Evgenij (Евгений) Akel'ev (Akelev, Акельев)

Сборник статей «О вере и суевериях» посвящен юбилею доктора исторических наук, профессора Высшей школы экономики Елены Борисовны Смилянской. В него вошли исследования различных аспектов народной духовной культуры: заговорной традиции, представлений о святых и демонах, старообрядчества, религиозного вольнодумства. Одновременно в книге представлены работы о правительственной политике в отношении старообрядцев и  об осмыслении народной религиозности российской элитой Века Просвещения. Издание ориентировано на историков, этнографов, фольклористов.

В сборник включены статьи, посвященные проблемам изучения России XVII – XIX вв. истории социальных практик, истории представлений о власти и властителях, персональной истории, истории идей, истории повседневности горожан и духовенства. Отдельный раздел составляет публикация богатого сведениями о жизни преступного мира Москвы комплекса документов, возникшего благодаря доносительской деятельности Ваньки Каина. Издание предназначено для специалистов и читателей, интересующихся отечественной историей.

Полный текст сборника см. по ссылке.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

In 1761, Mikhail Lomonosov astutely noted that among other causes of population loss in Russia—such as diseases, murders, and accidents—was the issue of the "living dead" (zhivye pokoiniki): "From border provinces, people leave for other countries, especially for Poland, and, as a result, the Russian Crown loses its subjects." He subsequently compared the Russo-Polish border to a "great hole [velikaia skvazhina] that was impossible to seal" to prevent ordinary people from slipping out of the country. Some fled because of seigniorial demands and conscription, while others, affected by the Schism, moved to the Polish town of Vietka. Finally, he proposed that the Russian government should alleviate the tax burden and eliminate conscription to make borderland residents less likely to flee and use troops to bring the "living dead" back to the empire. Lomonosov's concern with population loss was widely shared by his contemporaries and further accentuated by several official reports that mentioned "over a million people"  dwelling abroad. Thus in his comments, Lomonosov succinctly captures the essence of a problem that figured on the imperial agenda throughout the 18th century: the existence of a porous western border that created an opportunity for many thousands of Russian subjects to escape and begin a new life in the Commonwealth.

From the 1720s onward, Russian rulers became continuously preoccupied with both the scale of emigration to Poland-Lithuania and the state of the western border. They viewed these issues as intertwined, because imperial subjects would not have been able to leave if the border had been sufficiently guarded. Considerable efforts hence were exerted to restrict departures. At the same time, the population flight abroad revealed the most oppressive features of Russia's social order and prompted government administrators to consider existing policies on noble-peasant relations and Old Believers. The most ambitious and problematic point on the agenda, nevertheless, was to discover ways to return fugitives to Russia.

This article investigates these interrelated processes by focusing on interactions between the authorities and fugitives (peasants, town residents, Old Believers, soldiers), which took a number of forms—such as petitions, deployment of military force, and issuance of amnesties. Considered together, they allow us to understand the "imperial repertoire," the ruling strategies used by Russian central and provincial officials to deal with specific situations that arose because of the problematic border with Poland-Lithuania. As Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper note, "an imperial repertoire" was not "a preset formula for rule" but improvisations and decisions often "shaped by past practices and constrained by context." Specifically, we argue that attention to the porousness of the Russo-Polish border and processes associated with it enables us to view the imperial state not as rigid and limited in its capacity to control the population but as experimenting with various approaches and constantly adapting to changing circumstances along the border and within the country.

Likewise, the examination of the western border complicates our understanding of cross-border migrations. Commonly, social historians tend to simplify this issue by presenting it as resistance to oppressive features of the imperial regime and ignoring fugitives' expectations for potential benefits in the receiving country. By contrast, historians of borderlands argue that we need to view borders "as historical constructs that empower some at the expense of others," and therefore our task is to understand the effect that borders exert on different people.6 This article demonstrates that ordinary people had motivations and considerations that went beyond resistance and were based on their knowledge of border conditions, advantages, and freedoms available in different places. For those living on the Polish-Lithuanian side, the border represented a bargaining chip that helped them interact with the Russian government at a different level, as independent parties that could make demands and concur with or disregard official orders when they so pleased.

The exploration of the early modern Russo-Polish border also contributes to the growing field of borderlands studies, whose scholars actively research the significance of mapping, treaties, demarcations, negotiations, and violence...

Historians Enter the Archives
How Pre-1917 Russian Historiography Discovered the Muscovite State
This article analyzes the biases that archival practice introduced into Russian historiography on Muscovy before the revolution of 1917. It begins by presenting the main steps in the organization of historical archives since the reign of Peter the Great. For a long time, the state’s archival policy toward historical repositories was both passive and distrustful: little investment was made in the preservation and description of the collections, which remained difficult for researchers to access. The second half of the nineteenth century, marked by the liberal reforms of the reign of Alexander II, ushered in a new phase with the creation of a major historical archive, the Moscow Archives of the Ministry of Justice (MAMJU), and the consolidation of history as an academic discipline. It was during this moment that the fundamental historical assumptions that continue to shape our idea of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Muscovy emerged. Two case studies are presented: the use of ancient land and population registers (piscovye knigi) as a source for economic and social history, and Vasilii Kliuchevsii’s theory of social groups (soslovija). These examples show how the segmentation of archival materials, the uneven state of their preservation, the ambitions of archival science, and the nature and availability of new investigative tools produced by archivists influence the agendas and results of historical research.

The article tells the story of the rise of four generations of the Shagarov family from low‑level service status (cossack) in a Muscovite borderland to noble status in eighteenth‑century Russia. The text focuses on key moments and events in the family’s rise. In addition to questions of social (and geographical) mobility, the authors discuss the connections between service, economic entrepreneurship, personalized authority relationships, networks of patronage and protection, the salience of local conditions and relationships (and how they related to the center), the development of the Muscovite bureaucracy (especially questions of professionalization and the relationship between provincial and Moscow service), administrative effectiveness and corruption, and finally the ongoing motif of regular government. On the whole, the reader will see how an ambitious family navigated the “system,” what they did to survive and thrive, how they struggled, how social mobility more broadly could be achieved, how crucial economic success was to success in service and to the process of ennoblement, and how servitors experienced the Table of Ranks and other Petrine reforms. The authors show that upward mobility did not depend entirely on statist or tsarist mechanisms. By highlighting the multiple mechanisms and pathways to mobility that the Shagarovs worked and experienced, this article demonstrates how individuals and/or families (in this case family solidarity was a critical factor in success) could take charge of their own future and take advantage of the changing conditions and opportunities that arose.

Открытое письмо «Обращение славистов – историков и филологов к правительству России» было опубликовано на сайте журнала «Историческая экспертиза» вечером 1 марта 2022 г. Подписи к нему продолжают приходить. До 4 марта они добавлялись на сайт порциями, однако после введения в России военной цензуры (в ночь на 5 марта) письмо было снято с публикации хозяином сайта. Текст письма с подписями, поступившими до введения цензуры, доступен в виде копий, в том числе в архиве Интернета, а также в переводах на другие языки.