long-term suspicion that the people of Leningrad secretly longed for their city to be the capital again meant that he did the opposite and centralized most government institutions in Moscow. He also dismissed and then executed some of what was left of the Leningrad elite.

The inglorious Soviet-Finnish War (1939– 1940) and the defeats in the first year of the Patriotic War (1941–1945) revealed the weakness of Stalin’s brand of socialism, which was in reality equal to the old feudal order with elements of slave ownership. Stalin was forced to resort to the patriotic feeling of the people of the USSR, and more particularly to the patriotic feeling of the Russian people, because Russian soldiers were the basis and the majority of the Soviet army. Soviet archaeologists glorified the national character of the Russian people and some other peoples of the Soviet Union, tracing their noble ancestors and their ethnic peculiarities back in antiquity and searching for their ethnic territories and broadening their boundaries during the remote past in order to justify any new “historic claims” on territory.

Marr’s position was no longer fashionable, and his theories were dismissed personally by Stalin in a public discussion in 1950 in the party newspaper Pravda. Stalin declared that Marr was not a Marxist, and Indo-European linguistic studies were restored. The theory of staged development was rejected as well, and another detachment of scholars was forced to publicly repent. Although the repression this time was not as dramatic as earlier, it still existed, and “cosmopolites” (mainly Jews) became “antipatriotic critics” and “slanderers” and were expelled from scholarly organizations.

Soviet Archaeology: From Thaw to Moderate Frosts to Stagnation, 1956–1991

Nikita Khrushchev’s speech during the Twentieth Party Congress exposed Stalin as a despot and took power from his nearest associates. It was a kind of liberalization, and the writer Ilya Erenburg coined the word “thaw” for it. The dictatorship of the proletariat was repudiated, and normalization of relations with the West began.

All of this change led to some shifts in archaeology. Gradually, the concern for “historic rights” on maps disappeared, the details of local origins were no longer so important, and archaeologists were able to argue for migration in their explanations of cultural change. Slavic archaeology began to be as well regarded as other branches of the discipline, and ethnogenesis lost its priority. However, the new ruler of Russia neither understood humanist intellectuals nor had any special sympathy for them.

In 1956, Boris Rybakov, a specialist in Slavic-Russian archaeology, was appointed as head of the IHMK, which was shortly renamed the Institute of Archaeology. Rybakov earlier had made his name by encouraging patriotic ideals in archaeology, specifically by the glorification of ancient Russian handicrafts.

In the middle of the 1960s, Khrushchev, whose political experiments were considered dangerous for the regime, was demoted by a palace revolution. To justify this change in policy, it became necessary to introduce objective and reliable methods in all disciplines. Archaeologists seized this opportunity to develop theoretical studies, their relationships with western non-Marxist scholars became more positive and respectful, and debates took place. However, the new scholarly freedom that led to the invasion of Prague by Russian troops in the spring of 1968 badly frightened the Brezhnev oligarchy, and debate and discussion, even critiques of Stalin, ceased.

Archaeological activity continued to grow enormously. In 1985 there were some 700 expeditions; more recently, it has been estimated that every two years 8,000 archaeological books and articles are published in the USSR, i.e., as much as was published between 1918 and 1940. Using state donations, planned economy, and centralized organization, Rybakov managed to initiate the twenty-volume edition The Archaeology of the USSR, and although only a small number of the volumes have been published, hundreds of other volumes entitled Corpus of Archaeological Sources have appeared.

Russian Archaeology in the Struggle for Survival since 1991

In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev’s rise to power initially caused considerable liberalization and the