Art has always played a significant role in representing power. In France, the establishment of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture (1648) was a landmark event, not only for artists wishing to distinguish themselves from the craft community but also for the rise of absolutism. Through the Academy’s masters, the monarchy acquired individuals capable of conveying key ideas for the state, as well as projecting the image of the king himself. The Academy, in turn, gained a monopoly on royal commissions. This ensured both the quality and ideological accuracy of the artworks. The relationships between royal power and the selected circle of artists became the focus of this study. The article explores the following questions. How was the process of obtaining, executing, and delivering royal commissions organized throughout the eighteenth century? How was responsibility for their successful completion distributed? What were the official genre and stylistic preferences of the Crown? How were the masters selected to join the Academy? What role did working for a royal patron play in a painter’s career? When and why were such commissions attractive and beneficial for artists? Although each of these questions has been addressed separately in French-language literature, their comprehensive analysis from a modern scholarly perspective has not yet been undertaken. In addition to related scholarly works, the author analyzed the following informative sources: inventory lists of paintings commissioned by directors of royal buildings for the monarch, minutes of the Royal Academy’s meetings, and key theoretical works by the Academy’s members. The study allowed for the reconstruction of the life and creative circumstances of artists commissioned to create official art, as well as an examination of their social standing. This facilitates a more nuanced understanding of the artistic milieu of eighteenth-century France, with particular focus on the social and creative interactions that characterized the artistic community of the era.

The article examines how the programmes of population censuses conducted in Russia between 1897 and 1937 reflected the dynamics of perceptions of major ethnocultural identities. Among the various forms of cultural identity in Russia, the most significant were linguistic, religious, and ethnic. However, the relative importance of these categories shift ed across different periods, as state priorities in promoting one or several of them evolved. The censuses of 1897, 1920, 1926, and 1937 vividly reveal transformations in this hierarchy of identities. Special attention is devoted to the incorporation of the category of national (ethnic) identity into census practices. In the Russian Empire of the modern era, an elite discourse emerged that proposed diverse interpretations of the nature of the ethnic (national): defining Russianness through its attributes — Orthodoxy and loyalty to the throne; defining Russianness through culture; and defining Russianness through notions of “race”, “stock”, or “blood”. For the broader Russian population, however, a presumption operated: Russian meant Orthodox and loyal to the throne (with the tacit implication of the Russian language). The study demonstrates that, in Soviet Russia, the significance of ethnic identity increased, facilitated both by the principle of national self-determination adopted by the new regime and by the administrative divisions, which were closely tied to nationality. It is therefore no coincidence that the 1920 census included, for the first time, a question on ethnic affiliation, framed as “narodnost” (“ethnic group”), which in the 1926 census was replaced with the term “nationality”. The analysis of the censuses conducted between 1897 and 1937 shows that the fundamental factors of ethnic identity in Russia — although not officially recognized in every period — were language and religion. The connection between language and ethnicity appears almost self-evident. The link between ethnicity and religion is less straightforward, yet despite the repression of religion it persisted, albeit muted; over time, however, in the structuring of identities (primary/derivative), religion and ethnicity exchanged their positions .

This article focuses on the nature of the historical process within the broad geopolitical context of the so-called Greater Eurasia. The starting point of the research is the category of “silence” as a key phenomenon in Russian and Asian history, examined in its cultural, political, and psychological dimensions. Silence manifests in various forms, starting from the hesychia in the Orthodox tradition and extending to various forms of deceptive communication, bragging, jesting, the show-off culture, and others. This concept is explored in the context of two global cognitive approaches: one based on the principle of the identity of things to themselves, and the other based on the principle of their inequality to themselves, the self-difference of all being, a deviation from oneself, where reality is seen as becoming, the transition of things into something other, and consequently, the limit of existence. The first principle formed the foundation of Western intellectual tradition, while the second dominated the spiritual traditions of Asia. The principle of self-difference implies relations of free companionship, synergy, the dynamic centration of global forces, and affirms universal similarity, the mutual penetration of opposites, where things embrace and contain each other, such that all being and the entire world seem to be preserved within themselves, becoming their own secret. Here, the singular merges with the individual, and the centripetal movement, or involution, the return to the origin of existence, turns out to be the condition for inexhaustible diversity and the hidden, perpetual continuity of life. This cognitive approach ensures great creative potential and spiritual discipline in personal and social life, through which moments of life experience are transmuted into a repertoire of typified and stylized forms of cultural practice. In this way, the timeless body of tradition is created, and the restoration of the fullness of being for all things (apocatastasis) becomes possible. Historically, the uncertainty of the structural foundations of tradition and the oblivion of the symbolic dimension of experience led to their gradual replacement by the logic of the sameness of things, characteristic of the Modern era. However, the principle of self-difference has resurfaced in the contemporary “postmodern” situation, characterized by the erosion of ideology, with history becoming a process of revealing within the depths of individual experience the perspective of a global humanity in the limitless diversity of its manifestations.

Colonialism, as a phenomenon, has long been studied within the context of European research. In recent decades, African authors have also engaged in its study, focusing particularly on the transformation of identity, which is directly linked to the legacy of colonial history. This article examines colonial mentality or “colomentality” (as coined by the renowned Nigerian musician Fela Anikulapo Kuti (1938–1987)), who emphasized that, sooner or later, it may take on an anti-colonial character. Colonial mentality is a product of a relatively short historical period and, in the historical and cultural context of Nigeria, it can be considered an integral part of both national and individual identity. Essentially, it became a “response” to the “challenge” posed by colonial powers, a result of their civilizing mission, which aimed to enlighten the “savage” black populations. The flip side of this process was the destruction of the previous Afrocentric epistemology and mentality, along with the Afrocentric worldview. Alongside the embrace of European values, there was the imposition and acceptance of double standards, the development of a tendency toward parasitic existence, and the institutionalization of segregation and violence. As a result, within the bounds of colonial mentality, two vectors of development emerged — both positive and negative. In post-colonial Nigeria, these vectors were refl ected in the revitalization of the creative energy of the local population, which manifested, on the one hand, in the dynamic development of literature, journalism, science, and entrepreneurship, and on the other, in the evolution of protest movements, which took the form of schemes and fraud. Since the mid-1970s, these movements underwent signifi cant evolution, revealing a resemblance to traditional carnival culture, acting, and play. By the turn of the 21st century, Nigeria had gained a notorious reputation as one of the most criminally corrupt countries in the world, and “Nigerian fraud” — as both a colonial and national mentality — became one of the country’s peculiar “brands” — or rather, an anti-brand.

One of the objectives of the project to develop a youth museum under the auspices of the MSU Museum of Earth Science is the popularization of scientifi c research and the creation of mechanisms for scientific and educational engagement among groups of early-career researchers. Within this framework, the annual Science Festival held at Moscow University assumes particular importance. Since 2016 the Museum of Earth Science has collaborated with the scientific and educational expedition Flotilla of Floating Universities, which ope rates in the Volga, Don, and Caspian regions. Presenting the youth museum as a mobile and network-based project at the Science Festival has proven most eff ective when combining three mechanisms: the exhibition format — temporary display of natural specimens and artifacts collected by young naturalists during expeditions; the presentational format — demonstration of popular-science books, films, and scholarly works produced with the participation of young colleagues; and the interactive format — the organization of specially designed engagement platforms. This approach was tested at the All-Russian Science Festival held on the MSU campus in 2023–2024. The exhibition featured finds from the Flotilla of Floating Universities (including prize-winning entries from the first All-Russian competition Youth and Museum) in the Volga region, and was displayed in the pavilions of the Museum of Earth Science and the MSU University Gymnasium. Key products created in collaboration with the youth museum project included the book Vernadism in the Contemporary University and the popular-science film The Brotherhood of Scientific Creativity: Vladimir Vernadsky’s Floating University, continuously screened throughout the event. Specially designed interactive platforms were also presented, including Virtual Reality in Museum Space: VR-Travel into the Geological Past of the East European Plain (developed by winners of the Youth and Museum competition), which enabled visitors to experience participation in an actual Flotilla of Floating Universities scientific expedition through VR technologies and curated video content, and S.N. Vinogradsky’s Column: A Living Demonstration of Ecosystem Evolution in Real Time. In addition, an expeditionarylaboratory practicum, Cosmic Traces on Earth, was conducted by students of the MSU University Gymnasium.