“A Student of the Reactionary Archaeologist A. A. Spitsyn”: To the Biography of N. I. Repnikov in the Early 1930s

This article discusses the little-known pages of the biography of the Russian archaeologist N. I. Repnikov in the early 1930s, when he was arrested and spent two months in prison. It was the time when his colleague from the GAIMK (State Academy for the History of Material Culture) A. A. Miller wrote a sharply negative review about Repnikov’s scholarly activities, accusing him of trading antiquities. The main reason for such a sceptical attitude to Repnikov’s academic works was the competition between the school of palaeoethnologists to which A. A. Miller belonged and A. A. Spitsyn’s students. This way, dramatic ideological and political situation of the early 1930s around the Soviet archaeologists was also greatly influenced by the relationship between various groups of researchers within the scholarly community.