Goths and Slavs. On the Path to Statehood. III–IV centuries.

The study is devoted to the development of early statehood of the Goths in Eastern Europe during the III–IV centuries. Special attention is paid to two Gothic pre-state formations (polities): the Goths of the Tervingi and the kingdom of the... Greuthungi. For the first time in both domestic and foreign historiography, a comparison of these two Gothic polities with each other and their overall comparison with Slavic polities of the same period is conducted. The use of almost the complete complex of written sources on Gothic history, a critical approach to recent research, as well as methods of foreign and domestic political anthropology have allowed the author to contribute to the resolution of problems of the Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages, which provided a basis to shift the time of the emergence of the first Proto-Slavic power structures in Eastern Europe approximately to the II century and to propose his own concept of early statehood. The work is intended for specialists engaged in the issues of Late Antiquity, the era of the Great Migration of Peoples, and the Early Middle Ages, as well as for a wide range of readers.