Tatar ASSR’s History of Writing and Defending Dissertations in Archeology during the 1920s-1950s
This article overviews the Tatar ASSR’s history of the culture of writing and defending dissertations on various archeological issues during the first three decades of Soviet power. Until 1918, universities followed the pre-revolutionary practice of awarding academic degrees, as it was with V.F. Smolin who defended his dissertation in 1918. M.G. Khudyakov, another talented student who studied archeology and V.F. Smolin’s colleague, dropped his research projects because he had been registered for the draft during the World War I to join the front-line army units; in 1918, he yet successfully passed the exams, but without defending a dissertation; although he had never submitted his work at any oral defense, he was awarded the degree of Doctor of History in 1936. Among the researchers who had received higher education before the revolution but defended their dissertations in archeology in the Soviet times, N.F. Kalinin stands out: he worked at the Institute of Literature of the Kazan Branch of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR and focused his research on the Stone and Bronze Ages of Tataria, but defended his dissertation in 1947, i.e., after the Great Patriotic War. At around that time, O.S. Khovanskaya and A.M. Efimova, both worked at the State Museum of Tatarstan, were writing their dissertations on the Middle Ages under the guidance of A.P. Smirnov; for many valid reasons, they did not present their works in front of the dissertation committee. In the 1950s, A.Kh. Khalikov and V.F. Gening, N.F. Kalinin’s post-graduate students, brilliantly defended their dissertations - on the Bronze and Early Iron Ages, respectively. V.F. Gening then moved from Kazan to Sverdlovsk, and the subsequent generation of archeologists in the Tatar ASSR was brought up and shaped by A.Kh. Khalikov. The results obtained show that a bulk of the dissertations in archeology were defended by the Tatar ASSR researchers in the late 1940s, most of them were based on the archeological expeditions in the republic and the excavations at the Bolgar settlement organized by A.P. Smirnov and N.F. Kalinin.