Historians devote a great deal of attention to the diplomacy that led Russia into the Great War, but have tended to neglect the course of this diplomacy once the fighting erupted. This volume addresses that lacuna with a broad range of essays examining the foreign relations of the empire, as well as its republican and early Soviet successors, from the July 1914 Crisis to the end of the Civil War in 1922.

Written by distinguished and emerging scholars from North America, Europe, Russia, and Japan, the essays make abundant use of Russian archival collections, largely inaccessible until the 1990s, to reassess the conjectures and conclusions previously drawn from other sources. While some chapters focus on traditional “diplomatic” history, others adopt new “international history” by placing Russia’s relations with the world in their social, intellectual, economic, and cultural contexts.

Arranged in roughly chronological order, the first volume covers the late imperial period, from 1914 through mid-1916, while the second proceeds through the revolutions of 1917 and the Civil War, up to the end of that conflict in 1922. Together, these books’ comments should foster a renewed appreciation for international relations as a central element of Russia’s Great War and Revolution.

the Great War, but have tended to neglect the course of this diplomacy once the fighting erupted. This volume addresses that lacuna with a broad range of essays examining the foreign relations of the empire, as well as its republican and early Soviet successors, from the July 1914 Crisis to the end of the Civil War in 1922. Written by distinguished and emerging scholars from North America, Europe, Russia, and Japan, the essays make abundant use of Russian archival collections, largely inaccessible until the 1990s, to reassess the conjectures and conclusions previously drawn from other sources. While some chapters focus on traditional “diplomatic” history, others adopt new “international history” by placing Russia’s relations with the world in their social, intellectual, economic, and cultural contexts. Arranged in roughly chronological order, the first volume covers the late imperial period, from 1914 through mid-1916, while the second proceeds through the revolutions of 1917 and the Civil War, up to the end of that conflict in 1922. Together, these books’ comments should foster a renewed appreciation for international relations as a central element of Russia’s Great War and Revolution.

asks whether the Caspian functions as a conceptual framework for various forms of exchange in commerce, diplomacy, political culture, forces of dissent and revolutionary movements, movement of peoples, material culture, art, and literature as well as ecology, disease, navigation and maritime culture. Are there tangible historical ties in the early modern and modern periods between regions of the Caspian littoral – Iran, the South Caucasus, Dagestan, Russia, and Central Asia? In what ways do exchanges in this region connect to neighboring, more established cultural and political spheres and with broader trends of global history? Can these ties create a viable field of study beyond Middle Eastern, Eurasian, and Russian studies to underscore interregional connections? Can the Caspian be conceptualized as an alternative or as a compliment to more established frames, such as the Persianate World or Central Eurasia and the steppe? To what extent can the links within this region be separated from state-centered histories of Iran and the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union?

The book aims to trace and explain the historical evolution of Moscow, the capital of the Tsardom of Russia, Soviet Union and Russian Federation, as a political entity and political community, and to understand what place Moscow occupied within the Russian political space and what role it played in Russian political life for centuries until 2018. The authors consistently examine the dramatic political history of the contemporary Russian capital in the Moscow (13th – 17th centuries) and St. Petersburg (18th – 19th centuries) epochs, in the Soviet period, in the post-Soviet era, and identify its key points and the most pivotal events.

This book offers new perspectives on the environmental history of the lands that have come under Russian and Soviet rule by paying attention to ‘place’ and ‘nature’ in the intersection between humans and the environments that surround them

Chapters gathered in Syriac Hagiography: Texts and Beyond explore a wide range of Syriac hagiographical works, while following two complementary methodological approaches, i.e. literary and cultic, or formal and functional. Grouped into three main sections, these contributions reflect three interrelated ways in which we can read Syriac hagiography and further grasp its characteristics: “Texts as Literature” seeks to unfold the mechanisms of their literary composition; “Saints Textualized” offers a different perspective on the role played by hagiographical texts in the invention and/or maintenance of the cult of a particular saint or group of saints; “Beyond the Texts” presents cases in which the historical reality behind the nexus of hagiographical texts and veneration of saints can be observed in greater details.

In Memory and Identity in the Syriac Cave of Treasures: Rewriting the Bible in Sasanian Iran Sergey Minov examines literary and socio-cultural aspects of the Syriac pseudepigraphic composition known as the Cave of Treasures, which offers a peculiar version of the Christian history of salvation. The book fills a lacuna in the history of Syriac Christian literary creativity by contextualising this unique work within the cultural and religious situation of Sasanian Mesopotamia towards the end of Late Antiquity. The author analyses the Cave’s content and message from the perspective of identity theory and memory studies, while discussing its author’s emphatically polemical stand vis-à-vis Judaism, the ambivalent way in which he deals with Iranian culture, and the promotion in this work of a distinctively Syriac-oriented vision of the biblical past.

This volume arises from the international conference 'Hymns of the First Christian Millennium — Doctrinal, Devotional, and Musical Patterns' held in June 2014 at the Institute of Classical Studies in conjunction with King's College London. The original scope of the conference has been re-scaled to focus particularly on late antique Christian devotion as it manifests itself in hymns; experts on a variety of topics of early Christian hymnody have been invited to boost both specificity and depth of discussion in the proposed volume. The resulting collection of papers covers a range of aspects of literary, social, doctrinal, musicological, and devotional patterns of Christian hymnic texts, their liturgical and pious use in the period of late antiquity.

This book was created to: 1. Represent the ancient world as it was; diverse. 2. Provide open-access, accessible, and inclusive pedagogical methods and teaching activities about the ancient world for any educator to use. 3. Highlight the importance of student-centered and object-based/hands-on teaching. 4. Showcase the possibility of a transparent, respectful, and collaborative peer-review process.

This issue of the Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik is comprising the full papers of the international symposium on Gothic language, history and culture “The Goths Compared: East Germanic communities between Balticum, Pontus and the West” which was held on November 5–6, 2019 at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (hse) in Moscow. The symposium was organised by the Centre for Medieval Studies, HSE.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, tens of thousands of Yiddish speaking immigrants actively participated in the American Socialist and labor movement. They formed the milieu of the hugely successful daily Forverts (Forward), established in New York in April 1897. Its editorial columns and bylined articles—many of whose authors, such as Abraham Cahan and Sholem Asch, were household names at the time—both reflected and shaped the attitudes and values of the readership. Most pages of this book are focused on the newspaper’s reaction to the political developments in the home country. Profound admiration of Russian literature and culture did not mitigate the writers’ criticism of the czarist and Soviet regimes.

“Catherine the Great: A Reference Guide to Her Life and Works has an extensive A to Z section which includes several hundred entries. The bibliography provides a comprehensive list of publications concerning her life and work”

How do local leaders govern in a large dictatorship? What resources do they draw on? Yoram Gorlizki and Oleg Khlevniuk examine these questions by looking at one of the most important authoritarian regimes of the twentieth century. Starting in the early years after the Second World War and taking the story through to the 1970s, they chart the strategies of Soviet regional leaders, paying particular attention to the forging and evolution of local trust networks.

This book explores Russia’s efforts towards both adapting to and shaping a world in transformation. Russia has been largely marginalized in the post-Cold War era and has struggled to find its place in the world, which means that the chaotic changes in the world present Russia with both threats and opportunities. The rapid shift in the international distribution of power and emergence of a multipolar world disrupts the existing order, although it also enables Russia to diversify it partnerships and restore balance. Adapting to these changes involves restructuring its economy and evolving the foreign policy. The crises in liberalism, environmental degradation, and challenge to state sovereignty undermine political and economic stability while also widening Russia’s room for diplomatic maneuvering. This book analyzes how Russia interprets these developments and its ability to implement the appropriate responses. 

This is the third book in a series on Medieval Novgorod and its surroundings and deals with a substantial body of animal bones that have been recovered over the last decade. The zooarchaeological evidence is discussed by the editor and a number of English and Russian specialists who dug the site, looking at domestic exploitation of animals, diet, animal husbandry, and butchery practices. Detailed data sets are provided to enable the reader to make comparisons with their own research, but the book is also suitable for those with a more general interest in Medieval Russian archaeology.

The Short Course on the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks) defined Stalinist ideology both at home and abroad. It was quite literally the the master narrative of the USSR—a hegemonic statement on history, politics, and Marxism-Leninism that scripted Soviet society for a generation. This study exposes the enormous role that Stalin played in the development of this all-important text, as well as the unparalleled influence that he wielded over the Soviet historical imagination.

The book is the collection of articles on the crisis in Russo-Austrian relations in early 18th century due to the case of tzarevich Alexis Petrovich. New archival materials as well as new interpretations of the corresponding events are presented.

The article aims to clarify the relations between the early versions of tale type ATU 575. Examining the range of Chinese accounts concerning various wooden birds, the author concludes that two groups can be distinguished. The first consists of stories about flying wooden kite-like birds that are not used as vehicles, while in the second, we deal with wooden birds that can carry people. Records belonging to the second group and evidently having their origin in Indian and Central Asian folk tradition appear later in China. An attempt is made to restore possible outlines of the tale type’s ancestral stories. The article states that the tale of an enamoured weaver in the Panchatantra evolves from the structure of such an ancestral story. 

Although the history of Russian-Iranian relations remains seriously understudied, few would refute the oppressive imperialist role played by Imperial Russia in Iran during the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth century. However, practically nothing has been written about the conceptual shifts which began to take place in Russia’s Persian policy immediately after the February Revolution of 1917. Little is known about the large-scale projects, through which Russia was to bring “its own democracy” to Iranian Azerbaijan and its other northern provinces, with further proliferation all over Iran. This was meant to facilitate Russia’s political and trade expansion down to the Persian Gulf, which had been the eventual goal for many decades. Drawing on unpublished documents from Russian, British and French archives, this paper studies the relevant correspondence between the Russian, British and French missions in Tehran and their central authorities, including the short-lived governments of Republican Russia, during the decade 1909-1919. In doing so, it analyses the local agency of the Russian diplomats in Iran, such as Vladimir Minorsky (1877-1966), in the emergence of these projects, and investigates the manifestation of symbolic capital and the productive interaction of power/knowledge relations.

This article focuses on 'On Military Tactics' (O ratnom povedeni), composed in winter 1700/1701 by Ivan Pososhkov and considered to be one of the first analytical military treatises written in the Russian language. Pososhkov heavily criticized foreign influences on native warfare, in particular, the Western infantry tactics and drill introduced by the tsar Peter the Great and his predecessors and reflected some controversial problems of contemporary military culture. Despite his declared hostility towards Western methods of warfare, Pososhkov acknowledged the utility of a 'military science' and read some foreign books on the subject.

On Christmas Eve 1402, Hungarian noblemen gathered in the Cathedral of Nagyvárad, where St. Ladislas’ tomb was located, and swore an oath on the holy king’s relics. They proclaimed thus their allegiance to King Ladislas of Naples and conspired against the ruling King Sigis mund of Luxemburg. By swearing an oath on St. Ladislas’ relics, the conspirators united their minds and forces around the ideal figure of the holy king and knight who became the symbol of a political cause and the embodiment of the kingdom which King Sigismund was no longer suited to represent. The symbolic gesture of oath-swearing on St. Ladislas’ relics took place in the midst of a three-year political crisis (1401–1403) that seized the Kingdom of Hungary as a consequence of the barons’ dissatisfaction with King Sigismund’s measures, which jeopardized their wealth and political influence. By relying on both written accounts and visual sources, the present paper examines the utilizing by Hungarian noblemen during this political crisis of important political and spiritual symbols associated with the Kingdom of Hungary. These included: the cults, relics, and visual representations of St. Ladislas, the Hungarian Holy Crown, or the kingdom’s heraldry. The propagandistic usage of these spiritual and political symbols was reinforced by their insertion into elaborated rituals and symbolic actions, such as coronations or oath-swearing on relics. By activating the link between secular and religious spheres through these rituals and symbolic actions, their performers hoped to attract the divine approval. By discussing such instances, the present paper seeks to illustrate how the ideal figure of St. Ladislas became the catalyzing force behind a political cause.

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Although nation and empire – as well as the organicist and universalist visions mirroring them – are usually put in opposition to each other, this article argues that the two can create synergistic alliances. The attempt of the Danish dynastic union proposal to Sweden in 1810 sheds light on the repertoire of rhetoric and arguments the state could harness to substantiate its potential to rule over diverse populations. First, the paper demonstrates how the trope of Scandinavian kinship was formulated in the Danish public debate during the transitional period, or what Koselleck calls Sattelzeit. Then, the article shows how this language was embedded into power relations and configured to reinforce the imperial aspirations of the Nordic amalgamation, meaning the fusion of the Scandinavian nations. The core sources I consult are the pamphlets published to advertise union-building and the documents stored in the folders of the Royal Archive in Copenhagen (Rigsarkivet).

This case study examines the bilingualism of the prominent Russian Muslim newspaper of the late 19th - early 20th centuries, known as the “Perevodchik-Terjiman” (literally a ‘Translator’ or ‘Interpreter’), by means of discourse analysis. This newspaper was published from 1883 to 1918 in Crimea, until 1914 by Ismail Gasprinskii (1851-1914), - prominent enlightener of Russian Muslims. Until December 1905 the newspaper was issued in two languages – Russian and so-called common-Turkic. The latter language was unsuccessfully intended to become a common literary language for Russian Muslims. Despite the declarations, the parallel articles in Russian and Turkic barely presented direct translations from one language to another. On the contrary, there were significant differences. The differences in Russian and Turkic narratives were not markers of opposing intentions or obscure meanings. It is argued here that this feature can be qualified as an instance of cultural bilingualism, which reflected multiculturalism of the newspaper’s heterogeneous audience.

Background/aims

Current research largely tends to ignore the drug-testing model that was developed in the “Second World” as an explicit alternative to the randomized controlled trial. This system can be described as “socialist pharmapolitics,” accounting for the specific features of state socialism that influenced the development and testing of experimental drugs. The clinical trials model employed in the “Second World” was heavily influenced by the Soviet Union, which was by far the most influential player in the socialist bloc during the Cold War. Based on extensive archival research, this article presents an empirical case of a late Soviet clinical trial as a pragmatic alternative to the randomized controlled trial model. It accounts for the divergences between the official model prescribed by the Soviet authorities and the messy realities of healthcare practice. It further outlines different factors that ultimately shaped how clinical trials were organized in Soviet institutions “on the ground.” Accordingly, this article presents a “real-life” history of “socialist pharmapolitics” and outlines the problems that this system faced in practice.

Methods

Archival research was conducted at the Russian State Archive of Scientific and Technical Documentation in Moscow. Archival files include scientific, technical, and registration documentation such as biochemical, pharmacological, and clinical descriptions of the experimental drug Meldonium, letters between various hospitals, research institutes and the Soviet regulatory body, as well as 26 reports of completed clinical trials. Manual content analysis was used for the interpretation of results.

Results

This article presents an empirical case of a late Soviet clinical trial as a pragmatic alternative to the randomized controlled trial model. It demonstrates some key differences from the randomized controlled trial model. This article also highlights some of the discrepancies between the model that was officially prescribed by the Soviet authorities and the realities of experimental drug testing in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In particular, it notes some elements of randomization, double-blinding, and the use of placebo that were present in Meldonium trials despite being formally denounced by Soviet bioethics.

Conclusion

The Soviet model for testing experimental drugs differed from the Western one substantially in a number of respects. This difference was not only proclaimed officially by the Soviet authorities, but was for the most part enforced in clinical trials in practice. At the same time, our research demonstrates that there were important differences between the official model and the clinical realities on the ground.

This paper examines the transformations of contemporary cultural policy in the Russian Federation on three basic levels: organizational, politico-discursive, and legislative. It also establishes the continuity and differences in that policy vis-à-vis the Soviet period. The principal thesis of this article is that the organizational behavior of the state sector of cultural policy currently seeks to reproduce the model that emerged in the final period of the USSR’s existence. State cultural organizations competing for state resources publicly demonstrate ritualistic ceremonial behavior in relation to political discourse and the established legal system, but at the same time avoid direct ideological instrumentalization of their activities, while seeking to support, update, and expand their network.

The article examines the self-identification and professional values of the university community in post-Soviet Russia. On the basis of the corpus of the interviews, which were recorded by the Poletayev Institute for Theoretical and Historical Studies in the Humanities (Moscow) in the 2010s, the authors analyse how the contemporary Russian scholars consider the problems of university autonomy and university management, as well as the criteria to define an ideal University and an ideal Professor. Instead of the unique perceptions on the specifics of research and educational characteristics of university space and people, the present investigation represents the problematization of the basic definitions of university and its purposes by the contemporary Russian scholars.

The paper investigates interviews from the archive of Poletayev Institute for Theoretical and Historical Studies in the Humanities (IGITI) which were conducted in 2010s with Russian scholars and professors. The data from these interviews is used to study transnational academic mobility experience in the post-Soviet years (2000s–2010s) by young Russian scholars – the respondents of the interviews who entered higher education institutions in the post-Soviet period. The paper examines how they described academic mobility experience, its impact on their idea of university, concept of excellence, and the significance of academic mobility itself.

This paper is focused on the image of the Other in early modern European imperial discourses as exemplified by Venetian discourse about Istria and English discourse about Ireland, which have not been previously compared, in the narratives by Pietro Coppo, Fynes Moryson, John Davies and Barnabe Rich. The authors of the article have analyzed mechanisms of construction of the Image of the Other and political or rhetorical context of its instrumentalization. The examination of English imperial discourses about Ireland and Venetian discourse has demonstrated instrumentalist nature of early modern ethnographic discourses of the Other. Imperial discourse of the Other justified sovereignty of the metropole over the periphery and also communicated knowledge about the Other in order to suggest possible solutions to the problems of governance.

Using data from official manufacturing censuses, we compare labour productivity in Great Britain and the Russian Empire around 1908. We find that Russia’s labour productivity was at 81.9 per cent of the U.K. level. Russia’s productivity was on a par with France’s and significantly superior to Italy’s. We also find that the majority of Russian industries underperformed British ones. However, the industries that had been established or modernised during the state-induced industrialisation policies of the 1890s, such as the Southern metallurgy, performed on a par with their British counterparts. Russia’s alcohol, tobacco, and petrochemical sectors outperformed their British equivalents. Our findings suggest a revision of the view that, at the turn of the 20th century, Russian manufacturing was economically underdeveloped.

The cultural heritage was defined in the 19th century in many European countries and the United States as “objects of cultural value.” In the context of building national states mostly material objects, archaeological sites and historical monuments, were marked as heritage. Further transformation of the concept of heritage took place after the World War II, when not only national and mostly European states, but also new international organizations (United Nations, UNESCO and later European Union) began to re-define and revise cultural heritage. The large-scale transformations in the social sciences and the humanities in the 1960–70s influenced the formation a new research field in the 1980s, heritage studies. Using the approaches taken from public history and cultural, memory, postcolonial and gender studies, heritage studies conceptualize heritage in more broad temporal boundaries and network of agents involved in the process of its formation. Within heritage studies, cultural heritage covers the sphere of ordinary and everyday life, distant and recent past, different social groups and their vision of heritage. In the 2000s, heritage studies were debated. As a result, a new field of critical heritage studies emerged. The key task put in the field was to analyze discursive practices of defining and using heritage primarily by state and international institutions (the so-called “Authorized Heritage Discourse”). The scholars conceptualize heritage as a process, discourse and participatory cultural phenomenon. So, heritage is understood as a constant rethinking and redefinition cultural values by different agents––social groups, media, institutions, which are also constantly changing. The paper examines the research fields of heritage studies and critical heritage studies in Europe. It provides an overview of their development and subsequent changes, as well as the main research issues and problems.

Grant-based funding became one of the crucial innovations in the Russian academia of the 1990s. It has been studied from quantitative and institutional perspectives while our paper focuses primarily on oral histories of grants that shed light on their subjective meaning. Interviews show that some Russian academics remember their first experiences of applying for various programs, competition and peer review as important part of their ego-narratives. These narratives portray ambitious, independent, and free-minded scholarly persona that chimes with the virtues promoted in the academic community back in the 1990s, when research grants and scholarships were introduced. Apart of their practical benefits and prestige, grants helped some scientists and scholars to comprehend themselves and the changing landscape of post-Soviet academia.

The paper is focused on Stefan Czarnowski (1879-1937), early Polish sociologist, one of the founders of professional sociology in Poland, and author of an original concept in the historical sociology of culture. His ideas about forms and ways of functioning of the past in the present as well as mechanisms of nation-building (using the example of St. Patrick as a resource of formation of national identity of Irish people) are considered in the context of history of memory studies and nationalism studies.

The paper addresses the problem of interacting of visual and written components for creating of historical narrativity, and its impact on the social practices of the archival employees in the late 18th  –  early 19th century. The research is focused on the case of  Moscow Archive of Foreign College, where a gallery of those who administered Russian foreign affairs had been collected since 1780s. This gallery was juxtaposed by a voluminous chronicle that united the Archive and the College into an indivisible institution and thus emphasized the role of the archival officials in the state affairs.

The music of vocal-instrumental ensemble "Pesniary" is recognized in Belarus as a cultural heritage that must be saved and protected. In this paper, the approach of critical heritage studies is used to show, how this meaning of heritage is created, what heritage discourses exist in Belarus and how they constitute different meanings of heritage. The focus of the paper is on the confrontation and interrelation between the authorized, self-authorized and unauthorized heritage discourses. As well, the use of heritage for the constitution of national identity narratives is analyzed. The key points of the preservation and management of heritage in Belarus are the establishment of the heritage continuation and authenticity, exclusion of contradictory interpretations of the heritage, its interrelation to the particular version of the past, and hence the particular identity narrative. One of the main actors in the authorized heritage discourse is the government that puts efforts into recognizing and funding the one version of the heritage that corresponds with the state's cultural policy. Self-authorized and unauthorized heritage discourses use the "Pesniary" heritage to express national components of the collective identity and rejuvenate the past.

At the turn of the XIX – XX centuries scientists focused on the procedure of the dissertation research’s scientifically verifications, create expert forms for assessing the quality of scientific work. One of these procedural forms became peer review. The article examines the culture of dissertation reviews at Russian universities in the designated period. The author, using an examples from specific texts of reviews, focuses on the formation of conventions, on criteria for assessing the quality of research, identifies the basic requirements for the degree of scientific texts. The main conclusion of the article is that the assessment texts contributed to the conclusion of academic agreements and their maintenance (retention).

The collection of Western European manuscripts gathered by Nikolai Petrovich Likhachev (1862–1936) and currently stored in the Scientific and Historical archive of the St. Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences (the Archive) contains, among other documents, a number of those coming from the Latin West. The vast majority of this array comes from Italy (about 5,000 documents), of which about a third are original notarial deeds. There are over 10,000 storage units related to the history of Italy in the collection of the Western European section of the Archive. The collection is divided into fonds, and the focus of this research is on the 6th collection, “Venice and its possessions”, containing notarial deeds analysed by a team of scholars. These manuscripts provide information about economic and social aspects of life in the rural communes of Val d’Astico, located in Northern Vicentino. Here we describe the geographical and historical peculiarities of the region in order to place the documents in their particular context and to better understand it. All of these documents are instrumenta rather than imbreviaturae, and, at least when it comes to the deeds drawn up by Pietro di Zennaro, we can treat this set as having a certain unity. Within this study, one of our main objectives was preparation of these documents for critical publication. The source material studied here still has to be contextualized and researched in a more profound manner; however, we can clearly see now that the investigation of the deeds stored here are more than promising.

This study presents a surveyofthe formation of thecollection of Nikolai PetrovichLikhachev (1862-1936), a great collectorand Member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, through his life and research interests. This collection was unique for Russia at that time. As a researcher and a collector, Likhachev laid the foundations for the professional study of watermarks and paper studies, medieval diplomatics and sigillography, scholarly art history (in the sphere of icons) in Russia. The Museum of Palaeographycreated by Likhachev included rich material on the history of writing in Europe, Asia, North America and the European colonies of the New World, encompassing a wide chronological period -from the turn of the 4-3 millennia BC to the beginning of the 20th century. His collectionshapedthe schools of the Russian and Soviet Egyptology, Assyriology, Hellenic and Medieval studies, Arabic studies, Byzantine studies, and Slavic studies. The present paper is a contribution to the studies of both his activity as a scholar and an antiquarian,and the shaping of his collection.

Education in early modern Russia has been traditionally described as imported from the West; secular; imposed by the state – or more specifically, by Peter I himself – from above on the unwilling population; driven by the  military needs, and therefore, technical. This chapter seeks to examine and to problematize some these theses. Some of them have already been re-assessed by scholars, especially insofar as the role of the church in providing education is concerned. In other cases, the discussion is limited to identifying the gaps in our current understanding and pointing to ways of addressing them. In particular, on the basis of he author's own research as well as that of other scholars, it seeks  to outline the responses of the tsar’s subjects to the educational change;  problematize the role of the “state” as an actor in this process, and that of Peter I himself; to understand what exactly is meant by the practical/military drivers of educational change and how exactly the role of these drivers could be ascertained; to emphasize the role of non-state, traditional, and informal genres and providers of education in that period. The last two sections seek to place the early modern education in Russia in the Western European context by identifying more precisely what exactly has been borrowed and how this “borrowing,” in fact, resulted in innovative reconfiguring of educational forms; and to discuss the role of early modern Russia as a pioneer, in some sense, of explicitly using education as a tool of social engineering.    

The level of alcohol consumption and the role of alcohol taxes as a source of state revenue in pre-Petrine Russia have been the subject of much scholarly interest and political speculation, yet reliable data on the magnitude of trade in “grain wine” is still lacking. This article draws on the records of central government agencies from the 1620s - early 1650s to partially fill this gap. In the decades immediately following the Times of Trouble tavern revenues nearly doubled in absolute numbers and accounted for about a quarter of the total state revenues of Muscovy. The growth rate of tavern revenues was on par with the rate of population growth (between the 1620s and 1640s, urban population increased by 60 percent). The article discusses different methods of running the state alcohol monopoly and estimates the profitability of alcohol trade and the overall levels of alcohol consumption during the period under study.

The 1980 Olympiad in Moscow (the first Olympiad in Eastern Europe and the socialist  state) is viewed through the prism of the successes and failures of the cultural and sports diplomacy of the Soviet state. Olympics-80 as a kind of mega-project "developed socialism" promoted (albeit temporarily) not only to strengthening the position of the Soviet Union in the international arena (especially in the background of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan), but also unity of Soviet citizens in the face of "Western threat". The situation was somewhat more complicated with attempts to use the Olympic project to strengthen the socialist camp.  The source base of the research was the materials of the State archive of the Russian Federation, the Russian state archive of socio-political history and the Central archive of Moscow, as well as the published documents of the Russian state archive of modern history.  It is shown that, despite the boycott of the Olympics, its consequences did not have a particularly strong impact on the development of sports ties and international tourism in the USSR. For example, in 1980, at the suggestion of the delegation of the USSR, the participants of the world conference on tourism, when adopting the Manila Declaration on world tourism, included in the Declaration all the initiatives of the Soviet delegation. And since 1982, the process of restoring international sports contacts began. 

This article uses the records of monastic account books to assess the level of prices in Russia in the second half of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The data from these books allow us to construct salt and rye price series, and identify prices of other goods for single years. The resulting numbers demonstrate that the prices remained largely unchanged. The exceptions were the mid-1640s and the early 1660s, when the price fluctuations were driven by the failed financial reforms. The available data shows the prices did not change synchronically in Russia and Europe. Our assumption, therefore, is that Russia stood apart from the price revolution of Western Europe in the seventeenth century.

The article examines views of A.I. Herzen on emotions and their role in politics. Herzen’s position on the issue of emotions traced back to the early socialist and romantic influences and interpreted in terms of “sentimentalist emotional regime” (W. Reddy). Two discussions that involved Herzen are scrutinized. The first one was a debate of the 1840s around rationality and morals in family life where Herzen advocated middle position between unrestricted capricious emotionality and moralistic rationalism represented by Hegelian T. Rötscher. It is argued that this debate noticeably influenced Herzen’s later conceptions of politics and the public sphere that came to prominence during the reforms of Alexander II. The article shows that Herzen repeated some of his previous arguments against excessive rationalism and emotional restrictions attacking Russian Hegelian B.N. Chicherin. Herzen backed sincerity in the expression of one’s emotions both in private life and in politics, challenging prevalent notions of rationality. Chicherin, on the contrary, was a strong proponent of the neutral and rationalized political sphere since he thought emotions would lead to disturbances and revolutions Concluding remarks concern ambiguous heritage of Herzen’s views on emotions that seem to be closer to his opponents than may be immediately apparent.

Kondratiev long cycle is generally treated as a phenomenon of a modern world economy. However, the existence of major cycles before the Industrial Revolution does not contradict the theoretical views of Kondratiev, the founder of the long-waves theory. We have discovered Kondratiev’s documents, which show him going farther back in history. The key question we are trying to answer is why are major cycles not associated with a pre-industrial economy? We also have at our disposal a number of unknown and little-known historiographical sources, which indicate that Soviet researchers cared about the existence of long cycles in the preindustrial period. At the same time, Soviet scientists had done a tremendous amount of work to construct the time series on historical data of Russia. Using this data, we concluded that the existence of Kondratiev waves in the Russian Empire was very probable.