Leningrad paleoethnologists was Alexandr Miller, who studied in the École Anthropologique in Paris after the death of de Mortillet and was friendly with Breuil and hugo obermaier grad. Miller published very little but trained very strong pupils—Artamonov, Piotrovskiy, Iessen, Passek, Latynin, Kruglov, Podgaecky, and Krichevsky. Miller was also arrested in the 1930s, and his pupils were encouraged to maintain an interest in ethnic problems rather than any paleoethnological directions.

This trend in Russia was strangely unlucky, but there was a logic to its bad luck. During the time of the czars, in the 1880s, the Department of Anthropology at Moscow University was closed and what survived was transferred as the Department of Ethnography from the historical-philological faculty to the natural sciences faculty in order to hinder the intrusion of naturalist scientific ideas into humanist studies. During Soviet times, it was dangerous for social scientists to look for explanations in natural factors instead of socioeconomic ones or (in the early period) to have an interest in ethnic problems. The attitude of paleoethnologists, whether consciously or not, was opposed to the historicizing and politizing of archaeology and to its Marxist directions. Thus, the heads of both schools of paleoethnology—Moscow and Leningrad—were arrested and annihilated, and some members of the schools also “visited” prisons and camps. Paleoethnology remained disorganized and broken.

After interests in ethnogenesis were allowed, and even encouraged, again in the USSR, the pupils of paleoethnologists who had survived started to research ethnogenetic questions. The leading figures in this respect were Artamonov, the pupil of Miller; Tretyakov, the pupil of Efimenko; and Tolstov, the pupil of Zhukov.

Diffusionism

An interest in cultural influences first appeared in Russia in the late nineteenth century in a paper by Anuchin entitled “On Cultural Influences on the Prehistoric Soil of Russia” (1880). Yet the proper bearer of the diffusionist concept in Russia became, partly as a result of the influence of Anuchin, Vasiliy Gorodcov. His generalizing works were built on the idea of ex Oriente lux (out of the East comes light). He sought the origins of any novelty in a given culture—as an invasion or borrowing. He attentively observed the activity of the prominent European diffusionist sophus müller, especially his remarkable excavations of Jutland barrows, and in 1901–1903 exactly copied those excavations in the Izyum and Bakhmut districts of the Ukraine, discovering the pit-grave, catacomb-grave, and framework-grave cultures. Gorodcov’s “typological method” was opposed to that of Montelius, mainly because Müller was an opponent of Montelius.

The controversy between Gorodcov and the head of the Moscow paleoethnological school, Zhukov, is characteristic of these different points of view. Zhukov built the periodization isophenomenologically, that is, he divided material into periods exclusively according to typological similarities and distinctions regardless of time. Gorodcov did so isochronologically, that is, he divided the periods into chronological sections regardless of material types. If some leading regions entered the Bronze Age, all others were considered as being in the Bronze Age; contacts were held to be more important than the level of development.

Some particular manifestations of Gorodcov’s approach existed after World War II (Foss in 1949 stuck to such a periodization, as did Bryusov in part), but all in all, diffusionism did not continue in Russia, even though Gorodcov had many well-known pupils, Arcikhovsky, Bryusov, Smirnov, and Kraynov among them. They continued his interests in classification but not his diffusionism.

Combinationism

The designation of the term combinationism is not well known and belongs only to the historiographer, the author of this article, who formed a special school for it (Klejn 1977). All the main schools of archaeology tried to answer the question of why there were breaks of continuity in the development of culture, because there had to be continuity in terms of process between past and present for the present to be understandable. The question of why or how cultures change requires us to limit the two notions of