Black Sea Region” (1932). In it, Ravdonikas suggested that the reader believe that Cimmerians who had populated the region earlier were Japhetides, i.e., they were related in language to the Caucasians of today, that they turned as the result of revolutionary transformations into Iranian-speaking Scythians, that they in their turn became German-speaking Goths, and that the Goths became Slavs. Nobody came from the outside into Crimea; everything evolved within it. Language and culture changed sharply and abruptly. Why? Because the sharp transformations are the dialectical law of being and because language and culture are connected with social structures, which, of course, went through revolutions.

In 1934 and 1935, Efimenko attempted to represent the development of the Paleolithic through stages and in 1935 Kruglov and Podgaecky postulated a series of stages in the Bronze Age of the steppes. In their work, however, the ethnic aspect was completely absent. They timed the stages according to technical shifts, to steps in the development of production, and while showing the revolutionary character of these shifts they tried to allot all of the phenomena of culture, including “superstructional” (projective) ones, to these steps. This work looked more realistic than the fantastic transformations of languages and peoples, but the more realistic it looked, the less it retained of the theory of stadial development. Because the essence of that theory was miraculous transformations, it resisted explanations that were logical and that proposed any continuity of development. However, stadial development depends on logic and on intermediate chains—“stadial transitions” as they were called by Kruglov and Podgaecky.

During the Patriotic War (World War II in Russia), considerable mass opposition against Stalin began, which forced the state to reconsider the patriotic feelings and nationalist temper of the peoples of the Soviet Union, especially the Russian people. Ethnic groups within the USSR were encouraged to take pride in their independent origins and to search carefully for their roots. Marr’s Japhetic theory contradicted this activity. In 1951, there was a multiweek linguistic discussion in the central Communist Party newspaper Pravda in which Stalin personally took part. He argued against Marr’s works, and both the Japhetic theory and the theory of stadial development were rejected.

It was now possible to criticize Marr. He was described as a bad linguist and really not an archaeologist at all—not even knowing that there was no metal in the Paleolithic period. Despite the lack of arguments, the theory of stadial development did bring some fresh ideas into the explanation of the most difficult problems of archaeology. It insisted that archaeologists begin to consider the sources of transformations in each society, i.e., to the importance of socioeconomic shifts for the transformation of culture, to leaps that are really inherent in every development. Later, such ideas began to be discussed seriously in many archaeological schools of the West, especially those interested in “the new archaeology.”

Marxist Sociohistoricism

After the victory of the Bolsheviks in Russia, Marxist doctrine and its values were imposed on the entire scholarly world, and young archaeologists began to search for methodological ideas that could distinguish their activity from “bourgeois” archaeology. One of the first to be proposed, “the complex method” (Nikolskiy 1927) was a dim conglomerate of ideas, and it was understood variously as a demand to consider things as being associated in assemblages, which was not a new idea in Europe at all. It also argued for the involvement of many source-studying disciplines in complete historic reconstruction and for the organization of “complex,” that is, multidisciplinary, expeditions.

In the middle of the 1920s, a group of young archaeologists in Moscow, disciples of Gorodcov, proceeded to engage in reeducation under the guidance of the Marxist sociologist Friche. They tried to superimpose Marxist concepts and principles onto archaeological material—to study the development of implements and to show how this development conditioned the whole appearance of economy and culture—and they tried to search for a connection between dwelling forms and the economy and socioeconomic structure of society. For a Marxist