This study seeks to identify the origins and subsequent evolution of the “heroic” interpretation of princely conduct during the assault on Vladimir by Batu’s forces in February 1238, and to assess the credibility of that interpretation. Its object is the complex of accounts of Batu’s invasion preserved within Russian chronicles from the late thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries, together with works of early domestic historiography of the second half of the eighteenth century. Analysis of these texts indicates that, in the earliest chronicle monuments, the princes were not represented as heroic resisters of the conquerors. The “heroic” reading that later became entrenched in historiography emerged from a subsequent reinterpretation of the Laurentian Chronicle’s narrative, which itself does not speak of any active struggle by the princes against the Tatars. Efforts to cast their actions in heroic terms begin to appear from the first third of the fifteenth century, finding their most vivid expression in the account of the First Sofia Chronicle. At each successive stage of rethinking this episode, the Vladimir princes were attributed ever more bellicose intentions toward the invaders. Within later chronicle compilations — up to and including the Nikon Chronicle of the first third of the sixteenth century — this approach came to predominate among learned compilers. The Nikon Chronicle’s interpretation, with only minor refinements, passed into early domestic historiography, shaping the works of V.N. Tatishchev, M.M. Shcherbatov, Catherine II, I.M. Stritter, and others. In this respect Shcherbatov’s History stands somewhat apart: while endorsing the “heroic” construal of princely conduct, he nonetheless reproached the princes for a “spirit of immoderate piety,” which, in his view, contributed to their refusal to “defend the Fatherland” and thus to defeat. This historiographical position, however, did not develop in subsequent generations: N.M. Karamzin, S.M. Solov’ev, and other nineteenth-century classics of Russian historiography continued to interpret the events surrounding the siege of Vladimir in accordance with the stance consolidated in the Nikon Chronicle.

An “alphabetical oracle” is a set of twenty-four responses arranged on an alphabetic principle, in a manner comparable to an acrostic. Alphabetical oracles survive only in epigraphic form and are dated to the second and the early third century CE. Eleven such inscriptions are known from the southern regions of Asia Minor, and only one from Cyprus. The study of the Cypriot text passed through several distinct stages; most unexpectedly, a text discovered in thirteen fragments was ultimately restored in full. The fragments of a marble slab bearing the inscription were found in 1930–1931 by the Swedish Cyprus Expedition near the city of Soloi, at Cholades, in the courtyard of Temple B (the temple of Aphrodite). In 1937 E. Ekman identified the text as a hymn to Aphrodite. In 1939 G. Bjorck demonstrated that the inscription was, in fact, an alphabetical oracle; his conclusion was published that same year by L. Robert, although Bjork’s own article appeared only in 1956. In 1963 excavations of the temple of Apollo at Hierapolis in Phrygia brought to light a block inscribed with an alphabetical oracle composed not in iambic trimeter, as in all previously known examples, but in hexameters. In editing that inscription, G. Pugliese Carratelli noted numerous thematic correspondences with the oracle from Soloi. In 1988 C. Brixhe and R. Hodot published an alphabetical oracle discovered by Brixhe in 1972 at the site of Timbriada in Pisidia. The text of this oracle — divergent from other iambic oracles — matched all the surviving fragments from Soloi and thus made possible the complete reconstruction of the Cypriot oracle. Yet the comparative study of the Soloi inscription alongside Asia Minor material had the effect of detaching it from Cyprus and from Cypriot scholarship. Thus, in 2012, G. Papantoniou, citing K. Hadjioannou, referred to it once again as a hymn to Aphrodite. The aim of the present article is not only to review the vicissitudes of the Soloi oracle’s scholarly afterlife, but also to restore it to the interpretive frameworks of Cypriot religious history.

The theory of just war, elaborated by theologians and jurists as early as the early Middle Ages, rested on three interdependent elements: causa iusta, legitimate authority, and the pursuit of peace as the war’s ultimate end. This conceptual triad made it possible to construe war — even between Christians — as a permissible instrument for the restoration of social order and violated legality. Yet, notwithstanding the formal parity of these necessary conditions, the legitimacy of authority remained decisive. Whatever the justice of a cause or the nobility of an end, Christian doctrine categorically forbade private bloodshed as a means of settling disputes. Among medieval theologians who addressed war within Christendom, the English church reformer John Wycliffe occupies a distinctive place. In his critique of warfare, he drew a sharp line between Old Testament and New Testament traditions, grounding his argument against war exclusively in New Testament texts. Exposing the sinful character of wars justified as the defense of laws, Wycliffe described vengeance for an injury as an expression of malice, and the recovery of seized property as avarice. Beyond theoretical reflections on wars in the abstract, he also turned to concrete historical circumstances, for example, the conflict waged by English kings for the French crown. Wycliffe insisted that a good ruler ought to care solely for his own subjects rather than seek the conquest of others’ lands. Wycliffe’s radical repudiation of violence and bloodshed is directly connected to the central theme of his philosophical doctrine, namely his understanding of the nature of power. While affirming the divine origin of all earthly authority, he made its legitimacy contingent upon divine grace, which the ruler could preserve only through uncompromising obedience to God. This entailed observance of evangelical commandments: love of enemies and forgiveness of the wrongs they inflict. From this theological premise Wycliffe derived a consequential political conclusion: for a lawful ruler, the declaration of war signified the loss of divine grace and, hence, of legitimacy itself. In such a case, subjects were released from any obligation to obey royal commands that involved violence.

This article examines the presence in Smolensk province of prisoners of war from the Ottoman army during the Crimean War (1853–1856). The episode is analyzed through the lens of the implementation of Russian legislation on prisoners of war and the mobilization of local resources and administrative practices for their material provisioning. The argument and conclusions rest chiefly on a comparative analysis of Russian legal norms governing prisoners of war and the office documentation produced by the provincial administrative institutions in Smolensk responsible for prisoners of war affairs. Where scholarship on prisoners of war has typically foregrounded foreign-policy considerations or the legal status of foreigners in the Russian Empire, this article instead focuses on prisoners’ material provision and their relations with the local population, examined through the prism of everyday interactions. The provisioning of prisoners of war coincided with the organization of the Smolensk state mobile militia, a conjunction that exacerbated the economic strain in an interior province on the eve of the abolition of serfdom. Ottoman prisoners were quartered only in two towns — Smolensk and Roslavl’ — yet, the author argues, even this limited provincial experience exposes systemic shortcomings in the captivity regime across the empire as a whole. That regime, drawing simultaneously on norms of military law and criminal-correctional legislation, nonetheless rested on an acknowledged principle of humanitarian treatment toward captives. Difficulties of material support for prisoners further illuminate mid-nineteenth-century fiscal relations between central and local organs of state authority and the mechanisms by which in-kind obligations were deployed to meet both local and state needs. Wartime pressures complicated these fiscal relations and effectively shifted responsibility for provisioning onto local resources. The material conditions of captivity, in turn, occasioned a number of quotidian conflicts between Ottoman prisoners and inhabitants of Smolensk province, even though relations overall remained largely peaceable.

The emergence of higher education for women in the Russian Empire proceeded in distinct stages. A first step was the permission granted to women to attend selected university lectures in the late 1850s and early 1860s; at that moment, however, the question of systematic instruction was scarcely raised. This was due in part to the mismatch between the curricula of women’s secondary schools and the level of preparation expected of first-year university students. A second, no less important factor behind the slow institutionalization of women’s higher education was the government’s limited interest in it. Against this background, the first women’s institution of higher learning — the Courses for Learned Midwives opened in 1872 at the Medico-Surgical Academy (renamed in 1876 the Women’s Medical Courses) — was, significantly, a state enterprise. Its establishment and expansion were largely owed to the minister of war, D.A. Miliutin, who not only placed the courses under his ministry but also, circumventing standard bureaucratic procedures, secured an enlargement of their curriculum. The article surveys attempts to organize women’s higher educational institutions both through public initiative and through governmental channels, emphasizing, on the one hand, the difficulties that confronted voluntary and civic efforts to create courses and, on the other, the ambivalent position of state structures compelled to introduce higher education for women despite broader tendencies in government policy. The organizers of the Women’s Medical Courses also devoted considerable effort to distancing the institution from the student movement and to demonstrating the loyalty of its auditors, whose commitments, they insisted, lay exclusively with study. The next step would have been the creation of a separate system of women’s higher education, yet no governmental department assumed responsibility for this demanding task. The War Ministry itself withdrew its support: after Miliutin’s resignation in 1881, institutional reform made the existence of a women’s educational institution within the ministry’s structure “inappropriate”. As a result, notwithstanding the widespread recognition of the courses’ utility, they survived only fifteen years and were closed in 1887.

The implementation of legislation on social provision for industrial workers injured in workplace accidents in the South of Russia has received little sustained attention in the scholarly literature. Drawing on the published proceedings of the Congresses of Mining Industrialists of South Russia, pre-revolutionary periodicals, and materials from the State Archive of the Donetsk People’s Republic, the author identifies the categories of enterprises involved in providing assistance to the population of the region and reconstructs a number of industrial accidents. The article also delineates the measures taken to support injured workers and their families, offering concrete examples of how claims for accident benefits were examined at the 38th, 39th, and 40th Congresses of Mining Industrialists of South Russia (1913, 1914, and 1915). From 1903 onward, the Congress played an active role in establishing a special fund intended to aid workers affected by mass accidents. The fund was financed through the proceeds of a dedicated levy paid by all enterprises extracting bituminous coal and anthracite. On the basis of documentation submitted by victims and enterprises, pension payments were assigned to injured workers; disputes and misunderstandings were adjudicated by the Congress Council in consultation with the interested parties. From March 1907 the statistical bureau of the Council organized the registration of all disabled workers in the Donets Basin by creating personal cards for mining and metallurgical workers of the South of Russia who had been injured after 1 January 1904, that is, after the entry into force of the law of 2 June 1903 on workers’ insurance. Workers suffering from diseases of the respiratory system were monitored in a sanatorium. In addition, funds allocated by the 29th Congress were used to pay pensions and allowances to the wounded and to the families of those killed during the Russo-Japanese War. Numerous protocols drawn up by police supervisors and medical certificates relating to accidents at the Berestovka, Amur, Ital’yanaka, and Sofia mines between 1911 and 1916 further attest to efforts to secure pensions for injured workers and their families.

Unlike the activities of flight crews, the work of Soviet military aviation engineers in Spain during the Civil War (1936–1939) has, until now, received little sustained scholarly attention; this article offers what is presented as the first systematic study of the subject in both Russian and non-Russian historiography. On the basis of an extensive body of archival documentation, specialized technical publications, and memoir literature, the author demonstrates that a number of Soviet specialists served not merely as advisers but, in fact, headed the aviation engineering service of the Republican Air Force as a whole, as well as its engineering units on particular fronts. This constitutes a rare case in military history and attests to the high professional competence of the Soviet aviation engineers dispatched to Spain. Soviet specialists directed the Republican aviation engineering service for nearly two years. This situation arose, first, because from October 1936 until the end of the war Soviet aircraft formed the backbone of the Republic’s air fleet; and, second, because among the small number of Spanish Air Force career officers who remained loyal to the lawful government there were no experts of sufficient qualification to organize independently the technically sound operation and repair of aircraft supplied from the USSR. The author identifies four Soviet advisers who held senior responsibilities for the air force’s aviation engineering service, while two others led the service on the Eastern (Aragon) front. The article describes the objective difficulties Soviet aviation engineers faced in establishing and administering such a service in a foreign country and delineates both the variety and the scale of their duties in Spain. These engineers were required to train Spanish engineering and technical personnel, to organize fixed and mobile aircraft -repair workshops, and to restore to operational readiness aircraft that certain countries sold to the Republican government without armaments or specialized equipment. The study thus brings into view their contribution to the creation and maintenance of a highly capable air force for Republican Spain. Particular attention is given to contemporary evaluations of the Soviet senior advisers’ performance – both by the head of the Spanish Air Force and by the Soviet military-political leadership.

The concept of the “youth museum”, introduced here into scholarly usage, is intended to overcome the formal limitations of existing definitions – “children’s”, “school”, “student”, and “university” museums — while synthesizing and foregrounding the most consequential functional aspects of contemporary museum practice. A diachronic reconstruction of the functional system of the modern youth museum suggests that the content-and-communication complex associated with this term constitutes an integral element of museum culture as such. The authors locate the origins of university museum activity in the natural-history museums of the Enlightenment; the Ashmolean Museum at the University of Oxford may be regarded as the first of its kind. Russian institutions of higher learning (including Moscow University and the Mining Institute) embarked on the creation of their own teaching museums as a key component of educational formation at roughly the same time as European universities; in both Europe and Russia, private benefactors played a substantial role in this process. Across the centuries, the museum functioned as a major alternative medium through which the young could acquire value orientations; it also served to legitimize particular cultural and ideological doctrines in the minds of new generations, thereby shaping youth sociocultural self-identification within a given mental community. The educational orientation of museums toward youthful audiences has, in turn, entailed a continuous search for new communicative resources capable of enhancing receptivity, appeal, and the efficacy of scholarly and public enlightenment. By identifying the principal motives and vectors of a youth museum’s work, the authors propose a model for an innovative scientific-educational structure designed to address pressing sociocultural tasks of the present. The theoretical premises developed on this basis have made it possible to design and test, within a contemporary university museum environment, an original system of activities positioned as the “youth museum” of Moscow University. In practice, the clusters of such a system emerge across multiple sites within particular university campuses and beyond them, while maintaining a unified developmental concept, a program of remote events, and a digital catalogue of holdings. It is precisely through the development of a university youth museum that diverse groups of contemporary youth may be most effectively engaged – not merely with a museum of a classical type, but with mobile, networked scientific and educational projects sustained by the museum community.

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.

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.