No 3 (2024)

The article analyzes the history of the creation and the activities of the «Secret committee of high political surveillance» (1837–1839) – the Russian interdepartmental body of international policing in the era of tsar Nicholas I, which is unknown in the historical literature. The paper introduces the minutes of the sessions of this body and the interdepartmental correspondence attached to them from The State Archive of The Russian Federation (GARF). These sources expand on the Russian empire’s system of international policing and highlight the Polish emigration’s history from the viewpoint of the Russian secret police, which wasn’t sufficiently covered in the historiography of the Polish national movement. The Committee examined intelligence on the Polish political emigration, which was formed after the failure of the November Uprising of 1830–1831 in Congress Poland. Alexander Benckendorf, the chief of the III Section of His Imperial Majesty’s Own Chancellery, was the chairman of this committee. The representatives of the War and Foreign Ministries took part in its meetings. The Committee corresponded with Congress Poland’s viceroy Ivan Paskevich and with the governors of the border provinces of Russia, as well as with the Prussian and Austrian authorities. The analysis of the minutes from the sessions of this committee shows that this body was exclusively consultative. It was an attempt to create a unified interdepartmental system of intelligence exchange on the activities of the Polish emissaries.

The article examines the Russian monthly and weekly periodicals’ perception of the fighting between Serbia and Albania between the end of the Second Balkan War (August 1913) and the beginning of the First World War (July 1914). These military clashes, known to contemporaries as the undeclared “Third Balkan War”, caused diplomatic complications and in November 1913 could have led to the outbreak of a major war in Europe. Throughout a year, the great powers with difficulty extinguished the conflict, that became the result of peace treaties imposed by them to the Balkan countries. In the paper, for the first time, the reaction of the Russian reviewers towards the Albanian crisis of 1913–1914 and the military operations in the region, the degree of awareness of the reading public in Russia about the situation in Albania and around it are examined. On the example of Pan-Slavist newspapers “Slavyanskie Izvestia” and “Dym Otechectva”, the liberal magazines “Vestnik Evropy”, “Ogonek”, “Russkoe Bogatstvo” and “Russkaya Mysl’” as well as opinions of Russian travelers, the growing awareness of Russian public about Albania and Albanians is shown.

The article deals with the elements of the lexical systems of the Serbian and Russian languages in the framework of a comparative project on lexicology, one of the goals of which is to compile a modern large Serbian-Russian dictionary. Definitions of the vocabulary is based on the translation equivalence, i. e. the denotative identity of lexemes, and it is based, apart from lexical, on derivational and grammatical semantics where possible; pragmatic and cognitive-discursive component, manifested in syntagmatic realizations of lexemes, is also taken into account. The currently processed lexical corpus provides a sample for revealing some areas and peculiarities of lexical system structuring in the Serbian language in comparison with the Russian one. The vocabulary representing linguistic contrasts is grouped according to derivational-structural and lexical-grammatical criteria, relying on its formal-explicit markers. The following lexical types were found to be difficult to represent in the dictionary: specific derivational structures; diminutive word forms (nouns, adjectives, verbs), having an access to the pragmatic and discursive level; names with the semantics of feature carriers, including feminatives; adverbial syntagms, etc. In the future it is planned to compare formally equivalent multi-valued lexemes at the level of their meaning structure.

The article publishes new information that sheds light on the history of the creation of the «Photographic Collection of Church Antiquities and Types of Slavs of European Turkey. Herzegovina and Bosnia 1867. P. Pyatnitsky» (St. Petersburg, 1868). The album was highly appreciated by art historians. The album is the result of the work of a photographic expedition in the Bosnian vilayet in 1865–1867. Very little is known about the self-taught photographer and his time in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The paucity of information has led to a number of errors taking root in historiography. Work with the archives of the Russian consulates in Mostar (Herzegovina) and Sarajevo (Bosnia) made it possible to identify documents containing information about Pyatnitsky’s trip to the Bosnian Vilayet: clarify questions about the financing and composition of the expedition, the dates of the photographer’s stay in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Materials from the Director of the Asian Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs P. N. Stremoukhov made it possible to clarify the issues of organizing the printing of the album.