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The History of Celtic Scholarship in RUSSIA AND the SOVIET UNION( Séamus Mac Mathúna 0. Introduction Mr Chairman, Colleagues, Ladies and Gentlemen, let me begin by thanking our distinguished patron, Professor Karl Horst Schmidt, for agreeing to open this inaugural conference of Societas Celto-Slavica. We are greatly honoured by his presence here today and we thank him most sincerely for his excellent introduction and kind words regarding the formation of the Society. I thought initially it would be possible in my lecture this morning to give a brief outline of the main works and achievements of Celtic scholarship in the Slavic countries, secure in the knowledge that it would not be necessary to discuss Celtic Studies in Poland as this subject would be dealt with by Professor Piotr Stalmaszczyk in a subsequent paper. However, having gathered together a significant amount of material on Celtic Studies in various countries – Russia, Czechia, Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, and others – I realised that I could not do the subject justice in the time available without considerably narrowing the scope of my investigations: I decided therefore to confine myself primarily to Celtic Studies in Russia and the former Soviet Union. The history of Celtic scholarship in other Slavic countries will, I hope, be addressed on another occasion. 1. The Slavs and the Celts Of all the ethnic European peoples, the Slavs are the most numerous. They reside principally in Eastern Europe, but are also found in Asia. The Slavic languages are normally divided into three main groups, as follows: East Slavic (of which the major sub-groups are Russian, Ukrainian, and Byelorussian); West Slavic (including Lekhitic, that is, Polish and related divisions, Czech-Slovak, and Sorbian); and South Slavic (with two main divisions, namely, Bulgarian-Macedonian, and Serbo-Croatian-Slovene). While the eastern origin of Slavic is not in doubt, the assumption of an original Balto-Slavic unity still rema