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.

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.

[7] The Marxist linguist Valerian Borisovich Aptekar[a] 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.

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.

[13] A crisis in Tokarev's career came on 20 August 1936 during the Trotsky-Zinoviev show trials, when meetings to denounce Trotsky and Zinoviev were arranged across the country.

Tokarev publicly said that if the Trotskyite-Zinovievite faction had come to power they would have continued the communist party's political and economic policies, and argued in defense of his position.

[15] Tokarev retained his position at the State Academy of the History of Material Culture, where he had worked since 1932 as a research fellow in the Department of Feudalism.

"[1] In World War II, he was evacuated from Moscow in June 1941, and headed the history department of Abakan Teachers' Institute.

[15] In 1943 he returned to Moscow and was awarded the title of professor, working as a section head of the Institute of Ethnography of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR.

His visit may have been arranged by Wolfgang Steinitz, a Jewish specialist in Finno-Ugrian languages who had emigrated from Germany to the Soviet Union in 1933.

[17] Tokarev lectured in the German Democratic Republic, stressing how important it was to study social and cultural changes that were occurring in both urban and rural areas.

Tokarev was a follower of Aleksandr Nikolaevich Maksimov, who had undertaken early studies of Siberian and Australian hunter-gatherers.

[20] Tokarev conformed to Soviet Marxist ideology and Russian nationalist views in his study of the history of anthropology.

[21] Joseph Stalin, who took power in the Soviet Union in 1924, imposed rigid constraints on the study of ethnography that were lifted only after his death in 1953.

He explored the question of whether the concept of private land ownership existed in Sakha society before the intervention of Russia.

[27] He said: The rapacious nature of the Tsarist conquerors in Siberia and in Yakutia has been acknowledged even by the bourgeois-exploitative camp of historians…Indications of...pogroms, murder and theft perpetrated against the iasak population on the part of service people begin with a 1638 order to the first Yakut general P. Golovin, and repeat in every subsequent order given to the generals.

[28]But after describing abuses of the colonizers, Tokarev noted that the Sakha prospered and grew in numbers in the longer term, and that other colonial regimes had been much more brutal.

In Yakutia from the 1630s to 1917 (1957), published under his direction, the violence, murder, and enslavements are treated as isolated incidents in a generally peaceful movement of Russians into the territory.

[32] Taking a Marxist view of the religious experience, in the 1980s Tokarev wrote that shamans "were almost always mentally ill, with a propensity for fits of madness."

[35] His 1963 work takes a scientific atheist view of the subject, but betrays his reliance on missionaries as he relates Muslim terms to their Christian equivalents.

He challenged the prevalent negative view at the time, which perceived Islam as a potential tool for the bourgeoisie and reactionaries, and not one that could be used to solve the problems of the masses.

The introduction noted the book was the first generalized work on the history and ethnography of the peoples of America based on Marxian and Leninist methodology.

[43] He stressed the human aspects, saying, "A material object cannot interest the ethnographer unless he considers its social existence, its relationship to man.