Book
История гуманитарных наук

The author discusses an idea of composing a list of «100 books of Higher School of Economics» as a university canon for a reader and analyzes a long-term publishing project of the Russian Christian Humanitarian Institute called «The Russian way».
This book is based on materials from the conference 'The USSR: Life after Death', and the round table 'The Second Crash, from the Collapse of the Soviet Union to the Crisis of Neo-liberalism', held in December 2011 and January 2012, respectively. The two events brought together different generations of experts and researchers. For some, Soviet life was part of their personal experience, while for others it was just part of their country’s history. To what extent and in what form have Soviet socio-cultural practices and everyday life patterns survived in the capitalist post-Soviet society? Is the 'Soviet legacy' an obstacle to the development of a new bourgeois society in Russia or, conversely, does it serve to stabilize the new system? Does a 'Soviet mentality' create resistance or help adapt to the neoliberal reality? The answers to these questions, which seemed quite obvious to the mass consciousness back in the 1990s, need to be reconsidered today.
This article examines the role of archivists in shaping the capacity and the structure of a university’s memory. Drawing on sources such as laws and ministerial instructions, the authors analyze the government’s archive policy with regard to universities and how professors and archivists were taking part in its implementation. Their participation included sorting documents and attributing them to individual ‘cases’, destroying some of the ‘unnecessary’ documents and preserving others that were designated for destruction. Based on information from service records and university reports, the article tracks changes in the corporate status of university archivists in nineteenth-century Russia.
Several approaches to the concept of fatherhood present in Western sociological tradition are analyzed and compared: biological determinism, social constructivism and biosocial theory. The problematics of fatherhood and men’s parental practices is marginalized in modern Russian social research devoted to family and this fact makes the traditional inequality in family relations, when the father’s role is considered secondary compared to that of mother, even stronger. However, in Western critical men’s studies several stages can be outlined: the development of “sex roles” paradigm (biological determinism), the emergence of the hegemonic masculinity concept, inter-disciplinary stage (biosocial theory). According to the approach of biological determinism, the role of a father is that of the patriarch, he continues the family line and serves as a model for his ascendants. Social constructivism looks into man’s functions in the family from the point of view of masculine pressure and establishing hegemony over a woman and children. Biosocial theory aims to unite the biological determinacy of fatherhood with social, cultural and personal context. It is shown that these approaches are directly connected with the level of the society development, marriage and family perceptions, the level of egality of gender order.