of "right old and rare" objects to Saint Petersburg in exchange for compensation, and the material thus
obtained became the basis of the Saint Petersburg State Hermitage Museum's collection of Scythian
gold. This resulted in significant grave robbery of Scythian burials, due to which most of the Scythian
tombs of the Russian Empire had been sacked by 1764.[180]
In the 18th to 20th centuries, the racialist British Israelist movement developed
a pseudohistory according to which, after population of the historical kingdom of Israel had been
deported by the Neo-Assyrian Empire in 721 BC and became the Ten Lost Tribes, they fled to the north
to the region near Sinope, from where they migrated into East and Central Europe and became the
Scythians and Cimmerians, who themselves moved to north-west Europe and became the supposed
ancestors of the white Protestant peoples of North Europe; being an antisemitic movement, British
Israelists claim to be the most authentic heirs of the ancient Israelites while rejecting Jews as being
"contaminated" through intermarriage with Edomites or adhere to the antisemitic conspiracy theory
claiming that Jews descend from the Khazars.[190][191] According to the scholar Tudor Parfitt, the proof
cited by adherents of British Israelism is "of a feeble composition even by the low standards of the
genre."[192]
In the 19th century, Scythian kurgans in Ukraine, Kuban, and Crimea had been looted, so that by the
20th century, more than 85% of Scythian kurgans excavated by archaeologists had already been
pillaged.[180] The grave robbers of the 18th and 19th centuries were experienced enough that they
almost always found the burial chambers of the tombs and stole the treasures contained within
them.[189]
Battle between the Scythians and the Slavs (1881) by Viktor Vasnetsov
In the later 19th century, a cultural movement called Skifstvo [ru] (Russian: Скифство, lit. 'Scythianism')
emerged in Russia whose members unreservedly referred to themselves and to Russians as a whole
as Skify (Russian: Скифы, lit. 'Scythians').[193] Closely affiliated to the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries,
the Skify were a movement of Russian nationalist religious mysticists who saw Russia as a sort of
Messiah-like figure who would usher in a new historical era of the world,[194] and their identification with
the ancient Scythians was a positive acceptance of Dostoevsky's view that Europe had always
seen Russians as being Asiatic. The Skify therefore used this image to distinguish Russia from the West,
although they nevertheless did not see Russia as being a part of Asia, and their ideas were instead a
revival of the old conceptualisation of Russia as being the bridge linking Europe and Asia.[195]
The culmination of Skifstvo was the famous poem written in 1918 by Aleksandr Blok,
titled Skify (Russian: Скифы, lit. 'The Scythians'), in which he presented "Scythia," that is Russia, as being
different from the rest of Asia while also being closer to Europe. In Skify , Blok depicted Russia as a
barrier between the "warring races" of Europe and Asia, and he made use of the racist Yellow
Peril ideology by threatening that Russia was capable of stopping its "protection" of Europe and allow
East Asians to overrun it.[196]