N.Ya. Marr and the Suvar concept of the origin of the Chuvash

The idea that the Chuvash descend from the medieval Suvar tribe, supposedly living in Volga Bulgaria, is widely held by scientists and representatives of the near-scientific community. The abundance of works mentioning Suvar obscures the almost complete lack of information about them in written sources, which only mention the city of Suvar in Volga Bulgaria and, occasionally, people from it. However, it is always emphasized that they are Muslims, unlike the Chuvash, who were pagans until their mass baptism in the mid-18th century. The article demonstrates that the true author of the Suvar concept was the academic linguist N.Ya. Marr, whose Japhetic theory dominated early Soviet humanities. With the wave of nation-building in the 1920s in the early USSR, national historical narratives began to be actively developed in the Soviet and autonomous republics. Marr has been actively involved in this process. The Chuvash attracted him because of the particularly archaic nature of their language compared to other Turkic languages. Therefore, Marr immediately recognized the Chuvash language as “Japhetic”. For Marr, the line of Chuvash ethnogenesis looked like this: Sumerians (Subars) – Suvars – Chuvash. Later, in 1950, when, grace to Stalin, the ideas of Marr and his followers were debunked, in order not to abandon the familiar scheme, the most odious element, the Sumerians (Subars), was discarded from it, and in this form the scheme has survived to the present day. However, after getting rid of the Sumerians, the scheme did not become more scientific, since it was based on pure speculation rather than solid facts. 

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