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The split mirrored the competencies of the two main schools and centers for archaeology in Russia, each with its own tradition. The Saint Petersburg school, with the Hermitage and state support, stood for a more professional approach, preferring the detailed study of material and strong methodology. The Moscow school was more open to amateurs, and its members had broader interests and more often made generalizations and historical inferences.
At the end of the nineteenth century, two very great and influential archaeologists were growing up—aleksander spitsyn in Saint Petersburg and vasiliy gorodcov in Moscow. Their eventual profession was not their only similarity. Both came from the provinces, both were of middle-class origin (Spitsyn was a teacher’s son; Gorodcov, the son of a deacon). Neither attended a school of archaeology, and both contributed greatly to the development and systematization of Russia’s archaeology.
Classical archaeology continued along traditional lines with a preference for the analysis of the art of antiquity. The most prominent representative of this school was nikodim kondakov, a Muscovite originally, who created his own school of archaeology in Odessa and then moved with it to St. Petersburg, together with his pupils Farmakovsky and Rostovcev.
At first, the 1917 Revolution had no impact on the content of archaeological studies, but it did cause a sharp decrease in excavations and the complete breakup of all the old institutions of archaeology. The AC and the Hermitage were subsumed into the Ministry of the Court, but both the ministry and the court suddenly disappeared. The majority of the members of the MAO, mainly from the nobility and clergy, were suppressed and lost their influence and possessions. Archaeology had developed in Russia as “knowledge for the rich,” and there were now no rich in the country. Private collections were partially robbed and annihilated, and what was left was nationalized and put into the large museums.
At the same time, the new government tried to give a civilized form to its power. In November 1917, the new Peoples Commissariat (ministry) of Enlightenment asked the people to save their cultural monuments. On 19 September 1918, a decree concerning the state registration of monuments was issued, and on 10 October 1918, the exporting and selling abroad of any artifacts of Russian art and history was forbidden.
A new central institution, the Academy for History of Material Culture in St. Petersburg, was created to replace the AC. The academy was a more powerful, centralized, and all-embracing institution that studied history, linguistics, ethnography, and the arts and later concentrated on archaeology. There was only a section of this academy in Moscow. The head of the academy was Nikolay Marr, half-Georgian, half-Scot and a linguist by profession. He was a talented man but emotionally unbalanced and not self-critical. Although his education was very narrow, his pretensions were enormous. He applied his revolutionary ideas to linguistics, declaring, for instance, that Caucasian languages (Japhetic in his terminology) were previous stages of Indo-European languages not only in structure but also in substance. For him, the main process was not the splitting of languages but their fusion. Linguists closed their ears to his wild ideas, hoping that he would adopt cultural studies and archaeology, while archaeologists excused his evident ignorance of archaeology and regarded him as a great linguist. In 1923, Marr finished formulating his “new learning on language” (or Japhetic theory), which, as yet, had no influence on archaeology.
There was another important institutional novelty, the teaching of archaeology at universities where faculties of social sciences were opened. However, these new structures were unstable, the revolutionary impulse was not exhausted, and they were constantly reconstructed and reorganized. Before the Revolution there were as many as 150 museums in Russia, and this number increased five times after 1917, mainly owing to the founding of small local museums. The development of archaeology was considerably damaged by the emigration of many of its great scholars, such as Kondakov, Rostovcev, Shtern, Bobrinsky, and Uvarova.
Even before Lenin died, in 1924, Joseph Stalin took over the reigns of political power, and after Lenin’s death, Stalin soon got rid of any opposition and “the Lenin guard” to become the sole ruler of Russia. This change meant a very different style of government, the end of any private-sector economic freedoms, and an increasing ideological monopoly, with Moscow-based organizations dominant.
In 1926, the Russian Academy based in Moscow (RAIMK) modified its title to encompass all of the USSR and was renamed the State Academy (GAIMK). From 1924 on, to centralize control, all the scholarly institutions of archaeology were united into the Russian Association of Research Institutes of Social Sciences (RANIION). This framework facilitated the reeducation of scholarly cadres in the ways of the new communist spirit.
In Moscow the well-known Bolshevik sociologist and art critic Friche surrounded himself with a group of Gorodcov’s students, who, under his influence, became very keen on Marxism and on building a Marxist archaeology. These students were Arcikhovsky, Bryusov, Kiselev, and Smirnov, and all of them later became well-known Soviet archaeologists. They fought against another group of young Moscow archaeologists from Zhukov’s paleoethnological school. Zhukov was Anuchin’s pupil, and he was interested in the impact of the natural environment on cultures and ethnic development. His pupils were Bader, Tolstov, and Voevodsky—they, too, became well-known Soviet archaeologists. Eventually, Zhukov was arrested and the paleoethnological school dispersed. However, Archikhovsky’s “Marxist archaeology” did reign supreme in Russia before it was demolished by colleagues from Leningrad (formerly St. Petersburg).
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