Despite the fact that several books and a plethora of articles have been published in recent decades on the archaeology of the USSR and Russia, Soviet-Russian archaeology is still largely ignored in the West (e.g. Fagan Reference Fagan2003, but see Trigger Reference Trigger2006: 230–32, 326–44). For non-Russian scholars, the first acquaintance with it can be nightmarish; for example, Anthony (Reference Anthony2007: 164) describes the periodisation of the Aeneolithic Cucuteni-Tripolye culture of Ukraine and Moldova (parts of the USSR before 1991), and Romania:

The two books under review go some way to filling the gap in understanding the theory and practice in Russian and Soviet archaeology.

Leach's A Russian perspective on theoretical archaeology describes the scientific and other aspects of the life of Leo S. Klejn (born 1927), perhaps the best-known Russian archaeologist and cultural anthropologist in English- and German-speaking countries. As the general facts of Klejn's life are well-known (e.g. Taylor Reference Taylor1994), here I focus only on his works. Two seminal papers (Klejn Reference Klejn1977; Bulkin et al. Reference Bulkin, Klejn and Lebedev1982) contain Klejn's main ideas and opinions on archaeology. Since the very beginning of his scientific career in the early 1950s, Klejn has challenged paradigms approved by the Communist Party, such as N.Y. Marr's ‘new doctrine of language’. He even anticipated Josef Stalin in the famous discussion on Marxism and issues of linguistics in 1950.

As well as archaeology, where Klejn has contributed significantly in the fields of theory, the Aeneolithic, Bronze and Iron Ages, and medieval times, he has also studied various aspects of cultural anthropology and ethnography—Slavic paganism, the ethnogenesis of Indo-Europeans, the evolution of culture, the organisation of violence (especially in prisons) and homosexuality. His analysis of Homer's Iliad (Klejn Reference Klejn2012a) and the history of Soviet archaeology (Klejn Reference Klejn2012b; see review by Kuzmin Reference Kuzmin2015) are especially notable. Klejn represents a kind of polyglot, which is extremely rare in the humanities today; according to Milisauskas (Reference Milisauskas2017: 93), he is “V. Gordon Childe, Lewis Binford, and Ian Hodder all rolled into one”. Leach's book is supplemented by a full record of Klejn's publications, which will help scholars to appreciate the range of his research, as many are published in Russian only. It also lists archaeological maxims (‘Commandments’) created by Klejn for a methodological seminar at Leningrad/St Petersburg State University; for example: “Archaeology is not history armed with a spade, but a detective story in which the investigator has arrived at the scene a thousand years late” (p. 144).

The second book under review, Klejn's two-volume The history of Russian archaeology, contains an unprecedented analysis of the concepts, schools and personalities in Russian and Soviet archaeology from the early eighteenth century to the present; an abridged English version focusing on the twentieth century is readily available (Klejn Reference Klejn2012b). The life and works of 59 scholars (25 from pre-revolutionary times, and 34 from the Soviet period) are described and analysed against the general background of the humanities in Russia/the USSR. Klejn believes that instead of formal biographies, it is more useful to trace the psychology of scientists and the formation of their personalities, to show how they conducted their research under the influence of certain ideas and to expose their virtues and vices, in order to understand how these scholars achieved their outstanding results.

Klejn subdivides Russian-Soviet archaeology into several stages (and sub-stages): imperial antiquarianism (until the 1760s); sentimentalism (1760s–early 1800s); romanticism (early 1800s–1850s); the beginnings of scientific archaeology (1850s–early 1880s); archaeology as a separate field of knowledge (1880s–1910s); archaeology at the time of revolution and revolution in archaeology (1917–1934); Soviet archaeology (1934–1991); archaeology during the early post-Soviet times (the ‘wild’ 1990s); and, finally, archaeology in the 2000s. The boundary between the Russian and Soviet periods is drawn not at 1917—a year of two revolutions—but later, when the ideology of Marxism-Leninism became dominant in both the Academy of Sciences and universities across the USSR.

The first archaeological excavations in Russia were conducted in 1710–1719. Archaeological societies appeared in the 1830s–1840s, and nationwide associations were established soon afterwards: the Russian Archaeological Society in 1851 and, in 1864, the more influential Moscow Archaeological Society, which organised 15 all-Russian archaeological congresses between 1869 and 1911. In 1859, the Imperial Archaeological Commission was created to oversee all excavations across Russia. Archaeological research was also carried out at universities, initially in Moscow, St Petersburg, Odessa and Warsaw. In the post-revolution period, all of these organisations were dissolved, and the Academy for the History of Material Culture was established in 1919; after several transformations, it became the Institute of Archaeology, USSR/Russian Academy of Sciences, in both Moscow and Leningrad/St Petersburg (today, they are separate institutions). Since the 1960s, academic institutes with a focus on archaeology and ethnology have been created in Novosibirsk, Vladivostok and Yekaterinburg. Numerous other universities and museums also conduct archaeological research (Klejn Reference Klejn2012b; see also Kuzmin Reference Kuzmin2015: ix). As for the achievements of Soviet archaeology, the most important among them are: the identification of Palaeolithic dwellings (by P.P. Efimenko, A.N. Rogachev, S.N. Zamyatnin, P.I. Boriskovsky and A.P. Okladnikov); the study of bone modification and the foundation of archaeozoology (G.A. Bonch-Osmolovsky); the development of use-wear (tracological) analysis (S.A. Semenov); the early use of mathematical methods (M.P. Gryaznov and G.A. Bonch-Osmolovsky); and the discovery and deciphering of medieval birch bark manuscripts (A.V. Artsikhovsky).

As it is impossible to mention all of the concepts and individuals included in this book, I focus here on some issues that have had a significant impact on the development of archaeology in Russia and the USSR. The Marxist-Leninist approach in Soviet archaeology, developed in the late 1920s to the early 1930s, determined the study of social changes from primitive societies to capitalism (see also Trigger Reference Trigger2006: 329–37). Archaeology was considered to be a part of the discipline of history; a famous expression by A.V. Artsikhovsky (which, as shown earlier, was modified by Klejn), long-term head of the Department of Archaeology at Moscow State University (1939–1978), was that “Archaeology is history armed with a spade”. After the revolution, N.Y. Marr, a scholar of Oriental studies rather than an archaeologist, was appointed by Communist Party officials as the Chairman of the Academy for the History of Material Culture (1919–1934); he also occupied prominent positions at Leningrad State University, the Academy of Sciences and in governmental organisations. Marr specialised in languages but was not a linguist—as Klejn observes, these are not the same thing. Marr's main contribution was ‘Japhetic theory’ (later turned into a ‘new doctrine of language’), which built on the view that a Caucasian-based proto-language existed in Europe before the advent of the Indo-European languages; later, these two linguistic groups were considered by Marr as stages in the development of speech (see Klejn Reference Klejn2012b: 203). Marr's doctrine was blessed by the Party, which he joined in 1930. The archaeological implication of his theory was that scholars were forced to explain cultural and other alterations in any given region as the result of the sudden changes of pre-existing populations, without reference to any external influences. This prompted a rise of stadialism, developed in the early 1930s mainly by V.I. Ravdonikas and S.N. Bykovsky. It was based on the assumption that ethnic history can be presented as a series of leaps from one social stage to another, without any influence from outside. Klejn observes that the essence of stadialism consisted of miraculous and unexplained transformations. After the Second World War, the rise of Russian nationalism inspired by Stalin brought stadialism, along with Marr's entire theory, to an abrupt end in 1950.

Another similar approach, autochthonism, was employed by Marxist archaeologists to prove the origins of the Slavic people in the local development and merging of smaller human groups, without external influences or migrations. One of the protagonists of this method was B.A. Rybakov, Director of the Institute of Archaeology, 1956–1987, Dean and Vice-President of the most prestigious higher education institution in the USSR—Moscow State University—in the 1950s, and Academic Secretary of the Division of History, the USSR Academy of Sciences in the 1970s; Klejn calls him an “overlord of Soviet archaeology” and “big man” (volume 2, pp. 192–93; see also Klejn Reference Klejn2012b: 253). In his archaeological work, Rybakov argued that the eastern Slavs derived directly from the Bronze Age cultural complexes of southern Russia. In his historical studies, he claimed that Kiev was established in the fifth century AD, five-hundred years earlier than the chronicled date; this resulted in a pompous celebration of the city's (totally fictitious) 1500^th anniversary in 1982.

Some Soviet archaeologists did not completely follow Marxist-Leninist approaches. The palaeoethnological method was initiated in the late nineteenth century by D.N. Anuchin and F.K. Volkov, and developed through to the 1930s by their students, most notable among them B.S. Zhukov, P.P. Efimenko and S.I. Rudenko. The main idea was to combine archaeology and ethnography, and to reconstruct the history of ethnic groups based on the analysis of pottery, in connection with the natural environment. But the strict ideological control of the humanities in the USSR since the mid 1930s resulted in the suppression of this paradigm and its followers, and palaeoethnological studies were resumed only in the 1950s. The use of other concepts in Soviet times fluctuated depending on the current political conjuncture. For example, the diffusionist approach (including migrationism) was common at the turn of the twentieth century (with V.A. Gorodtsov and A.A. Spitsyn as leaders), but was banned in the 1930s in order to promote the autochthonous roots of the Russian (Slavic) nation; in the 1950s, changes in the Party's upper echelons meant that the diffusionist paradigm was again permitted. M.I. Artamonov considered the origin of eastern Slavs to be a result of migration from the territory of modern Poland, contra Rybakov's autochthonism. Artamonov was one of the most influential characters in Soviet archaeology: a talented scholar (he first studied painting and wrote poetry, and later changed to archaeology and art history), he was Director of the Institute for the History of Material Culture (1939–1943), head of the Department of Archaeology at Leningrad State University (1949–1972) and Director of the Hermitage, the leading museum in the USSR (1951–1964). Klejn recalls how his own student essay, with its harsh criticism of Marr's ‘language doctrine’, was proposed by Artamonov for a discussion at the Institute for the History of Material Culture (extremely unusual and prestigious for an undergraduate) in March 1950, a few months before a formal debate of linguistics inspired by Stalin.

The issue of the Normans (aka Varangians) and their role in early Russian history reflects the struggle between two groups in Russian society since the eighteenth century: Slavophiles and Westerners. Several prominent Soviet archaeologists and historians—B.A. Rybakov, B.D. Grekov, A.V. Artsikhovsky and D.A. Avdusin—argued that the Normans did not contribute to the origin of the early Russian state, in agreement with the Soviet ideological mainstream. Other scholars such as Klejn, G.S. Lebedev, V.A. Bulkin and V.A. Nazarenko, upon careful study of the archaeological and textual evidence, identified the significant presence and political influence of the Normans in northern Russia in the ninth century AD. They also checked the original writings of Karl Marx on the role of the victorious Normans in the creation of the early Russian state: “It may be objected that victors and vanquished amalgamated more quickly in Russia than in any other conquest of the northern barbarians, that the chiefs soon commingled themselves with the Slavonians—as shown by their marriages and their names.” (Marx Reference Marx1899: 76). Previously, this statement was quoted by hardliners with the intentional omission of the first five words, completely altering its intended meaning. One of the focal points of Klejn's involvement in this issue was his participation in the academic dispute at Leningrad State University in 1965 where the autochthonists were shown to be wrong.

In my opinion, the culture-historical paradigm sensu Trigger (Reference Trigger2006) is still common in Russian archaeology today, and there is an easily recognised ‘descriptive style’ that is dominant in the major academic periodicals: Rossiiskaya Arkheologiya [Russian Archaeology] and Arkheologiya, Etnografiya i Antropologiya Evrazii [Archaeology, Ethnology and Anthropology of Eurasia]. Russian scholars should actively seek other methods, such as bioarchaeology, archaeological science, environmental archaeology and behavioural and cognitive approaches (e.g. Renfrew & Bahn Reference Renfrew and Bahn2016), in order to build on and develop the long and rich history of archaeological research traced in Klejn's books.