Vol 22, No 3 (2023): Cities of the Russian Regions and Cross-Border Territories in the Historical Space

Within the article, the author examines the history of everyday life of St. Petersburg through analyzing documents that have recorded the history of the city’s pavement replacement with various materials over a period of more than three hundred years. The study was mainly carried out on the basis of archival materials from the funds of the Central State Historical Archive of St. Petersburg and the Russian State Historical Archive. It is evident that this work is the first comprehensive study of the history of the pavements of the Russian Empire capital as a theme, a topic which has not yet been adequately reflected in either domestic or foreign historiography. It has been established that it took the city authorities a considerable time to pave the capital's roads during the imperial period. The paving of the city roads developed from the use of raw stone to natural asphalt. In the end, it took almost a century to bring the streets of the main part of the city to the proper condition; they have been previously been covered with mainly stone. Whereas in the XVIII century the main task of the central and city authorities was to pave as many streets as possible, then in the XIX - early XX centuries the city government instead concentrated on a way find an inexpensive but durable material for this purpose.

Through their research, the author has studied the process of providing the population of the Ivanovo and Vladimir regions with fuel during the Great Patriotic War. With an analysis of regional archival materials, the author reveals the both the importance as well as the future potential of such fuel resources as peat and firewood located in the region, as well as the main ways of their procurement for the needs of the national economy. Special attention is paid to the working conditions of procurement officers as well as the radical changes in the age and gender composition of workers employed in peat extraction and firewood cutting across the War. It is shown that during the war years the role of women increased considerably, which was caused by the mass mobilization of able-bodied men. The consequence of this was a significant decline in labor productivity, especially from 1942 to 1943. The location of firewood and peat resources at a considerable distance from cities with enterprises and institutions made it difficult to deliver them in a timely manner. These logistical difficulties often led to shutdown of plants and factories, as well as public institutions. The author comes to the conclusion that it was not possible to fully solve the problem of supply until the end of the war, although according to the available data, there were still fuel resources in various places for procurement. The sources also show large number of complaints of the population about the lack of heating in for their homes and the failure to provide assistance with the delivery of firewood, as well as the broader difficulties with the food supply.

The everyday life of Soviet women during the years of the Khrushchev thaw is one of the insufficiently studied issues of Soviet women's history. This article is devoted to its study using the methods of gender anthropology and multi-focal ethnography of urban life. Its analysis is based on: heterogeneous empirical material - published memoirs of contemporaries, their oral stories (recorded by the authors of the article), materials from periodicals, neglected works of fiction, and visual sources. Magnitogorsk was chosen as the main research locus due to it being a large non-administrative industrial center that had appeared even before the war, and in which demographic gender imbalance persisted even after 1945. After analyzing the features of the women’s contribution to the formation of a new image of the city, the authors completed the picture of the lifestyles of urban women, showing several social types that changed the face of the industrial giant: architects, housewives, social activists, workers of the Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works. The collected material showed the success of the Soviet Union’s new social policy, which was an innovative transition of the Soviet state from the harsh methods of management of the 1930s - early 1950s to Soviet democracy, including recognition of the importance of private life, including of Soviet women. However, everyday life of Soviet women from a half a century ago also revealed a number of issues such as: gender inequality and has the exposed the difficulties of organizing everyday women's domestic (family) and industrial life. By proving the importance of gender anthropology as an approach that expands the ability to analyze social idealism and hopes of the political thaw, this approach helps frame the period by showing how gender interacted with the shifting value-normative structures of Soviet thinking and the social image of the female builders of socialism.

The author in their work analyzes familial relations, gender roles and gender equality issues based on Vice Admiral N.V. Kopytov’s letters to his wife, letters currently being stored in his personal fund stored at the Russian State Archive of Navy. The novelty of the scientific usefulness of the letters is determined by their use as a source base for further historical analysis. The introduction of N.V. Kopytov’s personal letters into scientific use for the first time has allowed the authors and further researchers to obtain information to analyze a wide range of issues: including interpersonal communications, gender relations, everyday life, and professional activities. In addition, this research has allowed the analysis of the influence of peculiarities of mentality, class affiliation, financial situation on the character and main priorities of relationships in N.V. Kopytov’s family. Recent research interest in personal letters as historical sources of private origin and the epistolary genre is currently associated with the ability to identify common and specific features of intra-family communications of people of a certain social stratum and social status, in this particular case, the noble family of the Vice-Admiral of Navy. The study of the letters allows us to conclude that the Kopytov family was not typical of Russian society and was more of an equal partnership, despite the prevailing gender inequality enshrined in the legislation and in the mentality of the population of time. The authors have examined the causes of family relations which were considered progressive for the period under consideration, based on the equal division of gender roles and the position of spouses in joint decision-making.

From the example of Russian officer Boris Semenovich Sinani’s fate, the authors have attempted to reconstruct the events of the first days of the February Revolution, including certain aspects of the work of the “military headquarters of the revolution” - the Military Commission, as well as the reasons for the creation and nature of the functioning of the Union of Republican Officers of the People's Army. Through their research, the authors have revealed the complexity of the relationship between the Provisional Committee of the State Duma and the Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, as well as the attitude of the Russian officers to the revolutionary changes in the country. The authors note that the name Sinani was taken as a pseudonym by Georgy Borisovich Skalov, another participant in the revolution and the Civil War, and this choice played a tragic role in the fate of the latter. The study is based on the analysis of the documents of the Union of Socialists of the People's Army stored in the State Archive of the Russian Federation, memoirs, and their comparison with published scientific works. The authors have also attempted to reconstruct the main lines of interaction and contradictions between officer groups during the Great October Socialist Revolution.

While the concept of “cancel culture” is already a given in contemporary culture; through this article, the authors propose to illustrate a comparable concept/term “defensive practice” in a broader historical retrospective. The authors emphasize that in general there were relative few examples of such “defensive practices” in Russian history, but analyzes the two earliest of them. The first is at the end of the XVII century, when a conflict broke out between the religious and political groups of “Latinisers” and “Graecophils.” Patriarch Joachim played an active role in resolving the conflict by unequivocally taking the side of the “Graecophils.” As a result, the writings of “latinising heretics” were banned, and they were either executed or condemned by the local council of the Russian Church. In the XVIII century manifestations of comparable defensive practice became even rarer, but already at the very end of the century, under Emperor Paul I, the highest authorities again re-used this technique. Fearing the spread of revolutionary “contagion,” Paul I set the goal of banning the spread of “French fashions” in Russia, individual French words, as well as writings by French authors (or those who sympathized with the events of the French Revolution). However, all these measures had no effect and were eventually ended under Alexander I. As a result, the authors come to the conclusion that at the initial stage of the Modern era and even in the XVIII century, practices comparable to modern cancel culture were not widespread in Russian life, and were an exception rather than socio-political practice.

Through their article, the authors have conducted research on the suggested requirements for the nutrition of preschoolers which were established at the turn of the XX century in Russia, as well as on their implementation within noble intelligentsia families. The source base of the article includes the works of hygienists and nutritionists, reports of sanitary and pedagogical organizations, journalism, home economics guidelines, as well as ego documents. It is shown within these text that the idea of the importance of a proper diet for children as a way for them to obtain the necessary vitamins and minerals for the “building” of their body, and maintaining health had the greatest resonance with intelligent metropolitan female residents who had both the opportunity and desire to get acquainted with the latest scientific achievements in this field. The authors provide a conclusion that not only parents’ willingness to apply ideas from the guidelines instrumental in this process, but also guided the extreme difficulty of implementing them in practice, even in “responsible” families. The abundance and inconsistency of the recommendations combined with the difficulties of their implementation and additional financial and labor costs often forced women to adapt the ideas of nutritionists to the available opportunities of the time and their own ideas. As a result, even in “responsible” noble intelligent families, there could be bizarrely combined various, sometimes mutually exclusive, nutritional practices for preschoolers.