2013 Issue №12

This article uses archive documents to consider the management of Orthodox priests serving in the Russian Navy in the 18th century. The author describes the duties of the Holy Synod, bishops’ administrations, and the Admiralty and naval ship commanders. Special attention is paid to ober-hieromonks and commanding hieromonks of the Navy. The author studies their responsibilities in different locations and presents new biographical information.

This paper explores the influence of the development processes taking place in the Russian Empire on the Baltic Fleet. Five periods of the Baltic Fleet development are identified. The Fleet is interpreted as a significant element of the state mechanism for defending national interests in peace and wartime.

This paper explores different aspects of the daily life of a Chinese city on the basis of reports of the Russian Orthodox Church mission in Beijing dating back to the 18th century. The author shows how studying Chinese material culture contributed to the sociocultural adaptation of missionaries in Beijing.

This article focuses on the features of interactions between the Ministry of Imperial Court and architects during the reign of Alexander II. Special attention is paid to the usage of legal loopholes and deviations from the established standards.

This article uses published sources and literature to study the condition of peasant fishing trade in Novgorod and Pskov Governorates in the second half of the 19th/the beginning of the 20th centuries. The work focuses on analyzing the role of fishing trade in the peasant agriculture. The article describes the socioeconomic and environmental factors contributing to the spread of fishing in the Governorates. The author gives a brief description of fishing equipment used by peasants and emphasizes the wide spread of fishing cooperatives. It is shown that capitalism penetrated the trade when fishing entrepreneurs who used hired labour appeared alongside individual peasant fishermen. It is concluded that fishing continued to play an important role in the peasant economy of Novgorod and Pskov Governorates in the beginning of the 20th century through assuming a pronounced commercial nature with predominating capitalistic organization of trade.

This article considers the legal content of the concept of "leaving the community" though analyzing the legal nature of the farmstead and district land tenure formed through placing land in personal ownership, individual allotments, and complete division of rural lands into farmsteads and isolated land plots. It is shown that the reform legislation did not suggest legal discrimination of the community, which retained its administrative, economic, and land-related functions.

This article analyses the process of development and functioning of the state system of support for World War I refugees from the western territories of the Russian Empire in case of the central provinces of European Russia. It is concluded that the state system of refugee support proved to be efficient and managed to solve the problem of evacuation and relocation, as well as that of meeting the basic needs of millions of refugees throughout the war period.

This article analyses the historical prerequisites for the development of the legal framework for local self-governance in the last years of the USSR and RSFSR and the first years of the Russian Federation, as well as its role in the political system and the social life of modern Russia. The author identifies the key contradictions in power relations between public and local authorities.