Revolution in Archaeology: Leningrad Campaign, 1930–1934

In 1930, Stalin had finished with any opposition to his power and was ostensibly the dictator of Russia. Lenin’s new economic policy (NEP) was rejected, and the revolutionary ideas of freedom, internationalism, and annihilation of state apparatus were anathema to the tyrant. His slogan, “dictatorship of the proletariat,” aimed at building socialism in the country by increasing the power of the state and exacerbating the class struggle. Resistance was ruthlessly suppressed. The collectivization of agriculture was accompanied by the mass deportation of well-to-do peasants to Siberia, and the church, the peasants’ main spiritual support, was suppressed as well. Local archaeological and folklore studies were forbidden, and organizations were disbanded if they were sympathetic to and protective of old customs and church buildings.

The old archaeological cadres were badgered and accused of “creeping empiricism,” of “naked artifactology,” and of controlling archaeology with formal typological studies. If their work reflected idealism, nationalism, or other -isms, they were even worse off and forced to make public renunciations and repentances.

Bolsheviks from the Communist Academy (not to be confused with Academy of Sciences) came to help Marr at GAIMK, and their careers provide a study in the politics of the times. Sergey Bykovsky was a mathematician prior to the Revolution, a commissar during the civil war, a member of the Red Army’s secret political security service, and then a historian in the Communist Academy. Fedor Kiparisov was a philologist and had earlier worked as a trade-union organizer. sergey semenov was a young secret political security investigator when he began his postgraduate study of stone tools using modern criminological techniques at GAIMK. Marr became a member of the Communist Party, and his courses became obligatory.

In 1930, in Leningrad, Spitsyn’s pupil vladislav ravdonikas developed a work program according to orders from the Bolshevik rulers of GAIMK even though he himself was not a member of the Communist Party. Called “the Marxist history of material culture,” not of archaeology, it contained sharp criticism of many contemporary archaeologists for their unwillingness to work in the new way. The use of the new term material culture instead of archaeology was significant. Bykovsky and other Marxists favored a model that divided material culture in general, not by its sources or its methods of manufacture, but by epochs and their socioeconomic