Abstract:
Despite its beginnings in the 19th century, Slavic archaeology developed relatively late in the Soviet Union because of the generally hostile attitude of the Bolshevik regime towards Slavic Studies, in general, which were perceived as a tool of imperialist (and tsarist) propaganda. The attitude changed in the 1930s, when Stalin revived the idea in order to use Slavic Studies against the Nazi propaganda and its claims about the civilizational inferiority of the Slavs. The paper traces the explosion of interest in the Slavic ethnogenesis and the archaeology of the early Slavs between 1950 and 1991. Several key personalities of Soviet archaeology (Iurii Kukharenko, Irina Rusanova, Valentin Sedov and Volodymyr Baran) are highlighted, but the main focus is on the tensions between migrationist and autochtonist models for explaining the emergence and early developments of the Slavs on the territory of the Soviet Union. After Ukraine’s declaration of independence and the collapse of the Soviet Union (1991), migrationism was discarded in both Ukraine and Russia in studies concerned with the Slavic Urheimat, but adopted in those concerned with the presence of the Slavs as far into the forest belt as northwestern Russia and as far east as the Middle Volga region. The article ends with an examination of the political implications of the research on the early Slavs in northwestern Russia and in Tatarstan.
