The article deals with the research of the issue of donations in favour of the Imperial Russian Army and the Imperial Russian Navy during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905. Those donations were collected by the parishes of the Moscow Eparchy and fixed in the documents of the Moscow Ecclesiastical Consistory. The research focuses on the size and the content of the donations. It also analyzes the dynamics of their revenues to the Treasury of the Moscow Ecclesiastical Consistory and evaluates how that money was used for the purposes intended. Based on a comparison of the cash inflow for 1904 and 1905, it is accordingly concluded that the war-related charity of the parishioners of the churches of the Moscow Eparchy of the Russian Orthodox Church and the related structures was most active in the first year of the war, especially in the first half of it. That fact may indicate, on the one hand, a high degree of spiritual mobilization and inspiration of a significant part of the Russian society connected with the outbreak of the war, and, on the other, the subsequent disappointment with the course of the war and the growth of anti-war and revolutionary sentiments in Moscow and in its vicinity. The study was based on the previously unpublished monthly income and expenditure statements of the Moscow Ecclesiastical Consistory for 1904 and 1905, stored in the Central State Archives of the City of Moscow.

In this article, the author analyzes the changes in the salaries of teachers, teachers of pedagogical technical colleges, the financial and economic state of pedagogical technical schools, secondary schools in Uzbekistan in the period from the end of the 1920s to 1939 inclusive. The article provides the data on the changes in the construction of the premises used for studying by the students of pedagogical colleges. The reasons for personnel shortage among the teaching staff in schools are described, as well as the reasons for the insufficient staffing of pedagogical technical schools with students both in general in the USSR and in the Uzbek SSR. An analysis is carried out of those decisions that were taken by the People’s Commissariat for Education of both the country as a whole and the People’s Commissariat of Education of Uzbekistan, taking into account the circumstances that all decisions, resolutions and other regulations were issued from the center and all decisions were identical. There is a brief research of the influence of the internal political situation of that time on the state of the public education system and teaching in general. The article is based both on historiography, related to the universal education, personnel shortages among teachers in the 1930s, and on the unpublished materials from the National Archives of Uzbekistan (Tashkent), fund 94, “Secondary special education” 1925–1948. The article analyzes how the decisions made by the leadership of the People’s Commissariat for Education changed for the better the financial and economic spheres of the public education system and had a beneficial effect on the entire education system.

The article, based on the documents from the Russian State Archives of Social and Political History, presents the initial stage of the formation and development of the Higher Party School (HPS) under the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks. The stage covers the 1939–1945 period. The Higher Party School replaced a number of earlier educational institutions of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks; it established itself and strengthened after all 25 industrial academies were liquidated in 1940, which testified to the priorities of the country’s leadership in the field of education: preference was given to the training of ideological personnel. That trend also existed during the Great Patriotic War: at that time the range of specialties only expanded and began to cover such areas of training as journalism and diplomacy. During the war, the students were given the task of continuing their studies, since ideological personnel were needed in different sectors of the front and the rearward area. The HPS became an important tool for replacing elites – from the “old Bolsheviks” to the new party cadres, personally devoted to Stalin. Educational institutions such as the Higher Party School made a significant contribution to the transformation of Soviet society, to the creation of a solid basis for its unanimity and full support for the course of the country’s leadership in politics, economy, and culture.

After the end of World War II, due to the ideological shift in Soviet society and the deterioration of the relations with the West, the Soviet government decided to intensify propaganda work within the country. To this end, the Central Committee of the CPSU(b) proposed in 1946–1950 to broaden the reach and impact of propaganda by expanding and restoring the national network of film distribution and screening. Within five years, the Soviet Union had largely completed the reconstruction of the film exhibition network, but faced various challenges in its actual functioning. First, the increasingly harsh political censorship after the Second World War resulted in an underproduction and poor quality of films, which made it difficult to attract enough viewers to buy tickets and resulted in unsatisfactory box office receipts. It did not only undermine the popularity of the films, but also made it difficult to educate the uninitiated. In addition, because of the deficit economy in the Soviet Union, cinemas chronically experienced film-stock shortages, deficiency in projection equipment and qualified personnel, making it difficult to provide quality service to audiences. Together, those factors had a negative impact on the implementation of the propaganda and educational task of the Central Committee of the CPSU(b) in the postwar period.

The narrative focuses on the details of the history of the prohibition of the newspaper “The Moskvich” (1867–1868), published in place of the previously suspended Moskva (1867–1868). Using the example of I.S. Aksakov’s printing bodies, employing new archival sources introduced into scientific circulation, the author clarifies the specifics of the functioning of press legislation and the specifics of the work of the bureaucratic apparatus of post-reform Russia. The publication of “The Moskvich” with an emphatic imitation of the Moskva became Aksakov’s manifestation against the unfair system of administrative penalties – the system that was under the jurisdiction of P.A. Valuev, the Minister of Internal Affairs, alone who independently determined the period of suspension of the periodical press. Aksakov’s censorship “maneuver” did not constitute a violation of the legislative norm, but caused the government to find a way to eliminate and prevent such self-will, which was reflected in Valuev’s influence on the Emperor’s opinion on that issue and the consent thereto of the Council of Ministers. The researcher comes to the conclusion that such a method of Aksakov’s struggle for greater freedom in Russian journalism was not only motivated by the editor’s personal will, but it was also a battle tactic for the revision of the punitive censorship mechanism so as to bring the latter into line with the new judicial system.

The article deals with the fate of Maria Alexandrovna Myazgovskaya, the daughter of the Admiral of the Black Sea Fleet, A.I. Myazgovsky, who was assassinated in Nikolaev, Kherson province, during the Civil War. In 1920, M.A. Myazgovskaya, along with her mother and brother, were able to hide in Odessa, then leave for Constantinople and from there move to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. After the Second World War, M.A. Myazgovskaya moved to North Africa, to Tunisia, where she died in 1989 at the age of 95.

Shortly before M.A. Myazgovskaya’s death, Mikhail Nikolaevich Darwin Doctor of Philology, Professor of the Russian State University for the Humanities met with her. Several conversations took place during which she recalled her childhood years in Russia, the horrors of the Civil War and her life abroad. Though in exile, the Admiral’s daughter did not forget the Russian language and retained the Russian culture. Summing up her life, she noted that “she had always been a passionate patriot, loving Russia”. M.N. Darwin managed to record one of the meetings on a video camera. It was that very conversation that became fundamental when writing the present article.

The article deals with the biography of Konstantin Grigor’evich Mityaev, professor, founder of the school of Russian documentary studies. All the scientific and pedagogical activities of K.G. Mityaev took place within the walls of the Moscow State Institute for History and Archives (MGIAI), all the graduates of MGIAI know the results of that activity, his main works, but to date, very little is known about his personal life. The documents we have identified in the GARF funds, which contain biographical information, allow us to get to know K.G. Mityaev’s creative path better: the conditions that led him to the walls of the Institute for History and Archives, the features of upbringing and education that drove Konstantin Grigor’evich to a successful professional activity in the archival sphere.

K.G. Mityaev was born in a small village in the family of an estate assistant manager. He was the youngest in the family, left without a mother early, but obviously received a good primary education. At the age of 18, he came to Moscow and entered the State Institute of Living Word, then decided to enroll in the Higher Cooperative Institute (VKI) established under the Plekhanov Institute of National Economy. It was his economic education and significant work experience in the accounting and economic environment that determined the emergence of his interest in studying primary sources in the field of economic processes and that lead him to the post-graduate school at MGIAI, with which the last thirty years of his life were associated. The features of Konstantin Grigor’evich Mityaev’s life path allow us to understand more deeply how he managed to collect, preserve, multiply and transfer the accumulated knowledge in the field of archival and documentary studies.

The paper deals with the study of the contribution of the scholars and, simultaneously, the professors of the Institute for History and Archives of the Russian State University for the Humanities, to the analysis of the complex of different types of audio-visual documents. Special attention is paid to the works of the founders of that relevant research direction, professors – A.A. Kuzin, L.M. Roshal, V.M. Magidov. At the same time, the paper presents the content of the latest generalizing works about audio-visual documents – the works created in the 21^st century by the pupils and other successors of those authors. The used historiographical sources in the form of monographs, articles and manuals were systematized on the basis of chronological and thematic principles. The application of such an approach provides an opportunity to show the traditions and contemporary tendencies in analyzing different types of audio-visual documents by the specialists of the Institute for History and Archives and to determine the relevance of the published research on the topic.

The special focus of the article is on the works dealing with logically related issues of archival and source studies. Their choice for study is determined by the tradition of the scientific research at the Institute for History and Archives. At the same time, the paper presents the results of the study of the current topic of creation and preservation of visual and audio-visual documents in an electronic environment. Thereat, the article introduces the content of the notion of a “technotronic document” that was broadly used in the scientific studies of the end of the 20^th – beginning of the 21^st century.

The formation of the lineage scheme\ of the Putin family is considered in the article on the basis of the first introduced into scientific circulation sources from the funds of the State Archive of the Tver region, the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts, from the author’s personal archive, the passport service certificates of the internal affairs territorial departments and on the basis of vast illustrative material. That ancestry line is a family tree of V.V. Putin, the President of the Russian Federation. The hereditary scheme is also connected with many other accompanying issues.

The aim of the article is to inform the scientific community about the research carried out on the Putin family line: according to the author’s personal notes – since 1969; as indicated in the first document “Paradigm of the intra-family relations within the Putin lineage” received from A.V. Superanskaya, Dr. of Sci. (Linguistics), the head of the Onomastics Department of the Institute of Linguistics of the USSR Academy of Sciences – since 1986; as provided by the agreement signed with the Association of Genealogists of the Ural Historical-Family Society “On the creation of a family tree of the Putin lineage” – since 1992; informing the public by the official publication of the Association of Genealogists “Documents and materials”, Perm – since 1994; as on the website www.putin-rod.ru – since 2013.

The scientific novelty of the article lies in the fact that it is founded on the little-known public and private storage documents which allowed the author to provide, at the current stage, the most possible comprehensive picture of the life of the people from different generations and branches of the Putin family. The relevance of the article is particularly important in the current time of change because people strive to imagine the future in the generations of descendants.