A Russian Perspective on Theoretical Archaeology

The Life and Work of Leo S. Klejn

Stephen Leach

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781315435596
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

Both the work and the life of Leo S. Klejn, Russia's foremost archaeological theorist, remain generally unrecognized by Western scholars. Until now. In this biography and summary of his work, Stephen Leach outlines Klejn's wide-ranging theoretical contributions on the place and nature of archaeology. The book details-Klejn's diverse work on ethnogenesis, migration, Homeric studies, pagan Slavic religion, homosexuality, and the history of archaeology;-his life challenges as a Russian Jewish scholar, jailed for homosexuality by the KGB and for his challenges to Marxist dogma;-his key contributions to theoretical archaeology and, in particular, Klejn's comparisons between archaeologists and forensic scientists.

PART I

Life Story

Chapter 1

Before Prison

Background

‘It was the devil’s trick to allow me to be born with a soul and talent in Russia’¹—or, to be precise, in Vitebsk, the home-town of Chagall, in Belarus. Here Klejn was born, on July 1, 1927, to the Jewish physicians Stanislav Semenovich (originally Stanislav Samuil Simkhovich) and Asya Moysseevna. He had an older step-sister, Serafima, born in 1917, and was soon to have a younger brother, Boris, born in 1928. The family were an atheist and ‘Russified’ Jewish family. For already two generations before Klejn’s birth the family’s first language had been Russian; before that it was Polish. One of his grandfathers was a factory-owner; the other was a merchant of the first guild. (The first guild consisted of the very richest merchants, typically the top 2–5% of all Russian merchants.)

Klejn’s background was that of the highest echelons of society. However, one should not describe him as advantaged by birth without adding that, in the Soviet Union, this background did not bring obvious benefits; rather the reverse. In the Soviet Union it would have been clearly to Klejn’s disadvantage to have publicised his family background—both privileged and Jewish—in any detail. Thus, although Klejn was always grateful to his parents—acknowledging that from his father he inherited organisational skills and from his mother, a gifted teacher, his creative abilities—before the breakup of the Soviet Union his family background was barely mentioned on his official curriculum vitae.² There it was simply stated that he was born to ‘employed personnel’.

After the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, Klejn could afford to be less reticent. In an interview with Timothy Taylor he reveals his family’s activities in the civil war: ‘My father joined Denikin’s Whites;³ after their defeat he became a Red Brigade physician in Tukhachevsky’s army. He owed his life, frankly, to the fact that he wrote on every questionnaire that he was a White officer but never mentioned that he was a Red general; all his comrades were eliminated because they had been with Tukhachevsky’ (Taylor 1994: 723).⁴

Figure 1.1 Klejn’s birthplace, Gogol Street, Vitebsk. This photograph was taken in 1918; troops and civilians have gathered on the first anniversary of the Russian revolution. Klejn was born in the house on the right (no longer in existence). The building on the left was his first school.

In the supplementary notes to his curriculum vitae, appended to the Spanish translation of Klejn’s autobiography, Klejn describes himself as a ‘radically Russified Jew’.

Ethnicity

In the supplementary notes to his C.V. Klejn then goes on to discuss the influence of his ethnicity in some detail:

What does it mean to be a ‘radically russified Jew’? Is he a Jew or a Russian? The point is that by many indices (lingual and cultural), but mainly by self-conception I am a Russian. Although I have five languages, I do not number any Jewish language among them, neither Yiddish nor Hebrew; and my native language is Russian. This is the only language of which I am the absolute master—it is the language in which I think. I have no adherence to Judaism—I am an atheist, as were my father and grandfather (and their wives).

Yet, I am a Russian of Jewish origin. I do not renounce my ancestors. I have some reasons to be proud of them and some reasons to be ashamed. The same is true of everyone. I have not ‘deserted’ to another ethnicity: it was my ancestors who underwent assimilation, and so I was assimilated from birth. For me to become a Jew ‘anew’ would imply changing my ethnicity. In my opinion the majority of Russia’s Jews are of this sort—the exception being the small group that gathers around the synagogue. In contrast to the Jews of Israel (indeed a separate nation, with their own particular ethnos), Russian Jews are something like a caste of the Russian people, like the Cossacks or the Pomors (White Sea coast-dwellers). Indeed, only anti-Semites now speak with a Jewish pronunciation (they mimic Jews with an accent lost by the Jews themselves).

This question is important for people because it is upon Jewish ethnicity that national character is supposed to depend; as well as national solidarity and the defence of interests of national hearth (Israel, Zion). Let us consider all three of these claims.

1) What is it that is specifically Jewish that I have inherited from my Jewish ancestors? If one excludes the outlook (that is generally held in common by the population of South Europe) [that] modern Jews are distinct in their choice of preferable professions and by some features of national character—they are especially fond of their children (there are no Jews among waif children); they are enthusiastic for learning; and hate hard drinking. Yet none of these features is exclusively Jewish; they are inherent to many native Russians as well as to those with Biblical names. The difference is only in the extent of the distribution of these features.

For instance my name is Lev—it is a purely Russian name (from the Greek Leon stems the Slavic Levon (in Byelorussian Lyavon). In Russian this became Lev (pet name Löva). After the time of pogroms in which Lev (Leo) Tolstoy defended the Jews, this name became a very popular Jewish name. Yet I was called Lev not after Leo Tolstoy but in memory of my uncle Leon who died before my birth. Patronymics are common in Russia. My patronymic from birth was Stanislavovich, because my father, according to Polish custom (he was born in Warsaw), had three names: Samuil-Solomon-Stanislav (two Biblical names, one Polish). At home and at work he was called by his Polish name, and from this I received my official patronymic. At 16, on receiving my passport I changed it to Samuilovich, from a feeling of self-esteem: to have hidden my Jewish heritage at a time of worldwide persecution would have felt mean. This, however, did not involve a change of ethnicity. Then, as now, I thought of myself as a Russian and was classed in my documents as a Jew.

2) National solidarity or mutual aid among Russian Jews is greatly exaggerated by non-Jews—from jealousy (from tales of worldwide Jewish plots). In reality the mutual aid of Jews is manifested only in the extreme situations brought about by persecutions (as in every persecuted minority), and even this is not invariably the case. Jews themselves know its real worth. The Jews are as disparate and egotistical as any other group in our country (social connections are much weaker than in other countries of Europe and than in America). In my long life I received no more help and support from Jews than from any other people—friends and colleagues. Nor, with the exception of my parents, did I receive more help from relatives than from others. And from a certain world organisation of Jews I received nothing at all, for of course such [an] organisation exists only in the over-heated imagination of anti-Semites.

Among my close friends and pupils the proportion of Jews is no larger than among the surrounding city population. Among those who have lived for long periods at my home there were no Jews at all. My adopted son is Tartar, his wife Azerbaijani. Yet all of us are, in practice, Russians.

3) As to the interests of the national hearth, my national hearth, my homeland is Russia. Its interests and its problems are mine.

Toward Israel I am full of sympathy and respect as are many in Russia, regardless of origins. It is good to know that the people expelled from its homeland two thousand years ago and dispersed have created anew its state on the same territory; that during the life of one generation it transformed the desert into a blooming world; smashed superior military opposition and successfully defends its right to live by European and world norms and standards. Yet at the same time I understand the local Arabs who lived there for nearly a thousand years and for whom the Jews are newcomers. It hurts me to see two peoples destroy each other—and that the local Arabs choose a hopeless strategy of permanent war (and inner faction) instead of building on their remaining territory a state that might compete with the Jewish one in bringing pleasure to its inhabitants and neighbours.

However, I do not personally long for Israel: this is a very interesting and rich country, but not mine.⁵

War and Childhood

As a child Klejn was musically gifted and a skilful pianist. In Belarus he studied not only at a high school but also at a music school. Already before he was a teenager he gave public performances of Liszt’s Second Hungarian Rhapsody and Haydn’s ‘Farewell’ Symphony, the latter with a full symphony orchestra. However, as a wilful 13-year-old Klejn made the decision that music was not after all his main calling; and so it was that, at the end of what would be his last concert, he closed the lid of the piano in a gesture of emphatic finality.

Figure 1.2 Karl Marx Street, Yoshkar-Ola. Klejn lived on the next street, Friedrich Engels Street—very similar in appearance.

Already from childhood Klejn exhibited a noticeable independence of mind. Looking back on his childhood from old age, he recalls:

It was strikingly unpleasant to see how the grown-ups were intimidated. When I started a conversation about politics with anybody, my portly father started looking at the walls and immediately began to sing something bravura in order to drown out my voice. My mother would comment ironically: ‘He is singing already’. Sometimes he nervously sang without any reason; evidently, he was frightened by his own thoughts. I found that I myself developed a habit of singing when thoughts went in a dangerous direction, but then I would angrily interrupt myself: I had a desire to think without constraints.⁶

When the Great Patriotic War broke out in 1941 his parents were called up and served at the front—his father as a lieutenant colonel, in charge of several field hospitals, and his mother as a surgeon—while the rest of the family (Klejn, his grandparents, and younger brother) were evacuated first to Volokolamsk, then to Egoryevsk near Moscow (retreating ever eastward before the advancing German army), and finally to Yoshkar-Ola in the Mari Republic (the FinnoUgrian republic beyond the Volga).

At Yoshkar-Ola Klejn worked on a kolkhoz (a collective farm) and finished the eighth and ninth grades of high school. It was at this young age that he first attracted the attention of the KGB:

I was president of a secret school organisation called Prometheus. We couldn’t understand why the war was against the German people when, according to our international ideology, it should have been only against the fascists. Our objections were trivial but quite sufficient to warrant execution, and Soviet law had no age limitations. We had learned the poems of Pushkin about volnost—freedom, liberty—and revolutionary ideas, but Soviet practice was just the reverse. We imitated him and Lermontov, writing freedom-loving verses…. When we were discovered, in 1944, both the minister of the KGB and the secretary of the Party in the Mari Republic were personally involved in the investigation. We ought to have gone into a penal camp—even less guilty children of our age were given 10 or 15 years—but, as I now understand it, they were troubled not about our fate but about their own, because they had discovered our organisation only after a year of its existence. And so they decided to treat it as children’s play. But we were subsequently under the observation of the KGB. (Taylor 1994: 723–24)

It was at this time, 1944, after the smashing of Prometheus, that Klejn first began to read the classics of Marxism. His initial impressions were favourable: indeed, for a short time, as a teenager he was enchanted.

In the spring of that year, at the age of 16 (before finishing high school), Klejn went to the front, as volnonayemnyi (an armed civilian). He was stationed on the Third Byelorussian front with a unit of engineers, and with this unit he advanced to the German border. (He was awarded military honours for his actions in this campaign.) But for Klejn life at the front came to an abrupt end in the autumn, when he was caught in a shell explosion: he suffered a detached retina and chorioretinitis (inflammation of the retina and the optic vascular system) and was faced with the prospect of permanent blindness. He was put on a hospital train and returned to the district of Smolensk, the very place where he had first joined the front. Once he had to some degree recovered, he completed his secondary education at the Roslavl Technical School for Rail Transport (near Smolensk).

His poor eyesight barred him from any profession that involved driving, and it was only gradually that his vision improved. For this reason, he was not called up for officer training after the war but was instead enlisted as a translator. (It was only much later, in 1966, that he underwent two months’ officer training.)

Grodno

After the war, having been a year at Roslavl, Klejn was reunited with his family, who were now living at Grodno in White Russia, where his father was head of a hospital and his mother head of the city’s emergency unit. At the Department of Language and Literature at Grodno Pedagogical Institute Klejn studied philology and linguistics and became interested in folklore and the origin of languages, ‘especially Slavic and Indo-European’ (Ibid.: 724). At this time he was interested in linguistics and philology but had not yet developed an interest in archaeology (Kristiansen 1993: 184).

At the Grodno Pedagogical Institute Klejn was secretary of the Comsomol (Young Communist League) at the Institute. He studied Marxism intensively, via not only the works of Marx but also those of Lenin and Stalin. Consequently, contra Stalin, but arguably in the spirit of Marxism, he came to the conclusion that the intelligentsia are a distinct class, whose instruments of production are not material goods but rather thoughts, and that the distinguishing characteristics of the Soviet sociopolitical system was not socialism but rather feudalism, with the Communist party and its political bureaucracy a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword by Stephen Shennan
• Preface
• PART I LIFE STORY
• PART II LIFE’S WORK
• Appendix A The Commandments
• Appendix B Klejn’s Bibliography
• Notes
• References
• Index
• About the Author