Aleksandr Mongait

Who is Aleksandr Mongait?

Aleksandr L'vovich Mongait, Russian: Александр Львович Монгайт was a Soviet Russian archaeologist. His most important achievement was his fundamental work on prehistoric archaeology of Europe in 2 volumes which in fact made available achievements of the Western "bourgeois" archaeology to Soviet students. In the beginning of 1960-s Boris Rybakov, the informal leader of the Soviet archaeological science, organized a campaign against Mongait, which was blamed in non-patriotic views; however, this campaign quickly failed due to reluctance of many archaeologists to participate.

In his book Archaeology in the USSR published in 1959 Mongait made reference to Victor Petrov, which at that time had a reputation of a Ukrainian nationalist stolen by Soviet secret services. Ironically, this reference helped emigrants understand that Petrov in fact was alive and cooperated with KGB, simply because any reference to "enemies of the people" would be impossible in Soviet publications.