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 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.

As a tribute to their academic teacher and to further his interests, the students of Prof. Dr. Laurent Waelkens collected fifteen scholarly contributions on ius commune graeco-romanum, written by academics from eleven different countries, mainly but not exclusively from Eastern Europe. The book consists of three main parts. In the first part, four authors focus on the Graeco-Roman law in the Roman Empire itself. In the second part, five contributions concern the influence of Graeco-Roman law outside of the Byzantine Empire. The six contributions of the third and final part study the impact of the Western ius commune tradition on Eastern European countries. Thus, the volume highlights the continued importance of the study of Roman law for the understanding of our common pan-European legal heritage.

In America today, two communities with sub-Saharan African genetic origins exist side by side, though they have differing histories and positions within society. This book explores the relationship between African Americans, descendants of those Africans brought to America as slaves, and migrants from sub-Saharan Africa, who have come to the United States of America voluntarily, mainly since the 1990s. Members of these groups have both a great deal in common and much that separates them, largely hidden in their assumptions about, and attitudes towards, each other. In a work grounded in extensive fieldwork Bondarenko and his research team interviewed African Americans, and migrants from twenty-three African States and five Caribbean nations, as well as non-black Americans involved with African Americans and African migrants. Seeking a wide range of perspectives, from different ages, classes and levels of education, they explored the historically rooted mutual images of African Americans and contemporary African migrants, so as to understand how these images influence the relationship between them. In particular, they examined conceptions of ‘black history’ as a common history of all people and nations with roots in Africa. What emerges is a complex picture. While collective historical memory of oppression forges solidarity, lack of knowledge of each other’s history can create distance between communities. African migrants tend to define their identities not by race, but on the basis of multiple layers of national, ethnic, religious and linguistic affinities (of which African Americans are often unaware). For African Americans, however, although national and regional identities are important, it is above all race that is the defining factor. While drawing on wider themes from anthropology and African studies, this in-depth study on a little-researched subject allows valuable new understandings of contemporary American society.

Contributors to this volume discuss a variety of ways the African past (African history) influences the present-day of Africans on the continent and in diaspora: cultural (historical) memory as a factor of public (mass) consciousness; the impact of the historical past on contemporary political, social, and cultural processes in Africa and African diaspora.

This volume is an output of a research project implemented as part of the Basic Research Program at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE).

This book is based on the collection of articles centered around Russia and its policies. The articles are grouped under three parts. The first part contains articles on international relations, Russian foreign policy, and the situation in the world. The main themes they cover include Russian policy in Asia and the Eurasian integration — in which Moscow plays the most active role.

The second part looks at the theorization of Russia’s internal processes, issues concerning reforms to the communist system, its troubled transition from Communism, and analysis of the country’s current political regime. While elaborating on various reforms and transition from the communist system, the author has suggested certain alternatives concepts. Many of the articles analyze the shortcomings and inconsistencies of the modern Russian political system.

The third part is devoted to current issues in Russian politics, the democratization process, growing authoritarian tendencies, mass protests, and that evaluate the programs and policies of individual leaders. The book will be of interest to those specializing in Russian foreign and domestic policy as well as to all those interested in following the developments of this country, its role in the world, and the global situation in general.

The aim of the edition is to establish general narratives for the Alexandrine Age, not so much from the traditional vantage point of the emperor and his inner circle but from the point of view of experts and elites, especially the local ones, who perceived the empire a laboratory. These “men on the spot,” whether officially sanctioned by the state or independently of it, drafted “maps” of the empire and its collective subjects, constructed social political and economic imaginaries of the empire. Actors, who envisioned the functioned of the state and imagined its future, doing it also in comparison and in entanglement with other states in Europe. Therefore, individual experts like local doctors, legal scholars, practical jurists, and amateur scientists would be considered alongside with collective actors such as the Decembrists and the members of the so-called “conservative elite” and other networks.

Article about Merl Faisod's books about Smolensk.

Academic Bibliography of Syriac and Christian Arabic Studies in Russian published in 2020.

The article examines the population exchange between Poland and the Soviet Union in 1944–1947, its role in the shaping of modern Ukraine, and its place in the evolution of the Soviet nationality policy. It investigates the factors involved in the decision-making of individuals and state officials and then assesses how people on the ground made sense of the Soviet population politics. While the earlier scholarship saw the transfer as punitive national deportation, the article argues that it was neither punitive nor purely national nor was it a deportation. The article shows that the party-state was ambivalent about the Polish minority and was not committed to total national homogenization of Western Ukraine. Instead, the people themselves were often eager to leave the USSR because of the poor living conditions, fear of Sovietization, and ethnic conflict. Paradoxically, one of the largest Soviet nation-building projects was not the product of coherent nationality policy.

South Korea has experienced many socio-political milestones since 1945 and one of these was the April 19th Revolution of 1960 (4.19 Revolution). Through analysis of sites of memory,  commemorative practices and images in school textbooks, this paper demonstrates the integration of the historical memory of the 4.19 Revolution into the political nexus. The paper considers memory of the 4.19 Revolution and other moments of South Korean struggle and transformation as ‘postmemory.’ The author concludes that the 4.19 Revolution’s memory is cherished now because it helps to form South Korean national self-identity as progressive and democratic contributing to sustaining participatory civic culture.  

Fazliddin Muhammadiev’s Dar on dunyo (In the other world), first published in Tajik in 1965 and later translated to Russian, Uzbek, and many other languages, is the only known fictionalized account of the ḥajj produced in the Soviet Union. Based on a trip made by the author in 1963, the novel provided the Soviet reader a rare glimpse into this sacred rite. Drawing on archival sources, contemporary responses, and the text itself, this article traces the origins and publication history of the novel, situates it within Soviet domestic and foreign policy goals, and analyses the text to see how the author tries to reconcile competing ideological priorities.

The article serves as a starting point for a research project dedicated to the dichotomy of private and public, and its implications and dynamics in the late Roman republic – early Empire. The primary focus is on the roman private spaces in the villas and houses of the Vesuvian archaeological area. The main methodological approach is represented by the ‘space syntax” theory of B. Hillier and the “movement as memory” theory of D. Favro developed within the logics of Spatial Turn studies, further refined by A. Russel in her works on Roman public space

This article examines the trade in fugitive serfs in eighteenth-century Russia. This trade emerged from two interrelated phenomena—the sale of individual serfs and peasant flight—and was practiced by nobles, merchants, factory owners, and government officials. The acquisition of absent peasants, although seemingly absurd, represented a risky investment from which the new owners could profit upon discovery and reclamation of the fugitives. According to several eighteenth-century decrees, individuals found guilty of accepting fugitives were required to pay monetary compensation to the peasants’ legal owners for each year of harboring. In some instances, the sum of compensation reached staggering amounts of several thousand rubles. Exploiting this legal opportunity, eighteenth-century nobles or “Chichikovs”—named after the protagonist of Nikolai Gogol’s novel Dead Souls—purchased serfs on the run for the specific purpose of making a significant profit by collecting compensation. This article argues that the trade in runaways and “Chichikov schemes” reveals a yet unexplored dimension of Russian serfdom and its influence, both beneficial and ruinous, on the interactions between nobles, and between nobles and other members of imperial society. The article additionally advances the understanding of serfdom as a social framework based on practices and customs rather than on legislation alone.

The Muslim question in Late Imperial Russia is investigated via the deceptive strategeis of a Muslim jornalist, an impostor and double-dealer; M.-B. Hadjetlaché.. A micro-historical approach is developped. 

Educational reforms and introduction of compulsory schooling for nobility are rightly counted among the most import important changes introduced by Peter I in Russia. This article employs a large sample of records from the Heraldry, a government agency in charge of registering nobles for their mandatory service, to assess the spread of literacy among the first post-Petrine generation of the Russian elite and to explore the factors that affected one’ likelihood of being literate. The data suggests that literacy indeed has become the norm among the nobles, and illiteracy, even though not uncommon, came to predominantly be associated with relative social marginality. 

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.

Do personal connections matter for the performance of commercial banks in the period of economic development and financial stress? In the 1890s, the Russian Empire, when undergoing rapid state-led industrialisation, grew by foreign capital inflows into the national debt and by the state’s procurement of industrial output. In 1899, the inflow of foreign capital fell sharply, initiating a financial crisis. Using newly-collected historical data, I find that the banks which experienced greater distress during the crisis had more personal connections to heavy industrial companies, those that had been most-stimulated by state policies to expand production. These banks also had more personal ties to top government officials. In contrast, during the industrial development of the 1890s, banks’ personal connections to heavy industrial companies and top officials were positively related to bank performance.

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.