2016/04/01 by Jonathan Shepard · 3 citations
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #Soviet and Russian History #Historical and Archaeological Studies #Historical Geopolitical and Social Dynamics
paper · doi:10.1093/ehr/cew104
openalex publication_date 2016/04/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2025/11/06
Archaeology, medieval history and contemporary politics are hard for any student of Russia’s past to unscramble. This symbiotic relationship is apparent in the treble burden borne by the archaeological study of ‘Rus’, that polycentric polity once encompassing the territories between the Gulf of Finland and the Black Sea steppes. Firstly, the material remains are held to be important because they can compensate for the lack of literary texts datable (in their surviving form) before c .1050, and also for the narrow scope of most of the subsequent chronicles. Secondly, the sheer sprawl of the land of Old Rus is liable to offer precedents for extending modern Russian rule south to the Black Sea region. Rus princes, for instance, were ensconced at Tmutarakan on the Straits of Kerch for much of the eleventh century. One monument to this is the classical marble slab upon which Prince Gleb Sviatoslavich commemorated with a Slavonic inscription his measurement of the frozen Straits in the winter of 1067/1068. Finally, the discipline of archaeology was, like history, fundamental to justifying the existence and, subsequently, the expansion of the USSR, which dominated as far west as the Elbe for over forty years. Besides serving to demonstrate the early presence of Slavs in those German-held lands incorporated within Poland in 1945, archaeology was used to substantiate Karl Marx’s teaching on how societies had formed and could now develop further. In short, much is, and has been, expected of archaeology in Russia. Its practitioners have often found themselves at the centre of debates about national origins, identity and cultural orientation with a bearing upon their own day. The approach taken towards ‘material culture’ both in the Soviet period (when the term was much in vogue) and more recently is correspondingly revealing about Russian life and thought. One of the works under review here surveys archaeological studies in the USSR with considerable verve, while another provides the first full catalogue of Byzantine antiquities now kept in Moscow’s Kremlin. Their build-up behind the Kremlin walls says much about the professed cultural orientation of its masters, while the simultaneous publication in 2012 of two weighty tomes to mark a supposed anniversary of ‘the Old Russian State’ signals the importance of statehood and notions of ‘union’ and ‘federation’ to present-day political discourse. Indeed, an underlying theme of one of them is the essentially voluntary nature of the conjunction of scattered, heterogeneous groupings that made up Rus, trade being the big attraction.