Narrative Strategies of Soviet Historians of Antiquity at the Beginning of the Second Discussion about the Asiatic Mode of Production

Abstract

At the beginning of the article, the author defines the significance of the discussions about the Asian mode of production for the Soviet historiography of antiquity, and also talks about the special characteristics of the second discussion, the main phase of which dates back to the second half of the 1960s. If the first discussion established the rules for understanding the historical process among Soviet historians, then during the second one some historians tried to revise these rules. At the same time, those historians formed themselves as authors of texts already under unified rules for constructing a narrative. The author of the article consistently examines the principles of constructing statements pro et contra the revision of the unified terminology for historians of the ancient world. It turns out that, in fact, both supporters and opponents of the Asian mode of production used the same arguments, and their texts were built from the same components, only the vector of thought and the volume of concrete textual parts differed. Thus, in the early 1960s the unified narrative still dominated even in the face of diverging points of view. At the same time, another difference between the positions consisted in different vectors of understanding the general theory, and from this angle, the conservative trend, which essentially called for abandoning any significant changes in the Soviet approach to understanding history, looked the most unattractive.