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Новая имперская история постсоветского пространства
In this article history of university periodicals is approached as a history of practices of state administration, self-regulation of university corporation, professional self-organization, and normalization of different aspects of the university life. Research for this article has been carried out in the archives of Moscow University and Kazan University, and in the manuscript divisions of these universities’ libraries, as well as in the Archive of the Ministry of Public Education. Documents preserved in these collections reveal intentions of the publishers and circumstances surrounding the appearance of various periodicals in the first half of the nineteenth century. Another group of historical sources analyzed in this article consists of publications in university periodicals themselves. The authors show how the state policies regulating the market of the university press, on the one hand, and initiatives of university professors, on the other, influenced the configuration of the corporation of the university faculty, its internal hierarchies and accepted criteria of academic excellence. The article seeks to answer the question how politics and content of university journalism stimulated academic competition and created reputations.
“Empire Speaks Out” is a result of the collaborative international research project whose participants aim to reconstruct the origin, development, and changing modes of self-description and representation of the heterogeneous political, social, and cultural space of the Russian Empire. The collection offers an alternative to the study of empire as an essentialized historical phenomenon, i.e. to those studies that construe empire retrospectively by projecting the categories of modern nation-centered social sciences onto the imperial past. It stresses dynamic transformations, adaptation, and reproduction of imperial patterns of sociability and governance. Chapters of the collection show how languages of rationalization derived from modern public politics, scientific discourses of applied knowledge (law, sociology, political economy, geography, ethnography, physical anthropology) and social self-organization influenced processes of transformation of the imperial space.
The chapter is focused on exploration of the politics of comparison as it was practiced by the ideologues of the Russian Empire and imperialism at the beginning of the twentieth century. Special attention is given to the transfer of operative ideological frameworks from the British empire to the Russian context.
Battles of the First World War were accompanied by what was the first full-scale war of words in European history. It was aimed at influencing the public opinion abroad as well as at mobilizing the population at home. Leading intellectuals, including famous scholars, participated in propaganda campaigns waged by the belligerent nations. This text focuses on the discussions between philosophers
involved in the international conflict.
In his article Vladimir Kantor explores the destiny of Russia intelligentsia within the context of cultural crisis that took place at the turn of XIX and XX centuries, analyzing the Vekhovs, a group of leading intellectuals who ran a collection of essays, titled "Vekhi", studying their relationship towards that Russian cultural phenomenon. To author, the intelligentsia is considered as a critical factor in the development of Russian history. Within a context of the struggle around the "Vekhi", by referring to famous philosophical and literature books, published in 1909, the author focuses on relationships between intelligentsia and ordinary people, their attractive and repulsive interaction, which represents the key theme of the Russian destiny. Any historical movement occurs through tragedy; heroes who move the history have to sacrifice themselves to provide that movement. Confirmation to that idea would be rejection and exclusion of the Russian intelligentsia from the country's mentality throughout a number of generations which ultimately led to its tragic being.