First of all, many thanks, Paul, for a very interesting and detailed reply.
I think you hit the nail on its head when raising the question of social
aspects of the ethnogenesis debate. I too believe that the public
perception of archaeology in Poland is a very interesting topic for
discussion. Biskupin, a famous symbol in that sense, has been recently
discussed by Danuta Piotrowska in an excellent paper published in
_Archaeologia Polona_, but there are many other sites and artifacts that
offer themselves for this kind of research. I have a question, though. Paul
suggests that the relatively recent critique of ethnogenetic theories may
have been the result of (certain) Polish archaeologists kowtowing for
gaining respectability in the West. This, if I correctly understand him,
was often done by eschewing the embarassing question of the western
territories and the expulsion of the German population. What, then, was the
reaction towards the loss of (Polish) territories in the east? Is is not
true that Parczewski's theory about the "origins of Slavic culture" (to
quote the title of his article in _Antiquity_) applies to territories that
used to be within Polish borders before WW II? Did border changes affect
the discourse of the autochtonists?


>Pace Florin, I rather get the impression that the adoption by Soviet
>archaeology of the idea that the Przeworsk Culture and those preceding it
>were the archaeological indicators of the *Protoslavs was in fact initiated
>by the Poles rather than the Soviets who in fact had really to adapt to the
>version propagated by the Poles, and is in part due to the specific nature
>of Soviet archaeology. By the time Soviet archaeologists were able to
>examine this problem the Poles were able to marshal a whole number of
>arguments to support their case. 

I don't think we disagree on this one. As a matter of fact, I never
disputedthe Polish primacy on this point, which--as I mentioned in my
previous message--goes back to Surowiecki and _Lilla Weneda_. Be it as it
may, Soviet archaeologists and especially Rusanova and Sedov, gave much
more weight to the argument that the Slavic culture derived from Przeworsk
(see below). This was indeed possible only after ca. 1953, as the Marrist
paradigm was abandoned and a culture-historical kind of archaeology
restored to its pre-Revolution position, mainly due to the efforts of
Mikhail Artamonov. 

 One notes that much
>of the Soviet literature Florin cites comes from the last few decades, there
>is very little from an earlier period (when the Zarubinets Culture was the
>main candidate).
>
>I think that Stalinist policies of the mid and late 1930s concerning
>ethnogenesis had a different origin than that suggested by Florin (who
>suggests that it was a response to Nazi propaganda). The latter could have
>had very little influence in the Soviet Union before the Nazi invasion of
>1941.

Well, this is simply not true. Until the mid-1930s, Slavic studies were
viewed as anti-Marxist and the dominant discourse about the early Slavs was
that inspired by N. I. Marr. Marr's supporter in the discipline was N. S.
Derzhavin (1877-1953), a professor at Petrograd before the Bolshevist
revolution, later appointed chair of the department of Slavic languages and
rector of the University of Leningrad (1922-1925).  He also became director
of the Institute of Slavonic Studies established in Leningrad in 1931 and,
in that capacity, wrote the Institute's program of studies. Derzhavin
believed that the Slavs were native to the Balkans and that sources began
to talk about them only after AD 500, because it was only then that the
Slavs revolted against Roman slavery. According to Derzhavin, "Slavs" was
just a new name for the old population exploited by Roman landowners, not
an ethnic label. Because of their frequent riots, the Slavs ended up being
depicted as barbarians in Late Roman sources. Derzhavin's interpretation of
early Slavic history was very popular in the early years of Soviet
archaeology, because he interpreted cultural and linguistic changes as the
direct results of socio-economic shifts.  But a new interpretation was
abruptly put forward in the late 1930s. Little is known about the exact
circumstances in which this interpretation actually developed. In any case,
by 1934 academic research in the USSR was centralized and reflected
political priorities. Institutionally, historiography was directed by the
Propaganda and Agitation Department of the Central Committee, which
formulated directives defining historical themes, indicated directions of
research and then transmitted its decisions to historians. In matters of
exceptional importance, Stalin intervened personally. In 1936, for example,
I. V. Stalin, A. Zhdanov, and S. Kirov published a booklet entitled
_Remarks on the Question of the Short Textbook for the History of the
USSR_, in which they asked historians to write not simply history, but
histories of the nations belonging to the USSR, of their interactions and
relations to the outside world. This apparently benign requirement posed a
remarkably difficult problem, for studying the nations of the USSR meant
studying the process of ethnic formation and reviving the concept of
ethnogenesis condemned by Marr's theories. More important, the new treatise
of Soviet history, the first volumes of which were specifically written in
accordance with Stalin's recommendations, were expected to emphasize that
the Slavs were natives to eastern Europe. This was meant to counter German
claims linking the origins of the Goths to the territories now under Soviet
control.

[For the circumstances in which ethnogenetic theories were re-instated
under Stalin, long before the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union, see Stephen
Velychenko, "The origins of the official Soviet interpretation of Eastern
Slavic history: a case study of policy formulation," in _Beiträge zur 6.
Internationalen Konferenz zur altrussischen Geschichte_ (Forschungen zur
osteuropäischen Geschichte, 46)(Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1992), pp.
221-53. For a detailed narrative, based on archival research, see, however,
E. P. Aksenova and M. A. Vasil'ev, "Problemy etnogonii slavianstva i ego
vetvei v akademicheskikh diskussiakh rubezha 1930-1940-kh godov,"
_Slavianovedenie_ 2 (1993), 86-104.]

The first formal reference to the need to study the Slavic ethnogenesis is
by A. D. Udal'tsov at a meeting at the Academy of Sciences in September
1938. In his paper, Udal'tsov paid lip service to Marr and castigated the
errors of fascist theories. But the most controversial paper of the meeting
was that of A. V. Mishulin on early Byzantine sources concerning the early
Slavs [see A. V. Mishulin, "Drevnie slavian i sud'by Vostochnorimskoi
imperii," _Vestnik Drevnei Istorii_ 1 (1939), 290-307]. Mishulin boldly
spoke of the Slavic migration to the Balkans. In reply, Derzhavin argued
that the Slavs lived since time immemorial in the Balkans and that Mishulin
had taken his early Byzantine sources at their face value, without
understanding their true meaning [N. S. Derzhavin, "Ob etnogeneze
drevneishikh narodov Dneprovsko-Dunaiskogo basseina," _Vestnik Drevnei
Istorii_ 1 (1939), 279-289]. According to Derzhavin, Marr's theory could
better explain Mishulin's evidence. During the 500s, the Slavs (i.e., the
native inhabitants of the Balkans) had reached that level of development
which, according to the laws of histori-cal materialism, required their
separation from the Empire. Their struggle for independence was therefore
depicted by Byzantine sources as a barbarian invasion, but this bias only
indicated that the Slavs were viewed as a serious threat to the power of
Roman landowners. 

Derzhavin's paper did not remain without response. At the same meeting,
Mikhail I. Artamonov, though carefully citing long passages from Marr's
works, argued in favor of population movements. He embraced Safarik's and
Niederle's ideas and spoke of Scythians as ancestors of the Slavs.
Artamonov believed that since language was the crucial aspect of ethnicity,
only linguists could have the ultimate word in the debate over Slavic
ethnicity. I. V. Got'e, the head of the history department at the
University of Moscow and newly nominated member of the Academy, openly
accused Marrist linguists of being incapable of tackling the problem of how
the Slavs developed from the proto-Slavs. At another meeting at the Academy
of Sciences in April 1939, B. A. Rybakov, at that time a recent graduate
from the Lomonosov University in Moscow, presented a paper, in which he
claimed the Antes for Russian history. One year later, at a conference at
the Institute for the History of Material Culture, P. N. Tret'iakov, then a
doctoral candidate in History at the University of Leningrad, read a paper
on the ethnogenesis of the Slavs, in which, despite extensive citations
from his works, Marr's theses were indirectly criticized. 

As the Soviet war propaganda was searching for means to mobilize Soviet
society against the Nazi aggressor, the Slavic ethnogenesis, now the major,
if not the only, research topic of Soviet archaeology and historiography,
gradually turned into a symbol of national identity. As Marr's teachings
were abandoned in favor of a culture-historical approach, the origins of
the Slavs (i.e., Russians) were pushed even further into prehistory.
Udal'tsov saw a continuous ethnic sequence running through history from the
bearers of the Tripolye culture of the Neolithic, the Scythians, the
Sarmatians, and the Antes, to the modern Russians. Derzhavin, despite his
orthodox Marrism, went so far as to speculate on the origins of the
Russians in the Upper Palaeolithic culture of the Dnieper area, while V. V.
Mavrodin thought it would be appropriate to begin the history of the Slavs
with Neanderthal Man.  Soviet archaeologists unanimously embraced
Niederle's influential suggestion that the Slavic Urheimat was located
along the upper Dnieper river. As the Red Army was launching a massive
offensive along the Vistula, reaching the heart of the Third Reich, Soviet
scholars favored the idea of an enormous Slavic homeland stretching from
the Oka and the Volga rivers, to the east, to the Elbe and the Saale rivers
to the west, and from the Aegean and Black seas to the south to the Baltic
sea to the north [incidentally, it was Derzhavin who first spoke about this
"Slavic realm"]. The only apparent problem was that of a "missing link"
between Scythians and Kievan Rus'. Rybakov, now a professor of history at
the University of Moscow, quickly appointed chair of the history department
(1950), provost  (1952), corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences
(1953), and director of the Archaeological Institute (1956), offered an
easy solution. In the years of fiercely nationalist propaganda during the
war, he published a seven-page article in which he attributed to the Slavs
both Spitsyn's "Antian antiquities" and the remains excavated by Khvoika at
Chernyakhov ["Ranniaia kul'tura vostochnykh slavian," _Istoricheskii
zhurnal_ 11-12 (1943), 73-80]. Rybakov's argument was that the
archaeological distribution of both coincided with Jordanes' description of
the territory inhabited by the Antes.  The association between the Slavs
and the Chernyakhov culture was enthusiastically advocated after the war by
the Russian archaeologists P. N. Tret'iakov and M. I. Artamonov, and by the
Ukrainian archaeologists M. Iu. Braichevskii, E. V. Makhno, and M. Iu.
Smishko. The latter three were particularly active in claiming a long
chronology for the Chernyakhov culture (second to seventh century A.D.), in
order to bridge the gap between Scythians and the historically attested
Antes. They continued to ascribe this culture to the Slavs even after
Artamonov revised his previous views and argued, in 1955, that the
Chernyakhov culture represented a coalition of ethnic groups under the
leadership of the Goths.

It is under such circumstances that the "Przeworsk thesis" was adopted by
leading Soviet archaeologists. As Paul correctly points out, the Zarubinets
(and Kiev) culture(s) were (and still are!) viewed as good "candidates" for
illustrating the culture of the (proto-)Slavs. But with the imposition of
Soviet power in Eastern Europe, their map distribution did not fit into the
larger geopolitical picture. As a consequence, Zarubinets and Kiev (with a
distribution restricted to the territory of the Soviet Union) were
"dismissed" as Baltic, and Rusanova and Sedov embraced the Przeworks
thesis, until then advocated by Polish archaeologists. Nota bene, according
to Sedov, at least, bearers of the Przeworsk culture (whom he identified
with Tacitus' Venedi) began to move into the Upper Dniester valley during
the first and second centuries. By A.D. 300, as the Chernyakhov culture
emerged in western and central Ukraine, the Venedi formed the majority of
the population in the area. As bearers of the Przeworsk culture, they
assimilated all neighboring cultures, such as Zarubinets and Kiev. QED.

This process of "appropriation" shows how important the political and
social circumstances are, in which archaeologists articulate their
theories. As a consequence, I am afraid that the idea Polish archaeologists
insisted on a Polish "homeland" for the Slavs because of anti-Soviet
feelings does not hold water. On the contrary, I believe Sedov and Rusanova
deliberately "stole" the Przeworsk culture from the Poles, in order to use
it for a "pan-Slavic" theory. A Polish insistence on this point was made
ineffectual by having Venedi move into Ukraine, on Soviet territory. In
other words the proto-Slavic phase of Slavic history was admittedly a joint
Polish-Soviet enterprise, but a "truly" Slavic ethnogenesis only took place
on Soviet territory. To serve this purpose, Rusanova re-baptized
Borkovsky's Prague type (now "Prague-Korchak" type) and (mis)used sites
excavated in the Zhitomir Polesie to establish an archaeological basis for
a "true" Slavic culture. The same process was at work in the late 1970s and
early 1980s in Ukraine, with Vladimir Baran (who inspired Godlowski and
Parczewski) switching the emphasis from Polesie to the Upper Dniester and
Upper Prut region. With Ukraine an independent country, both areas area now
Ukrainian, rather than Polish or Russian "homelands". 

>Also, is it actually true to say as Florin does that God³owski and
>Parczewski have given "the final blow to ideas that Slavs were native to
>Polish territory"? and that former models have "just died out"? I think this
>is a simplification of a debate which is still ongoing in central European
>and especially Polish science as a whole (not just archaeology). 

I admit there was some over-simplification, if not exaggeration, in the
last few lines of my previous message. I agree with you that neither
Godlowski, nor Parczewski were able either to silence the autochtonists or
to explain away all issues involved. But I believe there is yet no major
response to either one of them, at least not in Poland. And that, despite
recent work in Poland (e.g., Marek Krapiec's work at Wyziace) and Germany
that makes extensive use of dendrochronology, thus pointing to a much later
date for the "early Slavic culture" than Parczewski would admit. Am I wrong?

>(PS: by the way Florin - as you probably know, Tadeusz Lehr Sp³awiñski was a
>philologist and not an archaeologist)

I thought he was a linguist, not a philologist. Anyway, I was referring to
his _O pochodzenie i praojczyznie Slowian_ (Poznan, 1946), a book cited by
almost all those who dealt with the problem of Slavic ethnogenesis, both in
Poland and in the Soviet Union. To my knowledge, it was him who linked the
Przeworsk culture to Tacitus' Venedi. But again, please correct me if I am
wrong.


Best wishes,


Florin 
_____________________________________________________________

Florin Curta
Department of History
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
University of Florida
4411 Turlington Hall
P.O. Box 117320
Gainesville, FL 32611-7320
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
http://web.clas.ufl.edu/users/fcurta


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