Upon graduating high school, Klejn entered the Grodno Pedagogical Institute in the Faculty of Language and History. In 1947, after a year there, he spoke against the First Secretary of Grodno's Party Committee at a conference and was forced to leave. He transferred to
Leningrad State University, first as a corresponding student, and then full-time. At Leningrad he studied both archaeology under
Mikhail Artamonov and Russian philology under
Vladimir Propp. While there he continued to act contrary to Party dogma by reading a paper criticising the work of
Nicholas Marr. Klejn escaped expulsion for this, however, as shortly thereafter Marr's theories were denounced by Stalin himself. Graduating with honours from the Faculty of History in 1951, Klejn worked as a librarian and high school teacher for six years before returning to Leningrad for postgraduate studies in archaeology. He began working in the Department of Archaeology in 1960 and became an assistant professor there in 1962. This was unusual as Klejn was a Jew and not a member of the Party, but he was appointed to the position by a special session of the faculty's Party Bureau on the strength of his academic qualifications. He was awarded a
Candidate of Sciences degree (equivalent to a PhD) in 1968, defending a thesis on the origins of the
Donets Catacomb culture. In 1976 he was made Docent (Associate Professor). Klejn's first printed work was published in 1955; his first monograph in 1978. He participated in a series of archaeological fieldwork expeditions in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, the last 5 seasons as head of the expedition. These included excavations of
early Rus' towns and
Bronze Age and
Scytho-Sarmatian barrows.
Persecution Klejn continued to chafe against the Party-backed academic establishment as a teacher. In the 1960s, he organised a series of seminars on the Varangian theory of the origins of the
Kievan Rus' where he contradicted the anti-Normanist position. Then in the seventies he began working on theoretical problems in history and archaeology—a subject that had been completely neglected since Stalin's purges of academia in the 1930s—and found himself contradicting the orthodox Marxist theory of
historical materialism. His frequent publication in foreign journals also caused alarm. In the early 1970s Klejn's brother Boris, then teaching in a Grodno institute, was dismissed and stripped of his degree and title for speaking against the
introduction of Soviet troops into Czechoslovakia. Then in 1981 Klejn himself was arrested for homosexuality on the orders of the
KGB. During a search pornography was planted on him, but too crudely, and the court could not accept the evidence. Nevertheless, Klejn was convicted and imprisoned. The scholarly community, however, interpreted this as an attempt to get rid of a troublemaker rather than a genuine accusation and came to his defence. Klejn neither affirmed nor denied the charge, even after homosexuality was decriminalised, on the basis that an individual's sexual orientation is not the concern of society or the state. But in his account he relates a parallel "investigation" conducted by his fellow inmates (to determine his treatment) which concluded he was not a homosexual. Eventually the initial sentence was overturned by a higher court and commuted to eighteen months detention, which by this time Klejn had almost served. After his release Klejn, like his brother, was stripped of his degree and title. He recorded his prison experiences under the pen name Lev Samoylov in the journal
Neva and in his own name in the book
The World Turned Upside Down.
Later career Klejn remained without an academic position for ten years following his release. Following
perestroika he began publishing again and, in 1994, defended a new thesis and was awarded a
Doctor of Sciences degree by unanimous vote. He co-founded the
European University at St. Petersburg and taught there until his retirement in 1997 at the age of 70. Afterward, he was a visiting scholar at a number of institutions, including the Universities of West Berlin, Vienna, Durham, Copenhagen, Lubljana, Turku, Tromse, Washington in Seattle and the Higher Anthropological School of Moldova. In 2001 he stopped teaching following treatment for cancer; but continued to research and publish. In his later years, wrote a column in the
Troitsky Variant. Klejn died on 7 November 2019 in
Saint Petersburg at the age of 92. ==Work==