Vol 16, No 2 (2017)

The article shows that in 1917 it was the internal turmoil due to which the tsarist regime collapsed so fast. The crucial role was played by the common idea of the complete incapacity of Nicholas II. The image of the weak power was reinforced by all sorts of rumours about Rasputin’s influence on the government decision-making, his intimate relations with the Empress, and finally, the actions of the authorities in “the interests of Germany.” On the eve of the revolution Russia was rife with rumors of plots against the royal family. This meant that the public opinion was ready for the violent overthrow of the existing government. The dissatisfaction with the hateful government led to a spontaneous revolt, which met no serious resistance from the authorities. The disposal of the Romanovs aroused delight in the society. At the same time, the masses demanded the immediate deliverance from all the burdens of wartime. It could not provide new power. Everywhere crowds destroyed “tsarist” emblems and other attributes of the old power. Even the Russian Orthodox Church almost unanimously turned away from its formal chief. However, very soon it became clear that the political culture of the elites was at odds with the social aspirations of the people. The masses were increasingly called for the immediate solution to all vital problems - particularly to stop the war and immediately resolve the agrarian question. The study of the psychosocial situation in February - March 1917 assures that the monarchy was not so much overthrown by the insurgent people, but collapsed due to the internal incapacity. In fact, people only made the final blow to the exhausted authorities. Hence, the rebellious potential of the masses didn’t manifest itself in full. In this regard, the subsequent attempts of the liberal and right-wing politicians to squeeze the revolutionary process into the framework of formal democracy obviously failed.

The beginning of the 21th century was a difficult historic period for Russia. It was the reorganization of the armed forces of the country that was the primary task after the defeat in the war with Japan. The problem of the military reform in the Russian Empire in the period between the Russian-Japanese War and World War I (1905-1914) was raised both in the Russian and foreign historiography. In spite of such a wide range of issues reviewed in historiography, there are practically no studies in which there was fully considered such a complex of financial documents like Estimates of the Ministry of War of the Russian Empire in 1909-1914. The estimates of the Ministry of War of the Russian Empire are an important historical source and they contain information on the funds which were at the disposal of the Main Departments of the Ministry. This information can be used in the process of studying of the issues related to the funding of transformations of the Russian army on the eve of the First World War. Especially informative in this regard could be the estimates of the Main Artillery Department, for they contain information on financial resources allocated for manufacturing of firearms, cold weapon and rearmament of artillery units. These are important parts of the process of reorganization of the military assets. The author draws the readers’ attention to the estimates of the Main Artillery Department of the Ministry of War: their analysis and structure (within the main paragraphs, presented in the document), a number of conclusions on the main directions of financing: artillery, machine guns, hand guns and cold weapon, production of gunpowder and ammunition, as well as the conclusions in relation to the issue of the reorganization of the armed forces of Russia on the eve of the First World War.

In the article the situation of intemees(persons having the nationality of a hostile state) is analyzed on the example of the Kazan province in 1917. Analyzing the rights and duties of the prisoners, the author equates their status to that of administrative exiles and gives moral evaluation to the phenomenon of internment. To illustrate the particular situation of the internees in the crisis year for Russia, the author refers to the earlier period of their lives in the Kazan province - from 1914 to 1916. The forced displacement from their homes entailed separation from family, inability to find jobs in their specialty, restriction of freedom of movement, prohibition of communication with the local population. The revolutionary year of 1917 was marked, on the one hand, by general liberalization which affected, among others, the civilian prisoners. On the other hand, the economic problems in the country provoked the province residents’ anger with foreigners. Thus, because of food shortages and economic disruption, the domestic problems only worsened, the internees couldn’t choose the place of residence and the expectations of easing of the internment regime were not met. The new public authorities - Public Security Committees - treated foreigners in general and internees in particular with caution and tried to curtail their rights. This led to the fact that even the citizens of neutral states were persecuted. After the 1917 October Revolution this mistrust continued. As a result, regardless of the fact which political force was in power, the fate of the internees did not become easier, even after such a strong social upheaval as the February and October Revolutions.

The article is devoted to the fate of the intellectuals who came over to the Soviet power and participated in the revolutionary process. The analysis is carried out on the example of the life and work of artist Alexei Rybnikov (1887-1949), who came from a merchant family, initially received economic education, graduated from Kharkov school of painting and drawin-gand participated in the exhibitions of “Jack of diamonds”.There are considered the peculiarities of his pre-revolutionary art. The author notes the role of the artist in the rescue of the unique art collections in the years of his work in the People’s Commissariat for Education. There is shownhow the Revolution and the Civil war, the nationalization and requisition of artistic values changed the processes of museum construction in Russia and then the Soviet Union. The author points out that the process of nationalization of the historical and artistic values revealed one of the important issues related to the conservation of works of art - the problem of restoration. The solution to this problem was associated with the need to study the technological characteristics of the paintings by old masters, to record the physical condition of all existing works of art, to describe its technical condition. There is shown that the practical work of rescue and restoration of the old masters’ heritage, which was carried out at the State Tretyakov gallery and the Hermitage by artists, technologists, photographers and scientists (chemists and physicists), led to the discovery of new methods of paintings salvation. Russian artist Alexei Rybnikov began his career before the revolution of 1917 as a painter, book designer and muralist.Like many other representatives of this profession, at first he became an officer of the People’s Commissariat for Education, then an employee of a museum. This path of a free artist’s transformation into a serious museum employee gave the world a new way of washing paintings, and then the method of texture photography invented by him. In the history of the world restoration this method is known as “Methode Rybnikoff’.

The article analyzes the attitude of the Russian artistic intelligentsia to the revolutionary events of 1917. There are studied the diaries and memoirs by Bunin, Berdyaev, M. Gorky, F. Stepun, Z. Gippius, P.A. Sorokin et al. Besides, the authors consider thedynamics of the intellectuals’ attitude to the revolution, from delight to complete denial. There are analyzed the reasons which encouraged the creative intelligentsia toemigrate. The Silver Age creative intelligentsia representatives’ memories are of particular importance. Memoir prose combined the personal-confessional and objective cognitive aspects. As noted by N.N. Koznova, these memoirs reflected different views of the historic past of Russia, the attempts to predict its future as well asthe thoughts about the fate of the country. Modern researchers study the Russian intelligentsia representatives’ self-discovery and self-criticism processes, but do not study the dynamics of their attitude to the revolution, taking it as a historical reality. The main purpose of the study is to see the way the creative intelligentsia of the Silver Age changed their attitude to the events of 1917. In the course of the study there was revealed the dynamic change of the creative intelligentsia attitude to the events of 1917. Schematically, this attitude can be divided into four stages. The first stage wasbreathless expectation of changes associated with the inability of the Russian government to resolve the problems related to the First World War in the short term. This expectation of change was primarily caused by the crisis due to the military events. The second stage was the enthusiasm aboutthe February Revolution. At that timethe creative intelligentsia perceived the revolution as the only vector of development and attached all hopes to it. The third stage was disappointment at the seizure of power in October 1917. The fourth and final stage was horror and aversion which became obvious already after 1917, which subsequently encouraged creative intellectuals to emigrate.

This article seeks to address the question of how the influence of the October Revolution reached Korea and to what extent it affected the outcome of the March 1st Movement. The author analyzes the documents from the Diplomatic Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan and the articles of the official mouthpiece of the colonial government Maeil Sinbo from 1917 to the mid-1920s. Based on the analysis of the primary sources, the author reveals two main channels of receiving information of the revolutionary events in Russia. The first of them was the official newspaper of the Governor General. The main actions of the government of Soviet Russia covered by this newspaper aroused such great interest among the Korean public that in order to prevent an “incorrect interpretation” of these events, the Governor General had to repeatedly dedicate the front page of the newspaper to the articles directly or indirectly condemning the 1917 October Revolution. The second channel was the Korean labour migrants in Primorye. Coming to Russia in search of a better life, most “unnaturalized” migrants faced difficult economic and social conditions. The February Revolution of 1917 which opened the discussion of the future of the Korean population in the Far East became a prerequisite for the politicization of a large part of the labour migrants who witnessed the revolutionary changes in Russia. The author concludes that the ideas of the 1917 October Revolution found active response in the hearts and minds of the masses in Korea. The political and ethnic oppression intensified the social and political contradictions in the colonial Korea resulting in the nation-wide March 1st Movement of 1919 that became the turning point in the history of the world political anti-colonial movement in Asia. The national-bourgeois idea of “gaining independence through diplomacy” suffered a crushing defeat but it retained the spirit of the March 1st Movement in history and laid the foundation for a new generation of revolutionaries who played a crucial role in the events of 1945-1953.

The article analyzes the monograph of V.P. Buldakov and T.G. Leontieva “The War that gave birth to the revolution”, which in terms of the content and research focus destroys the prevailing historiographical myths about the Great Russian revolution. After the historical-anthropological deconstruction of the old and new concepts, the authors created a multidimensional and multifaceted research of the problem of psychology of war perception in various strata of the Russian society. The authors examine the war and the revolution as anacute manifestation of global psychopathology, to which came the Enlightenmentthat resulted in the global cataclysm. The research approaches are based on the theory of resentiment (implicitly accumulated aggression within the “progressive” society). According to the authors,psychopathology of the European world was associated with the demographic boom and enormous development of technology. The “rejuvenation” of the population led to youthful destructiveness in societies. In Russiait was associated with the persistent internal social antagonism, which was exacerbated by the heterogeneity of the cultures of the “top” and “bottom”. Before the revolution people’s minds had been mainly influencednot by “objective” indicators, but subjective ideas of the events based on everyday personal experience. To prove this thesis, the authors used a huge number of personal sources. The most interesting part of the research is connected with the reproduction of extracts from censored letters of people of different ranks and classes. The authors seek to show that the preconditions of the revolution to a small extent depended on the parties, since the dissatisfaction with what was happening was typical of all strata of society. But whereas the liberal and socialist elites came from the political practices of parliamentary democracy, the lower classes tended to the traditional political culture. This allowed the Bolsheviks to easily “seize” power. This conclusion is a fundamental point of the author’s conception of the revolution.