scholarly journals MUSEUMS IN KYIV (1830'S - 1919): FORMATION, DEVELOPMENT, TRANSFORMATION DURING THE REVOLUTION

Author(s):  
Ihor Dvorkin

The article analyzes the formation and development of Kyiv museums during the imperial period, as well as the transformations, that took place in this field during the revolutionary period (1917 - 1919). The article deals with the history of museums through the prism of analyzing the contribution of central and local authorities to the development and further activities of museum institutions. The influence of the state authorities and the Ukrainian national movement on the development of museums is considered in the example of the largest Kyiv museums.   Museums have played an essential role in the formation of collective memory, memory policy, the nation-building processes et cetera. During the study period in European countries, national museums were opened. As P. Aronsson and G. Elgenius mentioned, «The national museum is thus a knowledge-based socio-political institution, with corresponding collections and displays that ultimately claim, articulate and represent dominant national values and myths». This article examines the potential of Kyiv museum institutions to become Ukrainian national museums. Kyiv during the imperial period was an important centre of Russian culture and power. For imperial authorities, Kyiv was the administrative centre of the Southwestern region, the city from which Christianity spread, the centre of Russification of Ukrainian territory et cetera. At the same time, Kyiv was the centre of the Ukrainian movement in the Russian Empire. The Ukrainian activists could perceive this city in a completely different way – as a historic capital. For the Ukrainian intelligentsia of the Russian Empire, museum institutions had great potential in the study of the history and culture of Ukrainian lands. The first museums in Kyiv were opened at St. Volodymyr University in the 1830s. The most significant museums in the city were the Church-Archeological Museum at the Kyiv Theological Academy and the Kyiv City (Art, Industrial and Scientific) Museum There was no purposeful state museum policy in the Russian Empire. At the same time, the imperial and local authorities had an influence on the creation of museum institutions and their further development (mostly through funding). From the point of view of imperial power, which acted in a particular paradigm of non-recognition of Ukrainians as a separate people, Kyiv museums were supposed to be “Russian”, followed by, or should be followed by, authorities of all levels. However, supporters of the Ukrainian national movement, occupying official positions, used the museums for their purposes, finding opportunities to involve local authorities and patrons. The city's museums operated under different signage, but they had the potential to become Ukrainian national museums, most of all the Kyiv City Museum. This museum has evolved accordingly, thanks to scholars associated with it. In 1917 - 1919 the situation in the city changed. Ukrainian state entities - the UNR and the Ukrainian state, of course, had completely different views on the development of the Ukrainian nation and sought to implement the "Ukrainian project" by creating their state. History and culture were now an essential lever of legitimizing the new government, which, thanks to the influence of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, understood the possibilities of the museum industry. The Ukrainian National Museum had a crucial role in this process. There was no doubt that it should be based in Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine.

2021 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-38
Author(s):  
Anna B. Agafonova ◽  

The article describes the history of creation and activities of sanitary guardians in the cities of the Russian Empire. The study aims to identify organizational and social contradictions in guardianships’ activities, which hindered citizens from involvement in solving local sanitary problems. Boards of sanitary guardians were established by order of local authorities to involve the population in the fight against epidemics and conducting sanitary measures. The sanitary guardians’ activities consisted of timely notification of local authorities about the emergence of epidemics, participation in sanitary inspections of households, and conducting preventive conversations with homeowners about their compliance with public health and urban improvement regulations. The practice of citizens social participation in monitoring the urban area’s cleanliness was intended to level out the contradictions between homeowners and temporary doctors and sanitary executive commissions “alien” to the city community. Still, it often provoked conflicts between sanitary guardians and homeowners who defended the rights to inviolability of their property. In general, public oversight conducted by sanitary guardians has proven ineffective in the long term.


2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 273-292
Author(s):  
Victoria I. Zhuravleva ◽  

The article focuses on the debatable issues of Russian-American relations from 1914 until the fall of Tsarism, such as the degree of the two countries’ rapprochement, ethnic questions, the positive dynamics of mutual images and the intensified process of Russians and Americans studying each other. Based on primary and secondary sources, this work intends to emphasize that the conflict element in bilateral relations did not hamper cooperation between the two states. The author’s multipronged and interdisciplinary approach allowed her to conclude that the United Sates was ready to engage in wide-ranging interaction with the Russian Empire regardless of their ideological differences. From the author’s point of view, it was the pragmatic agenda that aided the states’ mutual interest in destroying the stereotypes of their counterpart and stimulated Russian Studies in the US and American Studies in Russia. Therefore, the “honeymoon” between the two states had started long before the 1917 February Revolution. However, Wilson strove to turn Russia not so much into an object of US’ “dollar diplomacy”, but into a destination of its “crusade” for democracy. The collapse of the monarchy provided an additional impetus for liberal internationalism by integrating the Russian “Other” into US foreign policy. Ultimately, an ideological (value-based) approach emerged as a stable trend in structuring America’s attitude toward Russia (be it the Soviet Union or post-Soviet Russia).


Author(s):  
Anna Matveeva

The study focuses on assessing the representativeness and relevance of diplomatic documents for the study of key aspects of German domestic politics. Three issues are central to the analysis of the documents from the Archive of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Empire: the completeness of the indicated sources for understanding the factors of the German Empire’s inner policy; the assessment of the subjectivity of the author of diplomatic dispatches, i.e. how much the ambassador's personality determined the content of the dispatches that he sent to the ministry; the relevance of highlighting key issues of internal life in Germany from the point of view of Russian diplomats. Among constantly present in the messages, the most important was the problem of the socialist movement and the Social-Democratic Party’s activities. The socialists were mentioned for significant reasons: the repeal of the Law against the Socialists, the Berlin Conference on the Labor Protection (1890); elections to the Reichstag (1893, 1898); the Reichstag votes on issues important for Russia. The measures of counteraction to the socialists, discussed by the emperor and the government, also aroused interest. The study of archival documents (1890–1898) allows the author to draw the following conclusions. The dispatches adequately reflect the main trends in the socialist movement and the tactics of the SPD, therefore they can be used to study many internal problems faced by Germany in the course of its political evolution. The development of the social-democratic movement was rightly interpreted by Russian diplomats as one of the fundamental reasons for the internal instability of the German state during the reign of Wilhelm II. At the same time, the conclusion drawn by the diplomats can be primarily explained by the Russian imperial regime and its substantial characteristics, rather than the political realities within Germany itself. They considered parliamentarism, limiting the monarch actions (the state interests), to be the main reason for the high popularity and the broadest electoral support of the SPD. The key factor preventing the monarch from defeating the “coup parties” was defined as the activities of liberal political parties, which demanded the unconditional observance of the freedoms prescribed in the Сonstitution of 1871, as well as the prevention of the introduction of Exceptional Laws and other measures of an extraordinary nature.


Author(s):  
Kevin C. O'Connor

This concluding chapter details the aftermath of the city of Riga, as well as the changes it experienced, after falling to Russian rule. The migration of Jews to Riga, and of Russian officials and laborers, are among the many developments that would take place during the two centuries that followed Riga's capitulation to the tsar. The city's renovation and the appearance of dozens of yellow-brick factory buildings in the suburbs were still to come. The ruined city that fell to Tsar Peter I in 1710 had none of the parks, canals, gardens, and urban villas that would transform Riga into one of northeastern Europe's most attractive and welcoming cities during the twilight years of the Russian Empire. Yet, as this chapter shows, even as Riga tore down its medieval walls in the 1850s and incorporated the suburban areas, where promenades and beautiful homes were built for the city's prosperous bourgeoisie, the oldest parts of Riga would retain many of their traditional features into present times.


2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 35-38
Author(s):  
Vladislav A. Kolesnikov

By the end of 1916, the food issue had been escalating in the Russian Empire. The Russian government faced the need to supply not only the army, but also the provinces with consuming bread, and the civilians were hostages of the transport crisis. The fixed prices for bread introduced in September 1916 led to the restriction of market trade. An important step in the state regulation of the bread market was the unfolding of bread. The article provides an analysis of food policy before the introduction of the unfolding. The food distribution of the tsarist government was an attempt to mobilise grain resources for the needs of the army and the civilians. The peculiarity of the reform was the combination of the principle of duty and payment of the product at a fixed price. The expansion is considered both from the all-Russia positions, taking into account the experience of grain-producing provinces, and in terms of Kostroma Province, which had lack of developed agriculture. The article pays special attention to the measures of local authorities. The governor, the zemstvo, the volost peasant gatherings were not ready to complete the tasks in full. The article concludes that the food distribution in the bread-consuming province, experiencing a crisis of planned supply, could not end successfully.


2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (6) ◽  
pp. 29-38
Author(s):  
Drobotushenko Evgeny V. ◽  

The history of the creation of the agent network of the Russian Empire has not found comprehensive coverage in scientific publications so far. The existing research referred to specific names or mention private facts. This predetermined the relevance of the work. The object of the study is the Russian agents in China in general and in Chinese Shanghai, in particular. The subject is the study of peculiarities of the first attempts in creating Russian agent network in the city. The aim of the work is to analyze the attempt to create a network of Russian illegal agents in Shanghai in 1906–1908. The lack of materials on the problem in scientific and popular scientific publications predetermined the use of previously unknown or little-known archival sources. This is the correspondence of the Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Russian Imperial envoy in Beijing and the Russian Consul in Shanghai stored in the funds of the State Archive of the Russian Federation (SARF). The main conclusion of the study was the remark about the lack of scientific elaboration, at the moment, the history of official, legal and illegal agents of the Russian Empire in Shanghai, China. Private findings suggest that, judging by the available data, creation of a serious network of agents in the city during the Russian Empire failed. The reasons for this, presumably, were several: the lack of qualified agents with knowledge of Chinese or, at least, English, who could work effectively; the lack of funds for the maintenance of agents, a small number of Russian citizens, the remoteness of Shanghai from the Russian-Chinese border, etc. A network of agents will be created in the city by the Soviet authorities by the middle of the third decade of the 20th century, and Soviet illegal agents began to work in the early 1920s. The History of Soviet agents in China and Shanghai, in particular, is studied quite well which cannot be said about the previous period. It is obvious that further serious work with archival sources is required to recreate as complete as possible the history of Russian legal and illegal agents in Shanghai in pre-Soviet times


Author(s):  
Sergei Sergeevich Tiurin

Faithful military fortification, founded in the middle of the XIX century in the south-eastern outskirts of the Russian Empire, was located far from the center of the state with a turbulent political and social life. At the same time in the middle of the XIX century, there is interest in the history of Russia, memoirs, internal politics and social sciences in general, that leading to the emergence of an unprecedented hitherto the number of periodicals historical themes. This article explores references to the city / Verny Fortification in the "Historical Gazette", "Notes of the Fatherland", "Russian Archive", "Niva", "Russian Gazette", "Russian Antiquity", "Russian Thought" and a number of other publications. Identified during the study, articles and notes on the city of Verny allow us to get an idea of what exactly the city remembers to travelers, what specific information about it was reflected in historical journals published between 1854 and 1917 in Moscow and St. Petersburg.


Author(s):  
Lea Leppik

The City of Tartu is proud of its university and its status as a university town. The university is an even stronger memory site than the city and has special meaning for Baltic Germans in addition to Estonians, but also for Ukrainians, Armenians, Poles, Latvians, Jews and other minorities of the former Russian Empire. The commemoration of the anniversaries of the University of Tartu is a very graphic example of the use of memory and the susceptibility of remembering to the aims of the current political system and of various interest groups. Here history has become an “active shaper of the present” according to Juri Lotman’s definition. This article examines the commemoration of jubilees of the University of Tartu through two hundred years. Nowadays Estonians consider the entire history of the University of Tartu to be their own starting from its founding by King Gustav II Adolf of Sweden in 1632. The Estonian language was not unknown in the university in the Swedish era – knowledge of Estonian was necessary for pastors and some examples of occasional poetry written in Estonian have survived from that time. The university was reopened in 1802 when it was already part of the Russian Empire and became a primarily Baltic German university. It shaped the identity of the Baltic provinces in Russia and contributed to their growing together culturally in the eyes of both the German-speaking upper class and the Estonian- and Latvian-speaking lower class. The Estonian and Latvian languages were both represented at the university by one lecturer. There were also Estonians at the university in the first decades already but at that time, education generally meant assimilation into German culture. The 50th jubilee of the Imperial University of Tartu was commemorated in 1852 as a celebration of a Baltic German university. The 100th anniversary of the imperial university in 1902 was commemorated at a university where the language of instruction had been switched to Russian. The guests of honour were well-known Russian scientists, church representatives and state officials. For the first time, a lengthy overview of the history of the University of Tartu was published in Estonian in the album of the Society of Estonian Students under the meaningful title (University of the Estonian Homeland). Unlike the official concept of the 100 year old university, this overview stressed the university’s connection to the university of the era of Swedish rule. When the Russian Empire collapsed and the Estonian nation became independent, the University of Tartu was opened on 1 December 1919 as an institution where the language of instruction was Estonian. The wish of the new nation to distance itself from both the Russian and German cultural areas and to be connected to something respectably old was expressed in the spectacular festivities held in 1932 commemorating the 300th anniversary of the University of Tartu. After the Second World War, Estonians who ended up abroad held the anniversaries of the Estonian era University of Tartu in esteem and maintained the traditions of the university student organisations that were banned in the Soviet state. The 150th anniversary of the founding of the university was commemorated in the Estonian SSR in 1952 – at the height of Stalinism. The Swedish era university was cast aside and the monuments to the king and to nationalist figures were removed, replaced by the favourites of the Soviet regime. Connections to Russia were emphasised in every possible way. Lithuanians celebrated the 400th anniversary of their University of Vilnius in 1979, going back to the educational institution established in the 16th century by the Jesuits. This encouraged Estonians but the interwar tradition of playing up the Swedish era was so strong that the educational pursuits of the Jesuits in Tartu (1585–1625, with intervals) were nevertheless not tied into the institute of higher education. So it was that the 350th anniversary of the University of Tartu was celebrated on a grand scale in 1982. The protest movement among university students played an important role in the restoration of Estonia’s independence. Immediately thereafter, the commemoration of the anniversaries of the Estonian era university that had in the meantime been banned began once again. The 200th anniversary of the opening of the Imperial University of Tartu (2002) passed with mixed feelings. The imperial university as a university of the Russian state no longer fit in well and it was feared that the connection to the Swedish era would suffer. Yet since this period had nevertheless brought Tartu the greatest portion of its scientific fame, a series of jubilee collected works were published by various faculties. On the other hand, nobody had any qualms about commemorating the 375th anniversary of the Swedish era university five years later (2007) on a grand scale with new monuments, memorial plaques, exhibitions, a public celebration and a visit from the King of Sweden.


2019 ◽  
pp. 254-269
Author(s):  
Yuriy Labyntsev

At the beginning of the 20 th century in the Western provinces of the Russian Empire among the local Roman Catholics, the first convinced carriers of the Belarusian national idea appeared. Among the most active was the catholic priest Adam Stankevich (1891-1949), a graduate of the Catholic Seminary in Vilna and the Catholic Academy in Petrograd. In the future, he not only took a leading position in the Belarusian national movement, but also be- came an outstanding historiographer of this movement. In 1919, Stankevich settled in Vilna. In 1910-1930, he was active in social, political, scientific, literary and publicistic activities. Stankevich is the initiator of defending the rights of Belarusians to their own national participation in the life of the Catholic Church, to the official introduction of the Belarusian language. He considers the Belarusian people to be divided in political, state, and religious sense. Stankevich believes that the lands of Western Belarus were seized by the new Polish state, formed in 1918. Stankevich continues for many years the struggle for the revival of the Belarusian national identity among Belarusian Catholics. In the early twentieth century, he and the fu- ture Belarusian catholic priests were also helped by the actions of various Orthodox communities and Imperial authorities. In the middle of 1940, Stankevich tried to convince the Soviet leadership of the need to “create the independent Belarusian Catholic Church in the BSSR”. The four-year talks with the authorities have proved useless. Adam Stankevich was accused of anti-Soviet activities. In 1949, he was sent to a camp, where he soon died.


Author(s):  
Ziqiu Chen ◽  

After the establishment of constitutional monarchy in Russia as a result of the 1905–1906 reforms, the position of the Russian State Control (imperial audit service) changed. Formerly relatively independent, the State Control, whose head was directly accountable to the Emperor, now found itself in the united government, i.e. the Council of Ministers. The undermined independence of the State Control provoked a wide public discussion, which involved Duma deputies, employees of the State Control as well as competent Russian economists and financial experts, who made relevant recommendations calling for reducing the number of state institutions that were unaccountable to the audit service and giving the latter more independence. This paper analyses the key works of pre-revolutionary authors published in the early 20th century and devoted to the history of the State Control of the Russian Empire. Both in the imperial period and today, the Russian audit institution, in contrast with political, historical and military topics, has been of primary interest not to historians, but to economists, financiers and lawyers, since it requires special knowledge of the State Control’s technical mechanisms. Based on this, the author selected the following works that require thorough examination: How People’s Money Is Spent in Russia by I.Kh. Ozerov, On the Transformation of the State Control by Yu.V. Tansky, an official anniversary edition State Control. 1811–1911, and Essays on the Russian Budget Law. Part 1 by L.N. Yasnopolsky. The author of this article considers these works to be the highest quality studies on the Russian State Control at the beginning of the 20th century and their analysis to be of unquestionable importance for contemporary research into the history of the Russian audit institution.


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