The author states the problem of “the churching of intelligentsia” amidst the growing secularization of the Russian society at the turn of the twentieth century, and draws on the example of the life and journalistic essays of priest Iosif Ivanovich Fudel. The novelty of the work lies in the absence of treatises which would explore the topic of the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia becoming churchly, the ways and scale of this process, as well as the insufficient knowledge about the biography of the person whose activities vividly illustrate the chosen topic. Fudel’s personality and his system of beliefs are investigated in the context of socio-ecclesiastical life of his time. He had an original view on the issue of intelligentsia’s role, as he represented a conservative current within the Russian thought (which was first and foremost connected with Mikhail Novoselov’s circle and differed from the modernist and political currents of the “religious-philosophical Renaissance” age). At the heart of the source study base are Fudel’s political writings from the 1880–1900s, as well as his letters and memoirs about him. Some key articles on the topic are also used (works by Ivan Aksakov, collections of articles Vekhi and Intelligentsia in Russia). This made it possible to follow Fudel’s transition (spiritual and social) from the intelligentsia circles of the Moscow University to the Church, and the evolution of his thought from identifying with the initially criticized intelligentsia to the attempts at the meaningful dialogue with it and “internal mission” of the Church. Father Iosif set a great challenge, at that moment a practically impossible task of creating “folk intelligentsia”, which overcoming the stage of secularization would again become churchly at a new stage of its spiritual and intellectual evolution. Fudel’s standpoint was not exceptional, neither was it widespread enough to be able to overcome the alienation between the Church and the intellectuals. Nonetheless, Fudel’s work on bridging the gap between the Church and the intelligentsia — by way of preaching (inter alia, public and journalistic), mission, publication of literature, personal example — represents an important and individually successful case of relations between the two parties.

The subject of the article is the state of the historiography of the reign of Emperor Paul I, in particular, one of the most significant and controversial legislative acts of this monarch — the Manifesto of April 5, 1797. A brief overview of the impressive historiography devoted to the fleeting and tragic reign of Catherine the Great’s son suggests that the debate about the nature of domestic policy of the monarch, and, in particular, about the problem of serfdom, its place and role in the settlement of this issue by the Russian absolutism in the previous and subsequent time, is far from being resolved. This also applies to the assessment of the Manifesto of April 5, 1797. Despite the significant expansion of the range of studies focused on this document in recent years, historians have not reached unanimity. In a number of works there is a clear idealization of both the image of the Emperor himself and his policy on peasantry. Rather than being a Conservative seeking to protect serfdom from damage, Pavel Petrovich is presented as a Progressive, who marked the beginning of the implementation into practice of the idea of gradually alleviating the condition of privately owned peasants, culminating in their complete liberation. Supporters of the latter version cite as the main argument the above-mentioned edict of the Emperor. However, the analysis of the Manifesto text, the program documents of Tsesarevich Paul, the historical situation when the decree was published and applied in practice, as well as the assessment of the key points of the Emperor’s internal policy established in historiography allow the author to enter into polemics with this point of view. Therefore, the main task of the work is to draw the attention of researchers to a number of points that have been neglected by modern historians, and try to give a more objective and balanced view on the problem of assessing the Manifesto and the entire Paul’s policy on peasants. The novelty of the study lies in the combination of the historiographic review and the textual analysis of the decree that leads to an understanding why the historiography has provided such conflicting assessments of Paul’s reign, and demands further in-depth research.

The present study aims at finding historical patterns in the zones of contact and interpenetration of different civilizational models, which eventually lead to progressive dominance and the prevalence of one of them and displacement or absorption of the other. The author inspired by Russian byzantinist R.M. Shukurov’s book The Turks in the Byzantine World (1204–1461) attempts at comparing historical experiences of Spain and the Byzantine world in the 13th–15th centuries. He comparatively analyzes the processes that took place in the Pyrenees in the late Reconquista era (from the early 13th century) and in the Byzantine world during the last stage of its existence. Despite significant typological differences of state formations in these regions, the study reveals many common features, ranging from the political fates of Muslim Spain and Byzantium to the special nature of the intensive intercultural, interlingual and, more broadly, intercivilizational interaction in these lands at opposite ends of the Mediterranean. The author considers especially important R.M. Shukurov’s idea of the so-called “latent Turkicization” of the late Byzantine society, which actually unfolded from the inside: the Turkic element was gradually incorporated in the Byzantine world, became its integral part and determined the failure of the Empire. This model can be also useful for understanding the fate of Al- Andalus. The fall of the last Muslim state on the Iberian Peninsula, the Emirate of Granada, can be explained not only by political or economic reasons, but also by the “readiness” of Granada’s society to be conquered after more than 250-year interaction with the Christian world. A deeper study and better understanding of the historical role of the states like Granada or Byzantium, as well as other similar zones require to solve interdisciplinary problems not only within one specific academic field (Medieval, Byzantine, Oriental studies etc.), but through the interaction of various disciplines.

At the turn of the 18th–19th centuries an English court portraitist Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769–1830) was able to capture and reveal the character of his outstanding contemporaries who were associated both with Russia and Great Britain. The artist himself never visited Russia. Nevertheless, his work was known here, and Russian patrons and private collectors accumulated his works. The popularity of the artist is evidenced by the fact that several copies of his best works were made. In the first half of the 20th century part of these works were added to the collections of Russian museums, including the Museum of Fine Arts (later called the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts), where they have been held since 1924. The purpose of this article is to show the artist’s ties with Russia using the example of a small but diverse collection of Lawrence’s portraits from the funds of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts: Alexander I, Elizaveta Ksaverievna Vorontsova (née Branitskaya), Nikolai Alexandrovich Sablukov, Antonio Canova, Julia Peel (née Floyd), and Sally Siddons. The article compares the original painted images with their copies and written memoirs of contemporaries, gives descriptions, reconstructs the history of the creation of portraits and their copies, and briefly discusses the provenance of these works. The article also indicates the main phases of the life of Lawrence’s Russian models, relating facts about the patrons’ ties with both Russia and Great Britain. Although in general the work of Thomas Lawrence has been studied in sufficient detail by foreign experts, the article closes a certain gap. This is one of the first studies on the artist’s relations with Russia which describes Lawrence’s works from the collection of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts. The author provides unique data from the Archive of Foreign Policy of the Russian Empire, the archive of Prince Vorontsov, and also publishes for the first time in Russian the letter written by Robert Peel to Thomas Lawrence, dated January 17, 1825.

The factory founded by M.V. Lomonosov in the village of Ust’- Ruditsa in 1753 for “manufacturing glass of different colors invented by him, and beads from it, bead stringings and all kinds of other haberdashery items and garments” ceased to exist no later than 1768. The article presents the results of the analysis of smalt glasses made in M.V. Lomonosov’s chemical laboratory and the Ust’-Ruditsa factory in 1749–1767. It allows reconstructing the unique technology of their production. This technique consists in the use of two frits – a high lead “yellow frit” and a potash “white frit”, as well as bone ash and lime. At the first stages of working with glass, the scientist employed ready-made frits produced at other factories. In addition to the bone ash the scientist used white arsenic and antimony as additives that cause the clouding of glass. Thus, we can assume that it was M.V. Lomonosov who, for the first time in Russia, added bone ash as glass opacifier. Using one and the same amount of colorant he managed to change color by varying the ratio of two frits. This explains the long-established fact that, with the help of a relatively narrow set of colorants (copper, iron, manganese, cobalt, antimony, gold and silver compounds), the scientist created the wide palette of smalt glasses. The first attempted mathematical processing of smalt analysis data allows defining the compositions of individual components in glass and the ratio of charge components. It has been suggested that the uniqueness of this technology and its specificity for smalt glass manufacturing served as an obstacle to its employment at other factories. However, M.V. Lomonosov did not work in vain. The skills of “compiling matter”, using colorants, producing “golden ruby” glass and the scientific approach to the technological process were undoubtedly developed at his factory in Ust’-Ruditsa.

According to the sources, the term “in Powers” was used in the titles of various Russian iconographies; the widespread and well-known one is: “The Saviour in Powers”. The origin and nature of this image are largely open to question. Its meaning has not been revealed: the word “Powers” can define either “angelic powers” or “divine creative power and might”. The article draws attention to the fact that every Russian icon with “in Powers” in its title has the same quadrangular pointed elements with the symbols of the evangelists. The author suggests that the term “Powers” is related not to the angels, as is commonly believed, but to these star-shaped figures. They are the most noticeable and characteristic details of “The Saviour in Powers” and other iconographies with similar star-shaped objects. And it is reasonable to assume that these iconographies, especially “The Saviour in Powers”, are named after them and not after comparatively small and hardly visible “transparent” angels. In the author’s view, the epithet “in Powers” was initially applied to the icon of the enthroned Savior in a star-shaped “radiance”, which was located in the center of the Deesis row. And here it meant “divine creative power”. Repeating in other icons, these (and similar to them) star-shaped figures should have been associated with the epithet “in Powers” and could add it to their titles. It is also possible that it was attributed to both angelic powers and star-shaped figures that would allow using “powers” in the plural form.

The capital’s palace complexes of the 6th–4th-century BCE Achaemenid Iran in Pasargadae, Susa and Persepolis embodied the principle of a synthesis of arts, in which architecture and sculpture, as well as the landscape environment, were organically combined. A special type of Iranian regular garden — a paradise — emerged in the era of the Achaemenids and its remains were excavated by archaeologists in the center of the palace complex in Pasargadae. The analysis of ancient texts (the works by Xenophon and Lucius Flavius Arrian) reveals the specifics of ancient Persian gardens-paradises and hunting parks, their various categories, organizational features and semantics of the palace garden. The study of cuneiform tablets from the “Fortification” and “Treasury” archives of Persepolis also provides valuable data on the hiring of special workers who cared for the royal gardens. Additionally, the Elamite cuneiform tablets from Persepolis evidence the existence of home gardens (“partetaš”) that, being predominantly agricultural, markedly differed from the paradises. The examination of the extant stone irrigation system of the royal paradise in Pasargadae reveals a strict geometric layout of the Achaemenid gardens with intersecting alleys that create a four-part garden structure. Subsequently, Iranian landscape-gardening art will take this composition as the basis of the Persian four-part garden (“chahar bagh”). The presence of compact park pavilions brings the royal paradise of Pasargadae closer to the earlier Assyrian gardens in Khorsabad and Nineveh in the late 8th–7th centuries BCE. In the classical Achaemenid palace complexes in Susa and Persepolis, landscape-gardening art loose its significance and supplemented architecture. Due to this fact, the royal gardens of the Achaemenids in the 5th– 4th centuries BCE were more compact and intimate. In this regard, the author considers the relevant issue of localization of the palace gardens in Susa and Persepolis. He explores the problems of typology and reconstruction of landscapegardening art in Achaemenid Iran on the basis of all the collected archaeological data and written sources.

The article analyzes critical assessments of the concept of Russia- Eurasia in modern Western literature. The author especially focuses on Marléne Laruelle’s Russian Eurasianism: An Ideology of Empire, Alexander Etkind’s Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience and Bruno Maçães’s The Dawn of Eurasia: On the Trail of the New World Order. The author shows that some common shortcomings of these studies are determined by certain principles of the Western intellectual tradition. Thus, M. Laruelle seeks to portray the doctrine of the Eurasians as a heap of contradictions, but her strategy itself reflects the specific positivist rationality of the West, which, due to the adherence to the idea of subject/object opposition, divides the world and universalizes conflicts. This approach that is not wholly alien to Eurasian thinkers accounts for many of the Eurasian movement’s limitations and failures. The theoretical potential of the key concepts of Eurasianism, i. e. “place-development”, “everyday profession of faith”, “demotia” etc., remained unclear. The author offers a new approach to Eurasian thoughts based on the principle of (self)transformation of reality, which leads to the mutual transfiguration of humankind and the world. The afore said limitations of the Western methodology of history are inherent in the book by A. Etkind, who considers the history of Russia from the perspective of the socalled internal colonization. Following J. Habermas, the author defines it as an innovation of modernity, which “falls into the world of life from outside … and force it to assimilate”. The article reveals the inconsistency of this “colonialist” view of the Russian history and indicates the possibilities and real historical phenomena that allow seeing in the history of Russia not so much the colonization of the Russian world by Western “innovations” as meeting points, free “compatibility” of colonization and an alternative worldview, called “countercolonization”. This can be a basis of the global and prospective Euro-Asian world system, which includes Russia. B. Maçães’s book already admits an optimistic scenario of the integration of Eurasia and the West.

After the Locarno Conference of 1925, the idea of deploying the Locarno’s experience for concluding multilateral guarantee pacts in other regions of Europe, other than Western, gained particular popularity. Rafael Erich, the Finnish representative in the League of Nations, was a person who voiced this idea as a “Northern Locarno” project. It has not become an object of research in historical literature, as the project was rejected by the involved parties even before its official discussion. However, the study of its perception is necessary for better understanding the political climate in Europe in the mid-1920s and the politics of the minor Baltic countries and the Great Powers advancing their own interests in the Baltic region. The objective of this article is to examine the German reaction to R. Erich’s project as a demonstration of inconsistency in the German Baltic policy. The very idea of developing a multilateral guarantee pact in the Baltic grasped the minds of German diplomats. On the one hand, such a security system would be a bar against German revisionist aspirations in the east. On the other hand, due to the significant economic and political influence of Germany in the Baltic republics, Finland and Sweden, the “Northern Locarno” could be instrumental for maintaining German dominance in the Baltic region. Not daring to speak openly, either for or against the project, the Foreign Ministry of the Weimar Republic limited itself to collecting information from the Scandinavian and Baltic press, which wrote very negatively about the “Northern Locarno”. In addition, the USSR strongly opposed Erich’s project, while one of the primary goals of the German diplomacy was maintaining good relations with it. Finally, Germany refused to support the Finnish project since its alleged negative consequences outweighed positive ones. In subsequent years, the tactics regarding the “Northern Locarno” (i.e. avoiding open discussions and maintaining active interaction with the Soviet Union) were employed by Germany against the Polish plan of an “Eastern Locarno”

The first decades of the 21st century have witnessed special scholarly interest to a wide range of problems related to the socio-cultural study of collective mentality. This inevitably leads to the actualization of the research on mass historical sources that characterize the public mood in early 20th-century Russia. The “Letters of the Black Hundreds and Other Persons” are kept in the archival fund of the Union of Russian People in the State Archive of the Russian Federation. The fact that letters to political parties and organizations in the early 20th century, unlike to letters to Soviet authorities, have not been fully studied, determines the relevance of the article. The most effective way to analyze conservative and monarchist sentiments reflected in the “Letters of the Black Hundreds and Other Persons” is the method of content analysis, which allows getting the so-called hidden information from the source and significantly increasing its informative output. The result of applying this methodology to the “Letters of the Black Hundreds and Other Persons” was the identification of six significant semantic categories that are most often found in the epistolary texts and, thus, reflect a steady mood of their authors. An analysis of the semantic content of each of the categories made it possible to see all the currents of the public mood revealed by correspondents, and to identify the ideas of the right-wing monarchist ideology dearest to them. Paired occurrence of the most representative semantic categories allows supplementing their characterization. The textual analysis of the “Letters” demonstrated that through their messages the correspondents most actively broadcast their “support for the autocracy”, nationalist statements, anti-revolutionary sentiments, “support for and protection of the Orthodox faith,” upholding of the Union of Russian people and A.I. Dubrovin, personally. The fact that the expressions of support for autocracy and the Orthodox faith, nationalistic and anti-revolutionary statements are simultaneously found in most letters points to the existence of a stable conservative and monarchist mentality among the vast majority of correspondents, and the interpretation of these data in the article clarifies, in many aspects, historiographic assessments of their political and social views.