Piotrovsky B.B., (1908-1990), archaeologist

Categories / Science. Education/Personalia
PIOTROVSKY Boris Borisovich (1908, St. Petersburg - 1990, Leningrad), orientalist, archaeologist, museum worker, member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1970), honoured worker of arts of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (1964), Hero of Socialist Labour (1983). He graduated from the Faculty of History and Linguistics of the State Leningrad University in 1930. From 1929 to 1964, he collaborated with the Institute for the History of Material Culture, appointed the head of its Leningrad section in 1953 (until 1964). In 1931, he started working at the State Hermitage, to become the director of the museum in 1964. From 1930, he conducted archaeological digs in various regions of Armenia. In 1939-41 and 1945-71, he was responsible for the Karmir-Blur archaeological expedition which discovered a number of relics of the Urartu Civilization. In Leningrad, during the winter of the siege of 1941-42, he wrote his work The History and Culture of the Urartu Civilisation (published in 1944 and awarded the Stalin Prize in 1946). He spent the years between 1942 and 1944 in evacuation. In 1961-63, Piotrovsky headed archaeological expeditions to Egypt and Sudan. From 1968 to 1990, he presided over the Council of the House of Scholars; in 1984 he enrolled in the Presidium of Leningrad Scientific Centre of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, and took up the chair of its Council on Social Sciences. The chief editor of the St. Petersburg - Petrograd - Leningrad Encyclopaedia (1992). He lived at 25 Moika River Embankment and was buried at Smolenskoe Orthodox cemetery.

Works: Passages of My Life. St. Petersburg, 1995.

References: Борис Борисович Пиотровский / Сост. Л. А. Калашникова, А. Л. Вассоевич. М., 1990.

A. Y. Chistyakov. Piotrovsky Andrian Ivanovich
Moika River Embankment/Saint Petersburg, city, house 25
Борис Борисович Пиотровский / Сост. Л. А. Калашникова, А. Л. Вассоевич. М., 1990
Страницы моей жизни. СПб., 1995 Russian Academy of Sciences
State University, St. Petersburg
Institute for the History of Material Culture of the Russian Academy of Sciences
Hermitage
Siege of 1941-44
St. Petersburg Scientific Centre of RAS
Gorky House of Scientists, a creative club