2023 Issue №1

Formation of the State of Teutonic Order in Prussia in the XIIIth—XIVth centuries based beside military oppression on the relations with local population supported by the incorporation of them in the system of condition landholding. These relations implied, from the one hand, the representation by the Order its own status as a collective ruler, and from the other hand, symbolic expression of the loyalty of Old Prussians in various spheres of social communication: language, onomastic, objects of material culture. Definition of the ways to express loyalty that is the purpose of the article allows to characterize the comprehension of Old Prussians their own status in new political conditions. For this purpose by the using of the old comparative-historical, typological and diachronous-synchronous methods were re­sear­ched both written sources and funds from the Old Prussian necropolis. It allows to define that Old Prus­sians expressed their loyalty by the reception of Middle High German language, Chris­tian names and symbols and sign of Teutonic order. Being included in the culture of Old Prussians these elements co-existed with traditional names, language and principle of heathen fu­ne­ral rite. The resulting co-existence of the symbols different by their character became one of the basis for the relations between Old Prussians and Teutonic order that provided stable de­velopment of the State until 1525.

The author studies governmental measures to regulate the sphere of promotion in rank in the Russian Empire analyzing new data obtained from unpublished documents of the Russian State Historical Archive (RGIA). Documents demonstrate the role of the Table of Ranks of Peter I and its influence on the development of civil ranks in the Russian Empire. The issues of uncontrolled growth of the bureaucracy and abuse of civil ranks for the rapid career advancement of civil servants are seen to be essential for the XIX century. The article attempts at answering the question why the government failed to abolish civil ranks throughout the entire 19th century. In addition, the article explores possible alternative ways of reforming the system of civil ranks that could be adopted by the government of the Russian Empire.

The article studies the private documents of jurors of the Russian Empire such as diaries and memoirs and analyses them as a complex of historical sources containing unique information about the course of the trial and the work of the jury. The pool of documents included two diaries and eight memoirs. The author evaluated the authorship, purpose, place of creation of these documents as well as their content and cognitive value. It is noted that the memoirs under the study share the features which are characteristic of most memoirs of the second half of the 19th — early 20th centuries: they were originally aimed at publication and intended primarily for contemporaries; the time gap between the original events and the “memories” of them was relatively short (from several months to several years). The selected documents are primarily the ones belonging to jurors who participated in the metropolitan district courts trials. This fact narrows our understanding of the work of jury in the Russian Empire in the 19th century down to metropolitan provinces.

The article is devoted to the problem of the development of the Vladivostok commercial port in the early 1920s. The first quarter of the XX century was a time of severe trials for the whole of Russia in general and the Far East in particular: World War I; Civil War; foreign intervention. All this time, the Vladivostok Harbor was in fact the only source of external contacts of the remote region. Being the largest Russian port on the Pacific Ocean, Vladivostok has historically been a kind of center of attraction, both in socio-economic and military-political aspects. However, the destroyed logistics chains and the colossal damage that the era of political instability brought with it deprived him of the primacy in the struggle for the markets of the Pacific Rim. This publication is based on archival documents, many of which are being introduced into scientific circulation for the first time. The author sets himself the task of demonstrating the key activities of the central and local authorities aimed at restoring the competitiveness of the Vladivostok commercial port in the «Manchurian transit» — its distinctive «Visiting card» since the beginning of the century. The author concludes that despite the cardinal change in the vector of the country's political and economic development after 1917, the port of Vladivostok managed to retain the status of the Russian «Window to Asia». The key means of implementing these plans was the establishment of the so-called «Transit harbor» in the port, which became the logical result of generalization and application of the colossal pre-revolutionary experience in the functioning of «free economic zones».