The Khazar Economy: Economic Integration or Disintegration? 213
custom duties and taxes, collected from trade caravans [.. .] and from weaker
neighboring peoples”.190 In the same work, but referring to the tenth century,
S. Pletneva adheres to the official view: “Khazaria’s economy now relied entirely
on its extensive international trade ties, which it had established with neigh-
boring and distant peoples and nations in earlier times. Transit trade played a
major role, often together with speculative resale. Khazaria began to transform
into a typical parasitic state. Its rulers supported themselves through the char-
ity of the commercial capital, which they had organized until then, since it
needed an authority that could successfully protect its interests, to a greater or
lesser extent, along with the protection of the trade cities where the entire eco-
nomic life of the khaganate was concentrated [.. .] The large state entity that
had a stable economic basis and a strong centralized power structure that had
managed to unite the multiethnic people groups around it began to crumble.
The only thing that remained was a small parasitic khanate that hindered the
economic development of the neighboring lands and obstructed their trade
with the East. A single significant strike proved to be enough to obliterate it
from the face of the Earth. The last blow to Khazaria came from Rus’ ”.191
Such views were mandatory for the official Soviet historiography after
the 1940s. Their imposition on science was a consequence of the campaign
against cosmopolitism and anti-Semitism and began with an article in the
Pravda Newspaper from December 1951, followed by several publications by
B. Rybakov.192 The objects of the criticisms were M. Artamonov and his team,
who at that time were preparing the publication of their archaeological find-
ings on the Saltovo monuments in the Don Region. Studies of Khazaria were
also affected by the dethronement of Marrism after the notorious “linguistic”
treatise of J. Stalin,193 which was published the same year, 1951. Regardless of
whether the theories of N. Marr have a scientific basis or not, he was widely
cited in the scientific works of the 1930s and 1940s. Criticism against refer-
ences to his theories became a way for denouncing “inconvenient” theories
and teachings. In the specially published volume, Against the Vulgarization of
Marxism in Archaeology, among the criticized scholars are M. Artamonov and
V. Mavrodin, because of their works on the Khazar Khaganate.194 S. Pletneva
called 1951 “a terrible year”. In her opinion, studies on Khazaria during that
190 Pletneva 1976, 57.
191 Pletneva 1976, 68–69.
192 Ivanov, V. “Ob odnoi oshibochnoi kontseptsii”, Pravda, 25 dekabria 1951. Rybakov 1952 and
1953.
193 Stalin, J. Marxism and problems of linguistics. Moscow, 1951.
194 Merpert 1953. V. Abaev is also among the criticized historians (Krupnov 1953).