the Uzbek SSR and was the institute’s chief researcher. He was named Honoured Science Worker of the Uzbek SSR in 1973 and received the Order of Friendship of Peoples in 1981.

Lunin wrote 25 monographs, 50 booklets and more than 600 scholarly works. They include “The Scholarly Societies of Turkestan and Their Progressive Activity” (1962) and “Central Asia in the Scholarly Heritage of Russian Oriental Studies” (1979); he also compiled the annual bibliographic indexes of literature on the archaeology, history, ethnography, philosophy and law of Uzbekistan. He sat on the editorial board of the journal Social Sciences in Uzbekistan for forty years, was a member of the main editorial board of the 14-volume Uzbek encyclopedia, an academician of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences and a member of the Russian Archaeological Society.

Boris Lunin died in Tashkent on 18 October 2001 and was buried in the Dombrabad cemetery. A lane in Rostov-on-Don bears his name.