№ 4 (2023)

The theory of the revolution, which reflects the world view and way of thinking of the prominent figure of the revolutionary movement, is difficult to assess unequivocally. Scattered across various texts, both scholarly and propagandistic, it had evolved markedly over time and appeared contradictory in some parts, which was ultimately due to the different factors under which it was formed. In all his work Pyotr Kropotkin defended the ideals of anarchism and socialism, seeing in the revolution the way to their fulfillment. The naturalistic view inherent in him, a natural scientist, conditioned his attitude towards revolution as an evolutionary process in the context of world-historical progressive development. In an evolutionary spirit, he considered the possibilities of mitigating social antagonisms, channeling their destructive energy in a positive direction. His humanism was an essential factor in his work, encouraging him to view all social phenomena through the prism of the realisation and development of moral principles. While resenting the suffering of the poor, Kropotkin reflected on the moral cost of retaliating against society's upper classes and the danger of mutual embitterment. Defending the dominant role of revolutions in history, Kropotkin admitted reform as an alternative in specific cases. The subject of revolution was to be the people, namely the workers and the oppressed social classes. The task of the progressive representatives of the educated sections of society was to point out the goals of the revolutionary struggle, to assist them in such an expression of their will. Justifying the spontaneous forms of mass protest, the thinker believed the enlightenment of the people to be necessary for the transformation of the destructive element embodied in the revolutionary acts into constructive creativity of the masses. Proclaiming socialist arrangement of society as the final goal of the revolution, Kropotkin allowed for a gradual transition to it. In the historical process, along with the interruptibility of progress, he noted the continuity of positive forms of sociality that had emerged in history, including those existing in bourgeois society.

The author analyses the treatise “Suma de Geografia” (1519) by the Spanish jurist, traveller, conquistador, and scholar Martín Fernández de Enciso. He focuses on Fernández de Enciso's biography prior to writing the book, especially his years in America, in particular his role in the creation and early application of the Requerimiento. He looks at the context and purpose of writing the treatise, its structure and meaning. “Suma de Geografia” reflects the state of knowledge of the new seas and lands discovered by Europeans during the Age of Discoveries, while going far beyond it, as the first attempt in the history of geographical thought to integrate a generalised knowledge of the New World into a comprehensive picture of the world. There are differences in the descriptions of the New and Old World: while the American part, based on personal experience and eyewitness accounts, contains information unique for such an early date, Old World descriptions are much more traditional, generally having antique and medieval prototypes, but are also of great interest because, being quite popular, they allow a better understanding of the inner world of a sixteenth-century man.

In this article the author focuses on the first English compendium of information about the Americas and voyages in the North Atlantic, published by Richard Hakluyt in 1582. Unlike his major work, “The Principall Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation”, Hakluyt's earlier publishing project received little attention in academic literature. His “Diverse Voyages” has been interpreted by modern scholars as part of a propaganda campaign in favour of the establishment of English colonial settlements in North America. However, an analysis of all the texts selected by Hakluyt, the way they are organised, the author's comments and references to sources, shows that at that stage his main interest was the quest for the Northwest Passage to China and India. This global political project was designed to generate commercial profit and strengthen England's position in competition with the leading maritime empires of the era, Spain and Portugal. By presenting to the world the totality of English achievements in the exploration of the northern hemisphere, Hakluyt's first publication was instrumental in promoting English maritime expansion and in shaping English national identity. At the same time, Hakluyt's compendium, the first English adaptation of this particular form of scientific literature, marked an important stage in the development of geographical knowledge of the world, particularly of the New World, and in the evolution of the compiler's own views on polar voyages across the Atlantic.

The author examines the influence of the discovery of the New World on the historical consciousness of the French humanists of the sixteenth century. A study of the Latin treatises of Jean Fernel (1548), Jean Bodin (1566), the French works of Louis Le Roy (1567, 1575) and Michel de Montaigne (1580, 1588), allows one to challenge the idea established in historiography, according to which the discovery of the New World, the appreciation of new achievements, such as the compass, artillery, and printing, led humanists not only to recognise the superiority of their time over the antiquity, but also to the “idea of progress”. Indeed, French humanists, referring to modern geographical discoveries and unprecedented inventions, proclaimed the superiority of their era over antiquity in knowledge of the world, declared that their contemporaries had transcended antique experience, learned the whole of the globe and transformed the world into a single space of exchange and trade for the first time. Critical position of De Montaigne, who disputed the exhaustive nature of modern geographical discoveries and the innovative nature of a number of inventions, did not spread, because it did not meet the needs of humanists in high historical self-esteem. It was this need that often led intellectuals of the epoch to compare “our age” and antiquity and to be convinced of the superiority of modernity. However, the idea of the superiority of the modern era never developed into the “idea of progress” in the culture of French humanism. For humanists, this complex conception, according to which humanity moved successively towards a desirable image of the future, was both superfluous (in terms of satisfying the need for a high historical self-esteem) and inconsistent with their world view. The conditions for the birth of the idea of progress emerged only in the eighteenth century, within the culture of the Enlightenment. The humanists' understanding of history was based on the idea of cycles, the idea that human civilization, once established, would periodically reach its peak and then inevitably decline. This was borne out by all the historical experience available to humanists.

In the 1570s and 1580s, the Italian jurist Guido Panciroli (1523–1599) compiled a collection of brief notes on ancient and new inventions. In one of them, the author put forward the thesis that ancient thinkers knew nothing about the existence of the Americas. In an effort to prove the primacy of the Europeans in the discovery of the New World, Heinrich Salmuth, compiler of the commentary on Panchiroli's notes, made a number of arguments for and against this position. Thus in Panciroli's treatise “New Discoveries, or Two Books of Venerable Things”, first published in 1602, together with a commentary by Salmuth and initiated by the latter, the question of the possibility of discovering America before Columbus was raised. The purpose of this paper is to analyse grounds on which the time and essence of the discovery of the New World were perceived. To this end, the author examines the logic of the two authors' reasoning about European primacy and the differences in the justifications for this claim. On the basis of the research undertaken, it can be concluded that this work revisits not only the corpus of ancient worldviews, but also the exploratory, creative potential of Europeans to discover a new continent. In their work they try to find an explanation for the break with the preceding tradition and thus find themselves at the origins of the dispute over the significance of ancient knowledge for the new European science.

Almost two months after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, the leader of the insurgents Generalissimo Francisco Franco proclaimed himself the head of Spain on 1 October 1936 and immediately began to deal with its internal structure and with establishing ties with other countries to gain recognition by ideologically close states as Italy and Germany, but also by Western democracies, in particular the United States. To this end, Juan Francisco de Cardenas, an experienced diplomat, went to New York at the end of August 1936. In 1937–1938, he tried to get the government of Francisco Franco recognised and obtain the status of a Francoist agent in the USA. The fact that the United States did not recognise de Cárdenas de jure as Franco's agent in New York, did not name him consul and banned the official seal and the Francoist flag as an attribute of statehood on its territory, indicated that the US did not regard the Franco government as a legitimate one. The Americans maintained formal diplomatic relations with the leadership of Republican Spain until 1 April 1939, viewing it as the only legitimate Spanish government. Nevertheless, with the US State Department's knowledge, de Cardenas was in fact able to provide almost all consular services, which to a certain extent indicated the duality of US policy. In this article the author, for the first time in Russian scholarly literature, studied the materials of the Spanish General Archive of Administration (Alcala de Henares, Spain) where the incoming and outgoing correspondence of Juan Francisco de Cardenas and other Francoist politicians for 1936–1939 is stored.

The military administrations formed in the Soviet occupation zones in East Germany and North Korea were in similar conditions and faced similar challenges. One of the key issues of that time for both countries was land reform. The authors aim to analyse and compare the approaches of administrations in Central Europe and the Far East, to highlight common and special points in the planning of agrarian transformations. The study is based on a wide range of archival materials from the collections of the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, the Archive of Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation, the State Archive of the Russian Federation, as well as research papers in Russian, English, German and Korean. The source database also includes published documents of North Korean origin. Consideration of agricultural projects allows one to conclude that neither in East Germany nor in North Korea did the military administrations plan land reform as a step towards Sovietization of these territories. However, an important goal was to strengthen the social base of the Communists. The authors note that local specifics, as well as the domestic and foreign political situation in the region had a significant impact on the projects. This refutes the frequently expressed point of view in modern historiography, indicating that the USSR did not use the same template for projects in different regions.

After the Second World War, the most important priority of French foreign policy in Europe was the solution of the German problem, in other words, the prevention of the revival of Germany as a revanchist state. At the same time, French diplomacy, influenced by the “power complex”, sought to ensure the leading role of its country in the Western European part of the continent. Hence Paris's course, first towards anti-German alliances and then, following the proclamation of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949, towards the formation of European defence structures with the participation of the FRG, to at least keep its possible rearmament under control. The accession of the Federal Republic of Germany into NATO in 1955 signalled the failure of this strategy. Charles de Gaulle, who came to power in 1958, tried to form a Franco-German alliance that would allow the creation of a “European Europe” independent of the United States. The failure of this policy, due to the pro-Atlantic stance of the Federal Republic, prompted his successors to take a more flexible position. On the one hand, the French created a tandem with their German partner in order to strengthen European integration, particularly in the field of defence (European Autonomous Defence); on the other hand, they strengthened France's relations with the USA and NATO. Yet the reunification of Germany on the basis of the constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1990 exacerbated the already existing problem of power disparity in the Franco-German tandem in favour of Germany, which is slowly developing its own sovereign interests However, since his election in 2017, French President Emmanuel Macron, a staunch Europeanist, has been trying to use this tandem to promote the idea of a “European state” in the EU that can compete with the United States and China. However, the prospects for the implementation of this conception are very ambiguous.

The authors examine the evolution of Russia's position regarding the “Bulldozer Revolution” in Serbia in 2000. The response of official Moscow to the 'colour revolutions' at the beginning of the twenty-first century is a blank spot in Russian scholarly discourse, and the issue is being analysed in Russian and international historiography for the first time. In the course of the study, the documents of the Archive of Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation, the Digital Library of B. Clinton (USA), the Federal Election Commission of Yugoslavia, statements by major Russian politicians and diplomats, materials from leading domestic and Western media, many of which are published for the first time in the academic literature. The authors come to the conclusion that the official reaction of the leadership of the Russian Federation to the crisis events of autumn 2000 in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was cautious and restrained, which excluded open support for one of the parties to the internal political confrontation. While the collective West openly advocated the removal of Slobodan Milošević from power, Russia sought to ensure that the president of the country was elected by the Yugoslav people legally, without foreign interference and internal unrest. That is why, during the elections and before the victory of the “Bulldozer Revolution”, Russian officials and diplomats did not speak out in favour of any candidate, but also did not succumb to the pressure of Western politicians who sought to use Moscow to put pressure on Milošević. Russia attempted to play the role of mediator between the authorities and the opposition, yet in the face of proactive action by Western countries to overthrow the ruling regime, this policy was doomed to failure.