Khazar paradigm of Stalin
These attacks on Artamonov in the form of a note in Pravda are all the more strange because in 1951, after the completion of the Volga-Don expedition (1949-1951), which worked, in particular, on Sarkel, Artamonov was appointed - “by the highest command” as writes Pletneva, director of the Hermitage. Artamonov expected to be elected to the Academy of Sciences and awarded the star of the Hero of Socialist Labor.
In his “note” entitled “On one erroneous concept,” P. Ivanov wrote:
Using a large amount of material material, historians have irrefutably proven the originality and high level of culture of the Russian, Georgian, Armenian and other peoples of the USSR. ... In the brochure of Prof. V.A. Parkhomenko “At the Origins of Russian Statehood (VIII-XI centuries), published in 1924, and in some other works, the idea is advanced that the Khazar Kaganate, a primitive state formation that existed in the 7th-10th centuries, played a decisive role in the creation of statehood and culture of Kievan Rus centuries.
Prof. Parkhomenko spoke frankly about the Khazar origins of Rus'. He argued that “corresponding to the role of the Normans in the north-west, at the other end of Russian territory - in the south-east - the Kozares had a dominant influence on another group of Russian-Slavic tribes, that the Slavic tribes borrowed the beginning of statehood from the Khazars.
An incorrect assessment of the historical role of the Khazar Kaganate, oddly enough, is still in circulation today. It is most fully manifested in the works of the prominent archaeologist Prof. M.I. Artamonov, who has been studying the history of the Khazars for many years and has published a number of works on this issue. The main provisions of his concept by Prof. Artamonov formulated it in “Essays on the Ancient History of the Khazars,” published in 1937 [Leningrad]. In this work (replete with references to the erroneous statements of Academician Marr), he stated that “the Khazar state cannot be ignored as the most important (?!) condition for the formation of Kievan Rus,” that the Khazar Kaganate supposedly acted “as a state almost equal in strength and the political significance of Byzantium and the Arab Caliphate." Prof. Artamonov argued that Kievan Rus entered the historical arena “in the role of a vassal of the Byzantine Empire” and that the Khazar Khaganate allegedly served for it as a model of a new type of state.
If in 1937 prof. Artamonov wrote about the outstanding role of the Khazars in the historical development of Eastern Europe, then in subsequent articles he began to talk about their role on a larger scale. In one of the articles (1949) prof. Artamonov reports on the excavations of the Khazar fortress Sarkel and at the same time emphasizes the importance of the culture of the Khazar Khaganate, “the important role of which, according to the author, not only in world history, but also in the history of the ancient Russian state has not yet been taken into account sufficiently.”
In a report at this year’s session of the Department of History and Philosophy of the USSR Academy of Sciences, prof. Artamonov, regardless of the facts, again presented the Khazars in the role of an advanced people who allegedly became victims of the “aggressive” aspirations of the Russians. Regarding Svyatoslav’s eastern campaign, M.I. Artamonov stated that Sarkel “should be considered as one of the most important outposts of Russian political and cultural expansion (?!) to the East.” ...
According to Russian, Arab and Byzantine sources, the multi-tribal Khazar hordes in the 7th–10th centuries ruled over a vast territory stretching from the shores of the Caspian Sea and the Lower Volga region to the Sea of Azov and the Crimea. The Khazars captured vast lands that had been inhabited since ancient times by the Eastern Slavs and other peoples.
The works of many famous historians have convincingly proven that the wild hordes of the Khazars led a semi-nomadic lifestyle. Despite the presence of cities, they mainly roamed the steppes, imposed duties on ships heading along important trade routes, raided neighboring peoples, and imposed extortionate tribute on them. Wars served as a constant trade for them.
The Khazar Khaganate, which was a primitive union of various tribes, did not play any positive role in the creation of the state of the Eastern Slavs. In addition, state formations among the Eastern Slavs, as ancient sources say, arose long before the news of the Khazars. ...
Academician B.D. Grekov, who devoted a lot of work to the study of ancient Rus', emphasizes that there could not have been a high culture of the Kievan state if it had not had deep roots in the distant past, that even “before the 9th century. The Russian people have come a long way in their economic, social, political and cultural life.”
As for the Khazar Kaganate, it not only did not contribute to the development of the ancient Russian state, but, on the contrary, slowed down the process of unification of the East Slavic tribes and the growth of Russian statehood. The Khazars carried out devastating raids on the Slavs and enslaved some of these sedentary tribes with widely developed agriculture and crafts.
Our ancestors more than once had to defend their native land with arms in hand from the attacks of the steppe hordes. Ancient Rus' defeated the Khazar Kaganate, liberated the ancestral Slavic lands from its dominance and rescued the Vyatichi and other Slavic tribes from under the Khazar yoke.
Distorting the history of ancient Rus', prof. Artamonov is trying to adapt history to his far-fetched scheme. In the name of this false scheme, he extols the Khazar “heritage”, showing an incomprehensible admiration for the Khazar culture.
But the scheme of Prof. Artamonova does not even fit in with the materials obtained as a result of the excavations of the Khazar fortress of Sarkel carried out under his leadership and the Russian city of Belaya Vezha, which was later founded on the same site. The expedition found numerous Russian cultural monuments here, traces of various workshops, jewelry and blacksmith production, and fragments of vessels with Russian inscriptions, indicating the spread of literacy among the city's population.
The materials obtained by our archaeologists indicate a high level of culture of ancient Rus'. Only by trampling on the historical truth, neglecting the facts, can we talk about the superiority of the Khazar culture, from which not a single significant monument has survived. Even the urban culture of the Khazar capital was imported or created by the hands of alien masters - Khorezm, Byzantine, Russian and others.
In the idealization of Khazar culture one has to see a clear relic of the vicious views of bourgeois historians, who belittled the original development of the Russian people.
The fallacy of this concept is obvious. Such a concept cannot be accepted by Soviet historical science.
Here it is necessary to make a few comments about the history of the study of the Khazars in Russia and the USSR. The tone was set by the famous remark of N.M. Karamzin, a supporter of enlightened protection, about the Khazar rule that was beneficial for the Russians. At the same time, Karamzin contrasted the Khazar light yoke with the heavy Tatar (= Tatar-Mongol) yoke. Since the late 30s. XIX century, V.V. Grigoriev also defended the thesis about the generally positive role of the Khazars in the history of Eastern Europe, and by the middle of the 19th century, when the Russian Empire seized control of Central Asia, this tendency in his writings intensified; in many ways, Grigoriev anticipated subsequent Russian Eurasianism. It should be noted that the Khazar Jewry was of very little interest to Russian historians of the 19th century. Rather, in the “eastern” Khazaria they saw a certain, generally positive, prototype of the “eastern” Russian Empire, multi-tribal, multi-confessional and autocratic (this trend will continue in the twentieth century, when Kievan Rus is sometimes presented as a kind of “Russian Khazaria”).
On the other hand, interest in the Khazars turned out to be tied to the controversy between Normanists and anti-Normanists. The Normanists accepted the data of the Russian chronicle about the beginnings of Russian history, while the anti-Normanists pointed out obvious contradictions in the chronicle text. Naturally, many anti-Norman historians sought in Khazaria an alternative to Varangian Scandinavia as the source of Russian statehood. Almost all Russian historians of the twentieth century, both Normanists and anti-Normanists, recognized the generally positive role of the Khazar Kaganate in Russian history and in the emergence of the Russian state. So, for example, V.O. Klyuchevsky believed that the Khazars gave the Eastern Slavs access to world trade routes and contributed to the development of Russian trade, protecting the Slavs from attacks by nomads.
The discourse of Jewish historians of Khazaria in the 19th and early 20th centuries was, to a large extent, parallel and complementary to the discourse of Russian historians. In essence, throughout the entire Jewish-Russian discourse, the assertion of the right of Jews to be considered full citizens in Russia, and not alien aliens without a homeland, turned out to be, in one way or another, connected with the Khazar Kaganate. The tolerant and enlightened Khazaria, in the spirit of the descriptions of Karamzin and Grigoriev, turned out to be the common historical heritage of Jews and Russians, and this implied a certain share of Jewish superiority, which the Jews, like an older brother, were ready to nobly abandon in favor of their younger and more vital Russian compatriots.
In the first years of Soviet power, the study of the Khazars was dominated by a tendency that can be called “internationalist” - it emphasized the peaceful and mutually enriching basis in relations between the peoples of the USSR, consistently leveling out everything that could be perceived as a manifestation of Russian “great-power chauvinism.” Thus, Ukrainian scientist V.A. Parkhomenko - not coincidentally quoted in Pravda - pointed to the peaceful nature of the subjugation of the Eastern Slavs to the Khazars, to the borrowing of statehood by the Slavs from the Khazars. M.N. also wrote in the same key. Pokrovsky (1868-1932), founder of the Soviet Marxist historical school. As for N.Ya. Marr, also mentioned in the “note” in Pravda, he was seriously interested in the Khazars in the context of his theories of new Marxist linguistics, and it was he who brought Artamonov into Khazar studies. In 1937, when Artamonov’s first Khazar book, “Essays on the Ancient History of the Khazars,” was published, with which “P. Ivanov” a decade and a half later, both Pokrovsky and Marr were no longer alive. The first was defamed soon after his death in the collection “Against the Historical Concept of M.N. Pokrovsky" (1939–1940), and his scientific rehabilitation occurred only in the 1960s, while the second remained a Marxist classic until the summer of 1950.
Thus, the attack on Khazaria, transforming it from “a bright meteor on the dark horizon of Europe” into a nomadic savage horde hostile to everything Russian, was an outright attack on the Russian-Jewish narrative of involvement and common destiny. At the same time, it was an attack on all the Turkic peoples of the USSR, and of all the fraternal peoples, only the Armenians and Georgians were awarded by the author of the “note” the honor of standing next to Big Brother on the pedestal of history. The overthrow of Khazaria into the dry Horde steppe, over which you never know who walked and disappeared, meant the overthrow of the Jews from the nation of the founders of Russian history, which gave the new Soviet Russia its red gods, into a parasitic rabble of rootless tumbleweed cosmopolitans. Such a challenge could only be thrown at the Jews of the USSR by someone who knew better than anyone else in the world how to do it. Moreover, “P. Ivanov’s note” opened the so-called “discussion about the nomadic way of life,” during which the “nomadic hordes” were declared parasitic predatory gangs that lay outside the Marxist scheme of the correct historical progressive process. It should be noted that the deep connection between the attack on the Judeo-Khazar rootless parasites and the erasure of nomads from history (mostly Turks, some of whom, for their “predatory” lifestyle, were recently deported from their lands) was understood by many representatives of the Turkic intelligentsia.
So who was this “unknown comrade Ivanov”, and why did his “note” cause such a resonance? There was an opinion in science that the devastating article was written by B.A. Rybakova. Rybakov himself spoke out on this matter several times, and in exactly the opposite way, so it is completely unclear which of his statements can be trusted. One way or another, the text of the article in Pravda is striking in several aspects:
- the author, undoubtedly, is the master-manager on all issues, and, above all, on the most complex and vague issues of history;
- the author, alone in the entire Soviet Union, does not need any references to the classics of Marxism-Leninism when discussing basic questions about nomadic and sedentary peoples or about feudalism as an obligatory stage of development; no one could afford something like this in the USSR until 1991;
- the author in no way touches on the essence of the matter, understood by everyone and so precisely formulated by S.A. Pletnevoy half a century later: the words “Jews” and “Judaism” remained unspoken.
An article in Pravda on such a delicate topic as the possible role of the Khazars (and all politically competent people know about the Khazars’ adoption of Judaism, and therefore “Khazars” is nothing more than a euphemism implying Jews) in the genesis of Kievan Rus could only come from the fact that who was almost officially called the Instance, even if it was not written from beginning to end directly by him. If he did not write it himself, then he read it and, possibly, edited it (Rybakov himself could not imagine an article without quotes from the “classics of Marxism-Leninism” and Stalin himself), approved and sanctioned its publication in Pravda. Therefore, there is no choice of candidates for the role of this person. This is Stalin himself. According to biographers, he sometimes used the pseudonym “Ivanov.” In any case, no matter who the author of the “literary text” of this article is, for the purposes of political analysis this article is the work of Stalin.
Although the article “P. Ivanov" and was important for Stalin conceptually; he did not want to become a theorist of the "Jewish question", which in one way or another could link his name directly with the anti-Semitic campaign. According to N.S. Khrushchev:
Stalin’s major shortcoming was his hostile attitude towards the Jewish nation. He, as a leader and theorist, did not even give a hint of this in his works and speeches. God forbid if someone referred to such statements that reeked of anti-Semitism. Outwardly everything looked decent.
Stalin’s reluctance to publicly theorize on the “Jewish question” contrasts sharply with his willingness to act as a “luminary of linguistics”, signing his own name under what he heard from Arnold Chikobawa, which indicates his political caution and understanding of the political explosiveness of the very subject of discussion. The only officially permitted quotation from Stalin on anti-Semitism in the USSR was “Response to a request from the Jewish Telegraph Agency from America” dated January 12, 1931, published in the USSR for the first time in Pravda on November 30, 1936:
National and racial anti-Semitism is a relic of the misanthropic views inherent in period of cannibalism. Anti-Semitism, as an extreme form of racial chauvinism, is a dangerous relic of cannibalism.
At the end of 1951, Stalin entered his last and decisive battle. He returned to Moscow from the Caucasus on December 22, 1951; article "P. Ivanov" for Pravda, which will be published in three days, was apparently already ready. It fits perfectly into Stalin’s intellectual activity during this period: in the summer of 1950, after a discussion on language issues, his brochure “Marxism and Questions of Linguistics” was published.
In this work, Stalin declared the old comparative historical method, rejected by N.Ya., Marxist. Marr, the official Soviet classic of the 20-30s in the field of linguistics, declared Marr's four-elementary analysis non-Marxist, while emphasizing the “linguistic kinship, for example, of such nations as the Slavic ones,” and casually accusing the Marrists of the original sin of Bundism. Stalin's interest in the long-deceased Marr during these years may be associated with the revision of Caucasian linguistics by Arnold Chikobava. Apparently, on the night of April 12, 1950, Chikobava met with Stalin, and he took notes on a lecture presented by Chikobava - this was the genesis of the discussion about language, which began with an article in Pravda on June 20, 1950 and resulted in Stalin’s pamphlet. Stalin could re-read Marr’s old works and find there a rapprochement between the Kartvelian language and the Semitic ones. In addition, the Georgian Christian tradition obsessively emphasized Georgia’s special dependence on Jews as its baptists and educators, which the former seminarian and generally encyclopedically educated “Kremlin highlander” could not help but know. Chikobava’s lecture, which turned into a Stalinist pamphlet, removed the painful suspicion from Stalin’s soul that perhaps there was some kind of special connection between Georgians and Semites. Questions of ethnogenesis are more than naturally intertwined with questions of the genesis of language, so turning to the Khazar theme became natural against the background of Stalin’s linguistic interests.
One of the main accusations brought against Artamonov in Pravda is the charge of marism, and this is not accidental. This is a suitcase with a double bottom: Artamonov not only made an archaeological career at the Institute of the History of Material Culture (IHMC) named after Marr in Leningrad, where Marr was then director - his early book, quoted by P. Ivanov, “Essays on the Ancient History of the Khazars” (1937), not only full of open links to N.Ya. Marr, practically obligatory for works on similar topics in the 20-30s. Moreover: it was Marr who inspired Artamonov, who did not have knowledge of languages unnecessary for a Marxist linguist, to study the Khazars, whose very name interested Marr so much in the light of his Japhetic theory.
Nine months after the appearance of “P. Ivanov’s note” on the eve of the convening of the 19th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), Stalin will publish “Economic problems of socialism in the USSR.” After the war, economic topics, like all “ideological work,” were handed over to the so-called “Leningrad group” and, above all, to the economist N.A. Voznesensky, member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, first deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, Chairman of the State Planning Committee of the USSR. This group, led by Stalin’s then favorite A.A. Zhdanov and Stalin’s favorite of the war years A.A. Kuznetsov, Secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, among other things, was involved in the preparation of the Nineteenth Congress of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks and, above all, the preparation of basic ideological documents, including economic ones. Their economic concept of socialism in Soviet terms of that time can be called “commodity-money”. The internal political line of the “Leningrad group” was colored by anti-Semitism in everything related to the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and the fight against “Jewish dominance” both in all spheres of science and culture, and in administrative institutions, starting with the MGB. But from the end of 1948 - beginning of 1949. this group fell out of favor with Stalin, which led first to their removal from power, and then to their arrest and death on October 1, 1950.
But all this was not enough for Stalin. A year after the execution of A.A. Kuznetsov, who, together with the entire “Leningrad group,” enjoyed the reputation of a “Russian nationalist,” was posthumously accused of organizing a “Zionist conspiracy” together with his former supervised, now actively tortured accused, former Minister of State Security V.S. Abakumov. The latter, who was still alive, was demanded to confess to this, for which he was subjected to monstrous torture. As contemporaries close to state security believed, Stalin wanted to organize a public trial in which the “Zionist conspiracy” would be presented not only by Kremlin doctors, Jews and Russians, but also by MGB generals, headed by Abakumov. Abakumov will not live up to Stalin’s hopes and will thereby disrupt the implementation of the worked out scenario.
So, towards the end of his life, Stalin formulated a new “monistic view of history”, combining his historiosophical and repressive-terrorist tastes: from Marr and his “Japhetic” (read: Semitic) origin of the Caucasian languages, through Marr’s favorite student, the innocent director of the Hermitage Artamonov, with his theory of the Khazar (read: Jewish) genesis of Kievan Rus - to the “rootless cosmopolitans” from the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, who seduced the “naive Russian guys” Kuznetsov and Voznesensky onto the path of “restoration of capitalism” through the “protrusion” of “commodity-money relations under socialism” ; and all this with the connivance of their “ward” Abakumov, right up to the conspiracy of Jewish (and Russian!) Kremlin doctors.
This is how a coherent historical and criminal concept grew. The “Zionist conspiracy” became the crown of Stalin’s two “Marxist” theoretical researches: political economic and Khazar. The conceptual monism of Stalin's activities in the last two years of his life was evident. After all, as the founder of Russian Marxism G.V. wrote. Plekhanov, “... the most consistent and deepest thinkers have always inclined towards monism, i.e. to the explanation of phenomena by means of some fundamental principle.”
II. Grand design: Zionist generals, Zionist nuclear scientists, Zionist doctors
But in March 1953, the last and decisive battle was completely lost by Stalin, although, as we will try to show, it was on the theoretical - Khazar - field that Stalin faced a certain revenge after death. His victims - and the prosperous director of the Hermitage M.I. Artamonov, and the repeatedly arrested prisoner of the Leningrad prison "Crosses", a Norilsk prisoner, the son of the executed Nikolai Gumilev and the trampled Anna Akhmatova - Lev Gumilev, will declare in post-Stalin (and Gumilev - even in post-Soviet) times - Judaism the main evil that destroyed Khazaria and turned it into the source of the “Khazar yoke” over the Slavic peoples, which was written about in Pravda in 1951.
The declaration of the Khazars (read: Jews) as a “wild nomadic horde” (read: “rootless cosmopolitans”) was a “Marxist” conceptualization of anti-Semitism and made Jews a priori incapable of statehood and any settled way of life, which removed the candidacy of Khazaria as the forerunner of Kievan Rus. Without a settled way of life there is no feudalism. Therefore, the Khazars could not play a “progressive” role. And what does not fall under the Marxist scheme of historical development, that is, historical “progress”, is doomed. From here, by analogy, it followed that homelessness and cosmopolitanism of Jews are dangerous, but also doomed by the logic of history, just as the Khazars once were for Rus', and one must behave with them accordingly. Transferring the “Marxist” rationale for anti-Semitism to the early Middle Ages, to the plane of the genesis of feudalism, “P. Ivanov” seemed to implicitly refuse to interpret Jewry as the bearer of the idea of money, thereby representing the quintessence of the “spirit” of capitalism, as Karl Marx asserted in his famous article “On the Jewish Question” (1844). Although there is no clear trace of Stalin's knowledge of this article, its notoriety (as well as its use in Nazi propaganda) does not allow us to settle on the assumption that Stalin never read it.
Current Russian historians claim that in 1951-52, Stalin allegedly actually retreated from running affairs, which Beria and Malenkov took advantage of, provoking the “doctors’ case” to remove Kremlin doctors from the leader, which made it easier to kill him. And the anti-Semitic moment arose by chance, due to the careless wording of the “TASS Report” of January 13, 1953, “On the arrest of a group of saboteur doctors,” in the writing of which Stalin allegedly did not take part at all. We are trying to prove that for the last two years of his life, Stalin was hourly busy and completely absorbed in the “Jewish question”, both in theoretical and practical repressive aspects. And what he did, despite its incompleteness, in no way indicates his laziness, fatigue or inability to work.
Two areas almost completely absorbed Stalin's attention - the same theoretical activity and direct management of the MGB, including active and direct participation in its reorganization in 1952, especially the complete reorganization of intelligence and the creation of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the MGB. From a certain point on, the MGB ceased to satisfy Stalin’s requests - this was already the case in 1932-36. The old leadership of the NKVD was in no hurry to exterminate old party members, or even their comrades; it did not see the need for mass terror and was not eager to organize it. Then Stalin destroyed the entire old leadership of the NKVD, headed by Genrikh Yagoda, and appointed a new People's Commissar of Internal Affairs - Nikolai Yezhov, who had a strong reputation as a small, polite and gentle man. However, in his new post, he instantly grasped the task and began to act furiously. Then Stalin achieved from the NKVD everything he wanted: the extermination of the party and military elite and mass terror, which resulted in the execution of almost 682 thousand people and the imprisonment of another 600 thousand people in concentration camps.
But in 1951, something clearly stalled again. Stalin wanted big actions against the Jews. It is difficult today to explain the reason that prevented the implementation of Stalin's plans. The published materials leave us in a world of speculation - almost like with the Khazars. If we take the middle of 1951 as a starting point, we have a very strange situation: members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC) have been in prison for more than two and a half years, but the question of their fate is still as unclear as when they were arrested. Stalin decides to get rid of the head of the MGB, Viktor Abakumov. In July 1951, Abakumov would be removed and arrested.
At the same time, a grand design appeared in Stalin’s head, consisting of a “conspiracy” of Jewish doctors and Zionist generals of the MGB, coupled with the pogrom planned in Prague of the “Jewish wing” of the leadership of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, led by the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia Rudolf Slansky (Zalzman). In accordance with the Kremlin's decision, in September 1951 Slansky was removed from the post of Secretary General of the Czechoslovak Communist Party. Many historians, both in Russia and in the West, like to explain Stalin’s actions as induced by “initiative from below,” that is, as a reaction to certain appeals to him. In our case we are talking about the denunciation of M.D. Ryumin about Abakumov’s sabotage of the investigation into the case of Jewish terrorist doctors, as well as about Klement Gottwald’s denunciation of Slansky brought to Moscow by A. Chepichka. We deeply doubt the “primacy” of these initiatives, which involve a huge risk for their authors, known for their cowardice. Undoubtedly, these “initiatives” were previously agreed upon, and in detail. One way or another, the extraordinary activity of the sick and not very strong 72-year-old leader was focused on the “Jewish question.”
In search of an explanation for this in the absence of documents about the internal political struggle, we propose to pay attention to the main international event of the spring-summer of 1951: the death sentence handed down on April 5, 1951 to Etel and Julius Rosenberg. The scandal surrounding the Rosenberg case, like the McCarthyite campaign, was clearly anti-Semitic in nature. The abundance of Jews in the courtroom - accused, defense, prosecutor and judge - gave the trial a flavor of anti-Semitic grotesquery. We do not know in what form information about this process reached Stalin. But, given Stalin’s sensitivity to everything related to the “Jewish question” and his undoubtedly excellent political intuition, we have the right to assume that Stalin fully accepted the anti-Semitic spirit of the trial and could conclude that anti-Semitic actions were permissible in the eyes of the “West.” As in preparing the trial of Zinoviev and Kamenev 15 years earlier, he could have decided that “Europe will swallow everything!”
In addition, the death sentence of the Rosenbergs could symbolize something much more significant for Stalin, as if drawing a thick final line under an entire era in the history of Soviet intelligence and the entire Soviet political elite - an era that could be called “internationalist” or “cosmopolitan” and which a significant part of the opponents of Bolshevism called it “Jewish”. There are many points of view on the role of Jews in the Russian Revolution; Disputes about this have been going on since October 1917. However, there is no doubt about the very significant Jewish presence in the foreign policy and intelligence apparatus of the Soviet Union until 1939. The social and professional reasons for this are obvious and do not require additional comment. Stalin's terror of the 1930s destroyed this apparatus almost to the ground. To fill the gap in personnel, by order of the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs N.I. Yezhov on October 3, 1938, a special training center for accelerated training of intelligence officers was created - the School of Special Purpose (SHON) of the GUGB NKVD of the USSR, or school No. 101, as it was later called. As Colonel Alexander Feklisov, who later oversaw Klaus Fuchs in London and Julius Rosenberg in New York, recalls, “I am a typical representative of the generation that came to intelligence in the late 1930s, when, after the purge of OGPU-NKVD personnel, proletarian people began to be recruited into intelligence origin, just graduated from college.” Jews at that time were extremely rarely of “proletarian origin” - they were of “petty-bourgeois” origin, if not “bourgeois”, at best “from the civil servants”. Thus, the direct recruitment of Jews into intelligence service was finally stopped. A similar operation was carried out with diplomats; There should have been a rapid “de-Judaization” of the intelligence and foreign policy services, but history stood in the way. The war with Hitler forced Stalin to call Jews under his banner. He went to the creation of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee.
The peak of the JAC's activities was the triumphant eight-month visit of Mikhoels and Fefer to the United States in 1943 to mobilize support for the USSR from “international Jewish organizations.” The visit was organized by the NKGB from start to finish. Its on-site organizers were famous intelligence officers who at that time were completely immersed in “atomic espionage” - Vasily Zarubin, second secretary of the Soviet embassy in Washington, and Grigory Kheifetz, Soviet vice-consul in San Francisco.
The emergence of the atomic project in the USA and plans to create a parallel project in the USSR again confronted Stalin with the need to win over the Jews to his side. Jews dominated both among the creators of the atomic bomb and among the agents called upon to bring atomic secrets. And in the decisive directions these were the same people! The fact is that Soviet espionage in the USA was based on the US Communist Party and its so-called “illegal apparatus”, the majority of whose members in the 1930-1940s were Jews - immigrants from Eastern Europe, emigrants of the first and second generations. They were distinguished by communist fanaticism, sympathy for Soviet Russia and hatred of Hitler. With the increasing scale of the extermination of Jews by Hitler, it was this feeling that became the basis of motivation both in helping to quickly create an atomic bomb and in the readiness to provide assistance to the Soviet Union. Thus, the Jewish motivation of Julius Rosenberg is reflected in the first, French, edition of Feklisov’s memoirs, but disappears in the subsequent Russian edition. So, although the intelligence apparatus was largely cleared of Jews, in Stalin's eyes it was still dependent on them for central issues. This is best seen from the documents prepared for the big meeting with Stalin, which took place on January 9, 1946: they invariably indicate the Jewish nationality of the leading atomic scientists (Robert Oppenheimer, Rudolf Peierls, Klaus Fuchs).
The trial in England of Klaus Fuchs, sentenced to 14 years in prison, and a little later - the death sentence of the Rosenbergs, finally closed the circle that began 10 years earlier. Now Stalin could take on Jews who were outside the service establishment and its immediate agents. But the MGB should have done this, and Stalin has one way to force the MGB to do what he wants - to send the minister and his subordinates to prison. This is what happens in July 1951, and Abakumov is charged with sabotage specifically in the Etinger case (the future case of doctors) and in the case of the Jewish anti-Soviet youth organization. But the new Minister of State Security does not show the necessary zeal: the JAC case, the “Jewish anti-Soviet youth organization” case, and the Etinger case are not moving forward. Stalin undoubtedly sensed the ongoing latent resistance and took up the matter himself. In October, he gives instructions to “remove all Jews from the MGB.” In November-December, a number of generals were arrested, as well as Grigory Mendelevich Kheifets, one of the most successful Soviet intelligence officers of all time, former secretary of Lenin's widow N.K. Krupskaya and deputy executive secretary of the JAC in 1947-48, as well as the famous head of the MGB poison laboratory Grigory Moiseevich Mayranovsky. All this time, Abakumov is subjected to monstrous torture in order to obtain a confession about participation in the “Zionist conspiracy.” And finally, at the end of November, A.I. Mikoyan, a member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, goes to Prague, where he arrests Rudolf Slansky.
The Slansky case has not been reflected in Russian historical consciousness. Unlike the rehabilitation of Jewish doctors and Solomon Mikhoels, announced in Pravda on April 4, 1953, neither Slansky's partial rehabilitation in 1963, nor his full rehabilitation during the Prague Spring of 1968, were covered in the Soviet press. Only 36 years after the public hanging of Slansky and his comrades (December 3, 1952), the Soviet Union began to mention this case. Meanwhile, we are talking about an event of epochal significance, even within the framework of the “ordinary” Stalinist terror. For we are not talking about “individual” Jews, be they Kremlin doctors or MGB generals. We are talking about the General Secretary of the ruling Communist Party and his mostly Jewish comrades in the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, who allegedly betrayed the communist cause not to please the “bourgeoisie” or “American imperialism”, but to please “Zionism” and Israel, that is, their fellow tribesmen - Jews. Let us note that even in 1952, one person was arrested in the USSR, suspected of belonging to an “agency of the Israeli intelligence agencies,” while 546 people were arrested on charges of espionage for the United States. It seems that the Slansky trial (November 20-27, 1952) was deafening news for a significant part of the USSR MGB.
This is the historical moment of excommunication of Jews from the Soviet communist “church”; excommunication not on class, but purely on racial grounds. The gap between Soviet communism and the Jews, no matter how the word “Jews” is understood, will steadily widen over the years. No amount of de-Stalinization efforts will be able to overcome the anti-Semitism that has become immanent under the name “anti-Zionism.” With the dying of Soviet and European communism, “anti-Zionism” will successfully migrate to left-wing and liberal circles, which strongly condemn the old, “reactionary” anti-Semitism. “Anti-Zionism” will be the only attribute of Stalinism that has successfully survived even after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
But for Stalin, as a theorist, it is not enough for Stalin to excommunicate the current, still living, to use his own expression, Jews. Stalin was interested in ancient history almost on a professional level, as evidenced by historians who studied Stalin's reading circle. Jews cannot have any rights not only to influence in modern, communist history, but also attempts to attribute to Jews any participation in the emergence of Kievan Rus are unacceptable. If they had any role in history, it was exclusively malicious. Of course, this had to be presented as a solid theoretical concept, devoid of the external trappings of direct anti-Semitism. And the very word “Jews” became taboo in the Soviet Union for 40 years. Noteworthy is the testimony of N.S. Khrushchev, who knew Stalin closely: “Stalin would stop at nothing and would strangle anyone whose actions could compromise his name, especially in such a vulnerable and shameful matter as anti-Semitism.”
In this regard, an episode dating back to mid-February 1952 and described by the secretary of the Union of Soviet Writers, member of the Stalin Prize Committee and winner of six Stalin Prizes in Literature, editor-in-chief of the Literary Gazette, Konstantin Simonov, deserves attention. At a meeting of the Stalin Prize Committee, Stalin unexpectedly explodes due to the indication of the real name of one writer who regularly publishes under a literary pseudonym:
Why Maltsev, and Rovinsky in parentheses? What's the matter? How long will this continue? Last year they already talked about this topic and prohibited people from being nominated for the award by indicating double surnames. Why is this being done? Why do you write a double surname? If a person has chosen a literary pseudonym for himself, this is his right, let’s not talk about anything else, just about basic decency. A person has the right to write under the pseudonym he has chosen for himself. But, apparently, someone is pleased to emphasize that this person has a double surname, to emphasize that he is a Jew. Why emphasize this? Why do this? Why spread anti-Semitism? Who needs this?
Soon after this, Komsomolskaya Pravda published a pogromious article by Stalin Prize winner writer Mikhail Bubennov, “Are literary pseudonyms necessary?” Taking the public Stalinist tirade at face value, Simonov decides that the political situation has changed and, taking the pose of a “decent person,” decisively appears in Literaturnaya Gazeta with an article “About one note,” which indicates that Bubennov’s approach suffers from one-sidedness in the selection “accused”, while no one demands the disclosure of many other pseudonyms (persons of non-Jewish origin). But literally a day later, Simonov is attacked in Komsomolskaya Pravda by the classic of Soviet literature Mikhail Sholokhov in the article “With the visor down.”
This is a very significant episode in light of the anti-Semitic campaign that will be launched in 10 months in connection with the “Doctors’ Case.” Stalin makes no secret of his “philo-Semitic” tirade at the meeting of the Stalin Prize Committee. We have evidence of this from Ilya Ehrenburg, who was not at this meeting, but he spoke about it in his memoirs, which were published almost 30 years before the publication of Simonov’s notes. However, Bubennov, Sholokhov, the editors of Komsomolskaya Pravda, and their censors live in the same political world as Simonov - therefore, they received instructions and carried them out. Everyone understood that anti-Semitism was relevant, but at the same time Stalin provided himself with an alibi from accusations of anti-Semitism. Simonov claims that he himself believed Stalin,
until, after Stalin’s death, I became acquainted with some documents that left no doubt that in the very last years of his life Stalin did not take a point of view on the Jewish question that was directly opposite to the one that he publicly expressed to us... Stalin simply played that evening in front of us, the intellectuals, about whose conversations, doubts and bewilderments he was obviously quite aware through his own channels, a performance on the theme: stop the thief, making us understand that what we don’t like comes from anyone, just not from himself... we are used to believing him from the first word.
In the same February 1952, Stalin received a dated “Note” from Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs A.A. Gromyko, which states that “the Israeli government is raising the question of allowing Jews to leave the USSR for Israel before the Soviet government.” Gromyko, on behalf of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, proposes “... to indicate that the statement of the Israeli government ... the formulation of the question is essentially interference in the internal affairs of the USSR, and also to explain the existing procedure in the USSR, common to all Soviet citizens, for leaving the USSR, established by current legislation.”
This astonishing document raises questions and causes confusion. The questions essentially concern Stalin's reaction, which is unknown to us. We do not know whether the surge of “literary” anti-Semitism described by Simonov, which followed Stalin’s “philo-Semitic” statement at the meeting of the Stalin Prize Committee, was caused by direct Israeli demands to allow the emigration of Jews. Did they influence Stalin’s entire policy on the “Jewish question”? And why, in fact, in order to present such an obvious answer to every Soviet person, such a complex procedure of passing and approval at the highest level of the Soviet hierarchy is needed? Note that what is naively proposed by A.A. Gromyko’s explanation of “the existing procedure for leaving the USSR, common to all Soviet citizens in the USSR, established by current legislation” will not appear until May 1991, when on the eve of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Supreme Soviet of the USSR adopted the “Law on Entry and Exit.” Stalin was not naive in the slightest. There is no trace of an official Soviet response on the issue of emigration. However, a real, non-verbal answer came, and in the most painful form.
The background of the straightforward Israeli demand to allow Jewish emigration from the USSR was the continuous Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe, completely subject and controlled by the Soviet Union. Since this could not happen without the express consent of the Kremlin, Israeli leaders hoped that one day Stalin would extend this practice to the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, the then Israeli Minister of Internal Affairs Moshe Chaim Shapira turned out to be right when he warned that such an initiative on the Israeli side could result not in allowing Jewish emigration from the USSR, but in banning it from Eastern Europe.
On May 12, 1952, the USSR envoy to Israel, Ershov, sent his superiors the “Political Report of the USSR Mission in Israel for 1951,” in which he demanded, among other things, “an end to the immigration of Jews from people’s democracies to Israel.” This amazing demand within the framework of any hierarchy sounds incredible within the framework of the Stalinist bureaucracy, because issues of this kind relate to the highest politics determined by the rulers of the state. Since Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe continues, it means that it was allowed by Stalin. Ershov had already received a reprimand from Gromyko six months earlier for initiatives of this kind. And if he again dares to question the policy blessed by Stalin, and even demand its radical revision, it means that he somehow knows that Stalin himself wants the same. But for some reason, Stalin wants an “initiative from below,” like Ryumin’s “initiative” against Abakumov, from which the “Doctors’ Plot” grew. We know nothing about the circumstances of the “Ershov initiative,” but we can state the result: in 1951, Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe was stopped. Thus, in Stalin’s “Jewish studies” in 1952, in addition to the historiosophical and repressive aspect, a diplomatic aspect also appeared. Let us note that this work deals exclusively with events and episodes with the direct and documented participation of Stalin.
So, Stalin’s interest in ancient history merges with his political program, which he will begin to implement with all his might in 1952. At the end of 1951, he authorizes the publication in Pravda of a scientific historiosophical manifesto signed by P. Ivanov “On an erroneous concept” . It does not contain the word “Jews,” but only “Khazars,” but its meaning is absolutely clear to everyone. Instead of “modernity facing the past,” according to M.N. Pokrovsky, history becomes an ancient instruction for the fight against Jews, also relevant for P.’s contemporaries. Ivanov."
The coming year 1952 became difficult and in many ways disappointing for Stalin, despite the victories achieved. It was not possible to fabricate the trial against the Zionists - Kremlin doctors and Zionist generals of the MGB: the executioners loyal to Stalin firmly understood that the only chance to survive was to renounce self-incrimination under severe torture, and Abakumov and some others survived the torture. At closed trials on “Jewish cases,” the usually servile judges began to demand that Stalin and the Politburo terminate the trial due to the “inadequacy” of the evidence collected by the MGB. This happened at the trial in the JAC case and at some others; and although the “inappropriate” claims of the judges were rejected, uncertainty arose, which Stalin would desperately fight, accusing the MGB of purity. Officially, the investigation into the “doctors’ case” was launched only in October 1952, and only on February 22, 1953, “Order No. 17” was issued by the USSR Ministry of State Security, according to which all employees of “Jewish nationality” must be fired within 24 hours “due to staff reduction "
The Kremlin doctors, like the Jewish generals of the MGB, survived. The anti-Semitic campaign in Pravda was stopped on Purim, on the night of March 1-2, 1953. The corrected version of the indictment against Abakumov and his employees, sent to him on February 26, Stalin no longer had time to review. And although the historical “TASS Report” dated January 13, 1953 about the “arrest of a group of pest doctors” ended with the words “the investigation will be completed in the coming days,” as authoritatively stated by Nikolai Mesyatsev, appointed on January 19, 1953 as assistant to the head of the Investigative Unit for Particularly Important Cases MGB of the USSR, “I have not seen any indictment on the investigative “case of doctors” in its numerous volumes and have not heard of its existence.”
Thus, Stalin’s monistic fixation on the Jews ended in frustration and death for him, but its consequences are more than palpable even now, and their disappearance is not expected.
III. Post-Stalin Khazarian studies: anti-communist secret writing and distorting mirrors of history
As for Khazar research, the damage done by “P. Ivanov” the blow led to their death, which, fortunately, turned out to be clinical. M.I. Artamonov called “P. Ivanov” as his “reviewer” and even entered into an argument with him, speaking at meetings of the Academic Council of the Moscow branch of the IHMC on January 3, 1952 and at a joint meeting of the Academic Council of the Faculty of History and the Department of Archeology of Leningrad State University and the group of Slavic-Russian Archeology of the Leningrad branch of the IHMC. He recognized the exaggerated assessment of the historical role of the Khazar Kaganate, which he gave in 1937 in the Preface to “Essays on the Ancient History of the Khazars,” but categorically refused to agree with the idea of the Khazars as “wild hordes of nomads.” During 1952-53. attacks on Artamonov continued, and he had to repent of the sin of Marrism and the use of the words “expansion” and “aggression” in relation to Kievan Rus. But the main consequence of the article in Pravda was the impossibility of publishing M.I. Artamonov’s opus magnum - “History of the Khazars,” which brought together all the accumulated materials on Khazar archeology and ethnography.
Meanwhile, in 1954, a major monograph by D.M. was published in the USA. Dunlop, The History of the Jewish Khazars. Owing much to the unfinished pre-war project of the German biblical scholar and Hebraist Kahle (Paul Kahle) and the Belgian Bollandist Gregoire (Henri Grégoire), this epoch-making work of a non-Jewish Arabist, capable, unlike Artamonov, of working with primary sources, including in the Hebrew language, caused understandable irritation a tongueless Soviet archaeologist, disoriented by the fall of Marrism and Khrushchev's condemnation of the Father of Nations. Artamonov had to rework his book in a new spirit, drawing on Dunlop’s materials, and get acquainted with Turkology. Artamonov could not do either one or the other on his own and was only glad to receive help in editing his manuscript from L.N., who had just returned from exile. Gumilev, surrounded by the halo of a martyr of Russian fate. A few years later, the book was published by the Hermitage Publishing House, whose director in 1962 was Artamonov himself. At its beginning, the author declares with justified pride: “I hope that this book will show that the study of the history of the Khazars was by no means interrupted in 1951 ... as a result of interference in science by incompetent persons, expressed in the appearance of an article by P. Ivanov in Pravda “About one erroneous concept.”
Obviously, the book of 1962 was sharply different from the one that was being prepared for publication at the very beginning of the 50s based on materials from the Volga-Don expedition. It is possible that Gumilyov's role was closer to that of a co-author rather than an editor and assistant, but this issue requires additional research. Artamonov and Gumilev used Dunlop's results, but it is the translation of the title of Dunlop's book that symbolizes the “main question” so precisely formulated by Pletneva. Dunlop, obviously, said what was implied but not stated in the USSR: it says Khazars - read Jews. Artamonov translates the title of the book as “History of the Jewish Khazars.” He does not want to look like an anti-Semite and in the text emphasizes that the view of the Jewish-Khazar correspondence as a falsification is “unfair and based on a prejudiced attitude towards Jews”; “Judaism” is another matter. Artamonov, like Gumilev, knew neither Hebrew nor Aramaic and had never been professionally involved in Jewish history or the Jewish religion. All the more surprising are the theses that become increasingly stronger towards the end of the book:
... the exclusivity inherent in Judaism did not allow the conversion of the broad masses to the state religion and doomed them to a hopeless vegetation as eternal taxpayers and intimidated servants of their cruel masters.
As if to fix the purpose of the book, a conclusion was written, which in some places sounded like recommendations for the CPSU Central Committee, and in others like a hidden polemic with the “hordes” of “P. Ivanov,” which said:
The adoption of the Jewish religion was a fatal step for them. From that time on, contact between the government and the people was lost, and the development of cattle breeding and agriculture was replaced by an era of intermediary trade and parasitic enrichment of the ruling elite... Talmudic education did not affect the masses, remaining the privilege of the few. From that moment on, the role of the Khazar Khaganate became sharply negative... all the wealth accumulated by the Jewish merchants in Itil could not buy the hearts of the Slavs who inhabited these steppes, the steppes of the Black Sea region... Dunlop, who was going to write the history of the Jewish Khazars, did not understand what an insidious role Judaism played with the Khazar state . The Jews managed to become the head of the state, but it melted in their hands, because the connection between the government and the people was severed. ... The most powerful enemy of the Jewish Khazaria was Kievan Rus, on the path of economic and political development of which it found itself ... the Khazar people began to disappear long before the collapse of the Khazar kingdom ... the minority that settled in Itil lost its nationality and turned into a parasitic class with a Jewish tint.
The most striking thing about these passages is their absolute declarativeness. There is no written evidence - not a scrap of letters or manuscripts, nor chronicles that would allow us to somehow substantiate such unambiguous and such far-reaching organizational conclusions. It’s probably no coincidence that “Dunlop didn’t understand.”
In the text of Artamonov’s monograph there is practically no evidence about the collapse of Khazaria and its causes. We have before us purely ideological theses that do not need factual support. They are intended to replace the incorrect, according to Artamonov, thesis “P. Ivanov" about the "wild nomadic hordes" of the Khazars on "Judaism" and "a parasitic class with Jewish overtones" as the main source of evil in Khazar history. Obviously, the middle-aged reader of the book in the year of its publication could not help but think about the role of Jews in the history of Soviet Russia: the mass resettlement deep into ethnic Russian territory, starting with the flight from the Pale of Settlement, which fell under German attacks in 1915 - flight, which to many was reminiscent of the era of resettlement peoples, with subsequent waves of migration during the years of Soviet power; meteoric rise and fall of the Jewish commissars-Judas-Trotsky-Kamenevo-Zinovievs... Associations of Russian-Jewish history of the first half of the twentieth century with the history of Jewish Khazaria as presented by Artamonov could not help but arise. It is absolutely, in our opinion, obvious that the quoted passages have nothing to do with the Khazars and should be read as an invective against the destructive role of Jewish international communism in the fate of Russia in the twentieth century. Primordial Rus', together with the “hordes” defended by Artamonov during the polemics about the nomadic way of life and feudalism, did not digest and ejected the Khazar Judeo-Bolsheviks. Thus Artamonov relieved the tension between the object of his life’s research and his people. It’s not about the Khazars, it’s not about the “Khazar yoke,” it’s about Others. And if at the beginning of the monograph they spoke bitterly about “interference in science by incompetent persons,” then on the last page of the “Conclusion” an unexpected reconciliation occurs:
The idealistic concept of the history of the Khazars, created by the young V.V., existed for more than a hundred years. Grigoriev. A crushing blow was dealt to it only in our time by a small critical note published in Pravda by the unknown P. Ivanov.
Artamonov’s anti-Semitic theses are surprising only at first glance by the date of their appearance: 1962 marks the peak of Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization after the XXII Congress of the CPSU, held in October-November 1961. Anti-Semitism was not popular either with the authorities or with the opposing intelligentsia. Perhaps Artamonov was simply reacting to Dunlop's monograph. But Artamonov’s tone is overly emotional, in no way befitting such a venerable scientist, which contrasts strikingly with the academic tone of Dunlop’s monograph. We risk putting forward the following hypothesis: this is an anti-communist secret writing. De-Stalinization could lead to the elimination of Marxism in general. By “Judaism” Artamonov-Gumilev should be understood as Marxism, which, as is known, is of “Jewish” origin and is as destructive for Russia as “Judaism” is for Khazaria. Just as “Judaism” did not suit the Khazars, so international communism does not suit the Russians. Stalin still considered himself a Marxist and referred to the Jews for the purposes of the "Khazar debate" as "rootless cosmopolitans" and a "nomadic horde." For Artamonov, apparently, Marxism was no longer a sacred cow, and he, we believe, branded it under the guise of the struggle against “Judaism.”
The enemy who destroyed Artamonov’s beloved Khazaria, this “prototype of the Russian Empire,” has been found. These are not hordes hostile to the peace-loving Slavs, not a nomadic way of life, this is parasitic and rootless Judaism. These trends grow in the following works of Gumilyov, supported by Artamonov, reaching a peak in his book “Ancient Rus' and the Great Steppe” (1989), where a true synthesis of P. Ivanov’s “wild nomadic horde” and Artamonov’s “Judaism” into a “wandering superethnos” was carried out. This is how intellectual anti-Semitism met National Bolshevism, and how Stalinist intellectual anti-Semitism turned out to be compatible with anti-communist anti-Semitism. Surprisingly, Gumilev’s mythologization of the phantom of the wandering Khazars captivated the minds of many Soviet people and came close to becoming a contender for the status of a “Russian national idea.”
Emphasizing - to a certain extent, rightly - the steppe and nomadic contribution to the creation of Russian statehood, Gumilyov dilutes the Huns, Kipchaks and Mongols with very specific Khazars. The entire Gumilevian narrative, with the Huns, Pechenegs, and fraternal Turkic peoples, to whom the “Great Steppe” is dedicated, pursues a single goal: not only to downplay, but also to demonize the Khazar influence. The charm of the Generalissimo continued to affect those Soviet people who considered themselves anti-communists, and in this sense, the Norilsk prisoner Gumilyov is certainly a follower of Stalin’s all-explanatory monism. In general, the entire Soviet (after the “note” in Pravda) and post-Soviet discourse about the Khazars is charged and infected with the Stalinist agenda about the enemies of the people: who is to blame and what to do with these evilly oppressive hostile whirlwinds.
We do not set out to present here the history of Khazar studies or to explore the question of the role of the Khazar Khaganate in the history of the peoples of the Russian Empire / USSR, but we want to emphasize that in fact this is an absolutely academic question; Such questions, as a rule, are not of interest to the “ordinary person.” The widespread popularity of this issue is itself evidence of its transformation into a politicized metaphor. Stalin, undoubtedly under the influence of the chronicle legend about the “choice of faiths,” gave this topic the character of a fundamental question about Russia’s choice of its historical destiny, and, unfortunately, it remains in this capacity in the Russian-speaking space to this day. Khazaria became part of the political discourse; Dozens of websites discuss Khazars, Jews, Zionists and Slavs, mixed into a viscous mess. This is how Stalin defeated Russian history. There is only one way to overcome this protracted false discourse - to leave Khazaria to the Khazars, and ancient Russian history to the historians of Ancient Rus'.
Nevertheless, we are forced to summarize here the views of unbiased researchers on the historical role and causes of the fall of Khazaria, but first we recall that all empires and all nomadic states are doomed to fall someday. Despite the fact that Khazaria lasted longer (~650-955/8) than any other nomadic state, including the Golden Horde (~1240-1505), it is the only state whose fall is seen exclusively by Soviet and post-Soviet authors in his religion, and this view certainly correlates with the widespread belief that communism was the cause of the fall of the Soviet empire. In other words, Khazaria serves as a kind of distorting mirror for many authors writing in Russian, in which they try to see the historical past and future of their country. Note also that both nomadic empires of Western Eurasia, Khazaria and Danube Bulgaria, were founded almost simultaneously by closely related Turkic tribes, adopted (different) monotheistic religions almost simultaneously (around 860), and were destroyed almost simultaneously with the active participation of the same man - Prince Svyatoslav Igorevich. Was Slavic Orthodoxy the reason for the fall of Bulgaria, a multi-tribal state with a Turkic dynasty, like Khazaria? This question is worth asking yourself for those who continue to blindly believe that the reason for the defeat of Khazaria is “wrong faith.”
Dunlop entertained the possibility that the lack of a single religion, Jewish leadership, and the weakening influence of Judaism might have been the reasons for the decline of Khazaria - and rejected this possibility. Omelyan Pritsak explored various aspects of Khazar history, in particular those related to conversion to Judaism, without ever asking the above questions, rejected by Dunlop as irrelevant. Peter Golden, for example, sees the reasons for the decline of Khazaria in the overstrain caused by the need to wage expensive wars with nomads, in the collapse of the Byzantine-Khazar alliance in the 10th century, in the advance of Rus' to the south and into the Volga basin, with the attacks of Rus' on Khazaria and on the Muslim countries of the Caspian region , which caused a reorientation of international trade from Khazaria to Volga Bulgaria.
Of course, Artamonov was an outstanding scientist; but he also stands out in that he became the only significant researcher of Khazaria who accepted the Stalinist paradigm of explaining everything through one, anti-Jewish, principle, picked up with such commercial success by Lev Gumilyov. So Kievan Rus, the heir of Khazaria, turned into a besieged stronghold pursued by the omnipresent Khazar phantoms.