Vol 13, No 2 (2021)

The middle of the XIII century - the apogee of power of the unified Mongol Empire. In 1241-1242, the first, bloodiest and most destructive Mongol invasion into Europe took place. Certainly, it was vital for the Europeans to find an answer to the question: what did the invaders want, what goals did they pursue? In this article, the author shows that, due to the abundance of contradictory information and the acute lack of an objective understanding of the new enemy at first, European political and ecclesiastical figures attributed many goals to the Mongols (at least eighteen!), of which only three were fully confirmed - an attack on Russia, Poland, and Hungary, and the rest were either not realized for some reason, or arose in minds of the Europeans themselves. All these “goals”, identified in various official and unofficial European sources, mainly dating from the middle of the XIII century, are discussed here taking into account information from synchronous Eastern sources. Despite well-known ideas of a “world-building monarchy”, perhaps actually hatched by the Mongol khans, events in Europe suggest that their main goal there was to punish the Hungarian king Bela IV, who refused to hand over the Polovtsians hiding in Hungary to the Mongols.

The article shows the role of the Nizhny Novgorod Fair as the most important point of the Russo-Persian trade in the second half of the 19th - early 20th century. The problem of transportation of goods from Persia to Nizhny Novgorod and in the opposite direction is also considered. This research is based on the body of documents stored in the Archive of Foreign Policy of the Russian Empire and introduced into scientific circulation for the first time. On the base of them the authors show the inefficiency of activity of the “Caucasus and Mercury” Company, which actually monopolized the goods transportation across the Caspian Sea during the revised period. The extremely low speed of delivery of Russian goods purchased by Persian merchants at the Nizhny Novgorod Fair damaged not only private merchants’ commerce, involved in Russian-Persian trade, but also inevitably entailed a decrease in the overall trade between the two states.

This article examines the historical conditions, causes, evolution and options for solving one of the topical problems of the spatial historical dynamics of China in the late XX - early XXI centuries. - uneven regional development. The purpose of this article is to review in Chinese the works of such Chinese scholars as Wang Ke, Wang Feng, Wang Yunhui, Gan Chunhui, Li Zhuni, Liang Longbin, Xia Wanjun, Fan Jianyong, Hu Dali, Hu Shudong, Tsai Fang, Zhou Zhe, Zhu Degui, Chen Rong, Chen Changshi, Shi Lin, Shen Zhongqiang on the history of the uneven regional development of the PRC and highlighting the leading approaches and practical recommendations for overcoming disproportionate trends in the regional historical and modern development of China based on the use of system analysis and a comparative historical method. The main factors that significantly affect the uneven regional development of China in the modern period of history include: uneven industrial development, income distribution by provinces, foreign investment, agriculture, human capital and labor mobility.

The article analyzes the history of the formation of the Egyptian collection of the National Museum of the Republic of Tatarstan during the 19th and 20th centuries. Based on the materials of the archives of the city of Kazan, the national museum, as well as with the involvement of other scientific publications in the context of the museology in Kazan and the development of Russian Egyptology as a science, the four main stages of the formation of the archaeological fund, as well as the current state of the collection of the ancient Egyptian heritage, are examined and analyzed. An analysis of each stage allows the reconstruction of the evolution of Egyptology as a science, and oriental studies in general, in the regions of Russia. This collection of the National Museum of the Republic of Tatarstan is one of the largest domestic collections of Egyptian culture, which has not been exhibited since the beginning of the 20th century. In this context, cataloging and studying the formation of a collection is necessary for its preservation as a unique heritage. The author of the article came to the conclusion about the importance of Kazan University in the development of the archaeological foundation of the National Museum of the Republic of Tatarstan, the role of the collected Egyptian materials in the development of Russian Egyptology and Oriental studies in the 19th century.

The key idea of this article is that, for the first time, on the example of the domestic and foreign policy of the Canadian Liberals, led by Justin Trudeau, we discuss the problems and prospects of Canadian Liberalism. The recent defeat of the Conservative Party of Canada in the 2019 parliamentary elections gave the impression that only the Liberal Party contributes to the prosperity of the modern Canadian state. The closest attention to the activities of the Liberal Party allows us to identify its absolute advantages and corresponding shortcomings. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to analyze and investigate both the indisputable advantages and current shortcomings of the Liberal Party in power, and against this background to determine the effectiveness, or vice versa, the incompetence of Canadian liberalism as a political ideology. At the same time, according to the author, it is necessary to separate objective and subjective factors associated with the presence of liberals in power. The objective ones are related to how the Liberals’ program settings meet the needs of the time, while the subjective ones characterize how an individual, and, above all, the party leader, implements the party’s requests and the electorate’s hopes. In this regard, the reputation of its leader is of crucial importance. On the basis of the considered source base, and, first of all, the electoral programs of Liberals under Trudeau, since coming to power in 2015. In the first part of the article, the author presents a comparative analysis of the results of the liberals in the parliamentary elections in 2015 and 2019, explaining the reasons for the victory of the latter, and obtaining, respectively, a parliamentary “majority”, and then a “minority”. The second part of the article is devoted directly to the aspects of the domestic and foreign policy of the Liberals in 2015-2020. The author comes to the conclusion that the Canadian liberalism, implemented by Justin Trudeau is currently the leading political ideology that unites a significant part of the electorate.