Overcoming the “West”: The Originality of the Ancient Near East History in Soviet Textbooks

The article aims to outline and analyze the “turn to the East” in early Soviet historiography on the example of the history of the ancient Near East. In the first part of the article, the author discusses statements of leading Soviet Orientalists about the “East and West” problem from the Marxian point of view. Analyzing the report “The East and West in the Soviet Circumstances” by one of the most famous Russian and Soviet Orientalist Sergei Oldenburg, the author concludes that Oldenburg constructed the image of the Soviet scholarship led by a better theory that could solve the problem of objective knowledge about the Orient. Both Oldenburg and other researchers claimed that Soviet Oriental studies could reach a really new stage of knowledge about the East, in contrast to Western, “bourgeois”, scholars who could not get rid of the colonial attitude to eastern countries. However, in the early 1930s, such statements were wishful thinking: Soviet exploration of the East was in its infancy and a new narrative of Eastern history has not yet been created. The greatest influence on the formation of new approaches to the history of the ancient Near East had Vasilii Struve, who in the 1930s created not only a number of papers but also textbooks in which he defended the slaveholding conception. Struve, starting from the logic of Oldenburg, motivated the preference for the slave-owning conception from the point of view of difference from the “bourgeois” views, according to which “eternal feudalism” existed in the East. In the second part of the article, the author compares, on the one hand, textbooks before the 1930s (both pre-revolutionary and Soviet) and, on the other hand, publications written in terms of the declared solution to the problem of the originality of the East. The main conclusions are that there were no fundamental differences in the correlation between the main parts: the sections on the history of the ancient East continued to focus on Near Eastern societies, and from all the ancient countries Mesopotamia and Egypt were covered in the most detailed way. The main meaning of the “turn to the East” from the point of view of the content of the texts was to emphasize the thesis that Eastern societies went through the same forms of slavery as the Greco-Roman ones. To maintain the illusion that this position is supported by factology, several manipulations with the text were required from historians: for example, the constant mention of the participation of slaves in all major mass disturbances in the ancient East and the minimization of questions about analogies between Greco-Roman and Near Eastern societies.

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