In this article, the authors attempt to reconstruct the biographies of the two first directors of the Leningrad State Anti-Religious Museum, opened in 1931 in St Isaac’s Cathedral in Leningrad. The data presented in this paper is, on the one hand, important for a better understanding of one of the understudied subjects in the history of the museum. It allows one to contextualise this story more accurately within the larger history of the epoch. On the other hand, it also has a broader scholarly significance. A museum is not only a keeper of artefacts of past culture, but also an individual artefact of its own culture. Analysing its history allows one to understand better the circumstances of the place and time of its functioning. The article draws on materials from several St. Petersburg archives, namely the Central State Historical Archive of St. Petersburg, the Central State Archive of St. Petersburg, the Central State Archive of Historical and Political Documents of St. Petersburg, the Central State Archive of Literature and Art of St. Petersburg, and the Scientific Archive of the Russian Academy of Arts. Almost all of them are introduced into the academic circuit for the first time. The authors show that for both Lev Finn and Sergei Terekhov their work in the museum was a rather brief episode of their professional life. The article attempts to reconstruct their careers. An attempt is made to explain their trajectory.
During the Autumn Crisis of 1850, Russian diplomacy played a significant stabilising role. In particular, the Russian envoy to Vienna, Baron Peter von Meyendorff, made a considerable contribution to the peaceful resolution of the Austro-Prussian conflict, which threatened to escalate into a pan-European war. The author analyses Meyendorff’s political correspondence with Chancellor Nesselrode from the Archive of Foreign Policy of the Russian Empire, a translation of which is appended. These papers outline the course, results, and evaluation of the negotiations held at Olmütz between the heads of the Prussian and Austrian foreign ministries on 28–29 November 1850. Meyendorff, who accompanied Austrian Minister Schwarzenberg on this trip, sent important and valuable information to St. Petersburg in an attempt to present both Vienna’s and Berlin’s position in a positive light in order to dispel Nicholas I’s mistrust of Prussian intentions. At the same time, Meyendorff’s role and contribution to the conclusion of this agreement are still a matter of debate among historians, with some of them considering Meyendorff’s mediation to be only a minor factor in the positive outcome of the negotiations. Far from claiming to bring complete clarity to this issue, this article is meant to put into the academic circuit new archival sources on this crucial event, which determined the further course of the German question and postponed Austria-Prussia’s armed confrontation for leadership in Germany for a decade and a half.
In the article the author analyses the career of Evgeny Petrovich Novikov (1826–1903), a prominent Russian diplomat who played a significant role during the Great Eastern Crisis of 1876–1878 and enjoyed considerable confidence of Chancellor Alexander Gorchakov. He was ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Greece, and Austria-Hungary during the years when relations with these countries were extremely important for Russian foreign policy. His biography has not yet been written, although Novikov’s name is mentioned in many a monograph and article on important topics of the Russian Empire’s foreign policy in the 1860s–1870s. The study draws on archival materials, published papers, and memoirs of Evgeny Novikov’s colleagues. Numerous fragmentary pieces of information about him available in the academic literature have been systematised. Having received an excellent education at Moscow University, Evgeny Novikov distinguished himself by his conscientiousness, shrewdness, and strong sense of responsibility in defence of Russia’s national interests. High-class professionals of this kind made up the diplomatic elite of the Russian Empire in the 19th century.
The Battle of Kursk went down in world military history as a key stage in the USSR’s struggle against Nazi Germany. However, the peculiarity of this large-scale event lies not only in this, but also in the unique period of its planning and preparation, which lasted three months, relative to other battles and major battles. During this period only one offensive operation, Operation Citadel, was being developed in Berlin, which was to form the core of the summer campaign. The author analyses documents preserved in the Federal Archives of the Federal Republic of Germany, which reveal the course of the meeting in Munich on May 4, 1943, where the potential of two Wehrmacht strike groups concentrated in the Kursk Bulge area at the end of April 1943 was discussed, successfully implementing the plan of encirclement of Soviet troops in early May 1943, and the opinions expressed by Hitlers, generals and field marshals who were privy to its essence, on this issue. The meeting went down in history as the most important event in the planning process of the 1943 Wehrmacht summer campaign on the Soviet-German front, as it resulted in Hitler making a number of important decisions that, according to some of its participants, significantly influenced its results.
The author scrutinizes the development of civil society in the early republican Turkey focusing on the models of its interaction with the state in the context of Kemalist revolution, namely the large-scale reforms of the 1920s and 1930s aimed at building the “New Turkey” as a modern secular nation-state. He analyses various manifestations of grass root civic activity in Turkey in the 1920s and 1930s. In doing so, it focuses on the rural population’s reaction to the Kemalist land and taxation reforms. The article contributes to the exiting literature in two following ways. First, it challenges the existing assumption that the rural population of the early Republican Turkey sporadically protested against only the most visible cases of social injustice. It also suggests counterarguments to the thesis that at that time the center and periphery had their own socio-political dynamics isolated one from another. Second, the article introduces to the reader a wide range of Turkish sources (e.g., “public columns” in the main periodicals of that time, petitions published in the yearly books of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey, party inspectors’ reports stored in the fund of the Republican People’s Party). An analysis of the data presented in these sources and its comparison against already known historical facts form the article’s methodological framework. The author explains the key social contradictions about the land question. He further on defines the main forms of systemic grass root civic activity and the structural elements of the Kemalists social basis on the periphery. The main findings are that in the 1920–30s the rural Turkey witnessed both legal and illegal forms of resistance. The absence of a full-scale working formal state structure on the periphery made the Kemalist state curbing this resistance by using patron-client networks centered on the figures of “aga”, the wealthy local landlords and merchants.
