Ronchey, S. “Kazhdan, l'oligarchia sovietica e l'aristocrazia bizantina.” A. Kazhdan and S. Ronchey. L'aristocrazia bizantina. Palermo: Sellerio, 1997. 9-29.

This introduction provides an overview of the intellectual development of Alexander Petrovich Kazhdan and the political and ideological background to his historical vision and historiography.  The last heir of the Russian social-economic school in the USSR during the period of stagnation under Brezhnev - though also influenced by the French Annales School - Kazhdan conducted statistical and comparative research on the structure of the Byzantine ruling class of the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries, a first version of which was published in Russian in 1974 with the title: Sotsial'nyj sostav gospodstvujuš?ego klassa Vizantii XI-XII vv.  The hypotheses and deductions present in nuce in that volume were further elaborated by Kazhdan after his flight from the URSS and his move to the U.S.A. to the Dumbarton Oaks Institute of Byzantine Studies from 1978 on.  In the mid-1980s Kazhdan would decide to rewrite and restructure the work ex novo, with the addition of an extensive collection of new data, the introduction of rigorous philological analyses of sources, and the pursuit of new, more detailed conclusions, both empirical and theoretical. In collaboration with Silvia Ronchey, he would work on this study for over ten years until his death in 1997. In addition, the new version of the work, published in Italian that same year, presented the completed elaboration of the historical and sociological theory of the “ascendant vertical dynamism of Byzantine élites,” which the co-author illustrates in her introduction to the volume. The co-author detects an implicit transference between the Byzantine state structure and the Soviet state, on the one hand, and Byzantine aristocracy and Soviet nomenclature, on the other, subtly influencing Kazhdan’s historical analysis and overall vision.