Zelin, Konstantin

Born Mar. 13 (25), 1892, in Moscow. Soviet historian of classical history; doctor of historical sciences (1963).

Zel’in graduated from the history and philology department of Moscow University in 1916. He was a lecturer in the department of history of Moscow State University (MGU) from 1934 to 1955 and senior research associate at the State Academy of the History of Material Culture from 1932 to 1937. Zel’in was senior research associate at the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR from 1937 to 1941 and from 1950 to 1968. He became research consultant at the Institute of World History in 1968 and has been deputy editor in chief of the journal Vestnik drevnei istorii since 1966. His principal works are devoted to the problems of the economic structure and the social and political history of the classical world and to the problems of classical culture, historiography, and source study. One of the basic themes of his research is the history of Hellenism, which Zel’in examines not as a sociological category (a stage in the development of slaveowning social structures) but as a specific historical period in the history of the eastern Mediterranean.