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.

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 combines the approaches of history and criminology to study parricide and non-fatal violence against parents from across traditional period and geographical boundaries, encompassing research on Asia as well as Europe and North America. Parricide and non-fatal violence against parents are rare but significant forms of family violence. They have been perceived to be a recent phenomenon related to bad parenting and child abuse often in poorer socioeconomic circumstances – yet they have a history, which provides insights for modern-day explanation and intervention. Research on violence against parents has concentrated on child abuse and mental illness but, by using a rich array of primary and secondary documents, such as court cases, criminal statistics, newspaper reports, and legal and medical literature, this book shows that violence against parents is also shaped by conflicts related to parental authority, the rise of children’s rights, conflicting economic and emotional expectations, and other sociohistorical factors.

In 1921 Austria became the first interwar European country to experience hyperinflation. The League of Nations, among other actors, stepped in to help reconstruct the economy, but a decade later Austria’s largest bank, Credit-Anstalt, collapsed. Historians have correlated these events with the banking and currency crisis that destabilized interwar Europe—a narrative that relies on the claim that Austria and the global monetary system were the victims of financial interlopers. In this corrective history, Nathan Marcus deemphasizes the destructive role of external players in Austria’s reconstruction and points to the greater impact of domestic malfeasance and predatory speculation on the nation’s financial and political decline.

Consulting sources ranging from diplomatic dossiers to bank statements and financial analyses, Marcus shows how the League of Nations’ efforts to curb Austrian hyperinflation in 1922 were politically constrained. The League left Austria in 1926 but foreign interests intervened in 1931 to contain the fallout from the Credit-Anstalt collapse. Not until later, when problems in the German and British economies became acute, did Austrians and speculators exploit the country’s currency and compromise its value. Although some statesmen and historians have pinned Austria’s—and the world’s—economic implosion on financial colonialism, Marcus’s research offers a more accurate appraisal of early multilateral financial supervision and intervention.

Illuminating new facets of the interwar political economy, Austrian Reconstruction and the Collapse of Global Finance reckons with the true consequences of international involvement in the Austrian economy during a key decade of renewal and crisis.

The present thesis is a study of Athanasios of Alexandria‘s thought and writings—predominantly pastoral—in the context of ecclesial, ascetic, and liturgical developments in fourth-century Christian communities in Egypt. I explore Athanasios‘ Festal Letters, individual correspondence (primarily the Letter to Markellinos), and the Life of Antony from the perspective of the bishop‘s concerns about the contemporaneous diversity of devotional and liturgical practices of praying and hymn-singing. The central argument of this thesis is that Athanasios had a coherent vision of the ideal Christian prayer and hymnody. For Athanasios, 'orthodox‘ Christians—lay and ascetics, educated devotees and common believers alike—should derive their practices of devotion and liturgy from the Bible—the Psalter and the Biblical odes—rather than other sources. Athanasios‘ programme of devotional and liturgical orthopraxy centred around the Biblical ideal is part of his much broader ecclesiological project of bringing unity to the division-riddled church of Egypt. The bishop conceives of the Scripturally-cued shared patters of praying and hymn-singing as one of the means to unify scattered Christian communities. Although his pastoral programme of a uniform Biblical devotion is not as self-consciously and combatively formulated as e.g. his polemic against the 'Arians‘ or Meletians, it surfaces across his writings with consistency. Targeted against the diversity of modes of prayer and hymn-singing practiced across a variety of doctrinally, ecclesially, and socially different communities, Athanasios‘ pastoral programme of devotional orthopraxy reflected the trends towards unification in the bishop-led Christian culture of late antiquity and contributed to their further strengthening.

Big History is a new field that has been gaining ground rapidly around the world. It deals with the universe's grand narrative of 13.8 billion years and attempts to provide a connection between our past, present and future. Appearing in three volumes, this is the first international anthology of Big History. The  first volume, Our Place in the Universe: An Introduction to Big History, provides an overview and notes trends in Big History today. The second volume, Education and Understanding: Big History around the World, considers humanity's search for meaning and expression.

The third volume, The Ways that Big History Works: Cosmos, Life, Society and our Future, reflects on how Big History helps us understand the nature of our existence and consider the pathways to our future. This volume will challenge and excite your vision of your own life as well as focus on the new discoveries happening around us. Together with the authors, who come from all the inhabited continents of our planet, you will embark on a fascinating trip into the depths of time and space, and—we hope—will join us in coming to an understanding of our origins and our future. 

The publication is the latest in the African Studies in Russia series of compilations and contains full articles and annotations of the most important – from the point of view of editors – works of Russian Africanists over a certain period. The authors work at the Institute for African Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS). The present issue covers the years 2014 to 2016 and consists of two sections. The first section presents conceptual articles on Africa published in authoritative journals. The second section offers synopses of books by Russian authors on economics, cultural anthropology, social and political development, gender studies, and international relations of African countries. The main objective of the triennial series of compilations is to introduce new findings of Russian Africanists to interested foreign scholars who do not speak Russian.

Highly innovative and theoretically incisive, Two Lenins is the first book-length anthropological examination of how social reality can be organized around different yet concurrent ideas of time. Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov grounds his theoretical exploration in fascinating ethnographic and historical material on two Lenins: the first is the famed Soviet leader of the early twentieth century, and the second is a Siberian Evenki hunter—nicknamed “Lenin”—who experienced the collapse of the USSR during the 1990s. Through their intertwined stories, Ssorin-Chaikov unveils new dimensions of ethnographic reality by multiplying our notions of time.

Ssorin-Chaikov examines Vladimir Lenin at the height of his reign in 1920s Soviet Russia, focusing especially on his relationship with American businessperson Armand Hammer. He casts this scene against the second Lenin—the hunter on the far end of the country, in Siberia, at the far end of the century, the 1990s, who is tasked with improvising postsocialism in the economic and political uncertainties of post-Soviet transition. Moving from Moscow to Siberia to New York, and traveling form the 1920s to the 1960s to the 1990’s, Ssorin-Chaikov takes readers beyond a simple global history or cross-temporal comparison, instead using these two figures to enact an ethnographic study of the very category of time that we use to bridge different historical contexts.

 

 

What time is it? Many. In this incandescent book, we learn that time is always composite, a relation among things, made of conflicting simultaneities, teleologies, and eternities. Working through the timely and untimely worlds of 1920s Soviet Russia and 1990s indigenous Siberia, Ssorin-Chaikov delivers a dazzling brief for how exchanges among market, gift, and state time have made modernity itself.

— Stefan Helmreich (MIT), author of Sounding the limits of life: Essays in the anthropology of biology and beyond

Two Lenins is an ethnographically rich work on comparative exchange and temporalities within and across the hidden interfaces between the realm of bureaucracy (represented by Lenin, the Soviet leader) and the life of the people in remote regions (a Siberian hunter named Lenin). This is an exemplary work towards the development of a comparative anthropology of the formal sectors in their historical and local agency.

— Jane Guyer (Johns Hopkins University), author of Legacies, logics, logistics: Essays in the anthropology of the platform economy

Ssorin-Chaikov brilliantly updates an old set of anthropological topics, the multiplicity of social times and the moral economy of exchange. Scaling down from the chronotopes of high Soviet modernity to the everyday lives of Evenki hunters (and their ethnographers) in its aftermath, he provides a nuanced perspective on the politics of time, the nature of Modernity, and the deep imbrication of gift, credit and theft in the making and unmaking of socialist worlds.

— Stephan Palmié (University of Chicago), author of The cooking of history: How not to study Afro-Cuban religion

This is a highly original book. It presents an engaging plot made of three different events, places and times: the first takes place in Siberia, by the mid-1990s, and involves a director of a collective farm and an Evenki man, curiously nicknamed Lenin. The second is the story of the encounter of the true Lenin with an American businessman in the early 1920s. The last is the author’s own fieldwork. These three events are skillfully woven together, and discussed within a strong theoretical argument. A great achievement.

— Carlos Fausto (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro), author of Warfare and shamanism in Amazonia

This collective monograph is a study of one of the most important problems in today’s world: state and nation building in multi-ethnic and multi-national societies. It presents a comparative analysis of the experience of state and nation building in Russia and South Africa, two countries, which recently and practically simultaneously went through a period of abrupt social, political and economic transition. In both this transition resulted in an upsurge of ethno-national and racial tensions. Such an analysis is of great interest to all those who study similar problems both at an academic and practical levels.

 

This book is the first study that analyses bilateral commercial treaties as instruments of peace and trade comparatively and over time. The work focuses on commercial treaties as an index of the challenges of eighteenth-century European politics, shaping a new understanding of these challenges and of how they were confronted at the time in theory and diplomatic practice. From the middle of the seventeenth century to the time of the Napoleonic wars bilateral commercial treaties were concluded not only at the end of large-scale wars accompanying peace settlements, but also independently with the aim to prevent or contain war through controlling the balance of trade between states. Commercial treaties were also understood by major political writers across Europe as practical manifestations of the wider intellectual problem of devising a system of interstate trade in which the principles of reciprocity and equality were combined to produce sustainable peaceful economic development.

Nikolai Charushin's memoirs of his experience as a member of the revolutionary populist movement in Russia are familiar to historians, but A Generation of Revolutionaries provides a broader and more engaging look at the lives and relationships beyond these memoirs. It shows how, after years of incarceration, Charushin and friends thrived in Siberian exile, raising children and contributing to science and culture there. While Charushin's memoirs end with his return to european Russia, this sweeping biography follows this group as they engaged in Russia fin de siecle society, took part in the Russian revolution, and struggled in its aftermath. A Generation of Revolutionaries provides vibrant and deeply personal insights into the turbulent history of Russia from the Great Reforms to the era of Stalinism and beyond. In doing so, it tells the story of a remarkable circle of friends whose lives balanced love, family, and career with exile, imprisonment, and revolution.

The book prepared for the purposes of The 2nd World Congress on Logic and Religion, organised by the Institute of Philosophy of the University of Warsaw. 

The book contains the final version of the abstracts submitted by majority of speakers.

This article presents a review of a conference Debt: 5000 Years and Counting that took place at the University of Birmingham (Birmingham Research Institute for History and Cultures) on June 8–9, 2018. The conference was based on the recent influential book Debt: The First Five Thousand Years by David Graeber. The conference gathered representatives from all social sciences to discuss the understudied topic of history and ideology of debt. The review contains references to several papers discussed at the conference to give an idea of the approaches used in one way or another in many of the papers. The papers discussed in the review were devoted to the boost of micro-credit in Latvia after the 2008 global financial crisis, the ideology of trapped equity that led to this crisis, the attempt to resolve confusion between the view that debts are to be repaid and the view that profiting from lending is evil, credit in the Islamic Caliphate in the 7th to 10th centuries, the long durée of public debt since the Middle Ages to Early Modern times, and the royal debts in England in the middle of the 16th century. The conference was interesting not only because of the importance of the subject but also because of the originality of the format which helped make the event less hierarchical and less dominated by the academic elite. In addition, one of the aims of the conference was to combine academic and activist approaches. Among the participants there were a few activists. This experience is also described in the review.

Amid the extensive literature on the Stalinist dictatorship during the 1930s and the postwar period, the gap in scholarship on the Soviet leadership during the war years is particularly noticeable. This article fills that gap. Stalin’s war cabinet is characterised according to several criteria: first, the formal status of members of the leadership; second, the system of delegating authority; third, the functioning and competency of the structure of collective leadership; and fourth, Stalin’s loyalty to his top associates and the degree of their political immunity. The article demonstrates that the war years saw a relative ‘normalisation’ of the dictatorship. These important changes influenced the subsequent development of the Stalinist system of power and the evolution of Soviet authoritarianism after the dictator’s death.

This article is an analysis of metadata from 955 closed trials of Soviet people accused of being collaborators during World War II. The trials reveal Soviet officials' understandings of who was capable of collaboration and what kinds of acts were collaboration. At the same time, the aggregate data from trials demonstrates that the accusations were grounded in the realities of the war and were not falsifications like the investigations of the Great Terror in the 1930s.

The article discusses the influence of Soviet ideological constructs on the policy programmes of the African National Congress (ANC), South Africa’s ruling party. The most important of such constructs was the notion of the National Democratic Revolution (NDR) which, since 1969, has constituted the core of the ANC’s programmes and ideology. Since 1994, when the ANC came to power, the NDR has been the goal and the basis of the policy of this party. The article analyses the history of the NDR concept, its contents and goals and explores its long route from the Soviet Union to South Africa.

In recent years the environmental humanities have evolved in new and exciting directions, due largely to the democratisation of information and new digital communication technologies. Social media channels, smartphones and the ease of online communication have also helped to advertise the ideas of emerging scholars in the growing field of environmental history. Inspired by the success of other academic societies in supporting their early-career members, such as the Network in Canadian History and Environment (NiCHE), the American Society for Environmental History (ASEH) Grad Caucus and New Scholars network, and the Tensions of Europe Network (ToE), the Board of the European Society for Environmental History (ESEH) decided to initiate its own Next Generation Action Team (NEXTGATe), which was established in June 2018. The first tenure of NEXTGATe (2018–2019) consists of six scholars: Roberta Biasillo (Rachel Carson Center, Germany); Elena Kochetkova (Higher School of Economics, St Petersburg, Russia); Tayler Meredith (University of Birmingham, UK); Simone Schleper (Leibniz Institute of European History, Germany) and Erin Spinney (University of Oxford, UK). NEXTGATe’s coordinator is Viktor Pál (Higher School of Economics, Russia), who serves as Assistant to the Board. 

Although a general task of social science is to measure and predict change, international relations (IR) paradigms and theories have been unable to keep up with the rapid pace and destabilizing effects of change in international politics. When addressing Russia, IR’s “change problem” becomes clearer: the world’s largest country is treated as an object struggling to adjust to changes rather than a protagonist introducing them into the system. Yet, twice within the last quarter century, Russia has acted as a catalyst for changes in international politics that few saw coming and which confounded IR paradigms. The Soviet leadership’s decision to withdraw from the Cold War standoff and dismantle its empire in Eastern Europe was one of the most surprising events of the twentieth century. Russia’s interventions in Ukraine, Syria, and the 2016 US presidential elections have similarly caught most observers by surprise. IR theories have struggled to account for these actions and have not been able to integrate Soviet/Russian behavior into their larger understanding of change in international politics. Our underlying premise is to treat Russia (in both its Soviet and present-day incarnations) seriously as an agent of transformational change in international politics. Most theories that deal with transformational change focus on the effects of larger social and economic forces. However, change is seldom a smooth, linear process. Larger global forces may be operating, but individual agents catalyze changes produced by these deeper historical forces. What is needed to understand Russian foreign policy decision making is an evolutionary theory of change that is able to integrate historical (root) causes of change with proximate and contingent ones. In both cases examined in this paper, larger historical root causes push the international system toward change, but Russia’s status aspirations and status dissatisfaction have been the proximate causes catalyzing change.

The paper analyzes the contemporary situation in the history of interrelations between the cities and the water streams and puts the papers, published in the special issue of the Water History Journal into the propoer conceptual frame.

Mikhail Pavlovets surveys one of the hottest issues of Russian life today: school education. His article “School Canon as a Battlefield: A Font with no Child” develops a topic introduced by the author in the NZ pages, that of the formation and transformation of the “school literary canon”. The first of these pieces, “School Canon as a Battlefield: Historical Reenactment” (2016. № 2(106)), talked of the historical development of the school canon since the middle of the 19th century. The second one focuses on recent events: the way the school literature curriculum – and with it, the list of compulsory books – has turned (not at all unexpectedly) into a mirror of the “protective-conservative line” currently taken by the Russian authorities.

This paper is focused on the economic works of the Soviet machine learning pioneer Emmanuel Braverman who published, during the 1970s, a series of papers introducing disequilibrium fixed-price models of the Soviet economy. This highly original theory, developed independently from the Western analyses of disequilibria, proposed some rationing mechanisms capable, under some conditions, to bring a system to the state of equilibrium. However, in a fixed-price economy equilibria are not necessarily optimal or effective, therefore specific observational and analytical procedures aiming at defining the states of the systems’ elements and interventions bringing a system to a better state, had to be invented. This analytical framework was interpreted by Braverman as a “qualitative system of control” of the Soviet economy as a sort of a third-way solution between neoclassical models of spontaneous coordination of autonomous agents and theories of optimal planning. As I argue in this paper, this innovative approach, very different from the styles of reasoning in mathematical economics of his time, was grounded in his work on pattern recognition and was informed by a cybernetic vision of control as information processing and communication in complex systems. This work can be considered as a precursor of the contemporary approaches to algorithmic economic governance.

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.

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 affirm the existence of a special connection - between his personality, considerably mythologized due to his own efforts, the fable as a literary genre 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.

The movement of the so-called philosophiсal physicians was formed at the Prussian University of Halle in the middle of the 18th century as a medico-philosophical approach outside of the structure of university genres both in medicine and in philosophy. Being professional physicians, they read metaphysical texts relating to the status of body, to the living or to the relations between soul and body and introduce the elements of new philosophical discourses such as Wolffianism into the field of medical theory outside of academic discourse. In this context, the objective of the paper is to identify and describe the argumentative features of E. A. Nicolai’s “An essay on the beauty of human body”. Nikolai builds his reasoning more geometrico, referring directly to the works of Christian Wolff and Alexander Baumgarten. However, Nicolai’s use of Wolffian terminology and form of reasoning is systematically ambiguous; for instance, he comes to anthropological conclusions which seem quite consistent with a theory of physical influx totally denied by Wolff discussing the soul-body problem. Moreover, the style of many passages of “An essay on the beauty of human body”, saturated with philosophical terminology, is obviously ironic. Departing from Nikolai’s medico-philosophical approach, I lead to a reflection on the configuration of the disciplinary textual spaces and on the borders of academic medicine in the social dimension of the 18th century.

The paper discusses constructing various versions of Muslim identity by politically opposite actors, the government and Muslim activists, involved in ‘placing’ Muslims in modernizing late-imperial Russia. The problem is approached through the extreme case of M.-B. Hadjetlaché (ca 1870-1929), a baptized Jew reinventing himself as Circassian and Muslim and as such working as a State agent against Muslim opposition and vice versa. His strategies of deceit and reasons to trust him in different cultural and political milieus reveal reciprocal and often shared Orientalisms of the ‘regimes of truth’ defining the processes under study.

This study aims to present that A.V. Mikhailov’s historical method is systematic. Special attention is given to historical-anthropological dimension of the A. V. Mikhailov's theory of baroque. The article shows that Mikhailov's historical anthropology should be viewed as a constitutive part of his “Kulturwissenschaft”, opposed both to the literary science and to the positivist historiography by means of commitment to historize human sciences (the notion of «new historiсism»).

Studies of interconnections between social, technological, economic and cultural forces belong to the trend of modernisation studies in the Russian Empire in the second half of the 19th century. Modernisation implies establishment and growth of institutions and infrastructures that are examined as a set of communication practices between different actors – the state, experts and various offices. This research is a historical study of interconnections between technologies and society. It is focused on the significance of materiality (namely natural oil resources) in these processes.

In the course of the Middle Ages, the Copts experienced a variety of drastic changes in the attitude of Muslim rulers towards them, from confidence to disgrace. The latter included not only the increasingly rigorous tax policies, but also social and domestic constraints, which can be surely defined as religious discrimination. Though the Copts managed to regain the trust of the authorities by their profound skills in administrative and courtly functions and, of course, compromise in terms of religion, which allowed them to enjoy high ranks and other benefits of their proximity to the Egyptian court. This, in its turn, made them an outstanding social group and can be considered “positive discrimination” in contrast with the definitely negative discrimination based on confessional conditions. The question of the balance between positive and negative discrimination as an instrument of regulating intrastate social cooperation can be crucial for understanding the specific of these relationships during the described period. So, the main goal of this work is to trace historical precedents which can be considered either negative or positive discrimination, and their suppositional influence on the Copts’ turning into a minority.

This paper focuses on transformations of gender attitudes in a set of Arab societies covered by the Arab Barometer. We analyze age and cohort differences in thirteen countries using generalized additive modeling (GAM). We argue that stagnation or even retrogression of gender attitudes in some societies may be caused in part by an ideological shift of the 1970s–1980s, from largely secular and socialist-oriented national movements of the 1950s–1960s to the more conservative period often associated with the rise of political Islam. On the other hand, the youngest cohorts in those societies that have always promoted conservative gender attitudes are getting somewhat more liberal, although they remain slightly less gender egalitarian compared to other societies. We test our assumptions using the example of Yemen that was divided into two parts between 1967 and 1990: The South supported by the Soviet Union and the North influenced by Saudi Arabia and the Western bloc. We trace the support for gender egalitarianism across generations in the two parts of Yemen and show that the secular socialist ideology made a profound imprint on the attitudes of a whole generation and made those who were in their twenties back in the 1960s more egalitarian than the young people these days. The same is true for the other countries of the region that had some socialist experience.

The working paper analysed the infrastructure of the Russian-Swedish border from a transcultural perspective. The history of the border was split into three periods following major changes in political border regimes. The first period covered the history of the border between Sweden and the Novgorod Republic after its formal delimitation in 1323. The annexation of the Novgorod Lands to the Grand Duchy of Moscow in 1478 marked the beginning of the second period. The third period, which is discussed in detail, covered the history of border infrastructure between the transition of large part of the Novgorod Lands to Sweden in 1617 and 1700. Departing from the debate whether the border was a line or a zone and overcoming state-centred approaches, the working paper demonstrated that the existence of several parallel border regimes during different periods enabled the simultaneous existence of the border as a line and a zone pertaining to different social interactions and subject to manipulation by authorities. The consolidation of the border did not follow the Treaty of Stolbovo (1617), but owed to local demands and an accidental event of an epidemic in 1629–1630. Following the temporary consolidation of the border, the state established firm border control used for duty collection.

A series of plague outbreaks that occurred in the Kazakh steppe between 1899 and 1910s, with several thousand people dead, made the region a focus of medical, state and public attention of the period. The epidemics initiated a wide-scale research on the ways of life and conditions of living of the local population, resulting in the largest amount of texts ever written on the Kazakh steppe. The region turned into an arena of cutting-edge medical research performed by the leading bacteriologists of Russia, whose findings played an important role in the development of plague epidemiology worldwide. This paper concentrates on both the scope of the measures undertaken by Russian medical administration to control the disease, and the range of explanatory theories produced by the doctors in their attempts to identify the cause of the recurrent epidemic and provide the means of its eradication.

Water has always been an important resource for Central Asian states and peoples. Different rulers at different times used water, and access to it, as an instrument of political and even military influence. When the Russian Empire expanded into Central Asia, seizing substantial parts of three central Asian khanates (Bukhara, Khiva and Khoqand) and established its own protectorate over these states, its also found that water was one of the most effective means to control the rulers and peoples of Central Asia. The use of water and irrigation policy as an instrument of rule was effectively used by the Russian Empire in its relations with the Central Asian khanates and this has already been the subject of investigation. This paper analyses the legal regulation of water use and the irrigation policy of the Russian Empire in Turkestan in order to influence the Bukharan Emirate and the Khivan Khanate during the epoch of the Russian protectorate (1870s–1910s). The paper demonstrates how the internal “water law” was a starting point in Russian policy towards Bukhara and Khiva, and shows that each subsequent stage was closely connected to the evolution of the “water law” in the Russian Turkestan. The sources are official documents (including legal acts) of the Russian Empire, correspondence of Russian and Central Asian statesmen, memoirs of contemporaries and the notes of Russian visitors to khanates (diplomats, engineers, etc.) who participated in the realization of Russian water policy in Bukhara and Khiva and could estimate its effectiveness.

This paper examines Soviet development projects in African countries and Cuba during the Cold War. We analyze types of projects led by Soviet specialists and engage into the question of how Soviets, both leadership and engineers, viewed their roles and impacts as well as challenges on African territory and Cuba. In so doing, this paper analyzes differences and similarities in Soviet penetration to lands with newly established governments in Africa and Cuba.

The working paper offers a new interpretation of the intellectual and political genealogies of the Far Eastern Republic (1920–1922). The working paper demonstrates that the Far Eastern Republic was not a new project, as a similar formation was first proclaimed on April 10, 1918, in Khabarovsk as an autonomy within the Soviet Russian Republic under the name of the Soviet Republic of the Far East in line with the resolutions of the Third All-Russian Congress of Soviets. The Soviet Republic of the Far East was a product of regionalist and nationalist discourses and built on the ideas of decentralization which were widely discussed since the First Russian Revolution (1905–1907) by liberals and socialists alike and began to be implemented after the February Revolution (1917). The Chernobyl-born and Chicago-educated Bolshevik Aleksandr Mikhailovich Krasnoshchekov, who led the establishment of the Far Eastern Republic in 1920, also headed the Soviet Republic of the Far East in 1918. Its government, the Far Eastern Council of People’s Commissars (Dal’sovnarkom) defied the authority of the Central Executive Committee of Siberian Soviets (Tsentrosibir’) and disobeyed the Moscow central government implementing thereby a regionalist approach to Soviet federalism. Krasnoshchekov’s project relied on the ideas of the Populists (Narodniki), the Socialist Revolutionaries, and the Social Democrats which were tested in the Russian Far East during the First Russian Revolution and the interpretations of Far Eastern history and interests which were put forward by regional deputies in the Russian State Duma. The formation of the first Far Eastern republic was facilitated by the activities of Deputy of the Fourth Duma and Commissar of the Provisional Government for the Far East Aleksandr Nikolaevich Rusanov who led the formation of a regional organization uniting democratically elected zemstvo and municipal self-government bodies.

The article is dedicated to the history of Christian Alania in the 10th century, including its Christianization in 914 and creation of the archbishopric. Narrative, sigillographic, epigraphic and archaeological sources are used. As result the history of Christian Alania in the 1st half of the 10th century is reconstructed.