Publications

Introducing previously neglected primary sources and suggesting an alternative approach to researching history of art during the Cold War, in this article, I rethink Soviet Thaw- and post-Thaw fate of cubism. In doing so, I acknowledge the movement's major constituting role within Soviet art discourse. In a first step, I analyze an unknown strategy of apology of cubism designed by seminal Kulturträgers Igor Golomstock and Andrei Sinyavsky. This is to challenge dominant scholarly accounts paying overly attention to Soviet negative criticism of cubism while ignoring the actual complexity of debates within the allegedly monolithic totalitarian discourse. Analyzing results of the apology, I argue that the attempt to rehabilitate cubism caused an intensification of negative criticism characteristic of novel anti-modernist patterns such as by Mikhail Lifshitz, a prominent Soviet philosopher. This re-actualization of debates on cubism had both domestic and transnational premises. Ultimately, situating Soviet discussions of cubism within relevant European debates on modernist art, I nuance interpretations of Soviet art discourse as that of an isolationist.

Over the 20th century, there were significant changes in children's health and enormous gains in pediatric healthcare because of systematic healthcare development including public health interventions. This study reviews children’s morbidity and mortality at the end of the 19th century by examining historical medical records of the Children’s Clinic of Tomsk Imperial University (Western Siberia, Russian Empire). We reviewed the official books of the inpatient department`s records between 1893 and 1899 as well as outpatient department’s records for the one-year period of 1899. The study confirms that mortality due to infectious diseases remained in first place among all other causes.

In the present paper, I analyze peculiarities of legend collections in European literature of the mid-19th century, taking into consideration their Swiss, Spanish and Belgian variants. Starting with the history of the legend in European literature, I compare three volumes of legends – Sieben Legenden by Keller, Leyendas by Bécquer,Légendes flamandes by De Coster. What is being dwelt upon are  their attitude to the source (pre-text), conflict, composition, setting, personage type. The conclusion is made that the three collections are similar in their authors’ understanding of the legend, which is presented as a tale that depicts a conflict between a person and some established set of values. In Sieben Legenden this set of values is given as most natural for people and despised by the official religion. The protagonists go through a series of trials to return to the harmonious family. In Leyendas the established order is mainly embodied into an old tradition or superstition, which the protagonist tries to ignore, with a fatal outcome. In Légendes flamandes the protagonist may disregard some ethical or moral concepts, only to happily understand their mistake later on. Though all the books appeared in the time of the late Romanticism in non-dominant European cultures, they present different sides of Romantic philosophy: romantic irony (Keller), love to the supernatural (Bécquer), attitude to history (De Coster).

This chapter familiarizes Western readers with recent developments in the history of drugs in modern Russia and the Soviet Union. The field is just beginning in terms of its achievements, problems, new archives, and interpretations, and its uncharted territory for future research. The chapter starts by describing the main trends in the historiography of drug use and drug policy in twentieth-century Russia (both before and after 1991). It further sketches crucial points in both the social history of drugs and the evolution of a repressive governmental response between about 1900 and 2000, with a special focus on the early Soviet period. Open discussions of the drug problem (including cocaine) were prohibited in the Soviet era, but can be discerned via medical debates. Finally, the chapter closes with problematic aspects of “new drug history” in the Russian context and avenues for further research.

This article examines the phenomenon of Soviet industrial and technical creativity (promyshlennoe i tekhnicheskoe tvorchestvo) from the late 1950s to the 1980s. It particularly focuses on invention and rationalization movement at industrial enterprises via the lens of Soviet industrial policy. It emphasizes creativity as a labor resource and incentive developed into the oversized system and shows its structural elements and encouragements. The paper argues that beginning in the 1950s onwards, the Soviet state placed labor creativity into the center of industrial development and own vision of progress seeing it as a resource for technological competitiveness from Khrushchev`s aim to reach communism to perestroika. The Soviet leadership, however, overemphasized creativity as workers` ability to come up with new ideas and find rapid technical solutions to industrial problems in addition to their main duties to show the creative nature of socialist labor. As a result, it developed a formalized branched system of numerous institutions and nominal awards which made creativity not only an industrial necessity but to a large extent a performative product.This article examines the phenomenon of Soviet industrial and technical creativity (promyshlennoe i tekhnicheskoe tvorchestvo) from the late 1950s to the 1980s. It particularly focuses on invention and rationalization movement at industrial enterprises via the lens of Soviet industrial policy. It emphasizes creativity as a labor resource and incentive developed into the oversized system and shows its structural elements and encouragements. The paper argues that beginning in the 1950s onwards, the Soviet state placed labor creativity into the center of industrial development and own vision of progress seeing it as a resource for technological competitiveness from Khrushchev`s aim to reach communism to perestroika. The Soviet leadership, however, overemphasized creativity as workers` ability to come up with new ideas and find rapid technical solutions to industrial problems in addition to their main duties to show the creative nature of socialist labor. As a result, it developed a formalized branched system of numerous institutions and nominal awards which made creativity not only an industrial necessity but to a large extent a performative product.

The arctile uncovers Soviet biopolitics of respiratory safety. 

This article examines the history of socialist collaboration in Comecon through the lens of a large industrial project in Soviet Siberia. It examines the construction of the Ust`-Ilimsk forest industrial complex which was conceived as a collective effort of six socialist European countries. On the one hand, the project formed part of the Soviet Union’s strategy of technological colonization of Soviet Eastern lands, and on the other, it aimed to enhance socialist collaboration and integration efforts through the exchange of material goods and expertise, as prescribed by the project agreements. The paper focuses on the interplay between ideological implications, national interests and material shortages when completing the project, showing the contradictory nature of socialist collaborative construction. It argues that the Soviet central government sought material resources for the construction from ‘brother’ socialist countries with an ideological emphasis on how important it was for further cooperation in the Eastern bloc. In fact, the project exposed difficulties, ranging from material shortages typical of state socialism and the predominance of national economic interests, with the result that this socialist project was compelled to also make use of Western equipment and expertise, transforming Ust`-Ilimsk from a socialist to a far more international construction site.

This article investigates public readings in late Imperial Russia, which became both an official and popular educational practice with the establishment of the Standing Commission of Public Readings by the State Ministry of Public Enlightenment in 1872. Public readings were a form of useful and entertaining reading carried out by an authorized person who read aloud in front of an audience, thereby representing a significant democratization of the reading practice. The content of such readings, both textual and visual, was heavily controlled by the state authorities and inevitably led to the shaping of a very specific addressee, the so-called common reader.

The official image of the common reader was supposed to reflect an average citizen, and is emblematic of the complex problem of nation-building in Russian history. The study questions how the visual context of public readings contributed to the general image of the common reader. The article addresses the representation of the common reader in the media of the time, censorship limitations and strategies for illustrating public readings. This all gives a deeper perspective on the figure of the common reader, which became an ideological construct important for both domestic and foreign policy. 

The paper discusses prefiously unknown story of the first documented international voyage of the Russian whaling vessel throught the perspective of the early experience of interaction between the Russian seafarers and the foreign judicial system.

The study guide “Towards Improved Academic Writing Skills” is aimed to refine student academic writing skills and to facilitate the teaching process within the discipline Academic Writing in English. 12 units constitute the contents of the book, which embrace the issues related to differences between academic and non-academic styles, peculiarities of APA style, conciseness and wordiness, an effective use of academic word lists by Averil Coxhead (AWL). Additionally, all sections of a research proposal are considered in terms of their logical structure and relevant academic vocabulary. Each of the book’s chapter enables an analysis of authentic student writing performance with regard to the issue under consideration. The book is supplemented with a glossary of academic writing terms, posters and other helpful appendices. The publication  is intended for English teachers and undergraduates.

The coursebook is designed for university undergraduate students (BA) whose major is History or whose interest lies in history, both as an academic discipline and a professional field. It is designed to develop professional intercultural communicative competence of students who have attained B1-B2 level according to the CEFR global scale of English language proficiency. The coursebook applies a profession-oriented approach in foreign language teaching and is aimed at developing students' ability to use English as a tool for solving problem-based tasks of the broad context of the academic and future professional activities of historians. Engagement in solving profession-oriented project cases integrated into each module, develops such transferable and professional skills of students as searching, analysing, evaluating and interpreting various types of sources – authentic texts, audio and video materials, ensuring the development of receptive and productive types of speech activity. A major portion of each module is dedicated to the development of ‘learner autonomy’ and the ability of students to create their own personally meaningful information products of various genres and styles required in academic and professional activities of a historian, e.g.: a motivation letter, a concept paper for a project, a short article, a historiographic essay, debates, interviews, podcasts, etc.

The coursebook meets the requirements of the latest Federal State Educational Standards (Russia).

The article discusses the specifics of the state project of public education, initiated by the Standing Commission of Public Readings, held under the Ministry of Public Education. Publications of breeding literature and a plan of the central auditorium for public reading make it possible to identify a common system of values, in accordance with which it was required to transform the body of the subject from “narod”, as well as early mechanisms of indirect state control over the semi-literate mass of people.

In the first half of the 1930s in the Vyatka region about 60 Old Believers-Wanderers, mostly women, committed suicide, no longer wanting to live in a world overrun by the Antichrist. The initiator of the wave of voluntary deaths was the local preacher, Khristofor Ivanovich. It is easy to write off these episodes as an actualization of traditional Old Believers’ religiously-motivated suicides or as a reaction to the excesses of Stalinist religious policies. However, as will be shown in the article, the Vyatka Wanderers were neither persistent escapist radicals nor uncompromising dissidents in their dealings with the Soviet authorities. My hypothesis is that this grim practice became possible not because the Wanderers were consistent underground millenarians, but because, squeezed into the catacombs by Stalin’s social and religious policies, they found themselves unable to maintain this unprecedented (for them) regime of existence.

Russian symbolist Vyacheslav Ivanov and religious philosopher Sergius Bulgakov in 1905–1918 were connected by formal relations and friendship. In 1914 Ivanov published the poem “Mother” (“Te glyby chto nezhno zasypali grob ...”), with a dedication to Bulgakov. The article discusses this poem and its draft version, which allows to trace the movement of the poet's creative thought. The biographical context is the death of Bulgakov's mother – he described his intimate experience in the “Unfading Light” (“Svet Nevecherniy”). Special attention is paid to the symbols and motives typical to Ivanov's poetics: the firmament, the sun-heart and the motive of transparency. An idea, common both for Ivanov and Bulgakov, is that of some pre-world feminine principle that appears in their texts under different names: as Sophia, the Soul of the World, Great Mother, Mother Earth. They are also united by the special attitude towards death which is understood in a Christian way – as a birth into a new life and just a step on the path of resurrection. The intertextual connections of the poem with the philosophical and theological works by Bulgakov may be considered as a result of mutual influence and their reliance on common sources.

Τhis article explores the ways in which transhistorical thinking has manifested itself in European cultural history. Τhe overarching notion that the shared space traversed by human communication abolishes various kinds of distance (temporal, ideological, or linguistic) is conveyed by distinct motifs, in particular the idea of “book as a friend”, which originates in the Renaissance, and the conceptualization of the present as a community of “the quick and the dead”. Thanks to the use of these topoi, as well as to modes of readings that they encourage, great individuals of the past appear as interlocutors or objects of emulation, enter a national “pantheon”, or come “alive” with the aid of a historian’s pen. Based on the texts of Russian authors (Ya. P. Shakhovskoi, N. M. Karamzin and T. N. Granovsky), placed in a wider European context, the article demonstrates that the loci communes that make it possible to conjure up the encounter between the living and the dead, can also define visions of the present and of the future.

The article challenges the traditional theory according to which only transitive verbs can have passive voice forms in Russian. Based on the Russian National Corpus and texts found on the Internet, the paper shows that the grammatical system of Russian permits the passivization of oblique-complement verbs and verbs that govern prepositional phrases. The analysis shows that whether or not a verb permits the formation of passive voice forms depends on the communicative status of the complement rather than its grammatical form, while the semantic and morphonological restrictions on passivization equally apply to verbs regardless of the form of their complements. The paper gives evidence confirming that some passive voice forms are loan translations from other languages, but argues that the use of the loan translation mechanism does not bring about anything that contradicts the rules of Russian grammar, but rather leads to a more comprehensive implementation of previously unused capabilities of the grammatical system.

This article explores a repertoire of interactions between Alexei Sidortsev, a tenacious

Soviet worker defending his rights, and the Soviet legal bureaucracy up to the

Supreme Court. Using the Sidortsev case as an example, I plan to demonstrate the

judicial logic of interpreting the parties’ various arguments and evidence. This case

allows us to describe and analyze the range of rights and legal opportunities available

to the Soviet worker under interwar law. I also focus on the rhetorical transformations

of Sidortsev’s arguments, changing from ideological to pragmatically bureaucratic.

Although Sidortsev was skilled in ideologized Soviet language, it was the material argument

that was decisive in courts interpretations of the facts of the case. On this basis,

I argue that material truth in the socialist legal consciousness is not determined by the

discursive political language of denunciation that we have come to regard as defining

in the Soviet system.