Home – Home – Jornals – Humanitarian sciences in Siberia 2020 number

The article objective is to reveal the features of functioning agriculture in Siberia during the Great Patriotic War to give more objective assessment of the Soviet agrarian system’s effectiveness. The study task is to reconstruct dynamics of changes in main branches of agricultural production and different categories of farms. Authors analyze trends in agricultural production development in Siberia at different stages of the War, changes in its material, technical and personnel bases, evolution of the state tax policy, dynamics of the basic branches of agriculture (plant growing and animal husbandry), functioning of collective farms, state farms and private household plots of population, contribution of Siberian agriculture to the victory, the War’s impact on agriculture. For the first time in historiography, authors provide data on the size of the sown area of main agricultural crops, and the gross grain yield in farms of all categories in Siberia for each year of the War. Data on the total number of livestock in regional collective and state farms and various categories of personal subsidiary farms are introduced into scientific use. The study established that 1943 was the most difficult year for Siberian agriculture. Reducing the labor and technical resources reached a critical level. Due to the inadequate mechanization of work, simplified methods of land cultivation were used everywhere. Drought, poor quality of seeds, poor maintenance of crops led to the yield’s sharp drop. The situation aggravated in the livestock breeding in collective and state farms due to livestock’s surrender to the state in exchange for seeds and at the expense of grain procurement, lack of forage due to crops’ poor harvest. In 1944 and 1945 situation in the Siberian agriculture remained difficult despite some signs of stabilization. The War brought agrarian sector of the regional economy into a deep crisis manifested in a significant decline of quantitative and qualitative indicators.

NKVD abbreviation is associated in Russia’s citizen consciousness, as a rule, with repression and GULAG. However, this department had various competences and duties at different times. For example, NKVD carried out an enormous volume of construction works to erect defensive lines both east and west of Moscow at the beginning of the Great Patriotic War. This report introduces into scientific discourse the information about forming a special group in late summer 1941 by NKVD with the responsibility to realize sabotage operations against fascists in the capital in case the Red Army left Moscow. In May 1942 about a half of participants of this group was sent to the Far East, where they were engaged during 8 months in creating partisan units and bases in a case of war against Japan. The report provides evidences that the group successfully fulfilled the tasks assigned to it.

The article is devoted to evacuated scientists who worked in the USSR Academy of Sciences, universities, institutes and technical schools. Based on archival and other materials, the paper shows the research activities of employees of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union and higher educational institutions during the Second World War. It describes the scientific and social activities of some outstanding scientists who were evacuated to Alma-Ata and Borovoe resort in the context of their fundamental research. The study methodological basis includes scientific principles of historism and consistency based on reliable sources. The activity of evacuated scientists is studied in the historical context of the war period. The consistency principle is aimed to consider the investigated object related to the Soviet society of the 1940s, including the USSR Academy of Sciences, the Kazakh SSR, party and Soviet bodies, educational and scientific institutions. Scientific results are predetermined by the need to rethink the Soviet experience of evacuating scientific and educational resources from the USSR European part to Kazakhstan taking into account new documents. This should be a step to study facts and events of the history of the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945.

The article examines features of representing the Soviet war-time village in art cinematography. The Soviet village image under war conditions was determined by the propaganda tasks related to mobilizing collective farmers for labor exploits or fighting the enemy, on the one hand, and, by the myth-making purpose, on the other hand. The latter had the great symbolic load as the countryside and village community were associated with the concepts of “victim”, “people” and “homeland”. Based on the analysis of the war-time filmography, the author identified four main variants of the Soviet village figurative presentation: 1) a symbol of the Motherland; 2) a space for the people’s struggle against the enemy; 3) a sacrifice symbol; 4) a “fortress of defense”. The constructed images were determined by the tasks of propaganda and performed mobilization functions. They all were further developed in the cinema of the second half of the XX century, but had a different fate. In particular, the village image as the Mother land symbol was used in cinematography until the 1980s, gradually losing its semantic content under the completion of urbanization. The theme of the countryside as a “fortress of defense” was relevant for historical science, but not for cinematography. The most popular, both politically and cinematically, turned out to be the images of the occupied village as a victim and as a space of the people’s war, which became necessary elements of the heroic military myth. It has been supported by the politics of memory, and in the modern Russian society it gets a new life in remythologizing military history wave. The heroic myth of the war created by propaganda in the second half of the XX century experienced certain transformations related to the war phenomenon’s reflection in public consciousness during “ottepel’” and “perestroika” periods. However, rational rethinking affected to a greater extent science and art, but not political institutions, that is, remained unfinished. As a result, the war propaganda myth was transformed into the propaganda historical myth of the Great Victory, the main instrument of the memory politics.

The article is devoted to studying the national historiography of the problem of workers’ labor incentives in the USSR during the Great Patriotic War in the context of ideological conflict between opponents and supporters of the “Soviet project” in the late XX - early XXI centuries. It shows the evolution of the methodological and source base, research subject field devoted to the desired topic analysis within framework of perestroika, post-Soviet and modern stages. The “totalitarian” approach prevailed in scientific and historical literature at the background of Marxist-Leninist canons’ collapse and the archival “revolution” in the late 1980s - late 1990s. Based on sources of “critical” content, totalitarian historians sought to prove the leading role of non-economic coercion in stimulating military industry workers. At the same time, a “historical and psychological” direction was born, which tried to show the moral and motivational basis of this process. In the late 1990s-2010s, in connection with the end of the “totalitarian” school’s domination, studying incentives of workers in the rear developed along the lines of three-factor, “totalitarian” and historical-psychological approaches. Using a wide range of different sources, the followers of the concept of three factors of the labor motivation analyzed the phenomenon of “turning to compulsion” in the sphere of relations between the state-employer and employees at the war’s eve and during the war. Totalitarian historians continued to investigate the coercive strategies and practices of stimulating the personnel of Soviet enterprises. Historians-mentalists reconstructed the cultural and psychological roots of nationwide labor selfless devotion in 1941-1945, which caused the high value of moral incentives to industrial activity. The author concludes that in the late 1980s-2010s Russian historiography has gone from a heroic and epic interpretation of the labor feat of the victorious Soviet people to forming three explanatory models of the stimulating labor process in the wartime. The “totalitarian” and three-factor approaches correspond to the discourse of “anti-Sovietism”, while the historical and psychological approach corresponds to “neo-Sovietism”. The analysis of historiographical situation confirms the author’s thesis about the historical memory sense split in modern Russia.

Indigenous peoples of Siberia subjugated by the Russian state were obliged to pay a tribute numbered in the sable pelts almost universally in the XVII - first half of the XVIII century. But at the early XVII century the sable population decreased crucially due to hunting, therefore the authorities were forced to accept as payment both less valuable furs and other goods. The article analyzes the amount of yasak payments and their characteristics depending on the ethnicity of the yasak people (those who pay tribute) in different administrative subdivisions (uyezd, volost, ulus) based on materials of the Second Kamchatka expedition of 1733-1743 (registries of local administration offices compiled according to G. Müller’s questionnaires, his travelogue and descriptions of Siberian lands, monographs by S. P. Krasheninnikov and G. V. Steller). The author argues that the number, as well as the hierarchy of prices for sables and other furs, were not regulated by the central government, and were determined by the local authorities at their discretion. The highest payments were set for the poorest and most defenseless peoples (Khanty, Selkups, Kets, etc.). The peoples whose representatives had been serving the Russian state like the Cossacks, as well as the peoples who lived near the southern borders in Transbaikalia (Buryats, Tungus) paid less. The distinctions in the cost of fur of different types in various administrative subdivisions, or depending on particular ethnic groups or even clans, were rather significant. This study confirms that sable and other furs became a minor part of the collected yasak tribute due to the fur animals’ extermination in the second quarter of the XVIII century in many areas. Instead of this, the authorities were forced to accept money in ever growing amounts. Moreover, in the westernmost territories, the local authorities completely replaced sable pelts with cash. The materials of the Second Kamchatka expedition allow the author to state that corrupt practices while collecting yasak were widespread in areas located far away from the provincial centers.

The article focuses on the historical concept and contribution to the Decembrist movement studies by G. P. Shatrova, a prominent researcher of the mid-XX century. Special attention is paid to the role of memoir sources in the scientific analysis carried out by the scholar, to the significance of memoir heritage in elaborating the Decembrism concept by Shatrova, and effect of ego-documents on the development of such important trends of the Decembrist studies as: the Decembrists in Siberia, the Decembrism’s evolution during the period after the uprising, Decembrist biographies, as well as the history of United Slavs Society. Shatrova proved the enlightening character of this secret society exactly based on the memoirs. She laid down the main scientific approaches to the analysis of Decembrist memoirs as the most important basis to study Decembrists. Shatrova’s works are imbued with references to memoirs, making the story of the Decembrist movement personalized, lively and compelling as presented by the author. The principle of working with sources and their selection by G.P. Shatrova lies in the fact that it is the memoir heritage that is taken as a basis, and the materials of office work and investigation play a subordinate role. When characterising the Siberian period of Decembrism, memoirs become nearly the main source for the scholar, and this approach to the source base brings its positive results. Shatrova successfully investigated the problem of the Decembrist uprising’s defeat and its lessons on the basis of memoirs. Shatrova used the Decembrists’ memoirs especially wide in her historical and biographical works. In her study on D. I. Zavalishin, Shatrova brilliantly solved the difficult task of criticizing the Decembrist’s memoirs, which made it possible to involve them in the research. Shatrova clarified the important issue of the “Notes” authorship by I .I. Gorbachevsky. This article traces Shatrova’s vision of memoirs, her interpretation and application of them to crate the ideas. It shows Shatrova’s method of using the Decembrists’ memoir heritage as the priority source to characterize the Decembrist ideology and movement as a whole, and to create a scientific biography.

The “commune” concept is one of the main definitions of the ideological doctrine of the victorious party. It became the basis to create special theoretical constructs in the various spheres of the society. In the agricultural sector, this is the “agricultural commune”. The article objective is to consider the stages of forming, developing and correcting this concept in ideological texts of 1917-1919. The research methodological base is the theory of social construction, which makes it possible to consider the theoretical justification, program settings and the socialist idea’s embodiment in the early Soviet Russia as an integral process. When studying the topic, it has been revealed that the “agricultural commune” concept was formulated and began to be introduced in the village in the early 1918 as a result of using the theory and experience of Utopian socialists and Russian socialists. The created collectives were considered as the practical base to disseminate socialist ideas in the countryside, acquaint peasants with large collective production, and form a “new” man of labor. Before 1918, V.I. Lenin reacted negatively to the possibility of realizing the commune’s idea in practice at the initial stage of the proletarian dictatorship era, but by the spring of 1918 had changed his mind for tactical reasons. The same year, in the party and government circles a discussion started on the appropriateness of the financial and administrative support by the state based on the current dynamics of their activity. Several options were proposed for the concept existence within the general line of the Party. As a result, by the late 1919, the agricultural communes partially lost the status of privileged collectives. Meanwhile, the authorities’ interest in continuing this experiment preserved the inclusion of the studied construct with a special position in the general ideological field and allowed developing the initiative “from below” until the early 1930s.

The article is devoted to the so-called inspection of rural party organizations carried out in Siberia in January 1926 - March 1927. The research source base is shorthand reports of party forums, statistical digests, documents found in two central and one regional archives, as well as materials of the regional periodical press. The main goals, objectives, mechanisms and results of the campaign are identified based on these sources. The paper shows that it was carried out according to the directives of the Central Committee and the Central Control Committee of All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), but at the same time it had its own specific features. Thus, the inspection of rural party organizations took place in two stages in Siberia: from January to May 1926, and from November 1926 to March 1927. In just ten months of the campaign, 180 of the 2103 rural cells in Siberia were checked, which amounted 8.6 %. 345 of 2,250 tested members and candidates of the AUCP(b) were expelled from the party, at least 60 left it voluntarily or were recognized as mechanically dropped out. But in the Siberian party organization scales, this decline was insignificant and did not affect the dynamics of its number. The campaign’s main task wasn’t to exclude politically weak and decayed Communists from the AUCP(b), but above all to assess the overall performance of the cells and issue specific recommendations to eliminate the identified shortcomings. The author concludes that the inspection of rural party organizations in Siberia, contrasting the party purges of previous years aimed to combat the internal party opposition, had primarily the task to normalize the cells’ activity. By itself, checking 8.6 % of all rural cells in Siberia could not significantly improve the state of the Siberian party organization, but revealing the most common problems was an essential condition to form an adequate idea of the positions of the ruling party in the countryside for the regional leadership, and, consequently, a prerequisite for its further strengthening.

The paper analyzes the advertising consumer goods in the first half of the 1950s aimed to reconstruct the presented standards of material consumption and identify regional specifics of the advertising discourse. Posters and nine periodicals published in various regions of the RSFSR (magazines, central, regional, and municipal newspapers) are research sources. To achieve the study objective, the authors used qualitative analysis methods that allow to identify the features of text and visual presentation of advertising stories. It reveals that activation of the advertising discourse in the early 1950s, manifested in the expansion of the range of advertised products and active appeal to marketing rhetoric, was synchronous with the price reductions carried out in the country. Advertising implemented an informative function (introducing new products to citizens), stimulated consumer purchasing activity (through positive visualization of material consumption images, appealing to marketing rhetoric), as well as performed a propaganda task declaring the idea that the difficulties of the post-war recovery were left behind. Advertising in the first half of the 1950s formed a fairly high standard of material consumption focused on the urban society representatives. The increasing volume and changing emphasis in Soviet consumer advertising in the early 1950s (synchronous with the ongoing decline in retail prices) indicates significant economic results of the recovery period, and the adjustment of social regulation mechanisms and the weakening of the “mobilization” regime in the country. In the first half of the 1950s there was demarginalization of consumption sectors, indicated by the course to form the Soviet consumers, without limiting their inquiries to the narrow range of things necessary for life, but seeking to satisfy a wide variety of needs.

The article substantiates the need for a historical study of the rural cinema audience in the context of regularities of development of the communication environment. Cinema and the film distribution system are viewed as a space of dialogue between the government and society in the USSR. Based on documents regulating the film industry’s development and sociological studies of cinema rural audiences, it is shown that the cinema’s ideological function was gradually lost, while the commercial component in film distribution strengthened in the 1950-1980s. Rural projection facilities, unable to provide theatrical distribution’s income comparable to city cinemas, nevertheless made a significant contribution to replenish the local Soviets’ budgets. Technological modernization of the film screening, necessary due to growing competition with television, was not possible in rural areas due to the inapplicability of the large cinema model. Therefore, until the late Soviet era, the main criterion of the rural cinema network development was the extensive growth in the number of film projectors. This approach did not make it possible to ensure the proper quality of film screening, and caused a reduction in the rural film audience since the 1970s. The specificity of rural cinema consumption was determined by significant spectator activity under the information hunger conditions, the impossibility of choosing a film, and less exacting requirements of the quality of films and film screenings. Nevertheless, as the communication environment expanded, the rural audience increasingly gravitated toward urban cinema standards. As in the city, the average age of cinema visitors was steadily declining, and school children remained the most active cinema visitors. With the abolition of ideological restrictions and further commercialization of film distribution under “perestroika” conditions, the inefficient rural film screening system lost hopelessly in the competition with television and video gaining popularity, and was doomed to disappear.

Modern publishing practice in Russia demonstrates a previously unknown phenomenon, which is rapid development of publishing activities in mid-sized cities and towns, even in rural settlements outside the regional administrative centers, especially since the 2010s. This process is noticeable in Siberia and the Far East. Local centers create their own publishing houses and issue books. The author identifies five options of developing book publishing in Russia’s eastern regions, and five models to distribute publishing forces between the main city and other settlements in the region, accordingly. The first model is typical of industrially developed regions with a large concentration of publishing resources in the main city (Novosibirsk, Omsk Areas). Here, the peripheral publishing network is weak due to its low demand. The second model prevails in the majority of national republics in the Asian part of the country, and so-called depressed Far Eastern regions (Amur and Magadan Oblasts, Transbaikalian and Kamchatka Krais). Simply, these regions lack both material and intellectual resources for publishing in local settlements. The third model of the peripheral publishing network development is represented by a number of regions, where besides the regional “capital’s” publishing power, there are quite strong publishing complexes in another city of the region (Kemerovo Area, Krasnoyarsk and Khabarovsk Territories). The fourth model, that appeared in the Tomsk, Irkutsk Areas, Primorsk and Altai Territories should be considered as the most harmonious one. It provides an even distribution of publishing enterprises, corresponding to the needs, across all settlements in the region. The fifth model is implemented in the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug - Yugra, where the capital regional city has a poor publishing potential, and the main part of printed products is produced by two other cities, which are the Ob North oil “capitals”. Forming a cluster of book publishing enterprises in small settlements of the modern province fully corresponds to the prospect of Russia’s development along the democratic path, building the civil society foundations.

Modern regional book publishing has been formed under the influence of trends of monopoly, monocentrism, and concentration of publishing business in the central part of the country. It has specific features and develops in a specific thematic niche. Hundreds of publishing organizations form the infrastructure of regional book publishing, but only dozens of them are stable and relatively successful. The most regional publishing houses are small and medium-sized, low-budget, unprofitable and kulturträger without their own printing facilities and promotion channels. The main problems of regional book publishing are a shortage of financial, printing and human resources, unstable state support, undeveloped local book distribution networks, inaccessibility of large capital bookselling networks, lack of quality content, and low prestige of regional publishers in comparison with metropolitan ones, low purchasing ability of local readers. Regional publishing houses have almost no chance of achieving self-sufficiency under such conditions. The main sources of funding publishing houses are state and private foundations, sponsorship, crowdfunding, and book publishing at the authors’ expense. All these types of support are focused primarily on non-commercial publishing projects, which constitute the overwhelming majority in the regions. The range of regional publishing projects that can potentially be profitable is not so wide: first of all, it includes various local lore literature, as well as literature of a narrow audience orientation, in particular, educational and scientific books. The distribution of published books is also a significant problem. One of the most relevant solutions to this problem is active involvement of publishers in the modern communication space, formed both in the Internet environment and off-line, and constant direct contact with potential readers.

The phenomenon of the academic museum is studied using the typologization approach. 8 types of academic museums were distinguished by their prevalent function: museum as a Universum model, museum as a form of research organization, museum as a scientific institute’s depository, museum as an exhibit (variants: exposition based on the collections of the institute’s other departments; museum as a visit-center), museum as a means to adapt scientists to new conditions, museum as a mean to form a cultural environment, museum as realization of a self-identity function, museum as a means of fund-raising. The listed variants appeared in different periods of the Academy of Sciences’ history, but remain relevant nowadays. The tendency of museum function harmonization was noted in the first decades of the XXI century, that was facilitated by their wide interaction with other museum institutions.

The main problems in the preservation аnd research of heritage in development of museums are presented. They were discussed at the IV All-Russian (with international participation) scientific and practical conference “Modern trends in the development of museums and museum studies” held in Novosibirsk in October 2020. In the communication space of the conference the work with cultural heritage is reviewed as a modern trend in the development of Russian and world museology.

The All-Russian Conference dedicated to the 90th anniversary of Academician N.N. Pokrovsky (Institute of History SB RAS, November 9-11, 2020) became a communication platform, where the intensive intellectual work was launched to find solutions for searching scientific issues to study the Russian history, book culture, and Church history. It established and updated scientific contacts, proposed ideas for interdisciplinary projects, exchanged results of recent research, revealed new trends in the humanities’ development. More than a hundred historians, philologists, art historians, theologians from 16 cities took part in the conference.