2020 Issue №2

The article analyses demobilization of officers of the USSR armed forces after the Great Patriotic war in 1945—1948. Six mobilization rounds were carried out to reduce the size of the Armed Forces during this period, and more than 1.3 million officers were dismissed. The original idea was to retain the officers special for their moral and professional qualities, who have no re­strictions on health and age. All demobilized were given remuneration, the necessary documents, and the relocation was paid by the state. Meanwhile, the unprecedented and immense demobilization led to certain challenges in social­ization for the returned front-line soldiers. Archive documents and oral sources demonstrate a military impact on employment, attitude to studies, the state, creating an image of the desired future. It is shown that in terms of em­ployment, returning officers had clear advantages being appointed to leader­ship positions in various institutions, young officers could return to universi­ties and technical schools. The article emphasizes the difficult fate of those who were dismissed for injuries and disabilities, many of whom turned to begging. The influx of shell-shocked people greatly worsened the criminal situation in the country. The state devastated by the war was simply unable to socially provide for and employ such a large number of demobilized people in a single step. Gradually, over time, a significant part of the demobilized was able to adapt socially to a peaceful society.

The number of federal states in the modern world is extremely small. The Federal Republic of Germany is the largest and most famous federation in Eu­rope. However, German democracy and German federalism are often perceived as externally imposed political values as a result of the country's defeat in World War II. Such an attitude needs revising. Of course, Germany did not have the same deep tradition of parliamentarism as France or Great Britain, or federalism like the United States of America, but German history was not de­prived of certain prerequisites for both democracy and federalism. Of course, the state-territorial structure of Kaiser Germany was significantly different from the United States and had its own specifics. In this article, the author at­tempts at illuminating the historical origins of German federalism that devel­oped at the end of the 19th century during the formation of the North German Union and the German Empire in 1871.

The article discusses developing pre-revolutionary national academic schools which studied of the history of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. In the 18th — the first half of the 19th century the history of Lithuania was per­ceived by Russian scholars as “alien” and did not receive much interest. The situation changed after the “January Insurrection” (1863—1864): the atten­tion of politicians to Lithuanian history predetermined the establishment of pre-revolutionary lithuanistic research centers at the universities of Kiev, Moscow and St. Petersburg. Due to the efforts of such historians as Nikolay Ivanishev, Mikhail Vladimirsky-Budanov, Fyodor Leontovich, Vladimir An­tonovich, Konstantin Bestuzhev-Ryumin et al., Lithuanian history became a specific research area, naturally inscribed in the context of pre-revolutionary national historiography. The works of Matvey Lyubavsky and Alexander Presnyakov, whose conclusions in many aspects are still relevant, achieved the paramount importance in Lithuanian historical studies.