THE DEVELOPMENT OF CRIMEAN STUDIES IN THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE, THE SOVIET UNION, AND UKRAINE
THE DEVELOPMENT OF CRIMEAN STUDIES IN THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE, THE SOVIET UNION, AND UKRAINE

Summary/Abstract: The article analyses the development of Crimean studies from the end of the 18th century until today. It is only after the Russian annexation of the Crimea that the scholars started seriously studying the Crimean peninsula, its history, ethnography, geography, and other disciplines. At the end of the 18th and early 19th centuries the historico-ethnographic information was collected largely by state officials and travelling scientists of non-Russian origin. In the first half of the 19th century the Crimea was already studied by professional ethnographers and historians; it is in this period that the museums of antiquities were established in Kerch and Theodosia. A major wave of interest in the Crimea in Russia and in Europe took place as a consequence of the Crimean war in the 1850s. In the second half of the 19th century the Crimea continued to be studied by professional scholars; a special organisation TUAK was established to control the state of the Crimean antiquities. The study of the Crimea by Soviet scholars folded in the 1930s with the Stalinist purges of “bourgeois nationalists” in science. The period of the 1930s–1980s was characterised by stagnation in Crimean studies. The renaissance of the study of the Crimea began at the end of the 1980s; it coincides with the breakup of the Soviet Union and the establishment of the Autonomous Republic of the Crimea in 1991.

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