In 1919, he went to Moscow and entered the military engineering course for Red Army leaders, but he was soon recalled to work in the Political Department of the internal security forces.
He played an important role in destroying the old schools of archaeology and ethnology and introducing Marrist and Marxist theories into Soviet academia.
[4] In April 1929, Aptekar was working at the State Academy of the History of Material Culture, when he launched his most effective attack against ethnography.
[3] According to classical philologist Olga Freidenberg, who first met Aptekar in 1928, "Happily and self-confidently he admitted his lack of education.
Guys like Aptekar, ignoramuses, would come from the villages and out of the way places, bone up on party slogans, Marxist schemes and newspaper phraseology and feel like rulers and dictators.
He argued that ethnology was not scientific, that the concepts it dealt with were vague, and that by treating the development of mankind in terms of the evolution of cultural forms, ethnographers denied the more fundamental forces of production and class struggle.
[10] In April 1929, Aptekar returned to the attack in Leningrad, where he was opposed by philosopher P. F. Preobrazhensky, winning the debate that concluded that ethnography should move to a Marxist basis, studying only socio-economic systems with focus on social and cultural development.
Proponents considered that the Latin alphabet was simple, rational, international, and easier to learn than the "Church-Slavonic" Cyrillic script.
It has to die along with the bourgeois sociality that gave rise to it, clearing the way for the Marxist-Leninist theory of language that is being built in our country.