No 4 (2024)

The article shows that the protopopes at the beginning of the XVII century usually took a patriotic position and opposed impostors and interventionists, which is especially clearly seen in Bryansk, Zaraysk, Nizhny Novgorod and Veliky Novgorod. Episodes of the protopops' loyal attitude towards the supporters of impostors are not typical and were caused by their presence in the occupied territories. The support of patriotic forces by the protopopes of Russian cities strengthened their position both within the clergy and in society as a whole, as manifested by their participation in the signing of the Approved Letter of Mikhail Fedorovich not among the Consecrated Cathedral, but as electors from places not traceable in an earlier era

The article presents the results of the study of the reasons and the realization of the policy of territorial reorganization of parishes in Olonets uyezd, the goals and basic principles of which were formulated at the legislative level in the XVIII century. The effort to support the clergy of the tiny “monastic” parishes that emerged after the secularization reform of 1764 prompted the diocesan authorities to closure small parishes and reorganize parishes with large number of households. The reorganization of parishes that had taken in the late 1760s and 1810s were not systematic, however had ambivalent effects. On the one hand, the bishops began to solve ongoing problems on the delimitation of a group of vast parishes boundaries. On the other hand, they could not attain improvements in the welfare of the clergy and the maintenance of churches at the proper level. Furthermore the liquidation of economically incapable parishes without proper attention to the spiritual life of local communities resulted in the flourishing of the popular orthodoxy and the strengthening of the Old Believers positions.

The article is a review of the monograph by A.L. Beglov, dedicated to the history of the Orthodox parish in pre-revolutionary Russia. The article reveals the place of the monograph’s topics in historiography dedicated to the history of the Orthodox Church, features of the study of this topic at different stages of the development of historical studies. The main aspects of the content of the monograph are elucidated, the features of the theoretical, methodological and source base of the study, its advantages and disadvantages are revealed.

The article is devoted to the characteristics of parish life and discussions about the fate and structure of Orthodox parishes in the Russian Empire in the XVIII – early XX centuries, as well as the coverage of these subjects in the latest monograph by A.L. Beglov.

The capital monograph by A.L. Beglov provides an exhaustive analysis of institutional development, discourse about the parish question, and various attempts and proposals to reform the Russian Orthodox parish. With this macrohistory of the parish available, researchers can now proceed to conduct microhistorical studies to study the parish question not from above but “from below,” thereby making is possible not only to understand dynamics at the local level but also to give agency to miriane and recognize their response to the “parish question.” This article addresses the problem of sources and suggests the range of archival and printed sources for this new stage of parish microhistory.

The author shows that the First World War was a cultural phenomenon in its broad, creative and historical sense. At the same time, the war turned out to be the personification of the crisis of European culture as an existential whole. This affect Russia, which torn between the Europeanized culture of the upper classes and the archaic consciousness of the lower classes.

The article is devoted to the discussion that unfolded at the turn of the 1920s-30s between "Moscow" and "Ukrainian" historians on the principles of interaction between the Society of Marxist Historians at the Communist Academy and the Ukrainian Society of Marxist Historians. The study of the discussion allows us to come to the problem of building a model of interaction between the center and the regions in Soviet historical science. New documents from the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences demonstrate that the Moscow Society of Marxist Historians, headed by M.N. Pokrovsky set a course to build a relatively centralized model, which was opposed by Ukrainian historians who defended the principles of national communism. The confrontation was open in nature, in which Ukrainian historians relied on the leadership of the Ukrainian SSR. During the so-called "Great Turning Point", a wave of political purges swept through, which hit the Ukrainian intelligentsia hard, among others. After that, the obstacles to the Society of Marxist Historians were removed. However, it also found itself in crisis due to the death of its leader, M.N. Pokrovsky. The fruits of the discussion have already been "reaped" by other institutions: first, the Institute of History at the Communist Academy, and then the Institute of History of the USSR Academy of Sciences. The consequences of the "Ukrainian crisis" were massive. The opponents of building a centralized model of historical science, in which the republican centers were subordinate to the Moscow ones, were eliminated. This directly affected the process of creating the histories of the peoples of the USSR: the overcoming of the territorial historical and cultural approach, associated primarily with the Ukrainian political and intellectual elite, began, and projects appeared to create not individual histories of the republics, but the all-Union history of the USSR.

The article analyses the scientific biography of Ilya Evgenyevich Zelenin – an outstanding agrarian historian, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor, leading researcher of the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The main source used are copies of books presented to Zelenin, devoted to the agrarian and political history of Russia in the twentieth century. On their basis, a conclusion is made about the key elements of the historian's research credo, namely: painstakingness in working out the historiography of the issue, a wide archival search, accuracy of scientific terminology and understanding of the formality of ideological stamps. There are two stages in the author's scientific work, connected with the study of the history of state farm construction in the USSR and the history of agrarian policy of I. V. Stalin and N. S. Khrushchev, in each of which the historian achieved serious successes.

The article is devoted to the analysis of the book by the St. Petersburg historian Inna Evgenyevna Barykina, the main character of which is the famous political figure of the era of Alexander II and Alexander III, Count Dmitry Andreevich Tolstoy, who for several decades headed the most important departments of Tsarist Russia - the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Ministry of Public Education and served as the chief prosecutor of the Holy Synod. The author notes the serious scientific level of the monograph, based on a wide range of sources, and the extraordinary character of Count Tolstoy, one of the most prominent representatives of the autocratic bureaucracy, is noted.

Count D.A. Tolstoy is traditionally perceived, along with M.N. Katkov and K.P. Pobedonostsev, as one of the "triumvirs" who directed the policy of "counter-reforms". But if the fates and views of the other triumvirs have already been described in quite a variety of ways, then Count Tolstoy was less fortunate. Therefore, the monograph by I.E. Barykina is in a certain sense not only new, but also unique. Of course, it is written in the traditions of the same liberal and Soviet historiography and partially retains their cliches and assessments, but still its restrained style is far from both excessive complimentarity and caricature.

The article is devoted to the characteristics of the life, views, state and scientific activities of Count D.A. Tolstoy and their coverage in the latest monograph by I.E.Barykina.

The article analyzes the latest historiography devoted to the initial stage of Peter I's church reform. The authors showed that I. N. Shamina's monograph is a well-founded study on the Kolomna diocese, based on the analysis of a set of documents from F. 237 (Monastic Office) in the RGADA. The issue of completing the description of episcopal houses and monasteries is debatable. Thus, the inventory of the Solovetsky monastery was revealed, which dates back to 1705, and not 1701–1703. In general, the monograph of I. N. Shamina contains a valuable analysis of the identified sources and tells about the changes that took place in the life of the dioceses at the beginning of the 18^th century.

The text written by A.S. Tumanova is a review on the monograph of A.E. Ivanov, which analyzes the policy of the autocracy in relation to universities in 1899–1908.

The article analyzes a collective monograph edited by A. S. Puchenkov and devoted to the consideration of the role and significance of the religious factor during the Civil War in Russia. According to the reviewer, the authors, based on the unique material collected in 22 Russian and foreign archives, were able to show and prove the need to take into account the phenomenon of the religious factor, rightly defining it as «a set of many components affecting the social, socio-political, spiritual, cultural and national life of society, determining the order of functioning of religion and its institutions in the system of relations between the state and society, as well as the influence of religion as a social institution on non-religious forms of public life». According to S. L. Firsov, the authors have made a successful attempt to draw a detailed picture of the state of religious denominations (primarily the Orthodox Russian Church) during the Civil War. In his opinion, the reviewed monograph can be called a kind of encyclopedia of the spiritual life of Russia during the Russian Troubles of the early 20-th century. The authors of the monograph made a worthy contribution to the study of the moral and moral state of Russian society by writing a deep and useful work for all those interested in both the history of the Orthodox Russian Church of the era of Revolution and Civil War, and the history of the Russian Troubles of the early twentieth century as a whole.

A review of a new monograph by Professor Eric Blanc of Rutgers University (USA) is presented. The book is devoted to the history of the labor movement and the development of revolutionary social democracy on the outskirts of the Russian Empire from 1882 (the year of the creation of the first social democratic organization in Poland) to the revolutionary 1917. Blanc focuses specifically on the "non-Russian" socialist parties in the territory of modern Poland, Ukraine, the Baltic States, Georgia and Armenia. The author concludes that the development of the socialist and labor movement in the border areas of late Imperial Russia was characterized by greater radicalism, a more developed structure and popularity among the local working class. At the same time, the situation in Finland with its autonomy and legalized party struggle, which could include socialists, differed from the virtually illegal life of social democracy in Poland and the Caucasus.