Bashkortostan in the Life of Tatyana Troitskaya: New Additions to Her Biography and Scientific Activity

Abstract

Purpose. The publication is dedicated to the famous teacher and scientist-archeologist Tatyana Nikolaevna Troitskaya (1925-2018). The purpose of this work is to supplement her biography with information relating to lesser-known periods of her life and work in the Bashkortostan Republic following on from unpublished archival documents and memoirs of T. N. Troitskaya. Results. Analysis of the available sources and literature made it possible to study the time and circumstances of Tatyana Nikolaevna’s stay in the Republic of Bashkortostan. In 1941, it was the first time she was in Birsk, where she was evacuated to with her family after the beginning of the Great Patriotic War. There T. N. Troitskaya finished school and was accepted into the Birsk Pedagogical Institute, where she studied for a year and a half before re-evacuation in 1943. The second time she came to Ufa was in 1955 when she was sent to the Institute of History, Language and Literature, where she worked until 1956. T. N. Troitskaya’s research activities coincided with the beginning of systematic archaeological research in the region, making her involved in the formation of academic archaeological science in the Bashkortostan Republic. In 1955, Tatyana Nikolaevna took part in the excavations carried out by the Bashkir archaeological expedition on the territory of the Gafuri region of the Bashkortostan Republic. In the course of fieldwork, several monuments of the Kara-Abyz culture were studied there, one of which, the Mikhailovskoye settlement, was studied under the guidance of T. N. Troitskaya. The materials and results of excavations of this monument are still used by scientists studying cultural genesis and ethnic processes in the Southern Urals and in the Urals in the early Iron Age Conclusion. Despite the fact that T. N. Troitskaya lived in Bashkortostan for a short period of her life, this time as a whole was of great importance for her life experience. Tatyana Nikolaevna herself later recalled that it was in Birsk that she realized herself as a future teacher, and in Ufa she came to understand the priority for her teaching activity over research.