The early Upper Palaeolithic epoch in the north-west Caucasus is represented only by two sites. Korotkaya Cave, whose small area was investigated, contains few materials while the reference site for studying the Upper Palaeolithic in the North-West Caucasus is Mezmaiskaya Cave in the Apsheron district of the Krasnodar region. The earliest Upper Palaeolithic layer of the cave (1C layer) is between 40–37 thousand years old. The archaeological complex of this layer contains all categories of stone products, including tools, semi-finished chipped stone tools, their chips, waste products, cores and allows reconstructing the technology of splitting stone material. Technological analysis of Mezmaiskaya cave’s 1C layer industry has demonstrated that the early Upper Palaeolithic period in the North-West Caucasus was dominated by the technique of splitting stones into microchips in order to produce chips and microchips, 3–12 mm wide. Preference was given to high-quality flint that reached the site either in the form of ready lamellar blanks and prepared pre-cores, or in the form of pieces of flint and large flakes; the latter were regularly used to create butt cores. The analysis of the cores, technical chips and blanks allows establishing two technological chains: first, chipping chips, 7–12 mm wide, from prismatic one- and two-table cores and, second, producing microchips, 2–7 mm wide, from butt cores, some of which are made on solid flakes. The study of the metric and morphological characteristics of the chips shows the employment of stone-chipping techniques by striking with a soft, possibly stone, chipper. Mezmaiskaya cave’s 1C layer toolkit and splitting technology find analogies in the territory of the South Caucasus and the Middle East. The industries of these areas, as the material from the 1C layer of Mezmaiskaya cave, are characterized by predominance of chips and microchips, mainly knocked from single-table cores with a narrow splitting surface.

The annual visit of the Irish prime minister to the US and the official celebration of Saint Patrick’s Day accompanying it in Washington traditionally provide a platform for discussing topics and issues related to the Irish US community and important for the political leaders of Ireland. The subject of this study is the events in Washington in March 2017, their course and particularities in the context of the problem of illegal immigration in the US. The purpose of the study is to establish how, during the meeting of newly elected US President D. Trump and Irish Prime Minister E. Kenny, the contradictions in the Irish-American relations were revealed, including those related to illegal immigration to the US. The Russian historiography does not deal with the issues of illegal Irish immigration to the US while the studies in the area of Irish–US relations are evidently scarce. The results of the analysis presented in the article allow concluding that the conditions of the meeting were largely due to the lack of D. Trump’s support among the political circles of Ireland that led to numerous protest actions against E. Kenny’s trip to the USA. Yet his meeting with D. Trump took place. Over time it became more obvious that D. Trump enjoyed the support of a large part of Irish Americans. Equally, the need for action to resolve the problem of Irish illegal immigrants in the US was also evident. Consequently, the immigration issue became central in E. Kenny’s speeches, and he did not miss this opportunity to address to the US president. However, the call of the Irish prime minister to give illegal Irish immigrants a legitimate status has so far not received a response from D. Trump.

The foundation of the “Five Star Movement” political party in Italy was officially declared in 2009. The article analyzes the steps taken by Beppe Grillo, Gianroberto Casaleggio and their supporters on the path to success in the parliamentary elections in Italy in 2013. The author unlocks the mechanism of the functioning of the social movement which seems to have no clear management structure. The article examines the reasons why the “Five Star Movement” emerged in the political arena precisely in the early 2000s. The main stages of the building of the Movement are identified: the first stage in 2005–2009, the second stage in 2009–2013. The author considers unusual forms of social mobilization: the Genoese comedian’s blog that united many of his supporters on the Internet; Meetup platform, which made it possible to shift communication away from the Internet to the format of personal meetings of Beppe Grillo’s supporters; the “central squares” of Italian cities format, which became the main site for the V-Day tours (2007) and V2-Day tours (2008). Using the blog, citizens who were not indifferent to the fate of Italy discussed topical issues and engaged in fierce discussions, sometimes directly with B. Grillo. In its turn, the Meetup platform made it possible to organize meetings of the Genoese comedian’s supporters in every city in Italy, and also to unite groups of people whose goal was to solve the local problems of their town or region. The “central squares”, where B. Grillo made speeches, helped not only to attract the electorate, but also to change the agenda for local groups organized through the Meetup platform. Gradually, the vector of attention shifted from local problems to the national level. The relevance of the topic of this study is determined by the significant role the “Five Star Movement” plays in the political life of Italy as a phenomenon that does not fit in with the framework of the old concepts of political parties and movements. Studying the activities of the supporters of Beppe Grillo, Gianroberto Casaleggio and the “Five Star Movement” at the initial stages enables us to understand key trends in the development of political mood within the country.

The article discusses the features of the process of psychological adaptation to a long existence in extreme conditions by prisoners of the Gulag and the National Socialist forced-labor camps in Germany. The Soviet prisoners’ collective biographical experience of survival, reflected in the corpus of ego documents, was analyzed by the author from the standpoint of psychosocial theories created by former prisoners of Theresienstadt, Dachau and Buchenwald, Austrian scientists V. Frankl and B. Bettelheim. The article describes and explores the changes that occurred with the prisoner’s personality at each of the three stages of their psychological perception of the camp realities: primary shock, or traumatization upon entering the camp, apathy, which is viewed as the main defence mechanism of the psyche, and the depersonalization at the time of the release from the camp. The process of adaptation of a prisoner to the camp’s conditions most often involved one or another form of cooperation with the camp administration. The study highlights these types of cooperation, both legal (practice of profession, participation in the camp amateur activities, service in the militarized guard VOKhR, and work as an informant whistle-blower) and illegal (practices of fraternization, scam, bribery and embezzlement, voluntary concubinage of female prisoners with camp personnel). The author classifies belief in God, the ability to value the beauty of nature and enjoy art, engagement in professional activities, self-observation, mental connection with the loved ones, and, equally, the ability to retain a sense of humour as conscious behavioral models that helped prisoners to resist destruction of personality. Along with these behavioral patterns, the study identifies a number of so-called anti-defences that worsened the prisoner’s morale and weakened their personality: immersion in thoughts of their own innocence, which gave rise to an impatient expectation of imminent release, constant dreams of food and home comforts, a tendency to believe camp rumors, aggression. The author also focuses on such issues as the content of the concept of “survival”, limits of the influence of the camp environment on a person, transformation of the identity of a surviving prisoner.

After the arrest of a member of “The People’s Will” party Sergei Degaev in December 1882, the Inspector of the Secret Police Georgy Sudeikin managed to make him his agent provocateur. The information then received from this agent allowed the police to neutralize many of his former comrades in the revolutionary underground. Vera Figner was among the first arrested. The question of the total number of persons whom Degaev betrayed to the police was not specifically addressed in historiography, mainly because the notebook where Degaev recorded who and when he exposed to the police was not preserved, and therefore there is no direct evidence to prove the specific involvement of Degaev in the arrest of each particular member of “The People’s Will” who was identified and neutralized by the police in 1883. The article is based on the previously unpublished materials of the Police Department from the State Archive of the Russian Federation as well as personal sources, and reconstructs, as accurately as possible, the picture of Degaev’s provocative activities. Furthermore, the article specifies the number of members of “The People’s Will” betrayed by Degaev and also restores the names of some of them. In addition, the article identifies certain structures of conspirators and names their contacts destroyed after their disclosures by Degaev. In particular, the Kharkov printing house was disclosed, and its employees were arrested. The police also destroyed the mechanism of contacts between the prisoners of the Peter and Paul Fortress and on the outside. Based on the results of the study, conclusion was made of an estimated number of persons who were betrayed to the police by the provocateur Degaev: there were at least 80 of them. By further studying the records of the Police Department, retrieving from them the information which implicitly proves Degaev’s involvement in the disclosure of “The People’s Will” clandestine network, and comparing these data with details from personal sources it seems feasible to verify some more persons betrayed to the police by this provocateur.

The purpose of the article is to outline the main stages of the development of the catering system in Russia, approached separately from the system of taverns, on the one hand, and from the hotel business, on the other. Such approach is caused by the fact that historians have only considered the formation of the public catering sphere fragmentarily, and mostly in popular literature. The research starts with the analysis of the 16th century, when the sources began to consistently mention the realities associated with the sale of culinary products. The study ends with the period of 1914–1921, when the established system of catering institutions functioned in the extraordinary situation. The article clarifies some terms. In particular, the modern generic term “catering” only appeared in the early 20th century and originally had a narrow, strict sense. “Inn keeping” and then “tavern keeping” in different chronological periods meant different types of trade in culinary products. The basic legal definition of “establishments for tavern keeping” was formulated just in 1861. The article pays particular attention to the differences between taverns and inns, because, due to the nature of trade, both the contemporaries and the later scholars confused the types of establishments. The article relies mainly on legal materials, since it was regulations that created conditions for the functioning of the system and required adjustment to these conditions. At the same time, less attention was paid by scholars to the legal status of taverns than their sociocultural role. It remains unclear to what degree the rules declared by the law were transformed in the course of their adaptation to the living realities of everyday life. The study of the process of mutual adaptation of law and the organization of the tavern business requires a different type of sources. In this article, the author deliberately refrains from giving consideration to the sociocultural role of catering establishments and the evolution of the culinary component, since this is a topic for a separate study

The problem of migration processes in the Russian North received wide coverage in the academic literature. M.K. Lyubavskiy, M.M. Bogoslovskiy, N.V. Ustyugov, P.A. Kolesnikov, A.A. Preobrazhenskiy and many other scholars identified the scale, direction, causes and consequences of the movements of peasants both in its territory and beyond it. However, the question of local peasant migrations rarely fell within the historians’ sphere of interest. It is only recently that scholars have addressed this aspect. The purpose of this article is to study peasant migrations within the Ustyug uyezd (district) in the 17th century. The territorial framework of the study case encompasses the Votlozhemskaya and Shemogodskaya volosts, as well as the Sukhonskiy Novovyshlyy, Yarokurskiy and Vondokurskiy stans. The source base of the research is represented by the cadastral and census books of 1623–1626, 1646, 1658, 1667, and 1678. To identify and study local migrations in a volost, an anthroponomic method was used, the essence of which is to compare the names of the residents of peasant households based on various censuses. In this way genealogical schemes were created and subsequently analyzed. As a result, the following conclusions have been drawn. In the 17th-century Ustyug uyezd there was a relatively low level of stability in the rural population. Only 37 percent of peasant families recorded in the 1678 book lived in their villages at the time of the censuses of 1640–1660s. 15 percent of families changed their place of residence within the studied volosts. These moves were mainly related to family circumstances: household division and assistance to incapacitated family members. In addition, some migrations were caused by economic ruin. The analysis of the directions of local migration inside the volost showed that the peasants preferred to move to nearby villages, and there was a kind of “interchange” between settlements. In general, the rural population of the Russian North was very mobile, and it was not uncommon for peasants to move home.

The NKVD (MVD) special camps in the Soviet zone of occupation in post-war Germany remain an element of the Soviet occupational policy relatively unknown and practically unstudied in Russian historiography. The present article deals with these special camps on the basis of the extensive archival material deposited in the Fund of the Special Camps Division in the State Archives of the Russian Federation. The author analyzes various aspects of their functioning, such as the reasons and prerequisites for their organization, the development of the camp network in 1945–1948, the contingent of the camps, their staff, as well as their place in the system of the organs of the Soviet military administration and role in the activities of the Soviet state security organs in East Germany in the first post-war years. The special camps are defined as a distinct type of detention. They cannot be identified with either internment camps or concentration camps, as has been suggested in some German publications on this issue. They were intended for detention of the Germans who were arrested by the Soviet state security organs and previously involved in the Nazi party-state and militarized structures, as well as the Soviet citizens convicted to various terms of imprisonment by military tribunals. In this sense, they can really be named “special camps” where various categories of people were temporarily detained. A large number of contradictions in the functioning of the special camp system and, due to the very high mortality rate, its relative inadequacy to the task of providing the Soviet economy with the demanded workforce ultimately led to the gradual dissolution of the special camps by the Soviet government. Additionally, from the point of view of foreign policy, information about the camps with tens of thousands of prisoners in the Soviet occupational zone damaged the international reputation of the USSR, especially in the context of the aggravation of the “German question” in the early years of the Cold War. All this factors entailed substantial revision of the Soviet “camp policy” in East Germany in 1948 and complete dissolution of the special camps.

The article examines the social composition of the right-wing parties that operated on the territory of Vladimir guberniya in 1905–1917, i. e. the Union of the Russian People and its subdivisions — the Shuya Union of the Russian Orthodox People and the Ivanovo-Voznesensk Autocratic-Monarchist Party. Their social base was the proletariat, the petite urban bourgeoisie and, to a much lesser extent, the peasantry, which had very close economic relations with the regional towns. “Census” classes were very poorly represented in the monarchical organizations of Vladimir guberniya. Not only the priests and officials who were not recommended by their superiors to participate in the activities of the right-wing organizations, but even the nobility were mostly very wary of the Black Hundreds and were in no hurry to join them. This statement is even more apt in the case of the local bourgeoisie, whose representatives, even if sympathetic to the monarchical idea, preferred to remain sympathizers, and lately completely distanced themselves from the Black Hundreds and joined the right wing of the liberal camp. The intelligentsia initially ignored the right-wing organizations, preferring opposition parties of varying degrees of radicalism. The social composition of the monarchical organizations in Vladimir guberniya was rather tightly correlated with their geographical location. The majority of the right-wing parties in the industrial centres, such as Ivanovo-Voznesensk, Kovrov, Nikolskoe, etc., were the workers. In the other towns, including provincial Vladimir, the petit bourgeoisie dominated in the monarchical organizations. In the rural chapters of the Union of the Russian people, almost all the members were peasants. There is very little information on the sex and age composition of the right-wing organizations, but it can still be argued that women’s participation in their activities was quite high, while there were a few young people among the monarchists, since they adopted a more radical ideology

The present article examines a number of the issues relating to the activities of the military-police councils established under Moscow Governor- General F.V. Dubasov during the December armed uprising — the causes and process of formation of this body, its structure and composition, meeting agendas, decisions and their implementation. The purpose of research is to evaluate the efficiency of this institution and to establish its role in suppressing the “insurrection”, and this is important to study the relationship between civil and military authorities during the first Russian Revolution. These issues have not received treatment in historiography: those authors who deal with the history of the Moscow uprising either have completely ignored the military-police councils, or mentioned them only in passing. In the first days of the uprising, the interaction between civilian and military authorities was fraught with significant difficulties (inconsistency in police and military operations, the massive shelling of civilians’ homes by the military forces without causing damage to the rebels, the practice of sending expeditions by the commander of the Moscow military district to destroy barricades, inability to bring the outskirts of the city under their control). This prompted Governor-General F.V. Dubasov to take measures to provide supervision over the forces of the Moscow Military District, including establishment of the military-police councils under his chairmanship. The meetings of this body were held almost daily and attended by a wide range of civilian and military high-rank officials of the city. They discussed the plans and results of the most important military operations against the “rebels” (for example, punitive expeditions to Presnya and along the Moscow–Ryazan’ Railway). The governor-general eventually managed to persuade the military to adopt his tactics, i. e. the step-by-step occupation and “cleansing” of the regions that remained in the hands of the revolutionaries. However, the work of this body was handicapped by a number of shortcomings: late timing, loose attendance, haste in organizing operations, and the lack of real control over the military actions. The interplay of these factors led to numerous “failures” during the operation to capture the last stronghold of the rebels — Presnya.