2026 Issue №1

A commented translation of a short but substantive correspondence of 1923 between Kusling, Chief Inspector of the dams of the Memel Delta, R. I. Detlefsen, Conservator of His­torical and Cultural Monuments of East Prussia, and W. Sch?nichen, Director of the State Commission for the Protection of Natural Monuments in Prussia, is published. The corre­spondence discusses the need to protect an untouched area of wilderness in the north-west of East Prussia, which received the unofficial name “Staldzen Switzerland.” The content of the letters, the issues they raise, and the circumstances of their writing are of particular interest given the limited study of the process of formation and development of nature conservation activities in East Prussia in the first third of the twentieth century. Additional interest for historians of regional culture may be represented by the fact that Detlefsen, who is known primarily for his activities in the preservation of East Prussian historical and cultural monu­ments, participated in correspondence devoted to nature conservation. The originals of the published letters are preserved in the Federal Archives of Germany in Koblenz.

The circumstances of granting V. M. Lermontov a personal national retirement benefit are identified; in particular, attention is paid to the specific features of assigning pensions of this type to relatives of Russian literary classics, his biography is уточнена, and the degree of kinship with the poet is established. The authors of the study are guided by the principles of historicism and scholarly objectivity. The historical and biographical method, based on the analysis of documents of a personal nature, made it possible to reconstruct the life history of V. M. Lermontov against the background of Soviet reality. The main sources include docu­ments from his personal (pension) file, including an application addressed to the editor-in-chief of the publications of the State Literary Museum V. D. Bonch-Bruevich; a petition by V. D. Bonch-Bruevich addressed to the Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR V. M. Molotov; a biography of V. M. Lermontov; a personal personnel record sheet; a mandate of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Caucasian Front granting the right to inspect stud farms and requisition breeding horses; and certificates of wounds. The analyzed materials confirm the fact that documents of applicants for personal national retirement bene­fit from among relatives of Russian writers and poets underwent preliminary consideration at the level of members of the Soviet government, as well as the emergence of a curator of this process. During the period under study, these functions were assigned to the Deputy Chair­man of the Council of Ministers of the USSR V. M. Molotov. The study emphasizes that Vla­dimir Mikhailovich was not a direct descendant of M. Yu. Lermontov; therefore, when pen­sion rights were considered, a greater role was played by his own achievements in supplying the Red Army with horses and in developing stud farms in the North Caucasus. The exam­ined documents confirm the fact of V. M. Lermontov’s arrest in 1931 only indirectly. Im­portantly, in the postwar period, the fact that an applicant for a personal pension had been subjected to repression in the 1930s did not deprive him of the right to receive a pension of this type, although it may have prevented the assignment of a personal national retirement benefit.

Using the example of the Kaliningrad Rail-car Manufacturing Plant, the article analyzes personnel policies and the composition of the workforce at industrial enterprises in the USSR during the early postwar period. The objective of the study is to identify key problems and the dynamics of workforce formation amid postwar devastation, a shortage of qualified personnel, and the challenges of reconstructing a new Soviet region. The methodology, based on a com­prehensive analysis of the enterprise’s archival materials (including statistical reports and personnel orders) as well as publications in the local periodical press, allowed for a compara­tive analysis of the data and the identification of discrepancies between them. The main find­ings indicate that, despite the rapid growth in staff numbers and production volumes, the plant constantly faced a severe shortage of skilled workers, high staff turnover, and low effec­tiveness of the training system through factory schools. The labor of the German population and prisoners of war played an important role in the establishment of the plant. The conclu­sions demonstrate that personnel instability and lack of qualifications became key factors lim­iting the sustainable development of the enterprise in the postwar decade.