2021 Issue №4

The article examines the personality of Pavel Smirnov/Tulsky who fled from the synodal church in 1831 to the Old Believers as a priest. Keeping in touch with the center of the Belokrinitsky accord — the Rogozhsky cemetery, Pavel gradually went into schism. On Pavel Smirnov's biography, the author seeks to identify and characterize the concept of the fugitive priesthood; the peculiarities of the approaches of the authorities and the official church to solving the problem of a "schismatic" priest; the behavior patterns of the "new" Old Believer hierarchy in relation to schism. To solve these problems, a corpus of historical sources reflecting the reaction of public institutions to a recalcitrant priest was studied. These include state authorities, the synodal and the Old Believer church. The author concludes that the beglopopovtsy successfully existed before the appearance of the belokrinitsky hierarchy. The article also notes the inability of the local secular and ecclesiastical authorities to solve problems related to the Old Believers.

The article discusses the major areas of theoretical research by foreign scholars (historians, sociologists, political scientists and other specialists), who are engaged in the study of the history of the Kaliningrad region of the So­viet period and use the category Homo sovieticus (the Soviet man). The first part of the article covers the history of the concept “Soviet people”, ac­ti­vely used by the Soviet researchers in 1970s-1980s. The second part describes the understanding of “Homo sovieticus”, which was developed in the national (first of all, in the émigré) literature of the late Soviet period. The third part pre­sents the works of foreign scholars that deal with the aspects of making of Ho­mo sovieticus in the Kaliningrad region (first of all, the factors of So­vie­ti­sation and the reasons for its failure). The author of the article concludes that the application of this category is not always sufficiently justified, but a number of observations by foreign researchers are undoubtedly worthy of attention. The conclusion provides an overview of research perspectives in the study of the history of the westernmost Russian region during the Soviet period.

The article considers the news content of the information environment in the Kaliningrad region, the new Soviet region, in 1947, when the main media of the first post-war years were formed here. The authors describe the process of organisation of radio and press. They also analyse key topics through the texts of Kaliningrad and district newspapers as well as radio programmes. The research draws the following conclusions: the tone of radio and newspaper reports, which was ideological and prevailingly positive, created a picture of the active post-war development of the Kaliningrad region. This measure should have helped to make the settlers arriving in the region stay here. The mass media “reminded” the population of the region of its inseparability from the rest of the Soviet Union by informing residents about events and processes that were taking place in the whole state and by using the categories “our homeland” and “our country”. The press emphasised that residents of the Kaliningrad region were a part of the Soviet people and along with the rest of the citizens of the USSR were involved in the overall development of the country. At the same time, the high rate of emigration from the region in the post-war years suggests that the work of the local media could not mask the problems that existed.

Through publications in the German Democratic Republic newspapers from 1949—1990 the article reveals dominant images of residents of the Kaliningrad region, such as ocean fishing pioneers, builders of a new city on the ruins of Königsberg and keepers of German heritage, particularly the Immanuel Kant's grave and other historical monuments in Kaliningrad. The author of the article describes factors that influenced the representation of the images of the Kaliningrad region’s population as the Soviet people as well as concludes that the images were not constructed independently in the editorial offices of German newspapers, but were imposed through publications of Soviet news agencies together with articles and notes of Soviet journalists printed in the GDR.