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The imperial governance system as a historical and legal problem has not lost its relevance for more than a century. The imperial problematics’ actualization at the early XXI century is determined by changes in the principles of relations between the center and regions. The researchers have moved away from the Lenin’s definition of periphery, and replaced it by the concept of “frontier”. In the modern historical science, the theory of “frontier” is widely used to study a vast array of problems in the history of foreign policy (“new frontier” factor), urban history etc. Two last decades in the Siberian historiography were marked by intensifying research interest in the special administrative bodies of the eastern regions in the XIX century - the First and the Second Siberian Committees, as well as the Siberian Railway Committee. Two main political institutions of the imperial Russia were investigated in details - the institution of Governor-Generals and the institution of Governors. The Russian Empire was an administrative space with complex structure from the governance viewpoint. The imperial regionalism is the subject of modern Siberian historians’ research. The focus shifted from the center to periphery in works published in the XXI century; the problems of ruling the Empire are viewed through the prism of the peoples inhabiting its margins, and influenced by the active integration into a single imperial administrative space. Each ethnic group inhabiting the empire had its own specific mentality largely determined by its relationship with the government. The issue of stability of the empire’s physical structure was related to the administrative system’s formation and evolution, which attracted the attention of modern historians. Recent scientific works are free from ideological clichés, which promotes active international cooperation among historians within the framework of joint projects. Appreciating the diversity of the imperial center’s models of the marginal regions’ management, many modern researchers see regionalism as a driver of the empire’s stability in the past and the guarantee of Russia’s prosperity in the future.

The modern sociocultural anthropology pays great attention to visual historical sources, in particular, photographs, drawings, films. The discipline of visual anthropology justifiably has taken a significant place in the West European scientific circulation, but in Russia, this field has been developed only fragmentarily. At the same time, visual anthropological practices in Russia have a rich history associated with expeditions to develop Siberian and Far Eastern regions, expressed in cumulating a corpus of historical photographs in regional archives that deserve researchers’ attention and introduction into scientific circulation. The materials created directly by professional researchers are of particular importance in this heritage. This article is devoted to one of them, so-called “Dybowski’s album”, a collection of unique photographs on the history of Kamchatka. The research work of Benedict Dybowski, an encyclopedic scholar who devoted a considerable period of his activity to studying and popularizing materials on Siberian and Kamchatka anthropology and zoogeography, is a poorly-studied page in the history of scientific development of the mentioned territories. The scientific novelty of the research consists in operating archival sources and focusing on the analysis of photographic heritage of the researcher and his colleagues. Many of these sources are introduced into scientific circulation for the first time. B. Dybowski’s photos, made in the classical manner without any special artistic delights, represent a special “look” of a foreign researcher on various life aspects of Kamchatka and adjacent areas. Studying “Dybowski’s album” as the explorer’s travel pages supplemented with materials from his biographers, allows merging photographic images gradually into a single collective image, which is an informative visual source of information on the history of the Far Eastern frontier at the turn of the XIX and XX centuries.

The article analyzes publications on the history of Siberian butter industry and dairy cooperation published from the early XX century to the modern period. The main historiographical heritage of pre-revolutionary period are monographs containing the description of socio-economic and natural-climatic conditions and factors favourable for the establishment and development of the butter industry and dairy cooperative societies in Siberia. The author introduces into scientific circulation actual materials reflecting the opposition of cooperators to private enterprises, activity of foreign capital, role of state institutions in supporting butter production, interaction of peasant communities and cooperation. Some works which appeared in the early 1920s partly inherited the tradition of systematic scientific analysis of the pre-revolutionary stage, but in the late 1920s the Soviet doctrine prevailed, which ignored the achievements of pre-revolutionary butter cooperation in Siberia. The most significant works devoted to NEP period shifted the focus of research to technical and technological aspects of the butter industry’s modernization. Only in the 1970s-90s, researchers again drew attention to the phenomenal development of the butter production in the pre-revolutionary period. In 2000s, historians showed greater interest in identifying patterns and features of development of Siberian butter manufacturing in the early XX century. The period of the First World War, studied superficially in Soviet historiography, attracted special attention of researchers. Publications on NEP period are few. They revealed the dynamics of butter production in the context of major manufacturers’ competitive struggle, causes of slow recovery and declining butter industry and dairy cooperative societies. A considerable drawback of modern historiography is the lack of works in which butter manufacturing and cooperation are examined over a long historical period in conjunction with a complex of domestic and international factors. A comprehensive, multivariant analysis of the development of butter cooperation, from its inception in the late XIX century and elimination in the early 1930s to the present time has not been carried out from the economic history stand-point.

The paper considers the VI International Congress of Historical Sciences held in August 1928 in Oslo, the Norwegian capital. The official Soviet delegation took part in the work of Congress for the first time. It pays attention to such a historical source as ego-documents containing personal impressions of the Soviet participants of the Congress about their sojourn in Norway. The article introduces into scientific circulation, analyzes and publishes full body of private messages consisting of six letters from Oslo by V.V. Adoratsky. This epistolary corps contains nowhere else published detailed information about the Congress activity, presented reports, lobby discussions, meetings with foreign colleagues, communication with them, as well as the everyday life during the trip to Oslo, starting with getting visas, solving difficult transportation problems, and to depicting the vivid impressions of the cultural program of the Congress, local sights, solemn banquets and feasts, habitation in a student hostel.

The question of the possibility of the Soviet society’s development on the “new economic policy” base in the historical literature of the early XXI century received mainly a negative answer: according to many authors’ views, there was no alternative to Stalin’s modernization in the USSR in the late 1920s. For example, the thesis of “delivering as one” of delegates of the XVI AUCP(b) conference remains until now, 90 years later. The paper objective is to reveal whether the postulate of the integrity of the XVI conference delegates is true; to find out who were participants of fierce internal party struggle during a year (April 1928 - April 1929); is there really no need to talk about any form of discussion at the conference, and as a consequence - how fair it is to claim that there were no alternatives to Stalin’s mobilization model? The article deals with the events of the XVI AUCP(b) conference in the general political context of the first months of 1929. Among delegates of the XVI AUCP(b) conference the most significant was the group of Communists who opposed the most unbridled initiatives of the Stalinists. The New Economic Policy (NEP)’s positive results developed some potential of social immunity from left-wing radical actions, and violence in the lives of some Soviet functionaries. It was those managers who tried to talk about acute social and economic problems; to preserve at least a “truncated” NEP. This group’s position was weakened by long-standing hatred of private capital, especially kulaks, but without applying the preventive repressive measures. Contrasting to four previous Plenums of the AUCP(b) Central Committee in spring 1928 - spring 1929, which divided the party elite into supporters of preserving a multi-layered economy (“resisting”), conformists, and those who actively supported Stalin’s line, the majority of delegates of the XVI AUCP(b) conference demonstrated both resistance to the course of continuous collectivization, and emphasized conformism, regularly voting for resolutions condemning the “right”.

The article is devoted to the analysis of the food situation in the Ural village in the mid-1930s. This problem has not been sufficiently covered in the historical literature. Materials from a number of publications do not give a clear idea about the famine that broke out in the Ural countryside. It is connected with the fact that historians use data on food consumption according to sources in annual average (publications by S.A. Nefedov and other authors). The article objective is to determine the food situation in the Ural countryside in the summer of 1936 - summer of 1937. Numerous historical sources show that the rural population’s is nutrition turned out to be critical due to the crop failure caused by drought. Already in the late autumn of 1936, the famine broke out and gained strength; there was no timely state aid, seed and food loans began entering the collective farms only before spring field work. The nutrition situation of the collective farmers is analyzed based on the energy index - the ratio of calories received and expended by collective farmers and their family members. The sources’ condition made it possible to compare the peasant nutrition in the 1926/27 fiscal year and collective farmers in 1936, which showed decreasing nutrition energy index of the Ural rural residents for this period. The average data for 1936 do not permit reporting about the famine which broke out in the village, they only indicate the unfavorable food situation. Calculations on main products (crops, flour, meat, milk, butter, potatoes and vegetables, etc.) were based on monthly budget surveys of collective farmer families in Sverdlovsk Region in the administrative boundaries of 1936-1937. The compiled graphs vividly reflect a rapid drop in the collective farmers’ consumption in the spring-summer of 1937, which allow reconstructing the hunger stages of rural population in the region. The article concludes that famine hit not only rural, but urban areas in the region as well. The authorities once again, as in 1932-1933, failed to cope with supplying food to population. The help rendered to the starving persons turned out to be untimely and insufficient.

The USSR Government Purchasing Commission (GPC) in the USA of the National Commissariat of Foreign Trade (NCFT) was responsible for booking, dispatching and transport cargo to the Soviet Union. The article studies the cargos’ destiny after their arrival to the USSR using a concrete historical analysis of GPC archival documents. Continuous delays in delivery of cargoes took place at the early supplying period, especially in the Northern route due to heavy losses in route. Cargo arrival supervision was carried on by NCFT Engineer Department. Reports of NCFT authorized persons, ports and customs statements give characteristics of freight condition, nomenclature, quality, as well as plans of their distribution and re-distribution due to losses. Reports describing cargoes used such terms as “crashed during the enemy raid”, “damaged with storm”, “got wet with water”. Cargoes were sorted according to departments including the group “undistributed cargoes” and “cargoes of ‘Lenvneshtrans‘ which included goods for besieged Leningrad. Starting with the17th convoy, freight documents processing was made in points of ship unloading, and delays in paperwork stopped. Documents on PQ-17 convoy disclose specific “fraud” of institutions with one of the best Lend lease goods - canned meat. National Commissar of Foreign Trade A.I. Mikoyan confirmed proposals to allot meat products first of all to Leningrad (2000 tons), and to the nearest fronts. He himself suppressed the departments’ abuses, a case to sell in Arkhangelsk soap sent as a gift from the Red Cross, ordered to pass that soap to fronts. Customs acts revealed various kinds of violations, among which the most widespread was “cargo didn’t arrive”; they fixed shortcomings in freight wrapping and arrangement while loading the ship, facts of theft, especially of foods from damaged containers. According to GPC data, over the whole period of Lend Lease shipping in total 2743 ships were sent to the Soviet Union (17 349 thousand ton cargo). Losses of ships as a result of enemy activities or the other reasons for this period comprised 2, 6 %, or 76 ships with 455 thousand ton cargo.

Defining the role of glosses in the progression of author’s narrative is one of the significant and complex problems of textological analysis of a medieval work. To put forward approaches to its solution on the example of analysis of the writings of Metropolitan Daniel and Maximus the Greek is the goal of this article. It has been established that in the chapters of Sobornik of Metropolitan Daniel, glosses, as a rule, accompany extracts and quotations from patristic literature which are assembled according to themes and compiled probably at Daniel’s order by the scribes of Joseph-Volokolamsk Monastery who worked in the metropolitan workshop. By their nature, the glosses of Sobornik represent (according to hermeneutic classification) literal interpretations. The early writings of Maximus the Greek (before the year 1525) contain single glosses of a lexicographic character. We find many scholia in Joasaph and Khludov collected works of Maximus the Greek (the end of the 40s - the beginning of the 50s of the 16th century), preserved in the lists with writer’s autographs. This article presents the results of analysis of The Word of Praise to Peter and Paul, which contains the largest number of glosses and marginalia. They allowed us to conclude that the glossing was not a one-act process which took place simultaneously with collected works compilation. The type of marginal notes made by the author and scribes in the margins of manuscripts makes it possible to see how Maximus the Greek edited his own texts which already contained glosses and marginalia. Disclosure of symbolism and figurative narrative, deepening of the meaning of the text, its commentation should be recognized as the main functions of glosses in the text of The Word of Praise to Peter and Paul. Glosses in the writings of Maximus the Greek, unlike the Words of Metropolitan Daniel, are diverse in their purpose. They are a tool which reveals the meaning of the text. They serve as a means of communication of the author (editor) and the reader, providing reception of the work. Glosses often had the character of allegorical and moral interpretations (allegorical and tropological type). The article attempts to identify the signs which distinguish the author’s glosses from scholia compiled by scribes. The numerous glosses observed in the manuscripts of the 16th century reflect the dynamics of development of the book culture of Muscovite Rus’ and level of understanding and perception of the text.

The community of church writers from the Patriarch’s surrounding occupied a specific place among the variety of groups of intellectual influence in the second half of the XVII century. The paper focuses on the most bright leaders of the community: Afanasy Kholmogorsky, Ignatius (Rimsky-Korsakov), Euphymius Chudovsky and Mitrofan Voronezhsky. The author uses manuscripts dated from the late XVII - early XVIII centuries as research materials, which are personal essays of the abovementioned writers or their contemporaries. The article objective is to identify and examine interpersonal communications of the community intellectual leaders based on the scientific analysis of these sources; receive data on the ways of their artistic communication and relations, ideas and values that were born within such communication. Almost all mentioned leaders of the community had a significant ideological and spiritual influence both on their surrounding and large groups of population due to their church activities. The main tool of their intellectual influence was spoken and written word. Studying their works shows that they reflected not only the specificities of literary works and interpersonal contacts, but also their active participation in the social life and debates on topical issues of the the epoch; demonstrated their role in preserving and maintaining the Orthodox standards and values as a traditional basis of the Russian national life and culture. Interpersonal communications of intellectual leaders of the church writers’ community close to the Patriarch were of constant and intense character. There were different ways to contact, including direct communication during face-to-face meetings; letters; author texts and books exchange (new translations of patristic and works by late Byzantine church writers); and cooperative bookish works. Within these artistic communications the writers exchanged their ideas, mastered their literary skills, polemic skills, developed their ideology, values and socio-cultural milestones influencing formation of the community identity.

The paper discusses two cases related to the loyalty of the Old Believers from the Vyg enclave to the Tsar’s regime. The first one was reflected in rhetoric panegyric texts and other writings of the 1720s created by AndreyDenisov, an ideological leader of the Old Believer “second generation”. The second one was elaborated in the works by his follower Andrey Borisov (about the 1780s). This article presents new interpretive approaches aimed to understand the Vyg enclave members’ viewpoint which gradually led to their adoption of the prayer ritual for the Russian emperor. Such position was not dominant among the Old Believers and became a cause of acute inter-confessional disputes and conflicts. Based on the analysis of handwritten texts that expressed the idea of justifying the Tsar’s autocracy, this paper studies the Vyg’s ideologues’ argumentation determined by the type of rhetorical book culture that was formed in Vyg at the early XVIII century. The author shows that Andrei Borisov, an Old Believer’s writer of the Enlightenment age, developed a particularly sophisticated argumentation. He substantiated the Old Believers’ right to call the tsar “pious” and “right-believing” relying on linguistic, philosophical, rhetorical arguments and the authority of Andrey Denisov, the famous predecessor. The loyal position of the Vyg enclave leaders conflicted with the central thesis of the eschatological doctrine which determined the Old Believer movement’s entire logic, but at the same time re-habilitated the New Testament’s postulate, according to which there was no authority except for God. The paper analyzes new manuscript sources including rhetoric and polemical writings created by Andrey Denisov and Andrey Borisov. These unique materials make it possible to suggest that idealizing the Tsar’s autocracy was not just the result of the forced compromise, but conditioned by the Old Believers’ utopian ideas about the state. Such belief was successively connected with the Russian concept of the Third Rome and the messianism, which were paradoxically combined in the Old Believer consciousness with the discourses on “last times”.

The study is devoted to forming the collection of authoritative fragments of the XVII century texts, which were selected by the Old Belief advocates as arguments to defend their right of being the official Church opposition. R.O. Krammey very precisely designated this collection as the “sacred texts’ canon”. It is composed of quotations of the Holy Scriptures and the patristic tradition, the works of church writers found in manuscripts and old printed books. The article shows the first period of research carried out by the church reform opponents in order to find authoritative texts indicating that Patriarch Nikon had violated the Russian Church tradition. This search started after the first steps of introducing innovations in liturgics and rite. The Solovets monastery monks largely determined the used texts’ range and provided the highest level of book culture in arranging and ordering extracts from them. This fact determined the selected quotes credibility both for the common readers, and the opponents. Appealing to Gerasim Firsov’s treatise “On a sign of the cross with two fingers...” and the collection compiled by Geronty allowed the author to illustrate how the Solovets monks were able not only to find the necessary quotes indicating the illegality of innovations, but to declare the original texts as “sacred” as well. This stage initiated the formation of “sacred texts’ canon”, which was inherited by the Old Believers’ next generations. The article shows how and why the “sacred texts’ canon” included publications of the Moscow Printing House in the XVII century, whose contents should be characterized as the creative heritage of Kiev Metropolia adapted for the Russian reader. Based on selected fragments of manuscripts and old-printed books, Old Believers offered solutions to the discussed questions of the rite and liturgical practice.

The article analyzes a polemic Siberian writing of the late 1890s by an unknown Belokrinitsky (“Austrian”) writer, monk Augustine, which is kept in the Centre of Books and Manuscripts Storage. It reveals sources of the epistle, reasons for its creation, mainly due to the struggle for spiritual and intellectual leadership among the Old Believer communities. The author investigates main issues and directions of sharp discussions between the two Old Believers’ branches (“Chasovennye” and the “Austrians”) with the originally common historical fate. The research restores reasons for their ideological discrepancies at a particular poorly-studied Old Believer center, which were determined both by changes in government policy related to Old Belief throughout the XIX century, and by the Beglopopovtsy’s own evolution. The paper shows that the studied topics are the next stage in perennial disputes periodically bursting with one of the Old Believers’ main opponents - the Belokrinitsky hierarchy.

The relevance of a subject is determined by huge importance of military libraries in training and upbringing of the Russian army officers, whose education level influences the military power, the country’s defense capability. The article expounds the main problems of creation of Officer Artillery School, its books’ acquisition and functioning; analyzes the regulatory framework of their activity for the first time in historiography. The paper objective is to characterize functioning of Officer Artillery School libraries. One of them was for students, another - for the officer corps. The author applies comparative, chronological, bibliographic, source study methods. The study provides better understanding of history of the artillery department libraries, and military library science of the Russian army in general. It shows the attitude of the Ministry of Defense to libraries of military schools, which can be characterized as understanding their importance for officers’ training, as well as active regulating their creation, acquisition and functioning. Based on “The instruction for officers of variable structure of the Officer Artillery School of firing” issued in 1909, 1910, 1912 the paper reveals features of using books and periodicals from the educational library by the changing staff of the school. Studying these libraries is difficult due to the fact that researchers can’t find their catalogs, neither printed, nor hand-written. The research results reveal some sources of library collections acquisition (free editions of the Ministry of Defense and Military and Topographical Department of the General Staff and purchasing books abroad), and a large number of publications on the artillery prepared by the school teachers and officials and sent to these libraries and other libraries of the Ministry of Defense according to their catalogs’ analysis.

The multi-party system, which came to Russia in the early 1990s, was accompanied by the appearance of publishing production of newly created parties, social movements and associations. Not only the parliamentary parties but so-called marginal ones and political organizations produced their books, magazines, bulletins, newspapers, leaflets and posters in large numbers. The article attempts to assess the scope of publishing activity of each political structures in the late XX - early XXI centuries in the territory of Siberia and the Far East (“United Russia”, the Communist party, the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), marginal parties of the 1990s), as well as social movements of centrist, left and national-patriotic orientations. The author represents the repertoire of newspapers, books and brochures, analyzes their content in the context of evolution of social life of the country. The study shows that the parties forming the basis of democratic movement in Russia in the early 1990s had lost the initiative in the political press by 1996. Newspapers of Union of Right Forces, party “Yabloko”, and others were published in East Russia only during the election campaigns, although having huge circulations. On the contrary, the main opponents of the current government - the Communists - created a stable network of their newspapers in the regions covering all regions of Siberia and the Far East with party publications in the early XXI century. The publishing practice of LDPR was extremely unstable: it had developed significantly in a number of areas by the end of the XX century, but declined then. Nowadays the main printed products of the Liberal Democrats are produced in million copies by the central headquarters in Moscow, and sent to regions. The specificity of the 1990s - early XXI century is editing in the regions of a large number of newspapers, magazines, brochures, which propagandize reactionary, nationalistic, chauvinistic ideology, including anti-Semitism and neo-Nazism. The article analyzes this phenomenon. The author concludes that extremist and conservative trends in the publishing products of a number of social forces were associated with the crisis in the first decade of post-Soviet history. In general, the emergence and development of a multi-party press and book publishing are an element of forming the civil society in Russia.

The article regards the organizational activity tendencies of the academic museums using the example of the Museum of the Buryat Scientific Centre SB RAS. It has significantly expanded its subject and accumulated a certain experience in the museum activity practice and theory in its 50-year history. The analysis of archive documents created in the museum functioning process, and the directives of the Museum Council of RAS and SB RAS, allows discovering vectors of the museum development driven with internal and external factors. The paper reveals modern problems of the museum activity, most of which are related to the legal difficulties in determining the academic museum status and its interaction with the Museum Fund of the Russian Federation.