Vol 21, No 2 (2022): Russia and the Baltics in the 20th Century

For the first time in the Russian-language historiography, there is examined the correlation of two approaches - ethnic and professional - in the formation of the teaching staff of the Latvian Conservatory in the first years of its existence (1919-1922). The research is based on materials of periodicals of that and later periods, letters from conservatory director Jazep Vitols, as well as documents of the Latvian Conservatory record stored in the conservatory fund in the Latvian State Archives and in the fund of the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Latvia in the Latvian State Historical Archives. The article considers the tasks that the state and its leaders set for the conservatory, as well as the dominant principles of staffing. The author reveals a fundamental contradiction between the desire to make the conservatory in the Latvian style and the need to set and keep a high bar of the higher music school of the European level. The author comes to the conclusion that the political circumstances and national aspirations hindered the formation of the teaching staff of the conservatory on a strictly professional basis. In turn, the requirement to ensure a high quality of teaching forced the conservatory to resort to services of non-Latvian musicians and thereby limited the manifestations of Latvian national egoism. At the same time, in the post-revolutionary years it was Soviet Russia that served as the main source of staff for the Latvian Conservatory, both Latvian and foreign.

The article analyzes the nuances of the changes in Soviet-Lithuanian relations after the coup d'etat staged in December 1926. The coming to power of the leaders of the Lithuanian Nationalist and Republican Union A. Smetona and A. Voldemaras initially contributed to the situation of uncertainty in bilateral relations. Moscow was extremely concerned about Voldemaras' desire to exacerbate the Polish-Soviet contradictions in order to solve the Vilnius problem in Polish-Lithuanian relations. The Soviet diplomats feared that Voldemaras could provoke an armed conflict with Poland and that the Soviet Union would inevitably be involved in the conflict. On the other hand, Soviet diplomacy was interested in maintaining both the independence of Lithuania and the maintenance of some tension between Poland and Lithuania, as this situation created obstacles to Poland’s spread of influence throughout the Baltic East. By the late 1920s, it became apparent to Moscow that dissatisfaction with Voldemaras’ policy in Lithuania had reached its climax and that Voldemaras was to be forced out of Lithuanian political life in the near future. As a result, a few months before Voldemaras’ resignation, the political leadership of the USSR categorically opposed contacts with him by the leadership of the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs.

The article examines the little-studied topic of the evolution of the protest sentiments of the Estonian students in the 1960s, which found expression in student processions in Tallinn and Tartu in October 1968. A wide range of archival documents allows tracing the origins and dynamics of this phenomenon, as well as the perception of these events by the Soviet party leadership and the Central Committee of the Komsomol. It is noted that the data from archival sources and contemporary works by Estonian authors contradict each other with regard to the measures (reaction) taken by the Soviet leadership. The Student days in Tallinn and Tartu, planned as days of student solidarity, turned into mass marches and riots of a national and anti-Soviet character. The article concludes that the active protest of the Estonian students was caused by a whole range of reasons, among which are clear nationalist trends that intensified in the 1960s, the active penetration of Western European culture and ideology through travel contacts, communication with relatives living abroad, and international youth festivals. It was Estonia that in the 1960s was visited by the largest number of foreign tourists. Estonian Student construction brigades traveled to Eastern European countries, mainly to Czechoslovakia. The stirring up of Estonian students was influenced by the mass unrest of European students, which foreign authors call the “phenomenon of 1968.” The students of European countries advocated lowering the voting age, actively sought participation in political processes, protested against the large financial expenditures of their governments aimed at an arms race to the detriment of other sectors of the economy. Similar ideas were voiced by Estonian students at Komsomol meetings and scientific conferences. They also wished to create their own student organizations, independent of the Komsomol and Soviet ideology.

In this article the author reconstructs the dynamics of home education sector in monetary value terms as the case study of a province in Central Russia, with application of mathematical modelling methods. As the source base, the author employs evidence primarily from published memoirs, epistolary heritage, fiction, as well as from previous research literature. The findings are obtained by means of calculations including inter-, retro-, and extrapolations of the quantitative evidence from the sources. The principal findings are the set of methods for reconstruction of annual output in the home education services segment of a regional economy and the respective long time series for Yaroslavl Province. They support the hypothesis that the home segment was comparable in scale to the educational establishments or even could exceed them at the start of the period under study. The methods developed by the author may be employed directly for similar reconstructions based on materials from other regions of Central Russia; and they are applied to the materials from the regions of Siberia, Far East and national peripheries of Russia.

The integration of humanitarian research has greatly expanded the range of related disciplines involved in the process of historical cognition. The article examines the epistemological aspects of interdisciplinaryism as the main principle of the development of modern history methodology. The consequence of strengthening inter-subject relationships in historical studies was the complexity of vocabulary, the emergence of new concepts borrowed from related disciplines. The modern conceptual system is caused by the appearance of new objects of study, which were not in the “classical” historical science, so called “event history.” Some of them (gender, historical memory, totalitarianism, childhood, the environment, etc.) are established in their status of “historical” and interdisciplinary. At the same time, there appeared new objects of “non-event” history studies (history of emotions, violence, etc.) which require an appeal to evolutionary psychology, historical sociology, anthropology and other areas of humanitarian knowledge.

The study analyses the political theology and imagery of a female Russian ruler in the first half of the 18th century in the context of the European political discourses on feminine rulers during the baroque period. The coronation ritual of Empress Elizabeth (ruled 1741-1761, crowned 25 April 1742) reflected in the coronation book (1744) illustrates the transition of European images of a baroque feminine ruler into the semiotics of westernized Russian absolutism. Elizabeth appears in the court media (sermons, engravings in the coronation book, poems, etc.) as the natural, God-given mother of all Russians, saving Orthodoxy from the political chaos of the previous rule, combining both masculine and feminine images of a ruler. The image of Elizabeth in the sermon by Archbishop of Novgorod Ambrosii illustrates a Russian variation of the political liturgy of absolutist culture in the 18th century.

The article examines the circumstances and history of delivery to Russia of ethnographic collections by the First Russian Expedition to Ceylon and India (1914-18). These items were stored at Russian Tea Firm Gubkin & Co warehouses in Colombo, Government Museum (Madras) and Indian Museum (Calcutta), at the State Far Eastern University (Vladivostok) until 1925. The authors consider political conditions and ways of protection of the Academy of Sciences property in the 1920s. The Indian collections in 1921-24 became the pretext for the working out a model of interaction between the young Soviet state and Great Britain. The arguments proposed by Academician F.I. Stcherbatsky made it possible to resolve diplomatic conflicts related to the confiscation of the property of British subjects in the Soviet Russia. In 1923-24 international cooperation of scientists facilitated the transportation of Indian exhibits to the academic Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (MAE). By 1925, most of the collections had been delivered to Petrograd, the Meerwarths returned to the MAE.

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