Ilia Pavlovich Petrushevskii (1898-1977) was one of the most outstanding historians of pre-modern Iran, not only in the Soviet Union, but globally. His article, K istorii instituta soiurgala, ...published here in English translation for the first time (no other translations have come to my attention), has been called the first scholarly work devoted entirely to the soyūrghāl. It does not diminish Petrushevskii’s merits to correct this claim: there is at least one Soviet publication that preceded Petrushevskii’s article by some years—Belenitskii’s study of the soyūrghāl in the Timurid period.The article was written as part of Petrushevskii’s doktorskaia dissertation, which was also published in 1949. The fourth chapter in Ocherki po istorii feodal’nykh otnoshenii v Azerbaidzhane i Armenii v XVI-nachale XIX vv., “Soiurgal i muʿafi” (soyūrghāl and muʿāfī, the latter category being another form of tax exemption), pp. 145-183, is this very article with minor alterations. It is not trivial to point out that the book title conveys a delimitation of research in time and space, whereas the article does not explicitly state such a restriction (but the materials discussed, of course, nevertheless derive from those periods.
PDF
