The article examines the political will of the Norwegian king Sverrir (1177–1202), given by him, on his deathbed, to his son and successor Hakon Sverresson in the “charter on state governance”. Although this document has not survived and its content is unknown from any source, it is traditionally believed in the literature that the main instruction to the heir consisted in the immediate and unconditional reconciliation of the royal power and the church, which had been in acute confrontation since 1130. According to most scholars, Hakon fulfilled his father’s will, which is reflected in his capitulation letter to the Norwegian prelates. However, the analysis of this letter in close connection with other documents, which contain information about the events of that time, showed that neither Sverrir nor his son were going to surrender their positions before the episcopate. On the contrary, they insisted that all social and political forces should recognize them as the legitimate rulers of Norway, and accept the full internal and external sovereignty of the royal power. The author proves a close connection between Hakon’s letter to the prelates and the “Speech against the Bishops” (En tale mot biskopene), composed in the last years of Sverrir’s reign. The latter became the only authoritative text for both the royal epistle itself and the faction of the “royal party” behind his successor. The “charter on state governance” actually established Hakon Sverresson’s rights to Norway as an inalienable inheritance (odal), and the general wishes for domestic peace concealed essentially confrontational proposals. The author concludes that the actions taken by both the “ecclesiastical” and “royal” parties in 1202–1204 did not lay the foundations for the subsequent merger of these groups, as the previous research tradition argued, but, on the contrary, aggravated the struggle between them and between the factions within them

The article is a publication of and extended commentary on Mikhail Kirillovich Gribovsky’s text. He was in charge of the Guards Corps’ secret military police service organized in the early 1820s, after the “Semenovsky history”. In 1822, he compiled a note which is kept in the Russian State Military History Archive. The commentary describes the prehistory of the creation of the secret police: Gribovsky’s activities, his brochure On the State of Landlords’ Peasants in Russia and its perception by contemporaries. The article provides general information about the service created by Gribovsky and peculiarities of its financing. It refers to Gribovsky’s note on the Decembrist Union of Prosperity (thanks to it Alexander I had information about this society) and his three more notes, published in the last decades. The author concludes that Gribovsky writes in his note about the attempts to fi nd the Brief Instructions to Russian Knights by M.A. Dmitriev-Mamonov, which were published in 1816 in limited edition and have not been preserved. He gives a brief history of the organization, the Order of Russian Knights, for which this brochure was compiled, and implies that this Order did not exist. Celebrities involved in the project of the Order of Russian Knights are listed. Despite the fact that the note is not signed, the author attributes it to Gribovsky on the basis of handwriting analysis and identifi es the likely person behind the abbreviation. The note shows how political police worked in Russia at the end of Alexander I’s reign. For example, the Gribovsky’s interest in the Order of Russian Knights was caused by the assumption that M.A. Dmitriev-Mamonov’s Brief Instructions to Russian Knights were, in fact, a charter of the Union of Prosperity.

The subject of the article is the ideas of the Russian foreign agents J. Balaszewicz and A. Stempkowski about the revolutionary democratic organization of the Polish emigration Republican Polish Center (RPC), which existed in 1867–1870. In historiography, this organization has been studied mainly from the point of view of its ideological features on the basis of sources created in the emigrant environment. The authors emphasize the expediency of a comprehensive treatment of alternative materials, Russian agent reports, that have been used only sporadically in the study of this topic. They allow us to shed light on the subjects that were previously on the periphery of the research optics, i.e. the problems of the involvement of the RPC in the counterfeiting of Russian banknotes and in plans to assassinate European monarchs. In the context of the problems under study, the question of the role of this organization in the international revolutionary movement is also raised in a new way. The authors examine two previously unused fragments of Stempkowski’s reports. The first of them contains data on the attitude of General J. Hauke-Bosak to counterfeiting, and the second one informs of the interception of the well-known letter of the Italian revolutionary G. Mazzini to the RPC, in which he expresses his opinion on the Slavic question in the Balkans and the role of the Polish national liberation movement in it. The article examines Balaszewicz’s reports, already published in Polish translation, from the perspective of the problems under study. It emphasizes that, according to agents’ reports, the RPC was actively involved in the plans of Italian and French republicans led by G. Mazzini to eliminate Napoleon III, but did not have the necessary resources and allies among other Polish emigrants to organize assassination attempts against Alexander II, who was a higher priority target for the Poles. The authors conclude that the RPC appears to be a minor link in the revolutionary projects of international radicals in the optics of Balaszewicz and Stempkowski’s reports.

During the Eastern Crisis of the 1870s, the British political elites followed with particular attention the Panslavic ideas expressed in Russia and often perceived them as a threat of the Russian Empire’s expansion into the Balkan Peninsula. However, at the very beginning of the Eastern Crisis, the British Parliament’s attitude to the Russian Panslavism was neutral or even positive and it had a considerable impact on British-Russian relations. Britain’s perception of Russian Panslavism during this short but signifi cant period has not been researched yet. This article uses the materials of parliamentary debates to trace the transformation of images of Russian Panslavism in the British political discourse in 1876 and to analyze the mechanisms of their construction. The author identifi es three models of interpretation of Russia’s “Slavic interests”, first, as “Slavic sympathies” of the Russian population, second, as Russia’s “territorial ambitions”, and third, as “Russian intrigues”, which allegedly instigated Slav uprisings against the Ottoman Empire. In the summer of 1876, the interpretation of Panslavism as sincere sympathies of Russian society for its Slavic brothers received the greatest weight in the British political discourse. This interpretation contributed to the formation of a more positive image of Russia and even a temporary change in the pro-Turkish policy of the British government. However, by the late 1876, British politicians increasingly began to suspect the Russian government of “subversive Panslavism”. The formation of images of Russian Panslavism in the political discourse of Great Britain was infl uenced not only the traditional patterns of British foreign policy, but also by the internal political struggle that escalated during the “Bulgarian agitation”. Panslavism was also interpreted ambiguously due to the lack of information, so politicians oft en based their judgments on stereotypes about Russia, the Ottoman Empire and the Balkan peoples. Finally, parliamentarians’ views were also aff ected by a rethinking of their own British identity. British politicians revisited issues of relevance to Britain’s own attitudes to the sovereignty of empires, the uprisings of colonized peoples, moral responsibility and Britain’s international mission

The article examines various aspects of everyday life of holidaymakers in the Crimea in the initial period of the resort development on the peninsula. The sources are newspapers published in Sevastopol and other Crimean towns, guidebooks, memoirs of those who visited the Crimea in the period under study. The analysis shows a rather vivid picture of the life of resort residents and allows us to distinguish several layers of information: on the development of transport infrastructure and everyday travel details, accommodation options, accommodation and food prices, ways of spending leisure time. It is possible to trace a close connection between the evolution of living conditions of vacationers and the resort and recreational sphere as a whole and the economic and social development of the country. The creation of a network of railroads made the way to the Crimea cheaper and more convenient. In the early 20th century, recreation on the peninsula ceased to be elitist, and representatives of diff erent social strata came here. The influx of resort guests caused the development of the entire tourist infrastructure: the number of hotels grew, the local population actively entered the market of relevant services, providing rented furnished rooms and sightseeing services. Guidebooks and memoirs show the role in the life of holidaymakers of such traditional entertainments as bathing in the sea and walks in the mountains, as well as the ways of their organization. Separate bathing of men and women was practiced both in bathing houses and on beaches. Group and individual excursions to historical sites were becoming more popular. The analysis of memoirs demonstrates that the level of service caused complaints from vacationers, who were not happy with the high level of prices at hotels, unkempt servants in restaurants, etc. However, the ever-increasing interest of the Russian society to the Crimea as a vacation destination contributed not only to the improvement of the quality of services, but also to the change of living conditions on the peninsula: villages and towns were transformed into comfortable settlements, which had all the attributes of civilization — electricity, post offi ces, pharmacies and hospitals,

The history of science is intended to study not only the history of discoveries, hypotheses and methodology, but also human connections, which sometimes infl uence the formation and development of scientific knowledge no less than articles and books. Ephemerides of various kinds are particularly diffi cult to observe and study: topical hints understood only in a narrow circle, various statements on a subject that may be forgotten aft er the passage of time, a way of joking that has long since lost its relevance — all that is woven into the fabric of life, including scientific one, and without which it is impossible to imagine people who did science. At the center of the article is a poetic text found in the archive of the remarkable Russian astronomer V.K. Tserasky, who headed the Astronomical Observatory of Moscow University at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries and put a lot of eff ort into its construction. The humorous work “Song about the Refractor” (1898) by the Berlin student Benno Messow is one of such samples of humor, which can shed light on the nature of scientifi c contacts between scholars from diff erent countries. The poem is a paraphrase of Friedrich Schiller’s famous “Song of the Bell”, deeply rooted in the tradition of German poetry. Meanwhile, the parodic “song” was presented to V.K. Tserasky, who, according to the presenter’s thought, was able to appreciate the subtlety of the joke. The construction of a refractor in the Moscow observatory seemed an excellent occasion to reuse the text dedicated to the completion of the same device in the Potsdam Astrophysical Observatory. This work is a testimony both to the scientists’ penchant for humor and to the versatile scientifi c and friendly ties between scholars and engineers of Russia and Germany at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The article examines Messow’s poem, some details of his biography and the alleged circumstances of the song’s transfer to V.K. Tserasky.

The authors examine inequality in an important branch of the Russian economy during the World War I using the materials of one of the large West Siberian enterprises. The study relies on the sources for the first time introduced into the scientific circulation: data from the funds of the tax inspectorate, which are related to the determination of the circle of income taxpayers and their earnings. The advantageous feature of these lists is that they include not only taxpayers (recipients of relatively high income), but all employees of the enterprise in general. Information on the wages of almost 400 employees of the Altai Railroad, from watchman to manager, was used to calculate the decile coeffi cient. This allows us to expand the field for microhistorical study of inequality by statistical methods through including new industries and new regions. In addition, one of the lists contains information that allows us to raise the question of the need to study additional parameters of inequality in Russia at the beginning of the20th century. It is shown that the income diff erentiation of railroad workers increases signifi cantly when taking into account their dependents (primarily children), i.e. taking into account family composition can change the inte rpretation of the degree of income inequality. Another list gives the authors a rare opportunity to examine the wages of railroad employees taking into account individual components of earnings (including salary, military increment, bonuses, payment for extracurricular work). The analysis of change in the decile ratio depending on the above-mentioned payment issues allowed us to prove that one of the weighty additions to the salary reduced the gap between the incomes of the highest and lowest employees, and the other, on the contrary, gave an opportunity to earn more to those who wanted it. Thus, it is demonstrated that one of the wage systems created before the revolution allowed to avoid simultaneously both problems that would become urgent for the new authorities in the 1920s — equalization and excessive inequality.

The victory of the October Revolution in Russia in 1917 awakened the enthusiasm of advanced Chinese intellectuals to master the Russian revolutionary experience, and many young Chinese revolutionaries sought to study directly in the birthplace of October. In order to study Russian revolutionary theory and experience and achieve the goal of transforming the country, it was necessary to train a group of Russian-speaking cadres for the future revolution. The article deals with the history of the first cadre school of the Communist Party of China, the School of Foreign Languages in Yuyangli, a neighborhood of Shanghai. The research shows that, although it existed for only about a year, this school made an important contribution to the education of the first cadres of the CPC and to the development of the Chinese revolution. Its teachers and students vigorously propagated Marxism, actively participated in party construction, led the Chinese workers, peasants, youth, women’s movements and armed struggle. They played a special role in connecting Marxist theory with the practice of the Chinese revolution, developing and strengthening the Party’s organizational strength and expanding its political influence. Old Yuyangli and New Yuyangli are two neighboring streets. In 1920, it was here that a group of Chinese communists in Shanghai established the School of Foreign Languages, which actually became a school for training Chinese revolutionary cadres. The first group of young communists who studied here were sent to the USSR after only a few months of Russian language and political training. Upon returning home, most of the graduates of the School of Foreign Languages became prominent fi gures of the Chinese revolution. The spread of Marxism in China is closely connected with this group of young people who studied in the USSR. Yuyangli is not just a toponym and a place where the School of Foreign Languages was located, but it is a historical “witness” of the CPC’s more than century-long struggle for its ideals.

The two major late-Soviet memorial policy projects, “Hero Cities” and “Golden Ring”, had many differences as well as points of intersection in terms of their emergence and development. Each of them appealed to a specific sample of regions, and the struggle for inclusion in the projects was fought at the union, republican, and regional levels. Both were “showcase” destinations for domestic and foreign tourism. E.M. Boltunova and G.S. Yegorova’s monograph “Territory and History: Late Soviet Projects Hero Cities and Golden Ring” makes a significant contribution to the study of two memorial projects of late Soviet society, which provided for it more than new places of memory and tourist routes: they formed alternative foundation myths that competed with the underlying Soviet narrative. The novelty of the monograph is the task of finding points of intersection in the history of seemingly completely unrelated projects: E.M. Boltunova and G.S. Yegorova’s work is about how society and power searched for and created new national meanings and reference points. The cities marked with the title of “Hero Cities” began to be gradually correlated in public historical memory with the territories of the most important battles of the Great Patriotic War, while a number of cities and regions that “fell out” of this project found themselves outside the program of state memorialization of the war 1941–1945. The issue of composition and boundaries also became one of the key aspects of the Golden Ring route development. Representatives of each region tried to justify as convincingly as possible the necessity to pay attention to this or that city or district when implementing the project, as the inclusion of a city in the route would allow the corresponding region to get additional resources for development. The authors of the monograph dwell in detail on the mutual influence of the projects at the level of narratives and visual components, as well as on the self-positioning of the territories included in the projects and their perception.

The article continues the research on the artistic image in the Russian art of the first third of the 20th century and aims at studying the concepts of “steed”/“horse” in the art of the 1900s–1920s. From the beginning of revolutionary transformations in Russian art to the changes after 1917, the semantic meaning of the artistic image in its evolution is of particular interest. The basis for the study is largely fiction, in which the horse image was formed most fully. The multidimensionality of semantic relations within the boundaries of the synonymic paradigm with the general meaning of “horse” is examined in the article on the material of fine arts. The author studies the diversity of artistic roles, symbolic and semantic functions, which were given to the horse image in the art of a certain period and reveals the specificity of these roles depending on the artistic concept. Identification and recognition of the image occurs at different levels. The content of the concept is not revealed only through the plot. Unexpected semantic associations, suggested to the artist by visual, worldly, intellectual, emotional experience or creative intuition, are also possible. In this context, the quotations in the title of the article mark two main notions: “a horse as a horse” (V. Shershenevich) actualizes the direct meaning of “a horse as an animal”, and “we are all a little bit horses” (V. Mayakovsky) is a zoometaphor defi ning the inner state of a person. At this stage of the study, we can distinguish five main sections that allow us to structure and order the set of works containing the horse image: a village, a city, a rider, Apocalypse, a historical event (here the Civil War and collectivization). In order to fully understand the specifics of the semantic content of the horse image in the art during the study period, it is necessary to carry out some additional research. So far, the proposed text cannot claim to be an exhaustive solution to the problem, but outlines the vectors that allow us to continue its study