Georgy Danilov

Georgy Konstantinovich Danilov (Георгий Костантинович Данилов; 10 January 1897 – 29 July 1937) was a Soviet linguist, Africanist and polyglot. He was executed during the Great Purge and rehabilitated during the Khrushchev Thaw. Georgy Konstantinovich Danilov was born on 10 January 1897 in Chyhyryn, a city located in the Chigirinsky Uyezd of the Kiev Governorate of the Russian Empire (present-day Cherkasy Oblast of central Ukraine). He was of Russian ethnicity. Danilov enrolled at Moscow University(ИФФ МУ,Faculty of engineering and physics) in 1916 but was immediately drafted into the Imperial Army and sent to the front during World War I for a period of two years. Although he formally graduated, his education remained incomplete. In 1922 he returned to Moscow, where he was assigned to the department of languages at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East (or Коммунистический университет трудящихся Востока КУТВ). He worked at КомА (Коммунистическая академия, Communist Academy), then taught high school. In February 1931, Danilov became the assistant director of the linguistic Institute linked to the Наркомпрос (Народный комиссариат просвещения, the People's Commissariat for Enlightenment). Danilov used linguistics to solve day-to-day practical political problems and his works were intimately related to social class. His approach to Marxism was dogmatic, always asking what the real Marxism was in linguistics and who could be called a true Marxist linguist. The social purpose of his work emerged from a linguistic study, done in Ukraine, entitled: Язык общественного класса (по данным говора мест. Белик Полтавского округа), or The Language of Social Class (according to the Dialect of Beliki, in the Region of Poltava) .4.The greatest achievement of this linguistic survey has been the modernity of his methods, using what he called mass observation that in a way reminiscent of modern sociolinguistics. The area where Danilov and his team worked was the village of Beliki in the region of Poltava, in the summer of 1927.