Arkadiy Shofman’s Concept of Conglomerate States and Its Ideological Biases

The article analyzes the concept of ancient conglomerate states developed by the founder of the present-day Classical and historiographic studies at the Kazan’ University Arkadiy Semyonovich Shofman (1913—1993) and presented in his book “The Dissolution of the Empire of Alexander of Macedon” (1984). According to this concept the Near Eastern interregional states of the First Millennium B. C. (from the Neo-Assyrian empire to the empire of Alexander the Great) were considered to be the so-called conglomerate states: created and supported by military force, uniting the regions that drastically differed from one another as to their economical development and culture, void of the real economic integrity. The article gives a critical analysis of the concept and defines its place in A. S. Shofman’s scholarly heritage. It can be shown that its cardinal points went back to the judgements of Joseph Stalin on the interregional states (“empires of Cyrus and Alexander”) in his works “Marxism and the National Question” (1913) and “Marxism and the Problems of Linguistics” (1950). Shofman certainly knew these judgements at the start of his academic career and used them in a short manual of 1954. It seems that his concept founded on this basis and placed in a topical political context was ultimately shaped in the early 1980s when Stalin’s narratives have already been largely forgotten.