The humanities and social science

The concept of “unclaimed land share” appeared and developed in Russian legislation due to the debatable nature of the legal nature and the ambiguity of the legal regime of the land share as a category of land law. The article provides a description of the theoretical and practical issues related to the genesis of the doctrinal and legal concepts of land share and unclaimed land share, the topical issues of recognizing a land share as unclaimed. The author gives the timeline of the concept of unclaimed land share in the legislation, and indicates the change in the criteria for classifying land shares as unclaimed, as well as the complexity of the legal mechanism for recognizing the right of public ownership of them. The article also outlines the possible areas for further development of the legal regime of unclaimed land shares and improvement of its efficiency: procedural improvement to recognize land shares as unclaimed and the criteria for classifying them as such; regulation of the extrajudicial transfer of unclaimed land shares into municipal ownership; establishment of a term for the right to recognize unclaimed land shares as municipal property; use of the legal mechanism for recognizing ownership of unclaimed land shares as ownerless; limitation of the period of use of the legal category of “unclaimed land share”.

The relevance of the study of judicial activity is determined by the need to improve its quality. Judicial activity directly affects the implementation of various human rights and freedoms, one of which is the right to a fair trial. In addition, knowledge about judicial activity needs to be systematized and generalized in order to use it most effectively. Judicial activity, as a rule, is considered while a number of other relevant aspects are being studied rather than as an independent category. The research mainly relied on the method of materialistic dialectics as well as the methods of information analysis and synthesis, the formal-legal and comparative-legal methods. The empirical basis of the study was an analysis of the legislation of the Russian Federation related to the issue of legal regulation of judicial activity, as well as an analysis of the data of the Judicial Department at the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation.

The article examines composition and morphology of household items that were found in burials of the second half of the 13th—15th centuries in necropolis of Alt-Wehlau situated in Prussian land Nadrovia. These items include razors, flints, whetstones, keys and comb that were common in everyday life of local population and were used as a part of burial inventory under the influence of pagan rite preserved until the 16th century. The study of items composition and morphology relied on the typological and comparative-historical methods that allowed to make following conclusions. Razors of type 1 and flints of types 1—4 were most frequently used in burials both separately and in combination with each other. Items were mainly located near pelvic and femoral bones due the tradition to wear them on the belt. During the specified period household items demonstrated tendency to unification on the form, composition and location in burials. Comparing them with the same items from other necropolis and cities of Order’s state and neighboring Zhemaitiya, the authors concluded that, on the one hand, unified material culture influenced on the household use of inhabitants of Alt-Wehlau and, on the other hand, such usage reflected some regional differences.

The article analyzes lead-tin badges of religious and secular character found in the archaeological excavations in the central part of Kaliningrad in 2020. The author describes morphological features and makes the iconographic attribution of the finds. The research identifies some of the finds, namely pilgrimage badges, as those of North German origin. Three of them belong to the cult of the Blessed Virgin, another three badges are associated with pilgrimage sites linked to Eucharistic wonders. An analysis of the icons with religious content resulted in assumptions about the destinations of pilgrimages from medieval Königsberg. Secular badges presumably marked professional affiliation. The examination of lead badges found on the outskirts of Lastadie in Altstadt gives a first outline of the history of the circulation of personal piety items and the profanum signs worn on clothing among the population of medieval Königsberg.

The article explores the history of chess in Königsberg in the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. The author gives the data on competitions held in the capital of East Prussia, as well as biographical data on players and chess composers who lived there and visited Königsberg. The reconstruction of the history of the chess movement includes the localization of chess clubs in the city. The researcher states, that in the 1850s — 1870s chess clubs with general and specialized membership flourished in the city. The Königsberg Academic Chess Club was the example of the latter. From 1878 until the end of the century chess life in East Prussia was under the umbrella of the East German Chess Union, founded to offset the difficulties of participation of local chess players in all-German tournaments because of geographical remoteness. In the 20th century several world-class players both from among the city’s visitors (Emanuel Lask­er) and local residents (Paul Saladin Leonhardt) appeared in Königsberg. Leonhardt became probably the main figure representing East Prussia at national and international tournaments after the First World War. The years of Nazism witnessed persecution of local chess players of Jewish origin in Königsberg. Chess life of the city itself remained provincial. The chess history of Königsberg ceased with the Red Army storming the city in 1945. Among the participants of the storming there were also Soviet chess players. The article is addressed to chess historians, local historians and tour guides.

Based on little-known and unpublished sources from the “Trotsky Archive” at the Harvard University’s Hogton Library, the German Federal Archives (Berlin) and the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History (Moscow), the article for the first time reconstructs the history of the United Left Opposition groups of the German Communist Party (Bolshevik-Leninists) in East Prussia in 1930-1933. The research highlights the figures of the Königsberg group, some of whom (e. g. Gustav Plep and Oskar Seipold) were active not only regionally, but also at the all-German level. The author describes the political activities of the leftist opposition (holding discussion evenings, sending circular letters to small towns in East Prussia, distributing leaflets at workers’ gatherings, etc.), and shows how local Trotskyists were influenced by conflicts between the leaders of the United Left Opposition - Roman Well, Anton Grylewicz, Kurt Landau and Oskar Seipold. The article considers some cross-border links of Trotskyists with groups in Poland. The study of this topic makes it possible to broaden the understanding of the development of the German Trotskyist movement in its regional perspective and to look differently at the political landscape of East Prussia, in which various opposition groups existed alongside the official parties.

The article analyses how the terms “memory wars” / “memorial wars” are applied in the contemporary research papers on conflicts of collective perceptions of the past. The author shows that in the late 1990s and early 2000s the concept was not yet associated exclusively with the political sphere, within which different social groups were producing historical narratives, but in the 2000s and 2010s modern understanding of the phrase “memory wars” was already established and since then it has become common in contemporary studies of collective memory to reveal its conflicting nature. It is noted that in the studies of clashes of historical narratives an active attention is paid to the content of the processes under the study, against which the attempts to give a strict definition to the term “memory wars” are noticeably rarer. The use of the “memory wars” concept shows that it has not yet received proper understanding as an element of categorical apparatus of memory studies and the issue of its relevance to the objectives of the contemporary research deserves special attention.

The proposed article attempts to determine the possibilities of reducing the level of contradiction between a person’s need for security and the a priori conflictogenic state of the system of international relations, which is in a state of permanent variability. Assumed as methodological “keys” of the study, preference is given to the methodology of the anthropological measurement of international relations, which allowed us to conclude that the anthropology of international relations does not deny the role of the state, but only checks its functions in order to avoid their hyperbolization and contribute to the transformation of an individual into a priority object of security. Another theoretical and methodological basis was the theory of Securitization in Policy Analysis, which contributed to the formulation of a conclusion about the contradictions that arise between the process of ensuring national security and the need for human security when one has to be sacrificed in favor of the other. Yet another theoretical basis for the article was by A. Maslow’s theory of the hierarchy of needs, which caused an objection from the author of the article to the well-known American researcher over his thesis that the need for security rarely acts as an active force. The main argument of the author of the article is that the need for security, transforming into a desire for security, turns into a completely active, if not aggressive, force, a priori creating conflict situations. An analysis of the evolution of paradigms for ensuring security in the international relations system concludes that a successive series of world orders resulted from wars that ended in peace, in which a causal relationship is found between the instinct for self-preservation and aggressive actions, between the need for security and trying to satisfy it by any means. In order to achieve the goal of the study, a solution is proposed to the complex task of maintaining an acceptable level of human security, possible under the condition of close interaction with the state.