The icons brought to Italy from the East during the first centuries of Christianity were especially revered among believers, and subsequently even their copies were often no less revered. After the capture of Constantinople by the crusaders in 1204, Greek icons began to appear in those areas of Italy where they had previously been a rarity, they were reproduced, these copies became images unto themselves, made to order, and, therefore, acquired their own semantic significance. The Byzantine icon of the Virgin, the Hodegetria, was skillfully created in the first half of the thirteenth century in Siena. After defeating the Florentines at the Battle of Montaperti, the Sienese declared the Mother of God their patroness in 1261. Soon, the copy of the Byzantine icon was made to be placed in the new altar of the city cathedral. Later, the work of a Sienese master became no less revered than the original Byzantine image and received the name of “Madonna del voto”. Its origin demonstrates that it was of paramount importance for the inhabitants of the city. Most likely, this was the first precedent of this kind. The very fact that a local artist painted an image that, on the one hand, embodies the Mother of God’s intercession for his hometown, and, on the other, clearly shows conscious, but not a complete adherence to the Byzantine prototype, significantly influenced the development of painting in the late thirteenth-century Siena. Relatively scarce attention has been paid to this event in the secondary literature. Such a research on the causal relationship between the specific circumstances of ordering a sacred image and its pictorial realization allows us to consider more widely both the issue of copying Greek images in Italy and the formation of the Sienese pictorial art in the second half of the thirteenth century.

The article discusses changes in Soviet cultural policy in the post-war decade of 1946-1956 while considering the management of thearical art. Te two aspects of this issue are analyzed: on the one hand, the measures to ensure censorship of dramatic productions, on the other, the attempts of the party-state leadership of the country and relevant institutions to maintain, despite the ideological and censor restrictions, at a sufciently high level the quality of dramatic works that were staged in Soviet theaters. In this situation, the authorities had to fnd various ways to counteract the obvious trend, i. e. the loss of spectator interest in theaters, whose repertoire was limited mainly to works of little interest by modern playwrights. Tey tried to switch theaters from state subsidies to self-fnancing, increasing the initiative of the theater administration, which was partially endowed with the functions of artistic directors to the detriment of the latter; artistic councils were established as sort of expert bodies that evaluated the production precisely in terms of its quality. While referring to these two sides of the management of Soviet theaters by party-state institutions, the author shows how purely administrative decisions could infuence the creative sphere itself. Debates about the prospects of the Soviet drama theater, held among the theatrical public at that time, had a certain impact on the decisions made by the authorities in this area. Te article analyzes the experience of Leningrad and some other stage venues during the said period and draws conclusions regarding its compliance with the all-Union patterns and special properties. Te author considers how these relatively insignifcant opportunities that emerged due to administrative and structural changes in cultural management helped preserve the political ideals of the Taw for their subsequent revival during the Perestroika.

The end of the Civil War and the transition to the New economic policy in the European part of Russia were very painful. In the North-West of Soviet Russia, this is clearly illustrated by the two most important “cases” - the Kronstadt Uprising and the conspiracy of Petrograd Military Organization investigated by the Extraordinary Commission of the region. Despite the desire of the Cheka’s directorate to reshape the policy of the state security agency in accordance with peacetime conditions, in practice, due to the aggravation of the anti-Bolshevik movement the chekists continued to resort to the extraordinary methods that had been employed during the Civil War. The article analyzes the relationship between the Cheka and the PetrogubCheka (the regional Cheka of Petrograd) and the participation of high ofcials of the Cheka in monitoring the investigation of these cases. It also deals with the history of the well-known agreement concluded between V.N. Tagantsev, head of the Petrograd Military Organization, and the special agent of the Cheka’s Secret Operational Division Ya.S. Agranov who was appointed to conduct the investigation. For the first time the author of the article analyzes in detail the text of this agreement and the testimony of V.N. Tagantsev and comes to the conclusion that V.N. Tagantsev’s reputation of a mere victim of the Cheka mystifcation among émigré journalists, inherited by the contemporary historiography, was ungrounded. The article emphasizes the ambiguous position of the anti-Bolshevik movement in Petrograd that maintained close contacts with the leaders of the White emigration and at the same time remained internally weak and poorly stafed. However, it does not deny the fabrication of cases to the advantage of the authorities. The memories of contemporaries of these events help demonstrate a public reaction to the actions of the Cheka in the indicated period and trace the possible “channels” of receiving information about the aforesaid secret agreement by the public. Ultimately, along with the expansion of jurisdiction and the application of extraordinary measures in other regions, the operations of Chekists in the North West in 1921 also contributed to abolishing the Cheka and establishing the GPU under the NKVD of the RSFSR.

The competition for the benevolence of the United States during the First World War is traditionally regarded in historiography as a confrontation between English and German propagandas, and thus the French less widescale but effective activity in this field remains poorly studied. Meanwhile, French propaganda focused on the political, financial and intellectual circles of North American society ensured mutual understanding and promoted close cooperation between the two republics in this global conflict. The sociocultural proximity of France and the United States, their historical ties, and the lack of any major contradictions allowed the French to involve methods that are now considered to be classified as “soft power”, so that the Americans did not regard them as the propaganda effect. The cumulative result of the activities of France and Great Britain made it possible to accelerate the entry into the war of the United States, which took over financing and industrial support of the exhausted countries of the Entente, and transported a two-million military contingent to the Old World by 1918. The unique and unprecedented experience of the formation and manipulation of public consciousness, accumulated during the First World War, later laid the basis of the methodology of studying public opinion and influencing the mood and consciousness of the masses. The study is based on the documents from the diplomatic archives, national archives and the Service historique de la défense of the French Ministry of Defense, previously uninvolved in the research on this issue in Russian historiography. The author attempts at comprehensive consideration of the historiographic material. The main focus of the article is the tasks, organization and methods of the French propaganda campaign. The most striking cases help illustrate all its main aspects. Particular attention is paid to the role of persons responsible for organizing events and establishing propaganda structures and agents performing special missions in the United States. The study covers the period of the US neutrality in 1914-1917.

This article refutes the stereotype that 19th-century Russian jointstock commercial banks were primarily for merchants and industrialists. The banks did indeed serve the commercial and industrial elite in the industrial regions and in the centres of national and international capital markets like Saint Petersburg and Moscow. However, in agricultural regions, the landowners, engaged in the production and sale of agricultural products, managed the joint-stock commercial banks together with the merchants. This phenomenon is analysed via the case of the Oryol Commercial Bank (1872-1908), which was a member of the Moscow banker Lazar Polyakov’s group. The bank operated in agricultural regions; it operated originally in the Oryol province in the Central Black Earth Region, but in the 1890s it spread to the twelve provinces of central, south and west European Russia. Biographical information about the bank’s leaders was collected from fragmented published and archival sources, and their business and family ties were reconstructed. The article concludes that the bank operating in the agricultural region was controlled by a coalition of merchants, landowners, provincial officials and zemstvo figures. Deep integration into the regional elite was one of the factors of the bank’s stability, because it connected the most solid regional customers with the bank. It helped the bank to survive in the second half of the 1870s and in the 1880s during an economically unfavourable period for the Central Black Earth Region. Another factor of the bank’s stability was its interregional connections - that is, access to the Moscow financial market via the Polyakovs’ banking group. This market far exceeded any regional Russian market. From the 1870s to the 1890s, membership in the group increased the bank’s opportunities to raise additional resources, but in the 1900s it negatively affected the bank because of the Polyakovs’ bankruptcy. The influential local coalition around the Oryol commercial bank helped to retain the bank inside the United Bank, which was created from the former Polyakov banks in 1908.

The article deals with the Balkan-related aspects of the life of A.A. Bashmakov, the Russian legal scholar, publicist and prominent figure of the Pan-Slavic movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It covers his early years since the 1880s until 1913 when he resigned from civil service. The main attention is paid to A.A. Bashmakov’s socio-political activity and his Balkan journeys, i. e. to the practical side of his activities related to the Slavic issue. The circumstances of his stay in Macedonia and Northern Albania are described in detail; the author also touches upon his works based on the results of his journeys (travel notes, articles, speeches, periodical feuilletons, books and collected papers) and his stance on the Eastern question. According to A.A. Bashmakov, a Slavic-oriented Russian foreign policy should have helped maintain the country’s undeniable impact on international affairs. Scarcely researched archival and published materials are involved in the study. Academic novelty of the work is due to approaching large-scale, but unstudied activities of such a prominent figure as A.A. Bashmakov, first of all, analyzing his Balkan sphere of interests which has not yet been dealt with in historiography. The article shows all the diversity of A.A. Bashmakov’s undertakings in this area, studies his motivation, clarifies a number of issues regarding his publishing and academic work and corrects historiographic fallacies. A number of cases show that, while traveling to unstable regions of the Ottoman Empire, A.A. Bashmakov acted independently and contrary to the prevailing opinion of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, risking his own career. The article argues that his resignation from civil service was determined by his public criticism of Russian diplomacy during the First Balkan War.

Abstract. The issue of making religious affairs a separate branch of the state administration arises in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, in the period of the formation of the Russian imperial ministerial system. The idea of a department of religious affairs appeared at the very first stages of the ministerial reform. However, its establishment affected the prerogatives of the Holy Synod, the supreme governing body of the Orthodox Church. In 1810, the Main Directorate of Religious Affairs of Foreign Confessions was formed. It dealt with all the religions of the empire save Orthodoxy. Since the scope of the new institution seemed to be too insignificant; it was projected to be merged with the Ministry of Public Instruction. The idea of religion as the foundation of the education system, which was formulated in these projects, served the basis for placing the dominant Orthodoxy under the supervision of the joint department. The authors of the article argue that this plan was realized in 1817 through the establishment of the Ministry of Religious Affairs and Public Instruction. It was important for the authors of the constituent documents of the “double ministry” headed by the future minister A.N. Golitsyn, on the one hand, to clearly and unambiguously formulate the idea of relationship between education and religious piety, and on the other hand, to determine the relations between the Holy Synod and the new ministry. Public instruction was to be understood as education and upbringing based on religious truths. It should have been clear from the contents of the manifesto on the establishment of the ministry that the Holy Synod could not be subordinated to the minister of religious affairs. The fact that the Orthodox confession was placed under the supervision of the same institution with other religions did not allow to clearly identify its prevailing status. In 1824, the ministry was abolished, and the affairs of the Orthodox Church were separated into a special unit, which laid the foundation for the Department of the Orthodox Confession.

The author uses the monograph by A.V. Laushkin on ethnoconfessional ideas concerning the peoples neighboring to pre-Mongol and early Mongol Rus as occasion for his own reflections. The article examines the concepts regarding the use of church precepts in the area of interconfessional contacts of that time, the vocabulary of self-identification and separation from “strangers” inherent in the original Russian texts, providential models of describing relations with other peoples in these texts and their biblical parallels. The article characterizes the techniques employed by the author of the monograph for his analysis of the language of conceptualization of the early Russian chroniclers, in particular, the use of the “vocabulary of rejection” applied to neighbors of other faiths, and the “vocabulary of self-identification” opposite to the “vocabulary of rejection” in terms of its evaluative content and applicable to compatriots. Close attention is given to the assessment of Laushkin’s approach to the study of the religious imagery of the chroniclers’ language, its inherent eschatological dimension and providentialism, allusions to the Old Testament history (in particular, the Babylonian captivity). In his study, A.V. Laushkin provides a detailed gradation of the nuances of providential interpretations of Russian relations with neighboring cultures. This systematization is perceived as justifying itself while analyzing the Russian medieval mentality. The main critical point is the overloaded structure of the book. Its problematicthematic systematization overlaps with chronological one, and this overlapping considerably complicates the perception of the material and makes it accessible to a rather small circle of scholars. The apparent advantages of the book are two principal conclusions convincingly proved on the basis of extensive primary sources. The first conclusion is that the way neighboring peoples were presented in the Russian chronicles depended on the Russian relations with them and there were no stereotypes associated with their religions or life’s particularities. The second one is that the mentality of medieval Russian intellectuals was based on the providential understanding of the past, present, and future.

Almost immediately after the suppression of the Catiline conspiracy, Marcus Tullius Cicero stimulated several poems, composing by different people, and at least one historical work in his honor. Perhaps the only one who lived up to Cicero’s expectations was his best friend, Titus Pomponius Atticus. He devoted a work in Greek and Amaltheum inscriptions (epigrammata) to the consulate of Marcus Tullius. Atticus Commentarii covered the events of 63 BC in the vein of the perished work of Cicero himself. Almost nothing is known about the influence of the Commentarii on his contemporaries. A painstaking and meticulous author, Titus Pomponius did not have outstanding literary talent, but his work titled Imagines (images, portraits) along with Marcus Terence Varro’s Hebdomades formed the basis of a new genre, collections of literary portraits of prominent persons with short poetic passages. Distant predecessors of Imagines were the inscriptions in honor of Cicero written and placed by Atticus in his estate in Epiros. The study of epigrammata can help clarify the essence and typology of Amaltheum, a mysterious building or architectural complex. The ancient tradition allows us to conclude that the poems in Greek, praising Cicero, the consul of 63 BC saving the Eternal City from massacres and arsons, has been lost. Despite the fact that subsequently Atticus became a zealot of fatherly antiquity, he was a Hellenophile in his youth, and he had no reason to ostentatiously reproduce idealized Rome in the Greek villa. Hypothesizing Amaltheum as a “gallery of glory” and direct prototype of the forum of Augustus is unacceptable. The language of the inscriptions compels us to search for analogies in the Hellenic tradition of epigram. Scarce information gives no chance to reconstruct Amaltheum in any way. There is no evidence that it was a regularly planned space with a meaningful sequence of statues or busts. It was highly probable (although not confirmed by any source) that there was Cicero’s portrait.

March 24, 2020 marks the anniversary of Lidia Vasilyevna Koshman: Doctor of Historical Sciences, Chief Researcher and Head of the Laboratory of Cultural History of the Faculty of History, Lomonosov Moscow State University