Olga Ivanovna Zhigalina, the world's largest Kurdologist, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor, died suddenly on October 23, 2013. Olga Ivanovna was a person of extraordinary discipline and culture, and devoted most of her life to science, working at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, where since 2004 she headed the section of Kurdish studies and regional problems at the Center for the Study of Near and Middle East Countries. It continued the glorious traditions of Russian Kurdish studies created by I. A. Orbeli, M. A. Gasratyan, and M. S. Lazarev. O. I. Zhigalina entered Oriental studies immediately after graduating from the Lomonosov Moscow State University, where she studied at the Romano-Germanic Department of the Faculty of Philology. In 1969, she was offered a job at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the USSR Academy of Sciences, where she began her research as a junior researcher in the Central Asian sector, headed by the famous scientist H. A. Khalfin, a major expert in the field of source studies and historiography. During this period, O. I. Zhigalina was engaged in translations from German, and also prepared the memoirs of the Russian General I. F. Blaramberg-an interesting source for studying Central Asia and the Caucasus of the XIX century. I. F. Blaramberg, who spent half a century in the Russian military service, wrote about traveling as part of a topographic expedition to the eastern coast of the Caspian Sea in 1836, about After several years of painstaking work, they were published with comments by O. I. Zhigalina and an introductory article by H. A. Khalfin in the publishing house "Eastern Literature". In the early 1970s, O. I. Zhigalina began collecting materials and preparing a dissertation for the degree of Candidate of Historical Sciences on the topic " The Central Asian question in English historiography (60s-90s of the XIX century)", which she successfully defended in 1973. page 215 O. I. Zhigalina's w ... Читать далее