ABSTRACT
Nationalism in Russian and Soviet archaeology expressed itself mainly in ethnogenetic studies, were encouraged and reinforced directly or indirectly by the state in Imperial Russia and in the USSR. Different fields can be distinguished in terms of international and inter-ethnic relations in respect to nationalism, the Russian response to the external Western world, Russians versus non-Russians within the country, non-Russians versus each other. In terms of external aims, the concern was with the confirmation of the single origin of the 'Slavic' people, and an independent establishment of the state by the Eastern Slavs. Their ideology was rooted in internationalism, which was perceived by them as an obligation to study only global universal regularities in order to confirm that the Russian revolution. It is well known that myths contribute much to national and ethnic identifications, and this has expressed itself in a great many ethnogenetic schemes produced in the USSR during recent decades.
