No 4 (2024)

The proposed article discusses the features of the presentation of “geography” and “chorography” by Martianus Capella. Of the nine books of Marriages, seven are devoted to elementary secondary disciplines: grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, degree, arithmetic, astronomy and harmony. From the content of the story in the sixth book, it becomes clear that geometry is a complex and multifaceted discipline, which additionally includes geography and chorography. n a narrow sense, geometry deals with the study of figures, in a broad sense – the shape and position of the earth, thermal zones and indicating locations on a geographical map. These two disciplines complemented each other and allowed students to gain a broader understanding of the earth's surface. The educational cycle outlined by the author, to the 5th century. did not yet represent a firmly established intellectual concept and underwent significant changes over the course of two centuries. Hence, it is permissible to assume that each author, until the final design of the range of free disciplines, had the right to make changes to the list and content of subjects, including “geography” and “chorography”. Despite the obvious similarity of their content with the story of Claudius Ptolemy, the “Marriage” also indicates a strict terminological framework for each key discipline. For the first, the use of the terms terra and orbis is acceptable, for the second - orbis terrarum, provincia and finis. This circumstance allows us to see the approximate path of “geography” (in the ancient sense) from the ideas of Claudius Ptolemy, who lived during the period of the highest flowering of the Roman Empire, to late Antiquity. The ideas laid down by Marcian Capella formed the basis for the definition of “Geometry” in the developed Middle Ages.

The paper aims to form the social image of the Octobrist local political elite at the all-Russian level comparing it with the social composition of the Central Committee and the party as a whole. The criteria of elitism were participation in the Union regional department leadership, representation and participation in the State Duma elections of various convocations as well as in the State Council except metropolitan figures participating in the Central Committee. The prosoprographic electronic database Party and Political Elite of Provincial Russia (1890s–1920s) was used as a source providing the data on characteristics of the elite, their social origin etc. The analysis of the accumulated information allowed drawing up a general portrait of the Union local political elite, to identify its preferential parameters (nobility, civil service, mature age, higher education, belonging to the Great Russians). The originality of the research lies in the first attempt to create a social portrait of the provincial elite of the Union of October 17 at the all-Russian level in comparison with the social composition of the Central Committee and the party as a whole, using a prosopographic database as a source.

The reseach is scant in Far Eastern historiography on the problem of providing the Sakhalin industrial sectors and enterprises with managerial personnel during the Great Patriotic War. The author introduced into scientific circulation a number of documents extracted from the funds of the State Historical Archive of the Sakhalin Region and the State Archive of the Khabarovsk Territory, as well as materials published in documents collections and periodicals. The data analysis allowed us to present a more detailed picture of senior personnel provision to leading industries and enterprises of Northern Sakhalin during the Great Patriotic War and to obtain that the problem of a senior personnel shortage in industries remained aggravated by their turnover, high though not of an urgent need. The paper identifies the specific results the activities of the party and Soviet bodies led to in eliminating the shortage of management personnel in the Sakhalin industrial sectors. In particular, it was found that the situation has been changing since 1943. It revealed in the state's refusal to reqruite personnel from the oil industry, conducting a policy on the ground aimed not only to consolidate personnel but also to organise a system for improving their skills, as well as inviting personnel from other regions of the country. According to the statistical data collected during the study, the measures taken by the end of the war resulted in resolving the shortage of management personnel for the leading Sakhalin sectors of the economy and enterprises. It is obvious, that the investigation of the experience of providing a particular region’s industry with senior personnel in wartime conditions can find its further development in subsequent research, and might be useful for educational activities as well as the implementation of modern regional personnel policy.

The the publication is focused on the problem associated with attempts to implement the central party and government’s decisions that implied a breakthrough in the development and implementation of computing technology, the creation of an automated control system and a nationwide automated system for accounting and processing information. The ivastigation involved declassified archival documents. The methodological basis of the study is the theory of modernization, with its theses of the interrelationship between economic development and political changes. The documents from the Apparatus of the Central Committee of the CPSU RGANI’s funds prove that of the options for further development of computing technology in the USSR proposed by specialists, the Soviet leadership chose the plan offered by the Ministry of Radio Industry. The plan did not ensure rapid overcoming of the USSR technological backwardness from the leading capitalist countries and turned out to be the least promising. Domestic developments were carried out less and less intensively, with no sufficient funds allocated. Soviet computing centers were filled with ES series computers, which turned out to be very expensive, cumbersome and energy consuming. The conclusion is formulated that a breakthrough in this area was not possible to ensure. The development of the USSR's own computer industry and its large-scale implementation did not trigger a new stage of the country's much-needed modernization. Technological backwardness remained increasing reasoned by miscalculations in planning and management, clearly demonstrated by OGAS project’s fate; the lack of a coordination center and proper interaction between the defense and civilian sectors; the prevalence of departmental interests, enterprises with thier weak interest in modernization, finally, the authorities ignoring leading scientists’ recommendations. The materials of the study may be of interest for developing an optimal scientifically based country's socio-economic development strategy, teaching courses in history and further researches.

This article addresses the problem of preserving the architectural heritage of cities, which is topical in the scientific and public space. This article addresses the problem of preserving the architectural heritage of cities, which is topical in the scientific and public space. Although the term Brusselisation has appeared relatively recently, it quite eloquently describes a chaotic approach to the design of urban space, which involves uncontrolled and sometimes massive demolition of historical buildings, replaced by modern examples of architecture. This issue is considered on the example of late Soviet Surgut, which, unfortunately, has become a classic example of this kind of policy. Therefore, in order to identify the historical conditions contributing to the emergence of the discussion on the construction of a museum and ethnographic zone in the city on the Ob, the author pays much attention to the analysis of urban planning policy of those years as a fundamental factor that threatened the cultural heritage of Surgut. In particular, we are talking about the historically established district of Old Surgut and the neighbourhood of Energetikov bordering it, which began to be built in the early 1970s. Finally, based on the materials of local periodicals of the 1980s-early 1990s, the author builds a chronological chain, starting from the stage of discussing the concepts of the museum-ethnographic zone and ending with intra-departmental contradictions that brought all project endeavours to naught. The content of the article also contains the assessments of contemporaries, which allow to reveal the public's opinion on the events that took place at that time, concerning the problem of preserving historical memory. Through the analysis of periodicals, using the methods of historicism, structuralism and positivism, the author identified the main reasons why the concept of the museum-ethnographic zone remained unrealised. In particular, we are talking about the departmental interests of the customer, as well as the inaction of the authorities and the All-Russian Society for the Protection of Monuments of History and Culture.