Sergei Aleksandrovich Tokarev (; 29 December 1899 – 19 April 1985) was a Russian scholar, ethnographer, historian, researcher of religious beliefs, doctor of historical sciences, and professor at Moscow State University.
Birth and education
Sergei Aleksandrovich Tokarev was born in Tula on 29 December 1899. He graduated with honors from Tula grammar school and entered Moscow University. Immediately after the revolution, conditions in Moscow in 1918 were dangerous and difficult, and Tokarev went back to the apparent safety of his home province of Tula. He taught Russian and Latin in local schools for four years. Tokarev returned to Moscow University in 1922, where he began social and historical studies. He received a state scholarship, and supplemented his income by giving private lessons. In 1924 he obtained a job as a bibliographer at the Central Library.
After graduating on 25 June 1925, Tokarev applied to continue research in the university's graduate Institute of History. He submitted a thesis on "totemic society", a fully-fledged work of research. His application was supported by a short but very flattering recommendation from Viacheslav Petrovich Volgin. Accepted in November 1925, Tokarev was enrolled in the Institute in January 1926, joining what later became the ethnology section.
In the spring of 1926 Tokarev presented a report on Australian totemism. In the 1926/1927 academic year he prepared a report on Melanesian religions and gave a talk on Australian kinship systems. In June 1927 Tokarev presented a report on the economic structure of English Manors in the 13th to 15th centuries. In 1927/1928 Tokarev returned to the Melanesian theme with a report on the social system of these people. His post-graduate training was completed in 1929, although officially he did not graduate until 1 January 1930.
Early career
Tokarev began working at the Central Museum of Ethnology in October 1927. In 1928, he joined the department of colonies at the museum, and in 1931 he was appointed head of the department of North Asia. As a graduate student, in 1928/1929 he also taught part-time at Moscow University, and taught a course on the history of social structures at the Sun Yat-sen University of Communist Workers of China.
Ethnography was considered important in the early years of the Soviet Union, which had a great many different ethnic groups, and the first university courses for professional ethnography were launched in the 1920s. However, by the latter part of the decade, Marxist radicals attacked the discipline for being "bourgeois", and some of the main ethnographic institutions were closed in April 1929. Ethnography became redefined as the study of prehistoric peoples. The University's Institute of History became part of the Communist Academy. Most positions went only to Marxists and communists, although in some circumstances non-Marxist scholars could be admitted.
The Marxist linguist Valerian Borisovich Aptekar was an opponent of traditional ethnography, strongly expressing his opinion in a debate on 7 May 1928. He argued that the subject was not scientific, that its concepts were vague, and that by treating the development of mankind in terms of the evolution of cultural forms the ethnographers denied the more fundamental forces of production and class struggle. The subject could only be approached in terms of dialectical materialism. Tokarev disagreed publicly. Although he accepted the need for a more scientific approach and for the subject to be treated from a Marxist–Leninist viewpoint, he defended the study of ethnology as dealing with realities that could not be ignored. Further debates were held at meetings of the AMI in April 1929 and in June 1930. Tokarev was still working at the museum, and the authorities frowned on people holding two positions. He was dismissed from the institute on 1 May 1931 but continued as a free-lance researcher and retained the more secure job at the Museum.
Despite the political climate, Tokarev undertook valuable work in the late 1920s and the 1930s. He spent less time on Australia and Melanesia and more time on the people of Siberia and Yakutia, perhaps due to political pressure, although he was always interested in both subjects. He made his first field trip in September 1928 in Turkmenistan, and in 1930 visited the Altai Mountains. The museum supported another expedition to the Altais in 1932, and he returned in 1940, just before the war. In 1934 he made an expedition to Yakutia, which had great influence on the development of his ideas.