No 6 (2023)

For thirty years now, the history of the Pugachev uprising has been experiencing a rapid process of rethinking the analytical categories and interpretations that had been used in historiography seventy years before. This process of rethinking has gone so far as to completely overturn achievements traditionally considered firmly established, with a consequent fragmentation of the theoretical foundations on which they rested. New interpretations, developing at different times, in different ways and with different goals, stemmed from a common beginning - criticism of the Marxist interpretation of the uprising. Revisiting the Soviet interpretation of the Pugachev uprising as a class war between peasants and nobles, English-language and European writers outside Russia emphasized other aspects of the uprising, especially when it came to the movement to restore Cossack autonomy and the protest of peripheral ethnic groups and nationalities. This article aims to demonstrate how this thesis of the peripheral revolt has shown in recent years that it still leaves several places open for further thought, and what its recent updates have been in the historiography of Central and Western Europe.

The Obdorskaya mission of 1832-1833 made it into the Christianization of Trans-Ural tundra aborigines history as one of the most unsuccessful. Among the reasons, the researchers name some such as the transport disorder of the region, the aboriginal elders' resilience, as well as secular authorities', who feared the indignation of the aborigines. To this we must add the not very successful choice of the mission head, Hieromonk Makarii, who did not show the needed will and dedication in missionary service. It also turns out that at that time the traditional economy and the social structure of the aborigines were in a state of crisis as a result of climate warming. In these conditions, traditional religious beliefs were actualized, which led to a sharp rejection of the evangelical preaching by the tundra inhabitants and, as a consequence, the failure of the mission.

After the June 3rd coup, the question arose about the future of parliamentarism in the Russian Empire. The answer to it depended on the possibility of cooperation between the 3rd Imperial Duma, part of the legislative assembly in the late Russian Empire, and the top government. This issue was at the center of pre-election discussions in the fall of 1907, in which Count I.I. Tolstoy, a well-known public and statesman. His political program turned out to be too liberal for the Russian society. Tolstoy set out his «political platform» in interviews, articles, letters and diaries. The Manuscript Division of the Russian National Library also holds an unfinished essay «Russia on the eve of the 3rd Imperial Duma». These materials make it possible to expand the idea of the limit of concessions that society was willing to make in dialogue with the authorities.

The article examines the creation and activities of monarchical organizations in Moscow, which has become one of the centers of the right-wing movement in Russia. The Moscow nobility played a key role in the creation of right-wing organizations. However, the events of the First Russian Revolution involved many representatives of other social groups and strata in the political process, some of whom found themselves on the side of the autocracy, usually adhering to extreme right-wing beliefs. This explains the creation in Moscow of many different monarchical organizations, most of which had a pronounced class, professional or estate character. Moscow monarchists laid claim to all-Russian leadership in the right-wing movement, taking a number of successful steps to consolidate it during 1906. But still, in this rivalry, Muscovites, having lost their recognized leader V.A. Gringmut in 1907, lost to the St. Petersburgers, who had more significant financial and administrative support from the government. Gringmut's successors were unable to continue even the unification of the Moscow monarchist organizations that he had begun, primarily due to the personal ambitions and selfish motives of their leaders. A certain role in this was also played by the impossibility of coordinating the interests of various social and professional groups represented in the monarchical organizations of Moscow.

The article is devoted to the process of constructing and presenting the narrative "pan-Turkism" in archival sources of the Main Archival Department (Glavnoe Arhivnoe Upravlenie, GAU) of the NKVD-Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR in 1944-1953. The analysis of the content, stylistics and process specifics of the archivists' work with documentary materials of the imperial and Soviet periods reflecting the "pan-Turkist" problems is carried out. One of the important conditions for the inheritance of the imperial tradition of constructing the "pan-Turkist danger" and the image of the enemy-the "pan-Turkist" was the effect of the information echo chamber that arose when the GAU was transferred to the state security agencies.

The article analyzes the contribution of Academician I. D. Kovalchenko, an outstanding Soviet and Russian scientist, Honored Professor of Moscow State University, Head of the Department of Source Studies of Moscow State University (1966-1995), to the development of problems of source studies. With regard to source studies, he expressed at least two ideas, each of which would be enough for the name of the scientist to go down in the history of science forever: he identified a class of mass historical sources and fundamentally solved the problem of the possibility of applying a number of provisions of the modern doctrine of information in source studies.