As a result of the political repressions unleashed in the USSR during the 1920s-1950s, irreparable damage was inflicted on the nation’s science. Scholars representing the humanities were particularly affected — both those in the capital and local historians from the provinces. This article briefly examines the scientific contributions and fates of repressed archaeologists whose research activities were connected with the Desna River basin. Among them are B.S. Zhukov, M.Ya. Rudynsky, B.A. Latynin, V.P. Levenok, E.A. Kalitina, G.I. Goretsky, and many others. The relevance of studying the crimes of the totalitarian regime for the current stage of Russian history is emphasized.
This era should not be erased from social memory.
The most foolish thing we can do is to forget about it
as quickly as possible; the least we can do is to remember it, until its seeds
have decayed.
Boris Strugatsky
The Stalinist regime dealt a terrible blow to the nation’s science, particularly to the humanities. Even such fields far removed from politics as archaeology and geology suffered irreparable damage. This is clearly visible in the fates of researchers of the distant past of the Desna region.
In 1929, I.V. Stalin set a course toward deep bureaucratization of all public life and suppression of the remnants of free-thinking intelligentsia. The “year of the great turning point” had arrived. The reviving local history movement did not fit into the system and was therefore doomed. Museums, on a new wave of struggle against religion, began disposing of icons, church utensils, and other exhibits that did not conform to the new ideology. At the First All-Russian Museum Congress in Moscow (1930), Marxists called to “cleanse museums not only of the junk of old things but also of human junk”[1]. By “junk” they meant intelligentsia of the “old” mold.
At first, specialists were simply fired. The creator and director of the Trubchevsk Local History Museum, the intelligent, educated enthusiast, archaeologist and naturalist Georgy Mikhailovich Porshnyakov (1868-1939), was removed from his position in 1930 and fled to Oryol [2].
The new director P.N. Gogolev soon went on a foreign assignment to Paris and happily stayed there, while the ignorant Proletkult members who followed him plundered the museum. The opinion of the creator of the Bryansk Museum, Sergei Sergeevich Deev (1875-1943), was respected even in Glavnauka. However, he committed “unforgivable” acts by attempting to draw the authorities’ attention through memoranda to the disastrous state of former monastic archives, and before the revolution had imprudently risen to the rank of state councillor in the field of education. As a result, Deev too was dismissed from the post of director of the Bryansk Museum Association. Paradoxically, the unjust dismissal and the fear it bred saved Deev from perishing in the camps. Abandoning science, he quietly taught at the Bryansk Construction Technical School.
In the spring of 1929, Marxists declared all non-Marxist approaches harmful to Soviet science. Among the “saboteurs” was the most talented professor of Moscow State University, a figure of world stature — Boris Sergeevich Zhukov (1892-1933), who in 1926-1927 had investigated the Suponevo site near Bryansk, discovered by Deev. He was among more than 150 prominent historians, archaeologists, philologists, and art historians arrested in connection with the “Academic Affair” — a conspiracy of scholars allegedly aimed at overthrowing Stalin and his entourage through the mythical “All-People’s Union for the Struggle for the Revival of Free Russia,” fabricated on orders from the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party. By the time it arose in the depths of the OGPU, the process of nationalization and ideologization of science had reached its peak. The “Academic Affair” was designed to break the resistance of the scholarly intelligentsia to the totalitarian takeover of the Academy and open the way into it for party bureaucracy [3]. Zhukov was declared a member of the Moscow center of the mythical underground.
There was no trial. Zhukov died in a concentration camp in the Altai region and was posthumously rehabilitated only on April 4, 1959. A number of his works remained unpublished; the typeset first volume of his expedition’s proceedings was broken up. Among Zhukov’s students were such outstanding researchers as O.N. Bader, G.F. Debets, M.V. Voevodsky, A.E. Alikhova, and others. They continued his work but could not replace their teacher — any talent is inherently irreplaceable [4].
The year 1930 proved difficult also for Professor Vasily Alekseevich Gorodtsov, who conducted excavations at the Timonovka site on the outskirts of Bryansk. A number of defendants in the “Academic Affair” testified that the “former military man” was “mistreated at work” and that “many young people gather around him.” But the professor was not arrested precisely thanks to the young people with whom he studied archaeology. Many from “Gorodtsov’s circle” were also members of the Society of Marxist Historians, whose chairman was M.E. Pokrovsky, who oversaw the “affair” [5]. As a result, Gorodtsov “merely” lost his positions at the Historical Museum, Moscow State University, and the Russian Association of Social Science Institutes as a “White Guardist” and “bourgeois scholar.” But in a situation where he could have faced the camps, on August 20, 1930, he selflessly declared that he intended to continue work at Timonovka and submitted an estimate for excavations [6]. A year later, the authorities “forgave” the old man, allowing him to return to work. In 1938, to avoid new persecutions, Gorodtsov at the age of 77 was forced to join the Communist Party, but his attitude toward the dictatorship that had trampled millions of fates was eloquently demonstrated by one fact: in 1944, it was precisely with Gorodtsov’s support that archaeologists K.E. Grinevich and A.S. Bashkirev, who had returned from the camps, defended their dissertations. After this act, worthy of a Russian officer, the scholar definitively left Moscow State University.
In 1933, along with a group of colleagues, a participant in Gorodtsov’s expedition was arrested — the graduate of Moscow State University, geologist of Mosgeolupravlenie Boris Mitrofanovich Danshin (1891-1941). He categorically refused to sign the fabricated indictment at the GPU, and something unheard of happened: Danshin was released from custody. However, the experience affected his fate: he emerged from detention with a sick heart. After defending his candidate’s dissertation (1938), working at Moscow universities and on commissions for the construction of the Moscow Metro and the Moscow-Volga Canal, he died suddenly of a heart attack while building defensive fortifications in June 1941 [7].
The graduate of Petrograd University Boris Aleksandrovich Latynin (1899-1967), a specialist in the genesis and chronology of Neolithic-Bronze Age cultures, conducted in 1928-1929 together with Tatyana Sergeevna Passek the first professional survey of Bronze Age sites in the Bryansk region (the vicinities of Bryansk, Navlya, Lokot). Working at GAIMK and the State Hermitage, he also researched Transcaucasia, the Volga region, Central Asia, and Ukraine, and was writing a dissertation devoted to a new view of the chronology and typology of Bronze Age antiquities.
This work would have significantly advanced the nation’s archaeology of the early metal period, but in 1935 Latynin was exiled to Kuibyshev as a hereditary nobleman — this alone was already a crime against the authorities. This was his second arrest; the first had occurred back in 1924. And in 1937, he was arrested a third time and sent for 9 years to Kolyma. The barbarians from the NKVD destroyed his dissertation. From 1946, deprived of health but unbroken in spirit, he returned to work — first at the Syzran Museum. He soon defended his candidate’s dissertation (1948), and in 1953 returned to the Hermitage and became a Doctor of Historical Sciences (1962) [8].
In the BSSR, according to a scenario similar to the “Academic Affair,” they fabricated their own plan of destruction. In the spring-summer of 1930, a large group of scholars, cultural figures, and educators was arrested. In the Belarusian Academy of Sciences alone, more than 30 people were taken. One of them turned out to be a scholar without whose works it is difficult to imagine the Quaternary geology and Paleolithic archaeology of the Desna region — Gavriil Ivanovich Goretsky (1900-1988). For Goretsky, this was not his first arrest. In the autumn of 1920, he was taken into custody for late return from abroad. The second arrest on August 31, 1922, was in connection with participation in the activities of the Belarusian Cultural-Scientific Association of Petrovtsy Students. It was limited to 17 days, but he was permitted to complete his studies at the Agricultural Academy only on the condition that he leave the association. From 1925, he was an associate professor at the Belarusian Agricultural Academy, then director of the Belarusian Research Institute of Agriculture and Forestry, and from 1928 was already in the first composition of the Belarusian Academy of Sciences. The third arrest occurred in Novorossiysk on July 24, 1930. On December 6, 1930, the Council of People’s Commissars of the BSSR resolved to expel Goretsky and several other members from the BAS, stripping them of their titles of academicians “in connection with the exposure of hostile counter-revolutionary activities.” At the moment the decision was made, the scholars were still in pretrial detention, meaning the presumption of innocence had been violated.
Goretsky was accused of participating in the mythical counter-revolutionary organization “Union for the Liberation of Belarus,” which allegedly aimed to separate Belarus from the USSR. By a decision of an extrajudicial body dated June 6, 1931, under articles 58-6, 7, 11 of the RSFSR Criminal Code, he was sentenced to the supreme measure of punishment, commuted to 10 years in the camps, and sent to Karelia — to the Kem cardboard workshop and the geological base of Lenrazvedtrest; then transferred to the mining and geological department of the Belomor Canal. He was released early on October 6, 1934, remaining at the camps as a civilian employee (Rybinsk, Karelia). A new arrest followed from October to December 1937. The fifth time he was in detention from May 8, 1938, to June 22, 1939; he endured torture, solitary confinement, was again sentenced to execution, and miraculously survived [9]. From 1943 to 1968, Goretsky was the chief geologist at the Gidroproekt Research Institute; he defended his candidate’s (1945) and doctoral (1946) dissertations. He was rehabilitated by the military tribunal of the Belarusian Military District on April 22, 1958. He devoted much effort to the rehabilitation of his brother, who perished in detention. In July 1965, his title of academician was restored. From 1969 to 1985, he headed the department of Quaternary geology and paleontology at the Institute of Geochemistry and Geophysics of the BSSR Academy of Sciences and chaired the Commission for the Study of the Quaternary Period of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Goretsky is the father of paleopotamology — the science of ancient rivers; he researched the valleys of the Proto-Volga, Proto-Oka, and Proto-Dnieper and participated in the study of such well-known Paleolithic sites on the Desna as Khotylevo and Yudinovo.
Repressions proceeded similarly in Ukraine, where national scientific schools were actively developing. The founder of one of them was the outstanding archaeologist who, among other things, researched the Paleolithic and Mesolithic of the Middle Desna region and discovered the famous Pushkari site — Mikhail Yakovlevich Rudynsky (1887-1958). He did not hide his critical attitude toward Marxism and the political-educational work imposed on museum affairs, saying that scholars were being “turned into gramophones” reproducing excursion texts. But the scholar’s authority in Ukraine was so great that, despite a series of court proceedings, regular denunciations, and “inspections from above,” he remained free. Only in 1934, when on Stalin’s instructions the systematic destruction of Ukrainian national science and culture began, was he arrested, and after a six-month investigation, charged by a Special Board of the NKVD with counter-revolutionary activity. Simultaneously, museum directors in Kyiv, Dnipropetrovsk, and other Ukrainian cities were arrested. Rudynsky spent three years logging near Arkhangelsk. In 1938, he moved to Vologda, again taking up archaeology.
Already in 1944, the reviving Institute of Archaeology of the Ukrainian SSR Academy of Sciences invited Mikhail Yakovlevich to the position of academic secretary. In 1948, he became a Doctor of Historical Sciences. The scholar was posthumously rehabilitated by the Kyiv Prosecutor’s Office only on July 22, 1989 [10]. Another Ukrainian researcher of Desna antiquities who was subjected to repressions was Petr Ivanovich Smolichev (1891-1944 — the date of death was clarified by the archaeologist’s son). The son of a priest, he graduated from the Chernigov Theological Seminary, the St. Petersburg Theological Academy, and the St. Petersburg Archaeological Institute. He returned to Chernigov after the revolution to teach at the Pedagogical Institute. From 1923, he began working at the Chernigov Museum. He collected materials on the history and archaeology of the Desna region, participated in excavations of the Transfiguration Cathedral in Chernigov, investigated burial mounds in Shestovitsa on the Desna, and studied sites of the “burial fields” culture near Cherkasy. From 1927, he conducted research in the Dneproges construction zone. In 1933, as an unreliable son of a priest and “Ukrainian nationalist” (a standard charge on the territory of the Ukrainian SSR), he was exiled with his family to Dushanbe, where he worked at the Institute of History, Archaeology and Ethnography of Tajikistan [11].
Sometimes the basis for repressions against scholars was direct or indirect denunciations by colleagues. In the atmosphere of those years, even a scientific review containing accusations of “departure from Marxist methodology” could become grounds for arrest. In this regard, a graduate of the Smolensk branch of the Moscow Archaeological Institute (1922), Candidate of Historical Sciences Alexander Nikolaevich Lyavdansky (1893-1937), who had spent many years conducting research in Belarusian, Bryansk, and Smolensk lands, paradoxically participated in the destruction of national Belarusian science. His odious speeches accused colleagues of collecting religious artifacts, of attempts to create a Belarusian autocephalous church, and of fighting against the dictatorship of the proletariat. The persecution of Belarusian science is completely at odds with the image of Lyavdansky preserved by his contemporaries: “A scholar-enthusiast, a cheerful and charming person, he knew how to unite around himself both young people and those of the older generation and infect them all with his love for their native history” [12]. Perhaps Alexander Nikolaevich sincerely believed in the ideals of the new era? He became an associate professor at the Belarusian University, academic secretary of the Institute of History of the BSSR Academy of Sciences, head of the archaeology section, and joined the party committee of the institute. However, the terror caught up with him too, and with him several talented colleagues. Lyavdansky was arrested on May 19, 1937, and by a decision of the “troika” dated August 25, 1937, under Art. 63-1 “treason,” Art. 70 “commission of terrorist acts,” and Art. 76 “organizational anti-Soviet activity or participation in an anti-Soviet organization” of the BSSR Criminal Code, he was sentenced to the exceptional measure of punishment as a Polish spy.
He was posthumously rehabilitated on May 7, 1958, by the Military Tribunal of the Belarusian Military District [9]. Let us return to the “Academic Affair.” From it, during the investigation, branched off Case No. 111212 “Local Historians,” which led to the arrest and subsequent repressions in 1931 under Articles 58-10, 11 of the RSFSR Criminal Code of local historians of the Black Earth region [13]. By a fortunate chance, this fate bypassed Bryansk. The local historians were accused of a “monarchist conspiracy” — a widespread, classic charge for people with a distinguished pre-revolutionary past. Among other things, the local historians were charged with propagating monarchist ideas among the population, creating counter-revolutionary groups, using scientific institutions to gather counter-revolutionary elements, conducting counter-revolutionary work among teachers and students of universities and secondary schools, and seizing leading positions in scientific societies and museums for counter-revolutionary purposes [14]. In 1933, many local history societies were closed. Against this background, the association of local historians from Bezhitsa (Ordzhonikidzegrad) that survived and developed looks like a miracle.
Ignaty Yevstafyevich Blagodatsky (1883-1938) graduated from a theological seminary. Until 1913, he worked in Tsaritsyn in city schools and gymnasia, then moved to Bezhitsa as a teacher of elementary grades at the newly opened men’s gymnasium. Until 1924, he combined teaching with positions in the provincial department of public education; from 1930, he began teaching at the Bezhitsa Institute of Transport Engineering, the Communist University, and secondary school No. 12. Nikolai Iosifovich Lelyanov (1893-1938) enrolled in 1914 at the Physics and Mathematics Faculty of Moscow University but did not have time to complete his education, swept up by the romance of revolution. He fought in Red Army units on the fronts during the Civil War, and then, for his membership in the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, was “gratefully” exiled by the Bolsheviks to the provinces. For a long time, he worked as a teacher in Rognedino and Dubrovka and became fascinated with archaeology. He participated in excavations led by B.S. Zhukov, where he met Blagodatsky and Deev. In 1927, he moved to Bezhitsa, becoming a teacher at factory-mill seven-year school No. 1 and the nursing school. In 1928, he professionally conducted an archaeological survey [15]. From 1934, Lelyanov was head of the local history office and secretary of the local history circle at the House of Artistic Education of Children in Bezhitsa. He was extremely well educated: he recited the “Iliad” by heart, had an enormous library, spoke several languages, knew history, geology, and botany, and completed the Smolensk Pedagogical Institute externally in 1936. By this time, he had catalogued over 700 archaeological sites of the Desna region, becoming the foremost expert on the archaeology of the northeast of the modern Bryansk Oblast. His ideas were distinguished by their originality and novelty. For instance, he hypothesized that the Sudost and Desna rivers in ancient times were two branches of one river. Only in the 1960s did Goretsky confirm this hypothesis.
Blagodatsky also distinguished himself in geology, discovering the Seshcha glaciodislocations. In 1935, under the leadership of Blagodatsky and Lelyanov, the Society for the Study of the Western Oblast conducted 32 geological and tourist expeditions. Among the participants was schoolboy Zhenya Schmidt — now a professor at Smolensk University, a prominent archaeologist [16]. Then came the tragic denouement. On June 10, 1937, a resolution of the Council of People’s Commissars of the RSFSR was issued, prohibiting the further existence of the central and local bureaus of local history. Their activities were deemed inexpedient. Soon the fate of the local historians themselves also ended tragically — N.I. Lelyanov and I.E. Blagodatsky were arrested by the Oryol OGPU under the notorious “Stalin lists” and executed on September 12, 1938, without trial, as “enemies of the people” [17].
A comprehensive assessment of the tragic events was given by the Finnish archaeologist, Baron A.M. Tallgren, who spoke about his trip to the USSR in 1936 (after which he became persona non grata in the USSR). “I visited institutions where I did not meet a single employee who had worked there in 1928. I can mention several archaeologists who were removed: G. Borovka, I. Fabricius, M. Gryaznov, Yavoretsky, V. Kozlovskaya, M. Makarenko, A. Miller (died), M. Rudynsky, S. Teplouhov (died), A. Zakharov, B. Zhukov (died). Among them are brilliant scholars and most worthy people, devoted and strong citizens of their country. How rich humanity must be if it can do without such interesting people. But can the world, can the Soviets afford to interrupt the creative activity of people possessing interest, enthusiasm, knowledge, and abilities” [18].
The repressive machine could not run idle. From the Moscow cohort whose fates intersected at Suponevo near Bryansk in the 1920s, the last to suffer was Georgy Fyodorovich Mirchink (1889-1942) — a graduate of Moscow State University (1912), Doctor of Geological-Mineralogical Sciences, Professor (1918), Academician of the BSSR Academy of Sciences. He composed the world’s first course of lectures on Quaternary geology, developed a set of methods for studying the geology of the Quaternary period, and had many discoveries and achievements to his credit. Among them was the study of the geology of the Desna basin and the first Paleolithic sites in the Bryansk region — Suponevo and Timonovka (where he worked with Deev, Zhukov, Lelyanov, and Blagodatsky). Fate was kind to the geologist. As the chief geological consultant for the Moscow-Volga Canal, he was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labor; he gave reports at international symposia and taught at Moscow State University, the Surveying Institute, the Moscow Geological Prospecting Institute named after Ordzhonikidze, and the Mining Academy. From 1941, Mirchink was the president of the Soviet section of the Association for the Study of the Quaternary Period. But on June 23, 1941, the scholar was arrested on charges of “participation in an anti-Soviet monarchist organization”: during a search of his apartment, they found a gold coin of tsarist minting, sheet music for the opera “A Life for the Tsar,” the magazine “Capital and Estate” with images of the royal family, and a token commemorating the 300th anniversary of the Romanov dynasty. The investigation dragged on. In February 1942, the disgraced academician was transferred to Saratov prison, where he died before reaching trial. In 1946, an obituary was published, a posthumous article was issued, and a bust was installed in the Museum of Earth Sciences at Moscow State University, but only in 1990, departing from legal casuistry, was Mirchink posthumously rehabilitated [19].
Yet another victim of arbitrary rule whose name is connected with the archaeology of the Desna is the already mentioned Elizaveta Arsenyevna Kalitina (1894-1956), an archaeologist from Smolensk. Under Lyavdansky’s direction, she participated in excavations of the Gnezdovo burial mounds; with Polikarpovich, she investigated the Paleolithic at Eliseyevichi and searched for the Stone Age near Dyatkovo. In 1936, she conducted surveys along the Navlya, adding 14 sites to the archaeological map of the region; in 1937, in Bezhitsa, she investigated the Torfel hill fort of the Yukhnov culture of the Early Iron Age, which was obstructing the expansion of the Krasny Profintern shape-casting factory. With the onset of war in Smolensk, as in many other cities, museum collections were not given due importance. For Soviet officials, it was more important to save party archives. On the night of July 9, 1941, a wagon with exhibits did leave for the rear, but 9 exhibitions and the main part of the collections were abandoned. Along with them, many museum employees remained under occupation, including the deputy director for science, E.A. Kalitina. The occupiers ordered museum workers to return to their duties of systematizing the collections and library. On their orders, 26 exhibits were requisitioned for the officers’ club, the city administration, and the Assumption Cathedral. Kalitina demanded receipts to preserve records of the exhibits’ new locations. It was precisely these receipts, issued in her name by German officers, that played the fatal role: on January 25, 1949, museum employee Kalitina was arrested by the MGB Directorate for the Smolensk Oblast. The investigation was swift, the court unjust: on March 31, 1949, she was convicted by the Military Tribunal of the MVD troops under Art. 58-1a to 25 years in the camps. Stages, humiliation, slave labor. The Military Tribunal of the Moscow Military District, by ruling No. 1768 of December 27, 1954, overturned the verdict and terminated the case for lack of evidence. Only two months later, on February 21, 1955, was Kalitina released, and she returned to Smolensk, but not to the museum: until the end, she harbored resentment for her undeservedly broken life [20]. Those who evacuated part of the collections received deserved laurels. She, risking her life, tried to preserve the collections abandoned to their fate, and in return received the camps and a hopeless existence branded as an “enemy of the people.”
Participating in Kalitina’s expeditions was Vsevolod Protasyevich Levenok (1906-1985), who in many ways repeated her fate. After graduating from the Painting Faculty of the Art Technical School in Voronezh, he worked as a drawing teacher and artist at the Voronezh Local History Museum, where he became fascinated with archaeology. In 1934, he returned to his native Trubchevsk and a year later headed the Trubchevsk Local History Museum. Communicating with his teacher and friend K.M. Polikarpovich, Levenok revitalized the museum, recreating the exhibition, conducted active archaeological research, enrolled at the Leningrad Institute of Culture named after Krupskaya, and began work on his dissertation. But the war began. The city council refused to evacuate the museum. Levenok, not drafted into the Red Army due to disability, remained in Trubchevsk, which the Nazis entered on October 9, 1941. The burgomaster issued a decree: all employees were to remain at their posts; the penalty for evading work was execution. Levenok, as the museum head, tried to preserve the collections, but in September 1943, the retreating Germans did what the Soviet authorities could not — they took the exhibits away.
Levenok, who resisted, was placed under convoy with his family. His wife and son perished in Zlynka from a Soviet air raid, and he himself became an Ostarbeiter forced laborer for a German landowner, went through a concentration camp, escaped across the front line, and took part in combat operations of the Soviet Army [21]. After the war, K.M. Polikarpovich took him into the Institute of History of the BSSR. By 1949, Vsevolod moved to Leningrad, becoming a laboratory assistant at the Institute of the History of Material Culture of the USSR Academy of Sciences. But in January 1951, he was arrested by the MGB and convicted by the Voronezh Military Tribunal under Art. 58-1 (anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda) and Art. 57-3 (treason) of the RSFSR Criminal Code.
He was charged with the fact that the museum in Trubchevsk had not been evacuated, that it had operated during the occupation, and that it was taken by the fascists during their retreat. Behind the arrest was a denunciation by a colleague from the museum, vexed by the local man’s rise to “capital heights.” The situation is painfully familiar, typical. “People went to the stake for science, and sitting in detention for several years is not so terrible after all. It is only a pity that during this time I will be torn away from scientific work,” wrote Levenok [22]. In October 1955, Vsevolod Protasyevich was released and returned to his beloved work, becoming an employee of the Leningrad Branch of the Institute of Archaeology of the USSR Academy of Sciences. In 1956-57, he continued research in his native Desna region, and then on the Upper Don, discovering hundreds of sites. The result was the defense of his candidate’s dissertation at the Institute of Archaeology of the USSR Academy of Sciences [23].
Levenok was not alone in his tragedy. A similar fate befell many museum workers throughout the country who continued to preserve history during the occupation. Their work under occupation was an insane act of self-sacrifice. But even in 1992, V.P. Levenok was posthumously rehabilitated by the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office on only 1 count of the charges.
Those who destroyed museum collections during the Red Army’s retreat continue to be considered heroes, while those who preserved collections are still classified as “enemies of the people.”
A look at the totalitarian past and analysis of the state of contemporary Russian society make one think about the not-so-distant future. In the notorious Law No. 122-FZ (monetization of benefits), the parliament “in a single impulse” removed from the preamble of the previously adopted law “On the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repressions” the words stating that the state had inflicted moral harm upon these people. In 2008, the tyrant Stalin took third place in the interactive project of the RTR television channel “The Face of Russia.” Recommendations are already being made to school teachers to present political repressions as an effective solution to state problems and Stalin himself as a “successful manager” [24].
All of this consists of landmark phenomena, attempts to rehabilitate the totalitarian system. No less rapidly than during the “Academic Affair,” the bureaucratization of the country and of science is gaining strength; under the pressure of bureaucracy, the structures of science and education are collapsing; there are symptoms of a return to uniformity of thought. This is precisely why we are obligated to remember and analyze the terrible past. This will help develop immunity and prevent the people from being plunged into a new abyss of lawlessness and arbitrary rule.
Irreparable damage was inflicted on a result in USSR political repression 1920-1950-h motherland science. Particularly damaged to figures of humanitarian direction: as Academy of science, so and local lore regional scientists. In article is briefly considered of archeologists scientific contribution and fate subjected to repression, whose exploratory activity was connected with of the basin Desna-river. Amongst them - B.S. Zhukov, M.Y. Rudynskiy, B.A. Latynin, V.P. Levenok, E.A. Kalitina, G.I. Goreckiy and many others. Importance of the studies of the crimes of the totalitarian state is emphasized for modern stage of the Russian history.
The key words: archeology, geology, Desna, Bryansk, Chernigov, political repressions, totalitarizm
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