The question concerning the place of death of Lucius Sergius Catiline, the famous opponent of Marcus Tullius Cicero, has long been discussed by erudite scholars and professional historians. The only detailed description of those events by Sallust opens the door to a variety of hypotheses. It is only known for certain that the Catiline’s last battle took place in agro Pistoriensi, in the vicinity of the modern-day city of Pistoia. Ancient tradition intertwined with the political collisions of medieval Tuscany, giving rise to a deeply rooted view of the inhabitans of Pistoia as descendants of Catiline’s soldiers. The early chronicles, without putting forward any argument, placed the battle at the Piceno’s plain near the Piteccio castle. However, in the 17th century, the erudite scholar M. Salvi suggested that Catiline died on the plain of Vaioni. This point of view became widespread and turned out to be the first scientific hypothesis, since its author provided a body of evidence and initiated a debate which should also be rightfully recognized as scholarly. Salvi put forward arguments of toponymic, archaeological and logistic nature. He based his interpretation on Sallust’s account, seeking to reconcile it with the previous tradition of the chronicles and local legends about the origin of the names of settlements. As an additional argument, Salvi appealed to archaeological finds in Vaioni. Eighty years later, his hypothesis was challenged by another erudite from Pistoia, D. Cini, whose interpretation prevails to this day. Cini and later scholars refuted most of Salvi’s arguments. Nevertheless, within the framework of this polemic, the foundations of a modern approach to finding the place of Catiline’s death were laid: the combined use of various historical sources and the consideration of the topographic characteristics of the area. With the development of scientific methods, the focus of modern research has shifted to the study of the northern Tuscany road network which allowed trans-Apennine movement. This shift was partly driven by the debate between the supporters and opponents of the Vaioni plain hypothesis as the site of the last battle of Catiline. Thus, M. Salvi’s hypothesis, though now rejected, has played a certain role in the history of historical research.

The article examines Chinese scholars’ views on the functioning of the provincial system in China. This system was formed in China under the Mongol Yuan dynasty in the 13th century and served as a model for the centralization of the empire. After having been developed through certain stages of transformation, it later provided the main administrative and legal structure of the region and significantly influenced the system of central and regional authorities in China in the 13th and 14th centuries. It was of great importance during the Ming and Qing dynasties that followed the Yuan dynasty and ultimately had an impact on the administrative system of present-day China. The analysis of the peculiarities of the provincial system in China helps deepen the understanding of the Yuan period and the evolution of the administrative-territorial division of China. The research objective is to present diverse views of some Chinese scholars regarding the significance of the provincial system in the history of China. The article outlines the concepts of the most authoritative Chinese scholars, characterizes the main features of the provincial system and presents the author’s own view on the above stated issue. The article consists of several parts which set out the scholarly views on the emergence and history of the provincial system, its nature, functions and significance in the Yuan Empire, and its future. The formation and development of the provincial system is still a poorly studied area in Chinese historiography. The functioning of the provincial system is mainly dealt with in general works on the history of China. This research provides an idea of the extent to which Chinese scholars have studied one of the most important administrative institutions in China.

The main trends of economic development on the Crimean peninsula had been shaped to the end of the 19th century. Due to the climatic and geographic peculiarities of this area of the empire, these principal economic sectors of investments were agriculture and health resort treatment and rest. This article examines the operational activities of several branches of the State Bank in the Tavricheskaya guberniya in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It particularly deals with the work of the most active branches of the bank in Sevastopol and Feodosia. The author dwells less upon the activities of the Yalta branch, which were started on a permanent basis only on the eve of the First World War. The decision to open a branch in Simferopol in 1915 turned out to be unpromising when the State Bank’s policy to reduce credit operations became obvious. In a short period of its working time, this branch only managed to replenish its staff and to master mainly the methods of processing passive operations. Taking into account the nature of the activities of the branches of the State Bank, the author describes in more detail bill of exchange accounting and commodity loan procedures. The article examines the methods of credit operations of the main Russian credit institution in the Tavricheskaya guberniya, its successes and failures in allocating its funds to the business circles of the province. In particular, it pays attention to the cooperation of the Sevastopol branch with small credit institutions to provide grain loans to peasants. The small credit institutions helped this branch increase the amount of grain loans to peasants up to 1 mln rubles and more by 1912. The author also reviews the activities of accounting and credit committees of the branches and their methods of work. He analyzes bill portfolios of the Sevastopol and Feodosia branches of the Bank and sources of their origin.

December 2020 marks the centenary of the birth of Nina Stepanovna Kinyapina, a prominent Soviet and Russian historian, an authoritative higher education teacher, honorary professor of Moscow State University. She is the founder of a school for the study of the history of Imperial Russian foreign policy, Russian policy in the East and outlying ethnic regions of the empire - the Caucasus and Central Asia. The article commemorates N.S. Kinyapina, her academic heritage and the school based at the faculty of history, Lomonosov Moscow State University. Her entire academic career path and pedagogical activity at Moscow University are traced, starting from the first day within its walls and up to receiving the title of Honorary Professor. The author briefly considers her theses, as well as the major milestones of her research work. The article pays particular attention to the N.S. Kinyapina's choice of research topics and directions and analyzes her major works, and most importantly, her views on key issues of the selected research problems, assessment of various political figures and their activities both within the empire and in the field of foreign policy, as well as an interpretation of the nuances of border management in the 19th - early 20th centuries. The article reflects the reaction of the Russian academic community to Kinyapina's research and involves some reviews. All well-known representatives of her scientific school are listed, first of all those of her students who made a significant contribution to the development of Soviet and Russian historical research. Many of her foreign students, especially from the Balkans and the Transcaucasus, are also mentioned. By giving concrete examples, the author traces continuity in professional specialization, and enumerates all modern scholarly works written in recent decades by the different generations of representatives of the school. The article draws on the fragments from the personal memoirs of the older generation of Professor N.S. Kinyapina's students and creates a more complete and multidimensional view of her personality.

The approaching 150th anniversary of the State Historical Museum is the best occasion not only to commemorate the names of outstanding scientists and organizers who stood at its origins, but also to pay tribute to the ordinary museum workers, who all contributed to its development and success. The article sets the task of reconstructing the biography of Lyudmila Petrovna Minarik, a long-term museum employee. Her bibliography is not large due to her professional path. Most of the scholarly results of her work were realized in short-lived exhibitions or permanent exhibition of the museum anonymously developed. Taking into account the deep scientific foundation of the State Historical Museum’s exposition, it might well be recognized as a historiographic fact, since the exposition is not just a collection of exhibits, but it conveys deep meanings, based on the analysis conducted by the group of scholars. Reconstruction of the L.P. Minarik’s biography is complicated by the absence of her personal archive, i.e. the sources of personal origin that allow revealing the evolution of her scientific laboratory. To fill these gaps, the research involves documents from the departmental archive of the State Historical Museum. Along with L.P. Minarik’s personal files during the period when she was postgraduate and research assistant of the museum, the author analyzes the records of the State Historical Museum for the period 1955-1993: annual plans and activities reports of the Museum and its departments, minutes of meetings of the Academic Council of the Museum and thematic plans of exhibitions. The author examines the documents relating to the accounting of research requests in the Written Sources Department of the State Historical Museum for the same period to determine the range of documents from the Museum collection, which were involved by L.P. Minarik while preparing exhibitions and writing her scholarly articles. She traces the milestones of the L.P. Minarik’s professional path and identifies the main directions of her activity: museum exposition, research and collection. The article also attempts at characterizing their internal contents on the basis on the documents involved in the research.

After the end of the Cold War, a unipolar system, based on the US military power, economic and cultural hegemony in different parts of the world, has been established in world politics. The Balkan crises in the 1990s revealed the methods and purposes of the great powers in this region. The Balkans has been destabilized since the end of the Cold War, disintegration of the USSR and collapse of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Under I. Broz Tito, interethnic and interfaith conflicts that had already existed in Yugoslavia were frozen, and in the 1990s, under S. Milošević, their outburst led to the disintegration of the country and civil war. This opened the way for the US influence here. In the beginning, however, the US, which had the opportunity to employ all its military power to prevent the conflict in Bosnia, took the position of an observer. In December 1992, the US troops first appeared in the territory of the former Yugoslavia as part of a United Nations peacekeeping team in Macedonia, directly bordering Kosovo. The US increasing presence and activity in the region was not accompanied with further escalation of conflicts, and in 1995, the Dayton Agreements were concluded with the US effective participation. The US actions have become much tougher and more offensive after the onset of the Kosovo crisis. The US-led NATO coalition in Kosovo ignored international law and its military operation demonstrated the tightening of the US policy. This study examines the US Balkan policies after the end of the Cold War, during the crises in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo. It also attempts at a comparative analysis of the factors that influenced Washington's activities in the context of these crises.

The victory of the opposition parties in the elections to the Second State Duma (1995) was facilitated not only by objective factors, but also by the peculiarities of the electoral system in the Russian Federation. In this regard, the president and his entourage actively promote a strategy that provided for abandonment of the majority-proportional system and transition exclusively to the majority principle of Duma elections. It was assumed that this would make the deputy corps more loyal and amorphous. This article examines the aggravation of political contradictions between the president and the deputies of the Second Duma in connection with his intention to radically change the rules of the “electoral game”. The analysis is based on the complex of the sources (regulatory legal acts, the Federal Assembly and media materials). The research subject is a political conflict in the context of a certain historical situation. Its resolution involved much larger political consequences than simply choosing an electoral system. There is so far no attempt to study the electoral reform in 1997-1999 as a complex political and legal problem. The clash between the president and the parliament over the procedure for electing Duma deputies was one of the many conflicts that were the essentials of the Russian political process in the 1990s. However, after the adoption of the 1993 Constitution, these contradictions were being resolved by legal means within the framework of public policy. The problem of the optimal electoral system and possible ways of improving the Russian electoral law were also publicly debated. The Constitutional Court played a special role in the overcoming of this conflict between the two branches of power and updating the electoral laws. Thus, the joint efforts of the three branches of power, as well as the academic community, helped to make the Russian electoral system better and more adequate to a specific socio-political situation, though it did not guarantee truly fair elections.

The present article deals with the notions of the influence of food products on human life expectancy, widespread at the end of the 18th - first quarter of the 20th century, as well as the concepts of longevity adopted during this period. The article considers food products that contribute to an increase in life expectancy when they are used correctly in accordance with the age, physique, temperament and sex of a person. The aim of this article is to provide a general overview of scientific and medical ideas about achieving longevity at the interface of dietetics, philosophy and history of medicine. Their rethinking seems to be very relevant given the renewal of longevity promoting practices in modern society, the revisiting of the hypotheses and theories about the “secret of long-livers”, etc. Currently, there are studies looking at medical concepts and specific recipes from the past in order to find new approaches to the development of modern medicine. Thus, a number of innovations in modern science and medicine (for example: the rejuvenating effect of blood, shunamitism, correlating the age of mothers with their children’s prospects for a long life, “magnetic mattresses to increase life span”, etc.) have already been described by experts in the field of longevity research in the 18th - 19th centuries. The study of such concepts and introducing into scientific discourse information about various relevant kinds of studies and inventions of bygone era will strengthen the scientific base of the issue. The present study is based on materials from medical and popular science literature of the late 18th - first quarter of the 20th century. Attention is focused on products that are widely used in current everyday life, and which were believed to have a geroprotective effect, as well as rejuvenate and heal the human body. These are such products as coffee, tea, sugar, chocolate, cinnamon, etc. The study results in identifying general ideas of the secret of longevity, based on the animistic concept, which was supported by representatives of scientific medicine, philosophical and religious healing as well as magical and mystical healing traditions in Russia at the turn of the 19th -20th centuries.

There have long been several debatable problems related to the Kizil-Koba culture and the Tauri in archeology. One of the most difficult is the Tauri’s settlement. After identification of the Kizil-Koba culture with the Tauri, the territory of their settlement is supposed to be identical with the area of the sites of this culture. However, since Herodotus describes in detail the “country” of the Tauri as a mountainous area, it contradicts to the archaeological fact that the monuments of the Kizil-Koba culture exist both in the steppe part of the Crimea and on the Kerch Peninsula, which Herodotus does not include in the regions of the Tauri. According to Strabo, the Tauri once occupied the entire Crimean peninsula. One of the scholars surmised that the habitat of the Tauri changed over time, and by the fifth century BCE their tribes completely moved to the foothill and mountainous areas. Heated debates unfolded regarding the boundaries of Tauria. According to Herodotus, its western border lies near the town of Kerkinitis. This issue was resolved after Kerkinitis’s ruins were discovered in Yevpatoria and this site was considered the town mentioned by Herodotus. The eastern border is supposed to stretch to Feodosia. The discovery of the monuments with Taurian ceramics and pre-Greek settlements in Bosporus’s territory points to the presence of the Tauri, although Herodotus does not include the Kerch Peninsula in the “country” of the Tauri. Since they were the autochthonous people of the Crimea, there must have been an archaeological culture that preceded the Kizil-Kobin one. The discovery of this culture, the Belozerskaya culture, expanded our understanding of the Tauri’s habitat. Thus, the archaeological finds of the steppe, mountainous and foothill Crimea change the idea of the area of the Tauri’s settlement and clarify the information provided by the ancient authors.