История Руси глазами шведского археолога Т. Ю. Арне и его российских последователей

Abstract

The paper tries to show how archaeologists contributed to forming the scientific phantoms “Skandoslavia”, “East European Normandy” and “Normandy” used to substitute the notions “Rus”, “Kievan Rus”, “Old Russian State” and thereby to justify the Norman theory. Scientific originality of the study lies in the fact that for the first time in domestic historical science, the researcher proposes a thesis that the Russian archaeologists’ views on the Russian history of the IX-X centuries were largely based on their Scandinavian colleagues’ conceptions, in particular, T. J. Arne, the founder of the “Normanist” theory. The research findings are as follows: the author proves that non-autonomy of domestic archaeological science, its self-proclaimed monopoly on truth as far as the Varangian question is concerned lead to fundamental misconceptions, which seriously distort our past and affect our historical and national consciousness.