Language policy and usage in the post-communist region have continually attracted wide political, media, and expert attention since the disintegration of the USSR in 1991. How are these issues politicized in contemporary Estonia, Latvia, and Ukraine? This study presents a cross-cultural qualitative and quantitative analysis of publications in leading Russian-language blogs and news websites of these three post-Soviet states during the period of 2004–2017. The most notable difference observed between Ukraine and the two Baltic countries is that many Russian-writing users in Ukraine’s internet tend to support the position that the state language, i.e. Ukrainian, is discriminated against and needs special protection by the state, whereas the majority of the Russian-speaking commentators on selected Estonian and Latvian news websites advocate for introducing Russian as a second state language. Despite attempts of Ukraine’s government to Ukrainize public space, the position of Ukrainian is still perceived, even by many Russian-writing commentators and bloggers, as being ‘precarious’ and ‘vulnerable’. This became especially visible in debates after the Revolution of Dignity, when the number of supporters of the introduction of Russian as second state language significantly decreased. In the Russian-language sector of Estonian and Latvian news websites and blogs, in contrast, the majority of online users continually reproduce the image of ‘victims’ of nation-building. They often claim that their political, as well as economic rights, are significantly limited in comparison to ethnic Estonians and Latvians. The results of Maksimovtsova’s research illustrate that, notwithstanding differences between the Estonian as well as Latvian cases, on the one hand, and Ukraine, on the other, there is an ongoing process of convergence of debates in Ukraine to those held in the other two countries analyzed in terms of an increased degree of ‘discursive decommunization’ and ‘derussification’.

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.

Liberalism in Russia is one of the most complex, multifaced and, indeed, controversial phenomena in the history of political thought. Values and practices traditionally associated with Western liberalism—such as individual freedom, property rights, or the rule of law—have often emerged ambiguously in the Russian historical experience through different dimensions and combinations. Economic and political liberalism have often appeared disjointed, and liberal projects have been shaped by local circumstances, evolved in response to secular challenges and developed within often rapidly-changing institutional and international settings. This third volume of the Reset DOC “Russia Workshop” collects a selection of the Dimensions and Challenges of Russian Liberalism conference proceedings, providing a broad set of insights into the Russian liberal experience through a dialogue between past and present, and intellectual and empirical contextualization, involving historians, jurists, political scientists and theorists. The first part focuses on the Imperial period, analyzing the political philosophy and peculiarities of pre-revolutionary Russian liberalism, its relations with the rule of law (Pravovoe Gosudarstvo), and its institutionalization within the Constitutional Democratic Party (Kadets). The second part focuses on Soviet times, when liberal undercurrents emerged under the surface of the official Marxist-Leninist ideology. After Stalin’s death, the “thaw intelligentsia” of Soviet dissidents and human rights defenders represented a new liberal dimension in late Soviet history, while the reforms of Gorbachev’s “New Thinking” became a substitute for liberalism in the final decade of the USSR.  The third part focuses on the “time of troubles” under the Yeltsin presidency, and assesses the impact of liberal values and ethics, the bureaucratic difficulties in adapting to change, and the paradoxes of liberal reforms during the transition to post-Soviet Russia. Despite Russian liberals having begun to draw lessons from previous failures, their project was severely challenged by the rise of Vladimir Putin. Hence, the fourth part focuses on the 2000s, when the liberal alternative in Russian politics confronted the ascendance of Putin, surviving in parts of Russian culture and in the mindset of technocrats and “system liberals”. Today, however, the Russian liberal project faces the limits of reform cycles of public administration, suffers from a lack of federalist attitude in politics and is externally challenged from an illiberal world order. All this asks us to consider: what is the likelihood of a “reboot” of Russian liberalism?

This book examines the function and development of the cult of saints in Coptic Egypt, focusing primarily on the material provided by the texts forming the Coptic hagiographical tradition of the early Christian martyr Philotheus of Antioch, and more specifically, the Martyrdom of St Philotheus of Antioch (Pierpont Morgan M583). This Martyrdom is a reflection of a once flourishing cult which is attested in Egypt by rich textual and material evidence. This text enjoyed great popularity not only in Egypt, but also in other countries of the Christian East, since his dossier includes texts in Coptic, Georgian, Ethiopic, and Arabic.

In this monograph I consider the role of institutional entrepreneurs –“projectors” in transferring organizational forms and building new secular school in Russia in the first half of the 18th century. During the period from the beginning of Peter I’s reforms until the accession of Catherine II, the institutional landscape of education in Russia has changed quite drastically. Pre-Petrine and the early Petrine schools were, in essence, pre-modern institutions: a “school” was conceived as a set of students gathering around an autonomous “master”-teacher and his "apprentices". By the time of Catherine II’s accession, however, Russia had a number of recognizably modern schools that differed little in their structure from the classical schools of the 19th century. These institutions were regulated by written instructions mandating, among other things hierarchical organization of faculty and staff; functional delineation of duties; regulation of the learning process and daily behavior of pupils and teachers; formal procedures for assessing and monitoring the students’ achievements and conduct. These schools were designed not just for training, but for achieving internalization by pupils of prescribed patterns of behavior and thinking to be attained through detailed modeling of their daily life and special organization of school space, including a pupil’s isolation from the outside world and constant monitoring. Separate chapters of the book to come out as a result of this project are devoted to the key episodes of implementing these new organizational forms. In the process, we propose a model of constructing the institutional landscape of modernity “from below,” not as the product of abstract “state policy,” but as an outcome of diverse efforts of individual actors, “institutional entrepreneurs,” for whom the introduction of these new organizational forms was a means to realize their own career strategies in competition with other courtiers and bureaucratic players. In the course of this project, we reconstruct the process of transfer of new organizational forms in education in Russia in the first half of the 18th century; demonstrate the role of key players in this process, their motivations, the social, financial, administrative and symbolic resources available to them, and their modes of action; reveal the competitive environment in which they operated; clarify the role of the monarch and the state apparatus in introduction of new organizational forms; identify factors affecting sustainability of new organizational forms. As a result, we propose a model and typology of institutional entrepreneurship as applied to early modern period and demonstrate its relevance to a wide range of countries beyond Russia.

The site Menekşe Çatağı, located on the north-west shore of the Sea of Marmara, 12 km north-east of Tekirdağ, was excavated between 1993 and 2007. The collection of transport amphorae from the destruction layer consists of interred and fragmented vessels produced in the main ancient wine-trading centres of the Aegean and the Propontis, such as Chios, Thasos, Mende and Lesbos. The chronological boundaries for the collection are the end of the 6th–second half of the 5th century BC. Of special note is a group of stamped amphorae produced in an unknown centre. According to various scholars, this type were produced in Samos, Miletus or Erythrae.

This report summarizes the results of a German-Russian dialogue project, which was implemented and designed by inmedio peace consult gGmbh (Berlin) and the Institute for Law and Public Policy, ILPP (Moscow) and funded by the German Federal Foreign Office under the ‘Expanding Cooperation with Civil Society in the Eastern Partnership Countries and Russia’ Programme. Using a mediative dialogue approach, 20 experts from academia, thinks tanks and NGOs as well as journalists and cultural exchange/dialogue practitioners met near Moscow in September 2018 and in Berlin in November to analyse and reflect on the Russian and Western narratives on what went wrong since the end of the Cold War regarding the deterioration of Russian-Western relations.

The concept of sacred insanity is widespread among many religions of the world and through many ages and cultures. The present volume collects the contributions of the symposium Holy Fools and Divine Madmen, held in Munich in 2015. Employing interdisciplinary approaches, these studies cover a wide geographical and cultural range, from Byzantium westward to Italy and Ireland, and eastward to Islamic Iran, and to India and Tibet

The coursebook is aimed at developing foreign language competence among university students and interlingual and intercultural communication in professional sphere. The book is a possibility to master phonetic, lexical and grammatical skills as well as listening, writing anf speaking on the basis of a documentay series "The History of the Kings and Queens of England". Students are provideв with various task types which assist in developing language, communicattive and cultural competences.

This book concludes The Industrialisation of Soviet Russia, an authoritative account of the Soviet Union’s industrial transformation between 1929 and 1939. The volume before this one covered the ‘good years’ (in economic terms) of 1934 to 1936. The present volume has a darker tone: beginning from the Great Terror, it ends with the Hitler-Stalin pact and the outbreak of World War II in Europe. During that time, Soviet society was repeatedly mobilised against internal and external enemies, and the economy provided one of the main arenas for the struggle. This was expressed in waves of repression, intensive rearmament, the increased regimentation of the workforce and the widespread use of forced labour.

The traditional narrative of the Russian Civil War is one of revolution against counterrevolution, Bolshevik Reds against Tsarist Whites. Liudmila Novikova convincingly demonstrates, however, that the struggle was not between a Communist future and a Tsarist past; instead, it was a bloody fight among diverse factions of a modernizing postrevolutionary state. Focusing on the sparsely populated Arkhangelsk region in Northern Russia, she shows that the anti-Bolshevik government there, which held out from 1918 to early 1920, was a revolutionary alternative bolstered by broad popular support. Novikova draws on declassified archives and sources in both Russia and the West to reveal the White movement in the North as a complex social and political phenomenon with a distinct regional context. She documents the politics of the Northern Government and its relations with the British and American forces who had occupied the ports of Murmansk and Arkhangelsk at the end of World War I. As the civil war continued, the increasing involvement of the local population transformed the conflict into a ferocious "people's war" until remaining White forces under General Evgenii Miller evacuated the region in February 1920.

Scandinavian motifs, both religious and related to arts and crafts, are typically deprived of their religious content in the process of Christianization as percieved in Old Rus' literature in which myths are treated as faded histories or legends.

The paper contains a review on a recently published volume ‘The Syriac World’, edited by Daniel King, which is dedicated to various aspects of Syriac culture, including history, literature, language and arts. 

Rev: S. Yu. Monakhov, E.V. Kuznetsova, N.B. Churekova, Amphorae of the 5th-2th c. BC from the Collection of the State Museum-Preserve « Tauric Chersonese »: Catalogue. Saratov: Novÿï proekt Press, 2017, 208 p., illustrations. ISBN 978-5-6040074-0-2

The “New Silk Road” or “One Belt–One Road” (also “Belt and Road”) is a global project ini- tiated by China, the implementation of which affects various areas of development of many states and regions of the world, including security issues, socio-cultural, political, diplomatic and civilisational aspects.

A total of 173 agreements with 125 states and 29 international organisations have been signed under this initiative. The project is gaining momentum every year and attracts ever more researchers who analyse the economic, political, and cultural sides of the project and the interaction of the different countries and regions with China within the framework of this global enterprise. This article assesses the participation of five Central Asian countries (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan) in the Chinese pro- ject and aims to define the mutual interests of the parties on the basis of economic indica- tors (i.e., ESI, RCA, TDC, and G-L indexes). 

The critique of Francis Thomson constitutes only part of Ostrowski’s book. The other

part, completely unrelated to the first one, is dedicated to a comparison of the in- tellectual development of the two halves of the Christian world in the Middle Ages.

Ostrowski’s assertion that the Byzantines did not include logic in their school cur- riculum is untrue. What seems to him to be the main difference between East and

West does not take root until the end of the 12th century. The West was drifting away from the common patterns of ancient Mediterranean civilization. The East largely remained the same. The Byzantines did not feel any special inclination toward the practical application of theoretical ideas. The people of Old Rus’, on the contrary, were quick at learning and innovating. Respect for tradition inevitably played a smaller role in a nascent culture than in a culture that had been born old.

In the present article, I attempt to bring to light the particularities of Stalinist wartime criminal justice via the example of the implementation of the most “popular” article of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic [RSFSR] Criminal Code on “counterrevolutionary crimes,” Article 58-10, regarding propaganda or agitation containing a call to overthrow, undermine, or weaken Soviet power or to commit specific counterrevolutionary crimes. In my view, counterrevolutionary crime cases most clearly demonstrate both the continuity of Stalinist criminal justice from the period of the 1930s and its evolution under the influence of the realities of war. Above all, the penal policies and judicial practices of the beginning of the war are in many regards reminiscent of the Great Terror, even though in absolute numbers the scale of repression was significantly smaller.

The article considers the practices of implementing the labor laws, primarily the law on deserters, during the years from 1941 to 1945. The following questions are at the center of attention: How were the bulk of sentences under the labor decrees carried out? How, due to delays in the implementation of these decrees, did the number of individuals actually serving their sentences change over time? How can the large-scale nonimplementation of the decrees or correctives applied to them be interpreted? In addition to published documents, this article studies these questions via documents from the USSR procuracy, which exercised oversight over the implementation of extraordinary labor law/

This is a review on the book of David P. Fields, Foreign Friends. Syngman Rhee, American Exceptionalism, and the Division of Korea. 2019, University Press of Kentucky, 254 pages, ISBN 9780813177199.

This essay reviews the characteristic features of the Soviet ‘shadow economy’ by examining the activities of a major construction enterprise headed by N. M. Pavlenko from 1948 to 1952. This was the largest currently known private illegal enterprise of the Stalinist period. Pavlenko’s organisation built dozens of roads and railways under contract to state entities. Based on newly accessible archival documents, the methods of Pavlenko’s organisational activity and the reasons for its lengthy existence are considered. The author argues that, regardless of its extraordinary scale, Pavlenko’s enterprise was in fact typical of the Stalinist ‘shadow economy’, and that future archival research would probably reveal that this shadow economy was far more significant than has been understood to date.

In the first, still unpublished, volume of The Blessed Compendium (al-Majmūʿ al-mubārak)—the historical work of the 13th-century Arabic-speaking Christian writer al-Makīn ibn al-ʿAmīd, there is a chapter on the Byzantine Emperor Theodosius II the Younger (r. 402–450). In this chapter, Ibn al-ʿAmīd retells the famous story of Moses of Crete, “who appeared among the Jews” and declared himself to be the Messiah to subsequent tragic disappointment of those who believed in him. The present article discusses this story and suggests an explanation for the discrepancies between Ibn al-ʿAmīd’s and its Arabic source—the Book of the Heading (Kitāb al-ʿUnwān) of Agapius of Manbij (Hierapolis).

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.

The paper presented at the Joint Workshop of the Cambridge DAAD Research Hub for German Studies and The German Historical Institute, Moscow entitled “Life Stories, Personal Narratives, and Ego-Documents: Problems and Perspectives from German, Central and Eastern European History” (Pembroke College, Cambridge, 20-22 September 2018) deals with some recent shifts in historiography aimed at deeper understanding European past. Based on the analysis of several recent studies of Early Modern autobiographies, diaries, memoirs, and other egodocuments, it claims that the first person writings present an incredibly valuable type of sources that can shed new light not only on the lives of individuals, as it is commonly considered, but also on the lives of European societies of the period.

The purpose of this paper is finding a method of calculating or at least reliably estimating the money supply in the 1710s’ Russia. The estimation is based on Gresham’s Law that states: “Bad money drive out good money.” The “good” and “bad” monies of Petrine era are identified. I argue that the “good” money was driven out by 1705 and, therefore, the emission of “bad” money in 1705–10 increased money supply. The increase is estimated to be about 40 percent. This conclusion calls for a further investigation of price dynamics of the period to determine effects of the increase.

This chapter surveys the Iron Age in the region extending from the western Black Sea to the North Caucasus. As in many parts of Europe, this was the first period in which written sources named peoples, places, and historical events. The Black Sea saw Greek colonization from the seventh century BC and its northern shore later became the homeland of the important Bosporan kingdom. For a long time, researchers sought to identify tribes named by authors such as Herodotus by archaeological means, but this ethno-deterministic perspective has come under critique. Publication of important new data from across the region now permits us to draw a more coherent picture of successive cultures and of interactions between different parts of this vast area, shedding new light both on local histories and on the role ‘The East’ played in the history of Iron Age Europe.

The present study is aimed at the research of the set of the Venetian lettere ducali of the fourteenth to mid-sixteenth centuries and the preparation of their full-text publication. Due to their diplomatic and paleographic characteristics, the lettere ducali stored in St. Petersburg are an example of a fairly well-developed chancery production, despite the chancery still being in the process of institutionalization at that point. At the same time, the lettere ducali are among the most widespread varieties of the documents issued by the Venetian Doges at that time. In this regard, the clarification of the criteria of authenticity and attributive features of these letters is the most urgent purpose of the project, given that the systematic publication and sequential study of the lettere ducali of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries are yet to be done in the future. As regards the medieval and early modern chancery activity in the Venetian Republic, only the period up to the thirteenth century has been studied well enough; as for the later times, only minor sets of the authentic lettere ducali have been published. The documents in question from the manuscript collection of N.P. Likhachev (1862-1936), Member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, have never been published, and went almost unnoticed in the scholarly discourse. The publication of these documents will allow the medievalists the study of the previously unknown sources. The extensive study of the diplomatic and paleographic peculiarities of the letters, their description and visualization, their attribution and the transcription of the notes of the scribes will provide the researchers of the given period with the tools of the historical criticism of this variety of documents. The preliminary outcomes of the research and the deep analysis of certain case studies found in the manuscripts are to be presented as scholarly articles in double-blind peer-reviewed journals, as well as in conference proceedings.

The present study is devoted to the research into a set of the Venetian lettere ducali to the Marquises d’Este of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries collected by N.P. Likhachev (1862-1936), Member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, stored in the Western European section of the Saint Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the preparation of their full-text critical publication. The lettere ducali are an excellent source to study the Serenissima and its continental and overseas domains. The source material of the Venetian lettere ducali have long and not without reason been considered and actively investigated by researchers as one of the most important sources on the economic, social, political, legal, environmental, cultural, and ethnic history of Venice. In addition, Venetian sources often provide researchers with important material on the history of other states of the Italian Peninsula, including, in our case, the domains of d’Este. This explains the exceptional importance of studying lettere ducali as the most important source on the history of the Western European Middle Ages and early modern times. This study revealed historical material on the specific cities and regions of Italy (Venice, Treviso, Ferrara, Verona, Padua, the Po Delta), as well as the Venetian colonies in the Mediterranean (Crete, Cyprus) and the Adriatic (Shkodra, Dalmatian Coast), history of international relations, history of economic relations, history of everyday life, history of state institutions and international law, history of a medieval document, history of Latin writing.

In this article, we attempt to trace the semantic changes two key concepts of the Modern period - fundamental law and constitution underwent at the 18th century and investigates how these European concepts were adapted and used in the Russian political language. The concept of the constitution and fundamental laws in eighteenth-century political discourse had differing connotations: while the constitution was used mainly to describe the form of government, the concept of fundamental laws referred to historically developing legal traditions which have been adopted as norms of political law. The most radical vision of constitution in the 18th century went further than identify it with the fundamental law, demanding that the latter should enshrine the principles of civil rights and liberties of the Nation, and the legal guarantees thereof. However, this radical view, arising at the end of the century, was far from universal, and the discussion around various understandings of this concept was still to continue for many years.  

The article deals with the process of emergence of tourism in Russia and focused on a visual pattern in the making of tourist places. Being an essential part of mass printed culture, travel guidebooks, along with travel literature and postcards, were in demand during the late imperial period. They were produced and replicated intensively and circulated widely. At the turn of the 19 – 20th centuries the Black Sea coast of Russia was evolving into a popular place for travel and a recreational destination. A set of images of attractive spots of this region, which were reproduced in Nikolai Lender’s guidebooks, as well as on postcards in 1880s - 1910s formed the empirical basis of this research.

This article is devoted to a reconstruction of Soviet discussions on long cycles based on an analysis of a wide range of unknown and little-known historiographical sources and archival materials. The role of discussions in the formation of assessments and ideas about long cycles is shown. In particular, we show that the controversy between Kondratiev and Gosplan about the economic development of the USSR had a noticeable effect on the negative evaluation of Kondratiev’s method for identifying long cycles. The study defines the relations between Kondratiev’s views on the problem of long cycles and his probabilistic-statistical approach to the analysis of society

V. K. Trediakovskii’s translation of Paul Tallement Voyage de lisle d’amour occupies a special place in the history of Russian 18th-century literature: it is often credited with creating a new vocabulary of love and amorous intercourse, an innovation that would pave the way for much of the later poetry and prose. It is also believed to have gained instant popularity among Russia’s youth, although who exactly Trediakovskii’ early readers were is not clear. Likewise, while Trediakovskii’s early life and his stay in Europe have been a subject of extensive study, we do not know much why exactly he choose this topic and this particular work for his translation: following the version offered by the poet himself, this choice is usually treated as nearly random. Against this background, this this paper uses a variety of archival sources to reconstruct the actual courtly context of these events. On the one hand, it focuses on the secret liaison between Ekaterina Ioannovna, the Duchess of Mecklenburg, the most important patron of Trediakovskii and his work in the early 1730s, and Prince Beloselskii. On the other, it explores a trove of unpublished letters written by a variety of French, German, and Dutch ladies to Prince A.B. Kurakin during his stay in Europe in the 1720s: these letters present the prince as fully integrated in the social life of Western European aristocracy and, most importantly, as thoroughly versed in the contemporary rules and conventions of gallant intercourse. Kurakin, as is well known, was another patron of Trediakovskii, and it was thanks to him that the poet has been introduced to Ekaterina. Taken together, these documents not only provide context for Trediakovskii’s translation and its popularity, but also allow us to reconstruct the amorous practices of the post-Petrine Russian elite.

This paper is dedicated to the education system in the Soviet Union and school-related issues in the context of the “Great Purge of 1937” - a very symbolic time in the Soviet history that became the climax of the Soviet political repressions but also - a time of the successful completion of the second five-year plan of economic development and other great soviet achievements. The intended research is aimed to clarify how all these events were reflected within the school communities, in what way they influenced the belief system, civil position and general trends in behavior of the senior students, who in the coming years would be bound to become the backbone of a war generation. At the same time, it was the period of the most important decisions within the country’s education system aimed at its participation in society consolidation and thorough preparations of the young generation to clash against some very strong foes. This work reveals the practical consequences of the campaign against a “pedological perversion” within Soviet education system and the process of the teacher selection which stimulated school’s development to be in line with the given ideological directions.

The Europeanization of legal scholarship and legal education facilitates the emergence of comparative legal science as a promising new tool to discover similarities and differences between two or more jurisdictions and their past development. Yet, the specific methodology of such studies is still not clear. Some legal historians hold that comparative legal history does not or should not have its own methodology other than that of comparative law. Others warn against imposing a contemporary agenda and toolbox on legal history. The author of this article aims to clarify this debate by examining the prospect of applying one of the most popular methods of comparative law – the functional method – to the domain of legal history. On the basis of several examples from the European legal past he claims that examining the functions (the social purpose) of legal norms can help legal historians in three ways: first, to determine the objects of comparison and the sources of analysis, despite the variety of verbal shortcuts (the initial stage of research); second, to analyse legal norms from the perspective of solving social problems in the past – to study the 'law in action'; and third, to arrange the results of the research according to meaningful criteria at the final stage.

Comparative legal history is a fashionable new discipline which aims at a better understanding of the law's past by comparing similarities and differences of legal phenomena in two or more jurisdictions beyond the limits of national legal histories. Despite its popularity in Europe, it still lacks comparative projects that cover both Western and Eastern areas of the Continent, not least because the methodology of such comparison requires proper consideration and cannot be simply copied from comparative law or national legal histories. The present article evaluates the applicability of the dominant method of today's comparative law (the functional one) in the domain of the general contract law of the first codifications in the major jurisdictions of Continental Europe (Austria, France, Germany, Russia) during the 'long 19th century'. This subject matter is chosen by way of example as a 'legal cross-road' of legal concepts and models, more susceptible to changes, innovations, borrowings, and closely linked to social needs. In the main part of the article, it is argued that the adaptation of the functional method to the needs of comparison in legal history becomes plausible due to at least two factors. First, comparatists mitigated the rigid assumptions of the 'classical' functionalism of the 20th century (rejecting its privileged status and purely functional perception of law, irrebuttable presumptions of similarity and unification of compared legal systems etc.). Second, many legal historians, like the drafters of the first civil codes in Western and Eastern Europe, also believe that law is more than minimally connected to social problems and manifests itself primarily through its actual application. On the basis of such premises, the author of this article discusses potential benefits and limitations of researching general contract law in the selected jurisdictions with the functional method. At the preparatory (descriptive) stage, it can be useful to assure comparability of contract law in the selected civil codes, to identify omissions in the codified general rules on contracts, and to arrange legal provisions around practically relevant issues. At the stage of analysis, functionalism can be coupled with teleological interpretation of legal norms to enable us to understand better the link between the application of the legal rules, their legal purposes, and the practical social problems serving as tertium comparationis for all the compared jurisdictions. A sketch of such an analysis in the final part of the article allows to conclude that a research with the help of the functional method narrows our perception of law as a cultural phenomenon and breaks the inner doctrinal logic, but in return, it offers a starting point for a much needed dialogue of legal historians with a wider legal community.

The collapse of the USSR and structural changes in society gave rise to family and marriage transformations in Russia and other post-Soviet countries of Eastern Europe. Estonia is among the examples of rapid marriage transformation and the spread of cohabitations and extramarital births. At the same time, throughout the post-war era Estonia accepted Russian migrants. Studies show that the adaptation of the Russian population in Estonia proceeds slowly, and that patterns of matrimonial behavior among the Russian migrants and their descendants in Estonia are closer to patterns of ethnic Russians in Russia. In this study, the Generation and Gender Survey data for Russia (2004) and Estonia (2005) were used to analyze the prevalence of first and second childbirths in first and higher-order unions and the determinants of fertility after repartnering among the Russian and Estonian populations in Estonia and Russians in Russia. We consider the impact of partners’ age and parenthood status at the beginning of higher-order unions, as well as social variables (e.g. education, type of settlement and ethnicity).  The results show that the contribution of higher-order unions to total fertility increased significantly in all studied populations. However, first childbirths in high-order unions are rare among both the Russians and the Estonians, second births after repartnering are more widespread among Russians in Russia. Divorces and separations significantly increase the interval between first and second births, but there is no difference in time interval duration between the three considered population groups. The determinants of childbearing among Russians in Russia and Estonia in higher-order unions are very similar: they are the age of women, the type of habitation and the initial nature of the union. The effect of the parenthood status and marriage cohort is individual for each population group: in Russia, if a male partner has no child(ren) from previous relationships, the couple has a higher chance of having a mutual child. The probability of childbearing after repartnering significantly increased in 1990-1999 in Estonia.

The topics explored in this essay include Ivan Andreevich Krylov’s reading practices in his young and mature years, reconstructed on the basis of various sources. The paper recontextualizes Krylov’s unique reading trajectory not always comprehensible for his contemporaries. It also highlights numerous links, not accentuated earlier, between Krylov’s strategies — in life, writing and publishing — and his service as a librarian in the Imperial Public Library of St. Petersburg. The analysis of several situations showing Krylov as a brilliant reciter of his own texts who smartly deals with expectations and obsessions of his audience allows to affirms the existence a special connection, of his personality, considerably mythologized due to his own efforts, the literary genre of fable and the status of classical writer obtained by Krylov by 1830. Sub specie of this connection the transformations of the circle of Krylov’s readers are represented, as well as different ways of perception of his fables by children.

The problem basically unanswered is whether the Soviet historiography has ever developed an all-embracing concept of antiquity as a slave-owning society and whether it produced a general scheme of this period at all. Two attempts to create a uniform Marxist concept of “slave-owning antiquity” in 1930-1940s (undertaken by the scholars of GAIMK and by A.V. Mishulin with his followers) failed; a real generalization of ancient history was not achieved before 1980s, when it was perceived (not quite in the manner of Marxist method) as the evolution of rural communities rather than slavery.