2023 Issue №2

The author studies the activity of Russian military engineers operating under the command of D. I. Debosket in the army of S. F. Apraksin on the territory of Prussia during the Seven Years' War. It is shown that as the province was occupied by Russian troops, the engineering tasks were changing: there was a transition from equipping the track infrastructure to restoring defensive facilities. Restoration work was complicated by a variety of circumstances, including the lack of military engineers in the field due to their presence at the front line, the limited possibility to engage the local population in the fortifications’ restoration, as well as poor funding for construction work. The research focuses on the active involvement of V. I. Suvorov, the governor of the province, in the restoration of fortification objects, in particular the Pillau fortress. The article describes the participation of Russian engineers in the rescue operation in the Labiau area in January 1761, which included the evacuation of local residents and their property from the settlements flooded by the storm. The last chord of the military engineers activity was ensuring withdrawal of Russian troops from Eastern Prussia in August 1762.

The author examines the position of the Serbian people and the Orthodox Church under Austrian rule since the end of the Holy League war with Turkey from the end of the 17th century to the era of Josephism. After having settled in Austria, the Serbs were exposed to the assimilation policy of the authorities, the main instrument of which was the union with the Roman Catholic Church imposed on the Serbs. The sources for the study were normative and administrative acts of authorities at various levels, decisions of the Serbian people's church councils, official and private correspondence, as well as previously unpublished diplomatic documents from the fund of the Russian embassy in Vienna. The article identifies the main directions of the state policy and the Roman Catholic Church towards the Serbs and analyzes Serbian response.  It is concluded that the inhabitants of the cities greatly resisted the union while, while the Orthodox bishops showed a tendency to compromise with the authorities. In the struggle against the union, the Serbs tried to apply for the support of the largest Orthodox power. Russia, for its part, provided assistance to the Serbs, and its volume was largely determined by the position and personal views on the "Serbian issue" of the Russian am­bas­sadors in Vienna. In conclusion, it is emphasized that thanks to the active position of the Ser­bian urban class and patronage from Russia, the Austrian Serbs managed to maintain their adherence to the faith of their ancestors and the independence of their church throughout the 18th century. This became the key to preserving their national and cultural identity in an alien, foreign environment.

Based on archival materials, the article considers problems of pensions provision of Vera Uspenskaya (1877—1942) in 1923—1939 whose pension case was registered in the name of her father, the writer Gleb Uspensky. Having analyzed the frequency of changes in the size of Vera Glebovna's personal retirement benefit, the authors found that all the increases in pension amounts were related to personal applications of the pensioner or petitions from her brother, sent to the People's Commissariat of Social Security of the RSFSR through in­ter­mediaries. The world-famous writer Aleksey Gorky, People's Commissar of Education Ana­toly Lunacharsky, leadership of the Union of Soviet Writers and the Literary Fund took part in the solution of her pension problems. Given the documents from the personal pension file of Ve­ra Uspenskaya, one can see that in the legally established three-step procedure for the pre-war establishment and further increase of personal pensions of republican significance (pro­vin­cial (regional) bodies - central bodies - the Commission of the NKSO of the RSFSR), an ins­titution of mediation was built in, based on the principle of personal merit.