Ideas and Ideals

The article is devoted to the phenomenon of political power as it is depicted in the artistic world of Pushkin’s “Boris Godunov”. The concept of Tzar Boris is analyzed in the context of contemporary view on the nature of power elaborated by Eugen Fink. The author of the article focuses on the dialogue of historical truth and artistic credibility. The article shows that the complexity of Godunov’s character gives way to a wide range of interpretations in nowadays theatre and movies. Boris Godunov is comprehended by stage directors as the “actor” (acting subject) of modernity capable to struggle through the problematic current reality. In addition to the problems of the relationship between power and an individual, the authorities and the people in Boris Godunov, the author raises the most important topic of relations between Russia and the West. The author draws attention to the most famous performance of "Boris Godunov" in new Russia, the play, staged in 2000 by the British producer of Irish descent, Declan Donnellan, and expresses the opinion that this very performance solves the problem in the context of the "unhealed present" at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries. The study is addressed to theatre professionals, philologists, specialists in cultural studies and aesthetics, cultural scientists and educators.

The student’s movement in the 1960s in the Novosibirsk State University (NGU), the longest open legal student’s movement of the Soviet period, is analyzed in this article.  The previous publications on this subject do not present the movement in its entirety, nor properly reflect the nature of the phenomenon. The civil movement in Akademgorodok (the Academytown) and, in particular, at the NGU was a by-product of the famous Siberian experiment. Nowadays, this by-product is quite topical in search for the best strategy of social change. The article reconstructs and analyses the preconditions and factors of the student’s movement, as well as the spectrum and directions of its political activities: self-organization and self-management, club activities, participation in choosing the Rector, protection of student political and academic freedoms, preservation of the autonomy of the university, etc. The conclusions about the nature of the movement are made based on numerous memoirs and available documents.

Computer engineering became a reality in the USSR in the mid-1950s. Capabilities of this new branch, demonstrated in the Soviet Atomic Project, generated an urge to expand the production of computers not only in the defense industry but in the civilian economy as well. Since the USSR’s economy developed in confrontation to the capitalist world, the political cliché “to catch up and outdo” introduced by V.I. Lenin back in 1917 was reiterated by other Soviet leaders in different situations. In particular, it was popular after the Second World War and, among other things, was applied to computer engineering. The comparative production of computers in the USSR and in the West was not in favor of our country. Our modest success was primarily attributed to the general slippage in this area. The situation with computer engineering is an example of the catching-up nature of the Soviet technological development during the period of late Stalinism. Nevertheless, since computer production was launched, there emerged a need for specialists both in industrial production and maintenance. Hence, appropriate disciplines were introduced in the Soviet higher educational institutions. Computer specialists were trained in Moscow, Leningrad, Gorky, Kiev, Penza, and in other leading universities of the USSR. Dating back to this period, until the mid-1950s, there are three out of the four principal academic programming schools, based in Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev.  At the same time, A.A. Lyapunov laid back the foundations of the theory of programming and L.A. Lusternik organized, in 1950, a workshop on programming at the Institute of Precise Mechanics and Computer Engineering, USSR Academy of Sciences. Computer design was improved simultaneously with software development. From the very beginning, the civilian applications of computers took computer engineering beyond mathematical calculations, to automatic translation, and with time this tendency grew stronger. The new industry developed in the conditions of severe competition between the two establishments: the USSR Machine-Building Ministry and Academy of Sciences, each promoting their own project. Various means were used in this struggle, up to classifying information about computers in academic and mass media. The ideological pressure on some scientific areas of biology, genetics and physics, characteristic of the late Stalin’s period, did not have any serious consequences for computer engineering. Yet, computer advocates intentionally distinguished themselves from the “bourgeois” theories of computer animation. Computer applications in civilian branches of economy were artificially held back: no small share in this had the authorities’ stance to strengthen, above all, the national defense potential.

This paper deals with the post-war period (late 1940s – mid 1950s) in the development of Soviet digital electronic computational tools and formation of the USSR science and technology policy in this field. The authors studied how well the Soviet scientists and managers were aware of the new aspects of this policy, detected its primary application area – the Soviet Atomic project and considered the conditions of its formation. Evidently, information about the new computational tools came to the Soviet Union from abroad. One of the sources of such information was academic and science and technical journals. Possibly, intelligence agencies played a certain role in obtaining this information. It was then that some contradictions between approaches to computer hardware appeared. On the one hand, leaders of the Atomic project realized its benefits and planned to produce and apply it, though in a limited scope. On the other hand, advocates of the development of computer hardware affiliated with the USSR Academy of Sciences and Ministry for Machine Building and Instrument Making were in favor of a more comprehensive approach, which implied the creation of new types of computers, increasing their capacity and extending prospective applications beyond the military-industrial complex. Participation of the two establishments in the development of computer hardware was highly competitive, with each body pursuing its own goals and lacking resources. The fact that the developments by S.A. Lebedev got ultimately higher priority testifies to the deep insight of the USSR Academy of Sciences into scientific and engineering problems. Ideological pressure, characteristic of the late period of Stalin’s rule with respect to some areas of science, did not have any serious implications for the development of computer hardware. The general situation with electronic computational tools confirms the fact that Soviet engineering in the period of late Stalinism was of the catch-up nature.

The author analyses the student movement in 1960s in the Novosibirsk State University (NGU), the longest open legal student movement of the Soviet period. The previous publications on this subject do not present the movement in its entirety, and they also do not reflect the nature of the phenomenon properly. The civil movement in Akademgorodok (Academic Town) and, in particular, at the NGU was a by-product of the famous Siberian experiment. Nowadays, this by-product is quite topical in search for the best strategy of social change. The article reconstructs and analyses the preconditions and factors of the student movement, as well as the spectrum and directions of its political activities: self-organization and self-management, club activities, participation in the Rector’s elections, protection of student political and academic freedoms, preservation of the autonomy of the university, etc. The conclusions about the nature of the movement are made based on numerous memoirs and available documents.

The article discusses the attitudes of different nations and national cultures to the memory of the Fallen on the battlefield. The author emphasizes the historical, cultural and religious peculiarities of the formation of traditions and customs of honoring and preserving the memory of them. It is concluded that the attitude to the memory of the Fallen demonstrates the level of development of national culture.

The article is devoted to the moral and ethical search and God-seeking of a prominent socialist-revolutionary Boris Savinkov. He earned a reputation not only as one of the leaders of the PSR “Fighting organization”, who participated in the organization of the most resonant attacks – on Interior Minister V.K. Pleve and Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, but also as a writer whose works "The Pale Horse" and "That Which Was Not (Three Brothers)" had a great public resonance. The contradictory nature of his personality, attitudes and actions, clearly manifested in the fact that he simultaneously combined leadership of “Fighting organization” and public reflection on moral inadmissibility of the murder, and in the fact that his anti-Bolshevik activities he combined with writing "The Black Horse", still attracts the attention of researchers and journalists. The circumstances of his death also attract the attention. The author explores them using the documents of "Savinkov case," initially stored in the secret archives of the Politburo of the CPSU (b), which allow us to speak with confidence about his suicide.

The article explores the role of Russia in the post-Soviet space, the purpose and the results of cooperation with the newly independent countries in 25 years after the liquidation of the Soviet Union. The main task is to analyze the Russian policy towards the countries that emerged from the former Soviet Union, measures aimed at the development of mutually advantageous cooperation, and their outcomes. It is important to develop the further strategy of Russia taking into account all the pitfalls in the interaction of Russia with all the newly independent countries taken together, to understand the reasons why there have been arising some periodical economic, political and cultural contradictions, and sometimes even conflicts. Today, it has become vital in the period of the new world order formation, in the conditions of worsening relations with Ukraine. The article substantiates the reasons for the lack of efficiency of interaction between Russia and CIS countries in the 1990s in the economic and military-political spheres. The author also highlights the historical significance of the efforts to preserve the declared unity of post-Soviet space in the organizational documents. The article shows the changes that have been made in Russia's policy towards the CIS countries since 2000s, the intense integration of regional parts of the countries to jointly emerge from the crisis, the creation of the collective security system of a group of countries of the former Soviet Union, awareness of the need to move towards multi-level cooperation with these countries as they are ready to join in the interests of mutually beneficial cooperation.