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Dear colleagues, Dear friends,
This issue of the journal Historia Provinciae - the Journal of Regional History includes mainly articles devoted to various aspects of the political history of Russia in the 19th - early 20th centuries. The underdevelopment of social and political institutions of the Russian Empire led to the extreme personification of political activity and to a situation when the policy of a state is assessed first of all by assessing the people who pursue that policy. Political images of certain public figures, events, and phenomena that are taking shape in public consciousness, especially in revolutionary times, play a significant role in that. Often, the political image plays a much greater role than the real intentions and agenda of a particular politician. The study of these images is the central theme of most of the articles presented in this issue. It hardly makes sense to explain the relevance of this topic for understanding modern socio-political processes in Russia and in the world.
One of the most important problems of the 19th century was connected with reforming Russia, which largely depended on the personal qualities of the participants in this process. The article by K. Donik examines the role of Prince Alexander Men-shikov as a kind of agent of the supreme authority in the course of reforming maritime administration in 1826-28. The author analyses the functions of the tsarist agent and the interpretation of his actions in the context of Nicholas I's distrust of the re p-resentatives of the former maritime administration, connected with the involvement of the naval generals and officials in abuses in the navy. The author considers the appointment of Prince Menshikov to the navy as a replacement of nepotism, which was common in the admiralty institutions, with a patron-client network mainly based on personal trust and various kinds of successful personal and official relations which were a guarantee of order the monarch needed in the department.
The inclusion of Poland into the Russian Empire aggravated the already challenging Russian-Polish relations. In this regard, the views of Polish historians on our common past are of particular interest. The article by R. Jurkowski, a professor at the University of Warmia and Mazury in Olsztyn, considers a little-known episode in the biography of Pyotr Stolypin related to his stay in Kovno Governorate in 1889-1902
and concerning the construction of the People's House in Kovno (Kaunas) in 189899. The House became the centre of Russian culture and a place for putting into practice the slogans of the Guardianship of Public Sobriety. The article, written with great respect for the shared Russian-Polish history, shows Stolypin as an effective supervisor of construction and a government official who defended Russian interests in the western provinces of the Empire and who stood for the idea of the good of Russia, which was understood very broadly at times.
Fake news plays a significant role in the formation of certain political images, which requires historians to study the mechanisms of their emergence and distribution in different historical periods. The article by E. Krylova, an associate professor of Pushkin Leningrad State University, uses the example of the distribution of fake news about the activities of the police in the newspaper Novoe Vremya in 1899 in order to analyse the use of information manipulation techniques which distorted the facts and formed a rather negative image of law enforcement agencies. The work convincingly shows that the system of control over the press which existed in Russia at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries did not allow creating a positive image of law enforcement agencies effectively, and the system of prohibitions and circulars restricting dissemination of information produced information vacuum, thus contributing to the spread of rumours and provoking certain tensions in the society.
The attention of many contemporary historians is drawn to the political images of the Russian revolutions of the early 20th century and to their participants. A number of materials in this issue are devoted to this problem. The article by S. Novosel'skii, a lecturer at the Russian State University for the Humanities, analyses the transformation of the concept of revolution in Russian political thought in 1905. The author shows the existence of two main interpretations of the image of revolution in Russia. Liberal public figures considered public demand for a just reorganization of the existing political system to be a revolution; they saw it as a process of political modernization and generally evaluated this phenomenon positively. Their political opponents, representatives of conservative social thought, considered a revolution to be a violent attempt on the legitimate state power and were antagonistic to such ideas and actions. These attitudes not only determined the ways how the contemporaries saw the events of 1905 in Russia but also had a significant impact on the interpretation of revolutionary events both in domestic and in foreign historiography.
In a period of acute social and political upheavals, the image of a politician, either positive or negative, turns into a major political sign, a key element of the political process. The article by B. Kolonitskii, a professor at the European University at St Petersburg, is devoted to the study of the image of Alexander Kerensky in the context of the political struggle in 1917. Particular attention is given to rhetorical techniques and visual images that shaped the tactics of praising and denouncing Keren-sky. The article makes it possible to clarify important aspects of the political isolation
of the Provisional Government. By the fall of 1917, not only the Bolsheviks and other left-wing groups but also the conservative and the Right-wing publications were carrying out a propaganda attack on Kerensky. The author of the article showed how different political forces opposing each other used the same tactics of delegitimizing the Provisional Government and Kerensky himself, presenting him as an unjust ruler. Both the left and right opponents of the Minister-Chairman spoke about his treachery, immoral behaviour, sometimes even using the same words, which increased the effectiveness of propaganda attacks on the authorities and contributed to the subsequent fall of the Provisional Government.
Using the example of the image of the anarchist Shlioma Asnin, the article by D. Ivanov, a junior researcher at the European University at St Petersburg, analyses the processes of political authority formation during the 1917 Russian Revolution. The emphasis is placed on the importance of subcultural affiliation for creating the image of a politician and an ally or the image of the enemy. The author examined the options for participation in the revolutionary subculture, and in the subculture of political hard labour in particular, and outlined the mutual influence between the "common criminal" and "revolutionary" subcultures.
In the year of the centenary of the end of the Civil War in European Russia, our journal could not ignore such an important topic. The article by A. Egorov, a professor of Cherepovets State University, focuses on the political activity of the outstanding theologian Anton Kartashev during the Civil War. A member of the Central Committee of the Kadet party and an active member of the All-Russian National Centre, he played a significant role in organizing the White movement in Northwest Russia. The article explores his activities in the Political Conference under General N. Yudenich, his attitude to the issue of recognizing the independence of Finland and Estonia, and points out his personal qualities which prevented him from becoming a true leader of the anti-Bolshevik movement. Despite begin a member of the Constitutional Democratic Party, which was democratic in spirit and in its principles, Kar-tashev himself upheld the principles of military dictatorship, which resulted in the fact that the image of Kartashev as a "democrat by mistake" was formed in the eyes of his contemporaries subsequently.
A distinctive feature of the journal Historia Provinciae - the Journal of Regional History is its interdisciplinary nature and the desire to consider the problems under discussion from the standpoint of various branches of socio-humanitarian knowledge. Therefore, all issues of the journal include materials prepared at the intersection of history and other humanities. Taking into account the political orientation of this issue, it seemed quite logical to include an open to discussion article by A. Me-dushevskii, a professor of the National Research University "Higher School of Ec o-nomics," written on the intersection of history and political science considering the idea of the global legal order. Using a significant number of foreign sources, the au-
thor analysed the results of the international discussion on global constitutionalism; summarized the arguments for and against its implementation which were put forward by international lawyers, constitutionalists and politicians, reconstructed the strategies of constitutionalizing the world order. Disagreeing with the prevailing legal-descriptive trend, A. Medushevskii defends the understanding of global constitutionalism as an ethical minimum, legal ideology and policy aimed at ensuring the inviolability of the very core of transnational legal guarantees of society in the face of the challenges of its radical transformation.
The articles published in the journal are supplemented by the review of the collected materials of the 12th International Scientific Conference "Current Problems of Parliamentarism: History and Modernity" ("Tauride Readings 2018") held in December 2018 in St Petersburg written by I. Chernyshev; review of the proceedings of the all-Russian scientific conference "The Russian Revolution of 1917: new approaches and views" prepared by D. Shchukin; O. Maiboroda's review of the collection of articles Role of Pictorial Sources in Information Support of Historical Science, published in 2019. Many articles of the first two reviewed collections are closely intertwined with the subject matter of this issue.
Let me hope that the presented materials will be interesting and useful not only to historians and political scientists but also to a broad readership and the expressed controversial points of view will stimulate further scientific research on the issues under consideration.
Andrei N. Egorov,
Doctor of Historical Sciences, Head of the Department of History and Philosophy,
Cherepovets State University, Deputy Editor-in-chief of the journal Historia Provinciae - the Journal of Regional History
