STAGES OF ANCIENT HISTORY AND THE CRITERIA OF THEIR DEFINITION IN RUSSIAN AND SOVIET SCHOLARSHIP OF THE 20th AND 21st CENTURIES. Part I

The article discusses the experience of establishing the periods of ancient history and developing its general scheme in Russian and Soviet research of the twentieth century till the 1980s. The development of such schemes was not considered as a specific task in the pre-revolutionary scholarship. In the 1930s-1950s there was an intention to tie the periods established traditionally in scholarship with the stages of the development of slavery; the formation of state at the beginning of antiquity was seen as a result of splitting the society into antagonistic classes, and the end of antiquity was ascribed the nature of a revolution. In the 1950s-1960s the evolution of ancient communities in their various forms was taken as a determining factor for the flow of ancient history and defining its stages; the influence of the 'revolution of the slaves' theory was eliminated. In the Late Soviet period the views of Igor Diakonoff on the development and the periodisation of ancient history, which matched well with the schemes developed by historians of ancient Greece and Rome, became particularly important.