The article discusses the features of the process of psychological adaptation to a long existence in extreme conditions by prisoners of the Gulag and the National Socialist forced-labor camps in Germany. The Soviet prisoners’ collective biographical experience of survival, reflected in the corpus of ego documents, was analyzed by the author from the standpoint of psychosocial theories created by former prisoners of Theresienstadt, Dachau and Buchenwald, Austrian scientists V. Frankl and B. Bettelheim. The article describes and explores the changes that occurred with the prisoner’s personality at each of the three stages of their psychological perception of the camp realities: primary shock, or traumatization upon entering the camp, apathy, which is viewed as the main defence mechanism of the psyche, and the depersonalization at the time of the release from the camp. The process of adaptation of a prisoner to the camp’s conditions most often involved one or another form of cooperation with the camp administration. The study highlights these types of cooperation, both legal (practice of profession, participation in the camp amateur activities, service in the militarized guard VOKhR, and work as an informant whistle-blower) and illegal (practices of fraternization, scam, bribery and embezzlement, voluntary concubinage of female prisoners with camp personnel). The author classifies belief in God, the ability to value the beauty of nature and enjoy art, engagement in professional activities, self-observation, mental connection with the loved ones, and, equally, the ability to retain a sense of humour as conscious behavioral models that helped prisoners to resist destruction of personality. Along with these behavioral patterns, the study identifies a number of so-called anti-defences that worsened the prisoner’s morale and weakened their personality: immersion in thoughts of their own innocence, which gave rise to an impatient expectation of imminent release, constant dreams of food and home comforts, a tendency to believe camp rumors, aggression. The author also focuses on such issues as the content of the concept of “survival”, limits of the influence of the camp environment on a person, transformation of the identity of a surviving prisoner.

After the arrest of a member of “The People’s Will” party Sergei Degaev in December 1882, the Inspector of the Secret Police Georgy Sudeikin managed to make him his agent provocateur. The information then received from this agent allowed the police to neutralize many of his former comrades in the revolutionary underground. Vera Figner was among the first arrested. The question of the total number of persons whom Degaev betrayed to the police was not specifically addressed in historiography, mainly because the notebook where Degaev recorded who and when he exposed to the police was not preserved, and therefore there is no direct evidence to prove the specific involvement of Degaev in the arrest of each particular member of “The People’s Will” who was identified and neutralized by the police in 1883. The article is based on the previously unpublished materials of the Police Department from the State Archive of the Russian Federation as well as personal sources, and reconstructs, as accurately as possible, the picture of Degaev’s provocative activities. Furthermore, the article specifies the number of members of “The People’s Will” betrayed by Degaev and also restores the names of some of them. In addition, the article identifies certain structures of conspirators and names their contacts destroyed after their disclosures by Degaev. In particular, the Kharkov printing house was disclosed, and its employees were arrested. The police also destroyed the mechanism of contacts between the prisoners of the Peter and Paul Fortress and on the outside. Based on the results of the study, conclusion was made of an estimated number of persons who were betrayed to the police by the provocateur Degaev: there were at least 80 of them. By further studying the records of the Police Department, retrieving from them the information which implicitly proves Degaev’s involvement in the disclosure of “The People’s Will” clandestine network, and comparing these data with details from personal sources it seems feasible to verify some more persons betrayed to the police by this provocateur.

The purpose of the article is to outline the main stages of the development of the catering system in Russia, approached separately from the system of taverns, on the one hand, and from the hotel business, on the other. Such approach is caused by the fact that historians have only considered the formation of the public catering sphere fragmentarily, and mostly in popular literature. The research starts with the analysis of the 16th century, when the sources began to consistently mention the realities associated with the sale of culinary products. The study ends with the period of 1914–1921, when the established system of catering institutions functioned in the extraordinary situation. The article clarifies some terms. In particular, the modern generic term “catering” only appeared in the early 20th century and originally had a narrow, strict sense. “Inn keeping” and then “tavern keeping” in different chronological periods meant different types of trade in culinary products. The basic legal definition of “establishments for tavern keeping” was formulated just in 1861. The article pays particular attention to the differences between taverns and inns, because, due to the nature of trade, both the contemporaries and the later scholars confused the types of establishments. The article relies mainly on legal materials, since it was regulations that created conditions for the functioning of the system and required adjustment to these conditions. At the same time, less attention was paid by scholars to the legal status of taverns than their sociocultural role. It remains unclear to what degree the rules declared by the law were transformed in the course of their adaptation to the living realities of everyday life. The study of the process of mutual adaptation of law and the organization of the tavern business requires a different type of sources. In this article, the author deliberately refrains from giving consideration to the sociocultural role of catering establishments and the evolution of the culinary component, since this is a topic for a separate study

The problem of migration processes in the Russian North received wide coverage in the academic literature. M.K. Lyubavskiy, M.M. Bogoslovskiy, N.V. Ustyugov, P.A. Kolesnikov, A.A. Preobrazhenskiy and many other scholars identified the scale, direction, causes and consequences of the movements of peasants both in its territory and beyond it. However, the question of local peasant migrations rarely fell within the historians’ sphere of interest. It is only recently that scholars have addressed this aspect. The purpose of this article is to study peasant migrations within the Ustyug uyezd (district) in the 17th century. The territorial framework of the study case encompasses the Votlozhemskaya and Shemogodskaya volosts, as well as the Sukhonskiy Novovyshlyy, Yarokurskiy and Vondokurskiy stans. The source base of the research is represented by the cadastral and census books of 1623–1626, 1646, 1658, 1667, and 1678. To identify and study local migrations in a volost, an anthroponomic method was used, the essence of which is to compare the names of the residents of peasant households based on various censuses. In this way genealogical schemes were created and subsequently analyzed. As a result, the following conclusions have been drawn. In the 17th-century Ustyug uyezd there was a relatively low level of stability in the rural population. Only 37 percent of peasant families recorded in the 1678 book lived in their villages at the time of the censuses of 1640–1660s. 15 percent of families changed their place of residence within the studied volosts. These moves were mainly related to family circumstances: household division and assistance to incapacitated family members. In addition, some migrations were caused by economic ruin. The analysis of the directions of local migration inside the volost showed that the peasants preferred to move to nearby villages, and there was a kind of “interchange” between settlements. In general, the rural population of the Russian North was very mobile, and it was not uncommon for peasants to move home.

The NKVD (MVD) special camps in the Soviet zone of occupation in post-war Germany remain an element of the Soviet occupational policy relatively unknown and practically unstudied in Russian historiography. The present article deals with these special camps on the basis of the extensive archival material deposited in the Fund of the Special Camps Division in the State Archives of the Russian Federation. The author analyzes various aspects of their functioning, such as the reasons and prerequisites for their organization, the development of the camp network in 1945–1948, the contingent of the camps, their staff, as well as their place in the system of the organs of the Soviet military administration and role in the activities of the Soviet state security organs in East Germany in the first post-war years. The special camps are defined as a distinct type of detention. They cannot be identified with either internment camps or concentration camps, as has been suggested in some German publications on this issue. They were intended for detention of the Germans who were arrested by the Soviet state security organs and previously involved in the Nazi party-state and militarized structures, as well as the Soviet citizens convicted to various terms of imprisonment by military tribunals. In this sense, they can really be named “special camps” where various categories of people were temporarily detained. A large number of contradictions in the functioning of the special camp system and, due to the very high mortality rate, its relative inadequacy to the task of providing the Soviet economy with the demanded workforce ultimately led to the gradual dissolution of the special camps by the Soviet government. Additionally, from the point of view of foreign policy, information about the camps with tens of thousands of prisoners in the Soviet occupational zone damaged the international reputation of the USSR, especially in the context of the aggravation of the “German question” in the early years of the Cold War. All this factors entailed substantial revision of the Soviet “camp policy” in East Germany in 1948 and complete dissolution of the special camps.

The article examines the social composition of the right-wing parties that operated on the territory of Vladimir guberniya in 1905–1917, i. e. the Union of the Russian People and its subdivisions — the Shuya Union of the Russian Orthodox People and the Ivanovo-Voznesensk Autocratic-Monarchist Party. Their social base was the proletariat, the petite urban bourgeoisie and, to a much lesser extent, the peasantry, which had very close economic relations with the regional towns. “Census” classes were very poorly represented in the monarchical organizations of Vladimir guberniya. Not only the priests and officials who were not recommended by their superiors to participate in the activities of the right-wing organizations, but even the nobility were mostly very wary of the Black Hundreds and were in no hurry to join them. This statement is even more apt in the case of the local bourgeoisie, whose representatives, even if sympathetic to the monarchical idea, preferred to remain sympathizers, and lately completely distanced themselves from the Black Hundreds and joined the right wing of the liberal camp. The intelligentsia initially ignored the right-wing organizations, preferring opposition parties of varying degrees of radicalism. The social composition of the monarchical organizations in Vladimir guberniya was rather tightly correlated with their geographical location. The majority of the right-wing parties in the industrial centres, such as Ivanovo-Voznesensk, Kovrov, Nikolskoe, etc., were the workers. In the other towns, including provincial Vladimir, the petit bourgeoisie dominated in the monarchical organizations. In the rural chapters of the Union of the Russian people, almost all the members were peasants. There is very little information on the sex and age composition of the right-wing organizations, but it can still be argued that women’s participation in their activities was quite high, while there were a few young people among the monarchists, since they adopted a more radical ideology

The present article examines a number of the issues relating to the activities of the military-police councils established under Moscow Governor- General F.V. Dubasov during the December armed uprising — the causes and process of formation of this body, its structure and composition, meeting agendas, decisions and their implementation. The purpose of research is to evaluate the efficiency of this institution and to establish its role in suppressing the “insurrection”, and this is important to study the relationship between civil and military authorities during the first Russian Revolution. These issues have not received treatment in historiography: those authors who deal with the history of the Moscow uprising either have completely ignored the military-police councils, or mentioned them only in passing. In the first days of the uprising, the interaction between civilian and military authorities was fraught with significant difficulties (inconsistency in police and military operations, the massive shelling of civilians’ homes by the military forces without causing damage to the rebels, the practice of sending expeditions by the commander of the Moscow military district to destroy barricades, inability to bring the outskirts of the city under their control). This prompted Governor-General F.V. Dubasov to take measures to provide supervision over the forces of the Moscow Military District, including establishment of the military-police councils under his chairmanship. The meetings of this body were held almost daily and attended by a wide range of civilian and military high-rank officials of the city. They discussed the plans and results of the most important military operations against the “rebels” (for example, punitive expeditions to Presnya and along the Moscow–Ryazan’ Railway). The governor-general eventually managed to persuade the military to adopt his tactics, i. e. the step-by-step occupation and “cleansing” of the regions that remained in the hands of the revolutionaries. However, the work of this body was handicapped by a number of shortcomings: late timing, loose attendance, haste in organizing operations, and the lack of real control over the military actions. The interplay of these factors led to numerous “failures” during the operation to capture the last stronghold of the rebels — Presnya.

The history of and the background of the creation of Saint Petersburg Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, which was formed in October 1905 and became the centre of the mass “Soviet” movement in Russia, undoubtedly demand further study. The subject of the present article is the analysis of G.S. Khrustalev-Nossar’s activities in the period prior to his chairmanship in the Saint Petersburg Soviet. The study seeks to investigate his role in the workers’ movement, putting it into the context of the preconditions for the creation of the Soviet. Unprecedentedly, the problem has been examined on the basis of not only the previously published accounts left by G.S. Khrustalev-Nossar and his contemporaries, but also archival documents (records of the Police Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs), memoirs of the parties involved in the events (particularly Social Democrats V. Perazich, P.D. Kolokol’nikov). The comparative analysis of the data from the afore-mentioned sources enables one to reconstruct, step by step, Khrustalev-Nossar’s work among the workers, his communication with representatives of various socio-political movements, to perceive whether he was, as he claimed, the maker of “the first Soviet” and elucidate his role in the workers’ organizational movement, in the forming of the idea to create the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies in Saint Petersburg in 1905. The article examines in detail Khrustalev-Nossar’s participation in the events following the Bloody Sunday, in the elections to Senator N.V. Shidlovsky’s Commission, in the holding of workers’ meetings at Udelnaya railway station in Saint Petersburg, in the activities of the Printing Workers’ Union. On the one hand, the research shows why, in October 1905, Khrustalev-Nossar was elected chairman of the fledgling Saint Petersburg Soviet, and, on the other hand, explains why he eventually became one of the “forgotten” figures of the period of the first Russian Revolution, 1905–1907, and has never received due attention in the academic and nonfiction literature. In this case, the pioneering contribution is a study and new assessment of the role of the individual in the course of the 1905 revolutionary events.

Since the 1990s, scholars have increasingly interpreted Robert Adam’s (1728–1792) castle architecture as part of the architectural culture of the Scottish Enlightenment. In this period, fundamental changes in Scottish society — the emergence of progressive Enlightenment ideology and improvements in socio-cultural and economic life — shaped both new urban-planning solutions and a revised understanding of country-house architecture. The urban “improvements” of the Scottish Enlightenment undeniably made Scottish cities more convenient to inhabit; at the same time, historical and cultural monuments that lent these cities a distinctive character were often deemed obsolete and destroyed. Yet alongside the repudiation of the past there emerged an opposing impulse: nostalgia for earlier times and a search for national origins, expressed in literature and in the architecture of country houses, including Adam’s castle style. Scholars have proposed various explanations for its origins. A fuller understanding of its emergence, however, requires recognition of its markedly personal character: architecture of the past is mediated through the architect’s intellectual commitments and an array of referential sources. Adam’s castellated country houses are commonly divided into two phases, early and mature. The early castellated style is distinguished by architectural simplicity, austerity in facade treatment, and regular planning; Mellerstain, Wedderburn, and Caldwell are cited as representative examples. Adam’s mature castellated style is characterized by more complex architectural solutions, with greater movement and picturesque effect, while preserving regular planning principles; Culzean, Dalquharran, and Seton belong to this phase. The nature of Robert Adam’s castle style is thus double: modern country houses with regular, convenient plans are clothed in architectural forms associated with the past.

This article examines the political crisis of the last two years of the Soviet Union (1990–1991) through Bulgarian diplomatic documents and analytical memoranda. It focuses on how Bulgarian diplomats, observing events in real time, recorded the accelerating disintegration of the union state, formulated forecasts, and assessed alternative scenarios for reform. The article aims to reconstruct and interpret Bulgarian diplomatic conceptions of the causes and mechanisms of Soviet de-integration and to gauge the extent to which professional practice “neutralized the ideological filter” in their assessments. The study draws on internal correspondence of Bulgaria’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, read against the unfolding political context in the USSR. Methodologically, it combines a problem-chronological framework with qualitative analysis of politico-diplomatic discourse: it isolates key causal clusters, ranks factors by perceived weight, and traces their articulation in specific episodes. The article shows that by December 1990 Bulgarian analysts had diagnosed a “threefold crisis” in the Soviet Union — political, economic, and international — and, despite a “high degree of unpredictability”, anticipated the USSR’s collapse a full year before it occurred. In the diplomatic record, the causes of disintegration are ordered by significance: political factors first, ideological second, and economic only third. Among the most consequential are an “administrative vacuum”, delays in drafting a new Union Treaty, the distinctive dynamics of multiparty pluralism as republican elites drift ed toward nationalism, and the breakdown of interrepublican ties. The article also examines proposed exit scenarios (a Union Treaty on Gorbachev’s model, a confederation, and an “enhanced presidential authority”), underscoring August 1991 as a catalyst of irreversible processes. The central conclusion is that, in Bulgarian assessments, the decisive mechanism of collapse was Russian-Union dual authority and “Russian separatism,” which institutionally set the RSFSR against the union center and hastened the finale — symbolically framed as a “Brest Agreement,” in deliberate allusion to Brest-Litovsk (1918).