The paper studies institutions for the promotion of the Chinese language and culture abroad – the Confucius Institute and the Chinese language classes. The initial thesis is the idea of the need to use various forms of promoting the Chinese language and Chinese culture. The general methodological basis chosen for the analysis of the PRC's activities to promote the Chinese language and culture is the culturological approach and the theoretical and methodological paradigm proposed by L.E. Vostryakov. According to this paradigm, the state cultural policy primarily depends on the cultural values of a country in general. Based on this conception, the author studies official documents that regulate direct activities of foreign educational institutions of China. Traditional Chinese culture serves as a consolidating value for the activities of modern public institutions.
The study examines the political public sphere as a tool for achieving interethnic harmony and civil consolidation. The public sphere is regarded as a necessary space for molding public opinion that affects political decision-making. At the same time, the emphasis is placed on present-day changes related to the ever-increasing tendency to shape public opinion through virtual mediation of the public sphere. The content analysis of local mass media reveals the characteristics of the discourse of interethnic and interfaith relations in the region by a case study of the city of Surgut, Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug–Yugra. An attempt is made to determine the role of local media in developing state and regional identity to promote interethnic and interfaith harmony. The relevance of the study is due to the need to reflect on the causes of the crisis of public policy, for example, the problems of interethnic relations.
The study reveals the conditions and features of the establishment of the occupational health and safety system at the factories of the Prioksky mining district in connection with the transition to accelerated industrial development of the country. It caused the need to establish unity of public and government efforts in this direction. The research urgency is determined by the lack of historical studies on this issue, as well as the occupational health and safety system reform today. The paper examines the interdepartmental commissions activities aimed to struggle with industrial injuries and losses when developing projects for reforming the occupational health and safety system. The research is connected with the processes of social and economic development of society. It is based on the materials of the Central Archives of the Nizhny Novgorod Region. The author reveals the main features of the creation of a new occupational health and safety system in one of the most important industrial areas of Central Russia. The data on the projects of reforming the occupational health and safety system and their practical implementation are introduced into scientific operation as well.
The study analyses the experience of the Soviet state in creating and improving the structure of local military administration bodies in the most difficult period of the Civil War (1918–1919). Special attention is paid to the importance of creating a unified centralized military apparatus of the country during the formation of new armed forces, along with the selection of ideologically aware, professionally trained personnel at the local level and strict subordination of lower bodies to higher ones. The purpose of the research is to study the experience of improving the staff structure of local military administration. It reveals the reasons and conditions for the Soviet government's rejection of a voluntary recruitment basis and transition to a mobilization principle of an army formation with the beginning the Civil War. It is shown that staffing of military commissariats with non-professional personnel and antisocial people was unreasonable and followed by the subsequent forced involvement of former officers of the old tsar army in the organization of the military commissariat system. The author analyses the difficulties of forming military administration bodies, such as insufficient funding for all types of supplies, the complexity of delivery of guidance documents to local authorities, the lack of stable and effective means of communication, and centralized military management throughout their entire chain of command. The research confirms the importance of local military administration systematic building, staff structure development and improvement in order to ensure the stability of mobilization activities of state and military administration throughout their vertical subordination.
The study deals with the interaction between the church, believers and authorities in the first decades of the Soviet state. A historiographical review helps reveal the crucial periods of research on their relationship and describes the major achievements in this regard. Since an atheistic approach forced researchers to regard liberation from religious consciousness as a goal, the studies were politically charged until the 1980s. Nowadays, there is a need for more detailed information about the life of secular clergy and religious communities. Based on the archives, the author demonstrates the relationship between the authorities and the religious community of the Church of the Kazan Mother of God in the churchyard of Borisogleb in Baglachevo, Ulybyshevskaya Volost, Vladimir District, Vladimir Province. The fate of its parish is described as well.
The problem of determining the subject of culturology was first raised by W. Ostwald and L. White and followed by Soviet and Russian scientists such as A.Ya. Flier, Yu.V. Osokin and others. It is still of particular relevance today. The author analyzes the development stages of culturology as a science, comments on the views of Russian and Western scientists on its subject matter, and makes a conclusion on a possible solution to this problem. The emphasis is placed on the contribution of domestic scientists to the institutionalization of culturology in Russia. The author concludes that the subject matter of culturology is of polymorphic nature. It involves social and human cultural studies; regional schools of thought; integrative research area, branch of science, academic discipline, and major in terms of higher education. To summarize, firstly, the subject of culturology in Russia touches upon the main types (forms) of culture and related historical and cultural processes. Secondly, it deals with specifically human characteristics, system-wide properties, and characteristics of culture as an integral phenomenon.
Challenging issues concerning sovereignty, nationhood, faith, social justice and religion have always been the basis for the existence and historical development of the Russian state. World War I served as a catalyst which lead the state to revolution, and then to its collapse. This caused the destruction of the most significant values of society, without which it ceased to exist in its original formation. The author tried to justify the need to conduct research regarding assessment of the role of military priesthood in World War I and to answer the question to what extent the military priesthood could influence the situation in the army and in the country in the considered period, as well as whether the military priesthood could impact the results of the war.
The paper studies the problem of religious asceticism in the context of community service for the Russian Orthodox Church based on the analysis of works by the Russian and Soviet scholars and churchman historians at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries: Ye.Ye. Golubinsky, A.P. Dobroklonsky, S.I. Smirnov, P.V. Znamensky, A.V. Kartashev, M.V. Tolstoy, Ye.N. Poselyanin. The author looks into the birth of orthodox asceticism in Rus, provides a classification of the types of religious asceticism, gives characteristics of the most prominent ascetics in the Ancient Rus, such as Anthony and Theodosius Pechersky, Venerable Sergius hegumen of Radonezh, Joseph of Volotsk, Nilus of Sora, Daniel of Pereslavl, Cyril and Therapont of Beloozero. The author indicates the importance of each of the types of the orthodox religious asceticism for the Russian statehood, the Russian Orthodox Church, Russian culture, especially book culture, private and social life.
The paper analyzes child and adolescent crime during the Great Patriotic War on the basis of state archival materials of Primorsky Krai. The author in course of study found that the offenses were expressed in petty theft, hooliganism and robbery. Almost half of all crimes were related to violation of labor laws. It was revealed that local authorities tried to carry out preventive measures to prevent crime by children and adolescents, which amounted to raids on places of accumulation of homeless children, their education in schools of factory tutoring with subsequent employment and material assistance them in the workplace. The author concludes that the main causes of offenses by children and adolescents were the difficult social and economic living conditions in which they found themselves, the lack of control by adults, educational and cultural institutions.
The paper discusses the dynamics of the educational level and skills development of Irkutsk regional office of the State Bank of the USSR officials during the 1950s–1980s. They are important components of personnel formation of the unit. The relevance of the research of historical context is in the deeper analysis of the complex of social and economic, managerial, professional and educational conditions of personnel reproduction of modern banking system. Growth statistics of head specialists provision for the regional office and its structural divisions are identified and summarized. Secondary and higher professional education system, refresher course and technical training are considered as the main channels for improving the educational level of the regional office of the State Bank officials. Trends of actualization of getting higher special education and maintaining the importance of mastering secondary special education are revealed. The trend of activation the mentoring system, the system of personnel reserve and national personnel formation are underlined. The research was based on the materials (for the first time introduced into scientific circulation) of State Archive of Irkutsk Region.
Summary: The research considers issues related to the analysis of the aesthetic based on ontological and phenomenological approaches. In the context of an ontological approach, the aesthetic is understood as a mode of a human existence. The problem of the development and application of special methodology for its holistic comprehension is defined. A phenomenological method is proposed as one of the structural components of such a methodology, which allows to reveal the aesthetic as a process, which main characteristics are incompletion, cyclicity and eventfulness. An aesthetic event is the mechanism for unfolding an aesthetic process. Based on the phenomenological description there are identified primary and secondary cycles in the structure of an aesthetic process. The phases and conditions of their implementation, as well as the dynamics of the structure's complication in the secondary cycle are presented. The research provides in detail the phenomenological description of the secondary cycle phases. An artistic creation is considered as one of the possible modifications of the act of co-creation, which is reproduced in an infinite chain of potential artistic and aesthetic reincarnations. There are defined the conditions for continuity of event aestheticization and the basic trajectories of its realization (linear and circular), which constantly replace one another, thus forming a spiral configuration of an aesthetic process. It is shown that the experience of phenomenological vision reveals the ontological space of aesthetic eventfulness as the one which is multidimensional, modal, constantly updated and transformed in the acts of aestheticization. It is concluded that the understanding of aesthetic existence as a holistic process allows to combine the description of its various ontological modes in a single space of consideration, taking into account the equivalence of subjective basic points (author, creation and co-author) included in the process of aestheticization.
The research analyzes the causes of the Kurdish Question in the context of the geopolitical situation developed in the Middle East region. The author traces the origins of the Kurdish Question back to the 16th century. The research pays special attention to the political, military and cultural factors that determined the disunion of Kurdish people and controversies emerging in the Kurdish society throughout the history of the struggle against their oppressors. It is also examined how various political forces which were developing in the Kurdish society sought to resolve the problem of political self-determination of their people and what were the reasons for the failures. The author reveals the importance of these processes on an international scale emphasizing the inconsistency of the world powers' policy regarding the application of the principle of self-determination in the context of Kurdish struggle for their recognition by the global community.
The study analyzes the mechanisms of interaction between government institutions and big businesses in the period of organized capitalism as well as modern globalization. In the authors' opinion, even a kind of bourgeois-based state was largely autonomous and performed functions assigned to it by society at the stages of primitive accumulation and organized capitalism. It took place during the large-scale economic crisis that shook the foundations of the capitalist system. In that period, the authorities revised their involvement in economic processes by taking ultimate responsibility for redistribution and by overcoming obvious resistance to business community. At the present stage of global capitalism, the official elites and big businesses still tend to converge or even intermingle and merge. A common environment of politicians and top managers is established on the basis of class and ideological unity. The alliance between big businesses and government institutions is becoming increasingly organic and inseparable, which affects political decisions accordingly. It is of the utmost importance that these processes result in a growing class nature of the modern state. An emerging political and economic hybrid can only be effective in neo-liberalist context.
The relevance of research in the field of human ecology – both in terms of its theoretical development and further application – at the present stage of development of scientific thought is revealed in the paper. It is noted that the formation of human ecology took several scientific lines in correlation of ecology with biological and social (sociological) components. The history of human ecology is briefly described, a review of scientific views on the problems of human ecology is given, and the contribution of various sciences to the development and formation of human ecology is noted. The special position of human ecology in the system of sciences is designated. The role of medical geography for the development of domestic human ecology is described. Regional anthropoecological studies are given as an example of applied research in the field of human ecology.
The author reveals the connection between the desire of the US government to implement a new concept of foreign policy and the development of the self-determination movement in Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan, as well as the US attitude to the national issue in the former Russian Empire and the problem of the status of nation-states in 1918–1920. The role of an external factor in the struggle for independence is considered in the paper. Some aspects related to the USA government decision not to recognize new states independence are studied. The factors that had an influence on changes in American policy on this issue, the controversial and inconsistent nature of the policy towards Armenia are explored by the author. The author focuses on inconsistent character of W. Wilson's government policy to Armenia, and the connection between Transcaucasian policy of the United States and the efforts of the Wilson government to internationalize the Black Sea Straits.
