On December 7, 2012, a prominent political scientist and historian, Marie Bennigsen-Broxup, died suddenly in a suburb of Oxford in the United Kingdom. Her books, articles, and first of all scientific journals on the history and political science of Central Asia and the Caucasus, which she created and edited for many years, made a significant contribution to the study of Islam in Russia in the XVIII-XX centuries. Maria Bennigsen was born in Paris on July 29, 1944 in the family of Alexander Adamovich Bennigsen (1913-1988), a member of the French Resistance movement, a descendant of cavalry General Leonti Bennigsen, who participated in the Patriotic War of 1812. Her grandfather Count Adam Pavlovich Bennigsen (1882-1946) emigrated from Soviet Russia at the very end of the Civil War. From Novorossiysk, his family moved in 1920, first to Gallipoli in Turkey, then to Estonia, until they settled in France in 1923. Maria's father is well known to all those who study Muslims in the Russian East, as the founder of the largest school of Islamic studies in Russia in Europe and the United States during the Cold War. Alexander Bennigsen is the author of a number of encyclopedic and analytical reviews on the relations of Muslim elites and communities with the state in Soviet and pre-revolutionary Central Asia, the Volga region, and the Caucasus. In the post-war decades, when the study of Russian, especially modern, forms of Islam in the USSR was under an unspoken ban, and research on this topic was not allowed. page 205 The problems in the Soviet archives are simply unthinkable, and he and his students have compiled an extensive database of publications about Islam in the Russian Empire and the USSR in Russian and European languages. Maria Bennigsen-Broxup continued her father's work. Even before graduating from the Institute of Living Oriental Languages at the Sorbonne University, she decided to specialize in the history of Russian conquests in the Muslim East, primarily in the N ... Читать далее