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.

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 North Caucasus. Her first academic work was dedicated to Sheikh Mansur (Ushurma), a late 18th-century hero of jihad in Chechnya. Later, while working at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Socialcs, she studied more extensively the problems of Muslim resistance on the outskirts of the Russian Empire and the USSR, about which she wrote a lot (mainly in English). The subject of her close attention was the poorly studied movements against the Russian rule of the Naqshbandi Sheikh Uzun Hajji and Imam Najm al-din Gotsinsky in mountainous Dagestan and Chechnya at the end of the Civil War and the first half of the 1920s.

In 1983, Maria co-authored the monograph "Islamic Threat to the Soviet State"with Alexander Bennigsen. Of particular interest in this book is the analysis of Soviet national policy towards Muslim peoples and minorities in the eastern suburbs of the country. The authors ' hypothesis that Muslim national minorities pose a serious challenge to Soviet power in the East was widely popular in Sovietology in the 1980s.In 1992, a collection of articles "The North Caucasus Barrier on the Path of Russian Advance to the Muslim East"was published under the editorship and with the participation of M. Bennigsen-Broxup. In 1997, she published her monograph "The Struggle of Chechens for Independence", written by her in collaboration with the famous Israeli Caucasian scholar Moshe Gammer. In it, she convincingly proves that it is impossible to solve the Chechen problem without taking into account the rich experience of relations between Chechnya and Russia over the past two or three centuries. Along with data from written sources and literature, she made extensive use of her own field materials and interviews with political leaders of the Chechen resistance, collected in the region since 1993. These and other publications of M. Bennigsen-Broxup proved to be in demand and were repeatedly reprinted in different countries of the world.

She devoted a lot of effort to reprinting rare monuments of Muslim journalism and local lore of the pre-Revolutionary era in Russian translations. Under her editorship, the Society for Central Asian Studies published in the 1980s a number of interesting reprints of the early twentieth century, including the report of the Main Press Department of the Russian Empire "The Muslim Press of Russia in 1910"; the Arabic original and an abridged Russian translation of the essay on Sufi ethics (Arab, adab) in the Caucasus, compiled by the imam's spiritual mentor Shamil by Sheikh Jamal al-din Ghazi-Kumukhsky ("Naqshbandi Tariqa", Petrovsk, 1905); abridged Russian translation of the chronicle of Imam Shamil's secretary Muhammad-Tahir al-Qarahi "Three Imams", etc. The publication of these narrative sources in the Soviet Union at that time was impossible for ideological reasons of the struggle against religion.

But the main business of her life was, of course, international scientific periodicals. Maria made a name for herself among Orientalists as the editor-in-chief of the Central Asian Survey, an organ of the Central Asian Studies Society, which she was a member of since 1981. For almost a quarter of a century, from 1982 to 2007, she headed this publication, turning it into an international scientific forum of scientists from all over the world. a leading academic journal devoted to the study of Central Asia and other regions with a Soviet and colonial past, primarily the vast area of Eurasia from Northern China (Xinjiang) in the east to Anatolia in the west, from Iran in the south to the Volga-Ural region in the north. Many important studies on Islamic studies, political science, sociology, and the history of Muslims in the Caucasus, Volga region, and Crimea have been published here. The journal has repeatedly organized major international symposia on the history of Muslims in Russia and the USSR, in particular the 1990 conference. in Oxford, dedicated to the Imam Shamil movement, which for the first time brought together leading experts on the history of Islam and Muslim regions from academic centers and regions of Russia. In addition, Maria Bennigsen-Broxup edited the bulletin "Central Asia and Caucasus Chronicle" in 1981-1990.

As one of the leading experts in the field of Muslim studies in the Caucasus and Central Asia, Maria Bennigsen-Broxup was widely known among both scholars and politicians. In 1981-1990. She was a permanent consultant on the Caucasus to the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Defense. At this time and later, she prepared a lot of analytical materials with an overview

interethnic and confessional conflicts in different regions of the world. In 2010-2012, she was one of the main organizers of the weekly scientific seminars "Caucasus: History and Modernity" at the Higher School of Social Sciences in Paris. Much attention was paid to the analysis of the current social, political and religious situation in the region and individual republics of the North and South Caucasus. Already in the last years of her life, she did a lot for the organization of a new international academic journal on Caucasian studies called the Caucasus Survey. His first issue was published after her death, in 2013.

Maria has always been keenly interested in what is happening today in the homeland of her ancestors. She traveled a lot and often, including to areas where military operations were taking place. She met with many leaders of the Afghan resistance to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Soon after her marriage, she lived for a long time in Hong Kong, and then in Moscow, where she worked as a correspondent for the British newspaper Financial Times. Since 1980. she moved to London, but since 1989 has often traveled to the regions of the Soviet (and post-Soviet) Muslim East: Tatarstan, the North Caucasus, Georgia and Azerbaijan. Starting from 1990-1993, she regularly visited Dagestan and Chechnya, where she visited more than once even during the two bloody Chechen wars. In 1998-1999, she managed to conduct 20 interviews with leading military and political leaders of the Chechen resistance about the events of the 1994-1996 war. The Chechen case particularly interested her as an example of long-term Muslim resistance to the claims of European powers from the colonial era to the present.

Maria Bennigsen-Broxup was not only a bright scientist and a talented organizer of science. She could not stand to watch the pain and suffering of ordinary people and entire nations who were victims of past and present bloody conflicts. During the second Chechen war, it provided effective support to the families of its victims who found themselves in the European Community. With her participation, the Children of Chechnya Action Relief Mission was established in London. Her hospitable home was open to people from the North Caucasus, to whom she devoted her life. The bright memory of her will always remain in the hearts of those who knew her, her relatives, friends, colleagues and students.

V. BOBROVNIKOV, M. VACHAGAEV

THE MAIN WORKS OF MARIA BENNIGSEN-BROXAP ¹.

Bennigsen, Alexandre, Bennigsen-Broxup, Marie. The Islamic Threat to the Soviet State. L.: CroomHelm, 1983.

The North Caucasus Barrier: The Russian Advance Towards the Muslim East / Ed. by Marie Bennigsen-Broxup. L.: Hurst, 1992.

Bennigsen-Broxup, Marie, Gammer, Moshe. The Chechen Struggle for Independence. L.: Hurst, 1997.

The Russian Experience with Muslim Insurgencies: from the North Caucasus in the 19th Century to Afghanistan and Back to the Caucasus. Washington: Jamestown Foundation, 2011.

LITERATURE ABOUT THE LIFE AND WORKS OF MARIA BENNIGSEN-BROXUP

Brocrs L. Marie Bennigsen-Broxup // Central Asian Survey. 2013. Vol. 32. N 1. P. 1-2.

¹ Comp. by V. O. Bobrovnikov.

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