Suchergebnisse

The political self-positioning of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania often remains on the periphery of research interest while studying political processes in the European Union. This is partly due to the usual attribution of the Baltic states to the «natural» sphere of influence of Russia, and partly to the idea of the specificity and «regionality» of this issue. As far as we can judge, the traditional term «Baltic Land» (Baltia) in relation to Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania has lost its significance, and those countries represent themselves as independent actors, striving to overwhelm this imposed community. A closer study of the Baltic issues shows that the positions of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were shaped in complicated historical conditions, and despite geographical proximity, are unique in each case. The idea of their initial cohesion turns out to be speculative. The relatively small size and limited political opportunities of the Baltic states paradoxically contributed to the fact that Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have always promoted the interests of their nations first. Their unity was at the same time an expression of unfavorable external conjuncture. Contrary to the public declarations of the Baltic states, the European identity is rather used as a moral category, whereas the national agenda always prevails. Overall, the «real politics» on the part of official Tallinn, Riga, and Vilnius are actually associated not with European, but Euro-Atlantic integration. It can be assumed that the Baltic states' accession to the EU and NATO fixed the imperatives of their foreign policy developed by that time, and such events as the Ukrainian and Belarusian crises only actualize them.

Trevor Erlacher. Ukrainian Nationalism in the Age of Extremes. An Intellectual Biography of Dmytro Dontsov. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2021. 642 p.

The article is devoted to Boris O. Unbegaun, one of the most notable scholars in the field of Slavic philology of the second third of the 20th century, a Russian emigrant by origin. Despite the fact that Unbegaun had a wide range of research interests, his scientific publications on the Russian language, primarily his book «Russian Surnames», made him famous. At the same time, as it turned out, Unbegaun has chosen the humanities in many ways by accident, since before the Russian revolution he was going to become a railway engineer. Based on previously unknown documents, an attempt is made to clarify the early period of the scientist's life, which was traditionally neglected by the biographers. The documents published within this article are extracted from the personal student files of Boris O. Unbegaun and previously they have not been entered into general scientific circulation.

In the 1920s-1930s, the political struggle in the USSR at the Politburo was closely linked with historical science. The search for "crimes" against the Communist Party that Bolshevik leaders had committed in the past became an important lever for obtaining political dividends in the contemporaneity. In this regard, the history of the Revolution was given special attention, and specialists in this field took on a great responsibility, often without even realising it. In the historiography of Soviet science, considerable attention is paid to the formation of the canon of the history of the Bolshevik Party, crowned by the Short Course of 1938. The author continues to study this topic from a different angle. The article aims to answer the question of how, under the conditions of the gradual establishment of the Stalinist vision of history, Stalin's recent opponents existed – historians participating in Grigory Zinoviev's opposition and the so-called United Opposition in 1925-1928. At the same time, it describes how they themselves used historical publications in the political struggle, as well as their direct participation in campaigning against Joseph Stalin's and Nikolai Bukharin's course. An important milestone was the publication of Stalin's letter to «Proletarian Revolution» newspaper, which, in addition to changing trends in historiography, also led to repression against former Trotskyists working in the humanities.