Free Black Sea by Neal Ascherson Page B

designed and reared up a skyscraper of chauvinist imbecility. This was the assertion that the whole area of modern Russia, Ukraine, eastern and even central Europe had been inhabited by proto-Slav populations since the middle Iron Age: say, 900 BC. Stalin fired his revolver in the air and the entire past of the Black Sea steppes, which had been a history of ceaseless migrancy and ethnic mingling, froze terrified in its tracks and turned into a history of static social development.
    And the shots were not only metaphorical. Mikhail Miller, a Russian archaeologist who took refuge in the West after the Second World War, recorded in his Archaeology in the USSR the fate of his colleagues when the new line was enforced between 1930 and 1934. Some 85 per cent of the profession fell victim to the purge. Most of them were deported to Siberian or Asian labour camps or exile. Some were shot or committed suicide when the NKVD came to arrest them. But most — including Miller's brilliant brother Alexander — died in the Gulag.
    It was not until well after Stalin's death that the past of the southern steppe dared to move again; at first, only cautiously. A. L. Mongait was a Party loyalist under instructions to write a book for western consumption which would undo some of the damage done by Miller's revelations. Mongait's own Archaeology in the USSR, published in an English version in 1961, tiptoed up to what he delicately called 'the Scythian problem': the patent fact that the Scythians had entered the Dnieper-Don steppe from somewhere else. He let the Scythians migrate - but only a little. 'They would have thrust forward from the lower Volga area', where, Mongait implied, they had originated some time in the Bronze Age. The truth known to scholarship for nearly fifty years — that the Scythians were an Indo-Iranian-speaking confederation which had arrived from Central Asia - was still too much for him.
    Today migration theory is securely back in Russian and Ukrainian archaeology, but it has returned with tatters of nineteenth-century nationalist historiography still flapping around it. Unpopular to this day remain those who argue that the whole balance of Russian history-writing about 'civilisation' and 'barbarism' is skewed, who ask why the steppe nomads and the non-Slav cultures, encountered by Kievan Rus and then by the mediaeval Russian state which arose around Novgorod and Moscow, must still be dismissed as backward and 'barbaric'. The centuries of Mongol-Tatar conquest, beginning in the early thirteenth century, remain for most Russians 'the Mongol Yoke': a time in which the leaders of Russia manned the outposts of Christian civilisation against a tide of ultimate savagery and disorder. But this traditional version now shows increasing symptoms of Russocentric myth.
    There is no denying the ferocity of the Mongols at war, or the devastation created in a subsistence-peasant society by the arrival of perhaps half a million horses with a single nomad army. And yet the Mongols had access to literacy, and their political, military and administrative institutions were in some ways more sophisticated than those of Novgorod Russia. When Russian cultural pessimists blame their nation's lack of democracy on 'the Mongol inheritance', as they always have, they ignore the tradition of the quriltai - the assembly of Mongol-Tatar nobles and clan chiefs who gathered to elect a new khan. This was a limited, oligarchic dispersing of power, but mediaeval Russia did not even have that. (The Poles, whose kings were elected by a mass assembly of aristocrats gathering in a field outside Warsaw, have always brought up this custom to prove their attachment to 'Western democracy'. The practice was introduced into Poland only in the late sixteenth century, and the precedent then advanced for it was the oligarchy of the Roman Republic, but this was also plainly a form of quriltai) probably borrowed from the Crimean Tatars.)
    Under Stalin, equally hostile to