This article examines citizens’ letters to newspapers as a mechanism of dialogue between the authorities and society. It analyzes a range of regional periodicals from the 1950s to the 1960s. Publishing readers’ letters in periodical print was a customary practice in this period. The large number of such publications was driven by editorial boards’ need to rely on non-professional contributors, given the limited professional staff of district newspapers. Taken as a whole, the examined issues of the regional press suggest that a considerable number of published letters were complaints concerning various aspects of everyday and workplace life. These may be treated as a source for the history of Soviet everyday life. They reveal the uneven, mosaic character of urbanization in the regions and the persistence of many unresolved domestic and workplace problems. The author stresses that any analysis of periodicals must take into account party control over mass media in the Soviet Union. Particular importance is attached to understanding the purpose of publishing large numbers of complaint letters in newspapers. The analysis leads to the conclusion that letters were used as an instrument for shaping public consciousness: undesirable behavior was publicly censured, while broader social problems were reframed, through the epistolary lens, as isolated and private shortcomings. Typical themes included everyday problems of various kinds: a poorly functioning club, a non-operational shop, bad roads, and repair issues. The authorities required newspaper editorial boards to process citizens’ appeals and to publish official responses from local institutions. This created the illusion that appealing to the newspaper provided an effective solution to the problem. In practice, however, the situation has not always been like this. An analysis of the state’s response to published letters, viewed through documents of executive and party authorities, shows that in reality resolution was often delayed for many years, while some issues proved unsolvable because of systemic deficiencies in the state apparatus. Only a portion of everyday issues were effectively resolved through the newspaper.

This article analyzes how scientific research and experimental design work was organized in the Soviet Union to create rocket engines powered by nuclear energy. At the center of the study are state methods of governing advanced R&D that made it possible to develop and test a production technology for nuclear rocket engines. The article highlights the advantages of intersectoral cooperation in the development of cutting-edge rocket technologies based on nuclear reactions, and it surveys the principal directions and results of theoretical and applied investigations carried out in more than one hundred organizations across multiple ministries and agencies. The Soviet government succeeded in coordinating key institutions of the defense-industrial complex — above all the Ministry of Medium Machine Building and the State Committees responsible for aviation and defense technology — while also mobilizing enterprises and design bureaus from other departments and from the Councils of National Economy. Leading Soviet universities and organizations of the Academy of Sciences likewise played an active role, contributing to advances in thermodynamics and plasma physics. The article further considers the personal contribution of the principal designers of nuclear rocket engines in addressing organizational and theoretical problems at the initial stage of the program. Such engines were complex to produce and to operate. Standard liquid-propellant rocket engines were cheaper, far easier to master in mass production, and simpler to maintain in military units. Nuclear engines also posed environmental risks if used in the atmosphere and could expose servicing personnel to radiation. These factors meant that, in the Soviet Union, nuclear-powered rocket-engine technology for ballistic and cruise missiles was relegated to a reserve line of development. At the same time, research undertaken during the Khrushchev Thaw yielded beneficial consequences for space propulsion, since it contributed to the creation of more efficient electric, plasma, and ion engines for spacecraft.

The operation of party congresses and conferences — considered in terms of decision-making mechanisms and the distribution of roles within the political elite — remains an understudied problem. In the USSR, party organs formed the core of the political system, and the principal questions of Soviet politics were addressed within the work of party congresses, conferences, plenums, and the Central Committee’s Politburo and Secretariat. Although the functions of all-party conferences were not specified in successive versions of the Party Rules, these forums were convened regularly in the 1920s and played an important role as institutions of horizontal integration within the political elite. V.I. Lenin held that broad party forums should shed their earlier “parliamentary” character and become more “business-like” meetings attentive to local experience and oriented toward practical questions. In the early 1920s, however, party conferences were marked by active discussion of theoretical issues and debates over the political line pursued by the RCP(b). Subsequently, free discussion of fundamental theoretical and political questions narrowed, in parallel with a growing number of reports and interventions devoted to concrete matters of party-organ work, party campaigns, and local and departmental concerns. These developments unfolded alongside the transformation of the party apparatus into a genuine vertical of power and the spread of appointment practices in staffing party posts. They were also shaped by the sociocultural profile of the party elite and by the process of “workerization” of party organs, which proceeded actively throughout the 1920s. The intense intra-party struggle of the decade fostered factional differentiation while simultaneously consolidating the majority of local workers represented at conferences around the dominant Central Committee grouping and the figure of I.V. Stalin. The outcome of these institutional and political shift s was the formation of a “totalitarian democracy,” characterized by the recruitment of leading bodies from “below,” an emphasis on collective procedures, and active delegate participation in debates over practical matters, combined with a predominantly ratificatory role in the discussion of the political line.

This article examines Soviet policies aimed at drawing women into the physical culture movement in the 1920s and assesses their practical outcomes. It considers both the theoretical and ideological premises that accompanied the USSR’s cultural revolution — especially the place of women’s emancipation within it — and the more immediate practical imperatives of postwar recovery that demanded the mobilization of women’s labor. In this context, physical culture in the Soviet Union functioned as an important instrument for educating the masses and preparing them for heightened exertion in both peacetime and wartime. The study traces the reasons for women’s relatively modest participation in physical culture during the decade. By the mid-1920s it had become clear that mass involvement could not be achieved without attention to gendered and national particularities and without addressing women’s everyday material burdens in both urban and rural settings. Various aspects of the effects of physical exertion on the female body began to be studied actively, while a parallel propaganda campaign sought to educate women in sanitary and hygienic norms and in basic skills of health maintenance. The agenda also came to include the training of female instructors and the creation of specialized programs and physical-culture circles for women in the countryside and in non-Russian national regions. The problem of women’s heavy domestic workload, however, proved intractable; statistical evidence suggests that the majority of women engaged in physical culture and sport were under twenty-three years of age. Despite these constraints, certain advances were achieved. Some women attained outstanding athletic results, and young women participated actively in competitions at both the all-Union level and in a number of regions. Norms of propriety likewise shifted gradually, making it increasingly acceptable for women to wear full athletic attire.

The intellectual history of Galician nationalism comprises a set of political and cultural concepts that defined the principal vectors and trajectories of nationalist ideology. The aim of this study is the integrate analysis of Celtism as one of the historical frameworks within the intellectual development of Galician nationalist thought. This determines the study’s novelty for Russian historiography. The author examines the cultural and social strata of Celtic ideas as a mode of Galician nationalist imagination. The article addresses: (1) the genesis and place of Celtic imagery in the history of ideas of Galician nationalism; (2) the forms and manifestations of political Celtism within Galician nationalist ideology; (3) the depoliticization and de-ideologization of Celtic narratives in post-authoritarian society; and (4) the transformation of political Celtism toward cultural nationalism, whereby Celtic ideas became part of Galicia’s academic discourse. It is argued that Celtism’s transformation into a political tradition of nationalism resulted from the instrumentalization of Celtic heritage and its integration into the ideological contexts of Galician nationalism. In analyzing Celtism as a segment of Galician nationalist ideology, the author contends that Galician nationalists’ use of these ideas legitimized their political and ideological claims by satisfying a collective demand for possession of illustrious historical ancestors. The article also examines Galician nationalism as a predominantly cultural and intellectual movement in relation to the development of Celtism as an imagined and invented political tradition. The author’s principal conclusions are as follows: (1) over time, the Celtic idea mutated from a form of political discourse into one manifestation of cultural nationalism; (2) the development of the Celtic myth became a form of solidarity between Galician and Irish nationalism; and (3) in the 20th century, Celtic narratives functioned as a cultural archaism, genetically linked to the traditions of Romantic nationalism and therefore incapable of resolving concrete political tasks.

Z.G. Morozova — wife of the entrepreneur and philanthropist S.T. Morozov and later of the Moscow governor A.A. Reinbot — left a marked imprint on the cultural, charitable, and business life of Moscow and Russia in the early twentieth century. For the first time, the authors have read Morozova’s memoirs in their entirety, provided commentary, prepared them for publication (2025), and introduced them into scholarly circulation on the basis of manuscript drafts preserved in the holdings of the A.A. Bakhrushin Central State Theatre Museum. Alongside the memoirs, seven letters from Morozova to O.L. Knipper-Chekhova, written between 1902 and 1939, have been published from the collections of the Moscow Art Theatre Museum, together with visual materials from several Moscow museums. The article offers a source-critical characterization of this editorial work and outlines further prospects for research and for increasing the informational yield of the published materials. The chronological horizon of the ego-document corresponds to one of the most contested periods in Russian history: the final decades of imperial Russia, the eve of the events of 1917, and the years that followed. Morozova’s memoirs feature political and public figures, writers, artists, and actors who formed the elite of Russia’s Silver Age culture. The perceptive, at times incisive, and often ironic — occasionally unexpected — observations and judgments of an influential and intelligent woman about her era, its protagonists, and its prevailing moods will undoubtedly contribute to a fuller understanding of this watershed time, with all its conflicts and contradictions. The work with Morozova’s memoirs is conducted within the framework of the biographical method, an approach that privileges the discovery and appropriation of sources capable not only of reconstructing the past but also of representing it. Ego-documents are treated here as micronarratives of self and time, registering individual responses to historical landscapes changing before their eyes; assessing their informational potential, in turn, enriches historical knowledge with the emotional and psychological apprehension of the past.

Turning to Anglo-Russian relations in the mid-eighteenth century, the author notes that the British crown, when dispatching envoys to the Russian Empire, required them to gather intelligence about their host country and, above all, to report on its ruler, Empress Elizabeth Petrovna. An analysis of the ambassadors’ secret correspondence with the secretary of state between 1741 and 1761 makes it possible to reconstruct their attitudes toward Elizabeth and their assessments of her political conduct. Although this question — approached here within imagology, a well-established field in contemporary historical scholar ship — has been touched upon episodically by Russian historians, it has not previously been the subject of sustained investigation. The article emphasizes the contested character of British diplomatic claims that the empress was unwilling to attend to affairs of state. It identifies the traits most frequently attributed to Elizabeth in the dispatches — her fondness for entertainments, pronounced piety, deliberation in decision-making on matters of government, and, in moments of crisis, boldness and resolve. English envoys were especially responsive to the empress’s benevolent disposition toward King George II. They devoted particular attention to her participation in celebrations and diversions that they themselves attended, as required by diplomatic etiquette. Balls and masquerades, in particular, afforded opportunities for informal exchanges with ministers and courtiers and, at times, with the empress herself. Such occasions proved to be productive settings for the acquisition of confidential information, a central component of the work of foreign diplomats in Russia. The author concludes that English judgments of the empress’s character and actions, though not invariably sympathetic, were more often than not grounded in sober observation. The evidence of diplomatic correspondence thus illuminates both the practice of British diplomacy in Russia and the envoys’ relationship with Elizabeth Petrovna, thereby opening new perspectives on the history of Anglo-Russian relations in the mid-eighteenth century.

This article concludes the author’s series of studies on the chronological dimensions of martial culture in pre-Mongol Rus’ from the late tenth through the first third of the thirteenth century. It asks whether the Rus’ princes shared a notion — attested in certain sources for Byzantium and Latin Europe of the same period — that active warfare was undesirable on the most significant days of the Menaion and Triodion liturgical cycles. Drawing on the earliest annalistic compilations and on the writings of Vladimir Monomakh, the author assembles all dated notices that allow one to assert — or, where chronological indications are insufficiently precise, at least to suggest — that bloody engagements involving the Rus’ occurred on Easter, on major feasts, on commemorations of saints especially venerated by the Rurikids, and during the pre- and post-Paschal weeks. The study refines the chronology of a number of events and considers, case by case, the extent to which Rus’ commanders, constrained by particular tactical circumstances, were free to choose the day of battle. Contrary to an entrenched view in the historiography that Rus’ dynasts were indifferent to the ecclesiastical calendar in wartime, the article argues that the sources point to a princely eff ort to avoid pitched battles and urban assaults on the principal Christian feasts of the annual cycle, especially those devoted to Christ and the Theotokos. It further suggests that the disastrous Stugna battle against the Polovtsians in 1093 — undertaken by the princes on the very day of the great feast of the Ascension — may have contributed to the formation of such an outlook. The reverent attitude toward the chief celebrations of the church year identified here corresponds closely to the similar respect for Sundays that the author has demonstrated in earlier work. There is thus little doubt that the heightened attention of Rus’ rulers to the liturgical calendar during campaigns reflects the growing influence of Christianity on the martial culture of early Rus’.

Drawing on four little-studied articles by N.M. Tarabukin from 1927 and 1928, this article examines his formulation of the concept of “genre as a problem of style”. Understanding style as the product of a specific artistic worldview, Tarabukin selects for analysis — conducted largely on the material of Western European art from antiquity to Cezanne — four major pictorial genres: landscape, portrait, still life, and genre painting. He treats these genres not in a descriptive-historical register but as a problem of style and, in methodological terms, as a theoretical construct. Tarabukin is concerned less with what these genres depict than with “how they transform, interpret, and embody their subject matter in formal and stylistic terms”. A proponent of the formal method and of objective analysis, Tarabukin opposes “literariness” to a “sense of pictorialness”. In characterizing styles, he employs such paired designations as the “living” (nature vivante), associated especially with portraiture and landscape, and the “dead” (nature morte), characteristic of still life. Without addressing contemporary art directly, he nonetheless views still life as the outcome of a new worldview, treating it as a distinct stylistic formation (“the still-life style”). One of his criteria for the “effective power of art” is “inner contentfulness,” set against “externally registered form”. Comparable reflections — grounded in an understanding of genre as not only narrative but also stylistic — are to be found in A.A. Fedorov-Davydov’s book Russian Art of Industrial Capitalism (1929). Locating the origins of a “new style” of painting in the landscapes of the “neo-realists” of the 1890s, Fedorov-Davydov carries his account forward to the Bubnovyi valet (Jack of Diamonds) group and argues that the evolution of this “new style” proceeds through a successive replacement of a landscape-based approach by a still-life-based one, a process that ultimately produces the “de-plotting” (the loss of narrative subject) of painting. The quotations assembled here introduce readers to Tarabukin’s little-known texts and to the elegance of his exposition, whose claims about art are often apparently paradoxical.

This article traces the principal stages in the formation of the supra-ethnic meta-identifications “the Soviet people” (sovetskiy narod) and “the Russian civic nation” (rossiiskaya grazhdanskaya natsiya), drawing on the population censuses of the USSR in the second half of the twentieth century and those of Post-Soviet Russia. Its central premise is that the census not only records social reality but also plays a significant role in producing it. Accordingly, the study considers the ways in which these political concepts were fashioned and/ or constructed and how they related to cultural forms of identification. The expression “the Soviet people,” already in circulation in the 1920s–1930 s, entered official discourse in Stalin’s address of 6 November 1944 and received its definitive codification in the USSR Constitution adopted on 7 October 1977, which defined the Soviet people as “a new type of historical community of people”. The project at stake was the creation of a civic-political identity within which ethnic identities would not conflict with the state, and ideally would be subsumed into the identity of “the Soviet people”, “the Soviet person”. At the same time, the censuses of 1959, 1970, 1979, and 1989 consolidated a categorization of the population on an ethno-cultural principle and the identities associated with it — ethnic and linguistic (ethno-nations). Russian ethnic identity constituted an exception: the politico-administrative order effectively rendered Russians a de-ethnicized substratum intended to serve as the foundation of the Soviet people (a politiconation). The authors conclude that the erosion of a union-wide identity alongside the strengthening of ethnic identities was not a consequence but a cause of the Soviet Union’s collapse. In the Post-Soviet period, state policy turned toward the construction of a Russian civic nation. In order to resolve the tension between “ethnic” and “civic” frames, the formula “a multi-peopled Russian nation” (mnogonarodnaya rossiyskaya natsiya; V.A. Tishkov) was proposed. This approach found expression in the censuses of 2002, 2010, and 2021, which present Russian citizenship and the Russian language as the foundational elements of Russian identity.