Modern historiography of the famine of the early 1930s in Russia and Kazakhstan: literature review

Background. The history of famine in Russia and Kazakhstan in the early 1930s is one of the most politicized topics in modern Russian-Kazakh relations. It has also been the focus of attention of researchers of the two countries and foreign historiography for several decades. The discussion continues among specialists and the general public on a number of important aspects of the problem: the causes of famine, regional characteristics of famine, demographic consequences of famine. Materials and methods. The study is based on the analysis of modern literature on the famine of the early 1930s in Russia and Kazakhstan, which has been published in recent decades, in the post-Soviet period, primarily documentary and monographic works by Russian and foreign researchers on this topic. Results. In the course of writing the article, the main task was solved – to characterize the state of modern domestic and foreign historiography of the problem. Conclusions. In the post-Soviet period, researchers from Russia, Kazakhstan and a number of foreign countries (Germany, Italy, the USA, etc.) have done considerable work to study the history of famine in the regions of Russia and Kazakhstan, which were part of the Russian Federation during the period under review

Penza region during the Great Patriotic War: integration challenges

Background. The relevance of developing the problem is determined by the need to comprehend the process of glocalization – strengthening the value of local specificity, its actualization. A consistent strategy for the formation of a regional identity, a sustainable awareness of the local community within a certain spatiotemporal continuum is an intangible factor in economic growth and human development. The purpose of the work is to study the processes of administrative and economic development of the rear region during the Great Patriotic War. The consideration of the practices of everyday life, the identification of communication links between the official and everyday levels of perception of what was happening is of fundamental importance. Materials and methods. The array of historical sources involved in the analysis was made up of documents from the State Archives of the Russian Federation and the State Archives of Penza region. The study was carried out on the basis of an interdisciplinary synthesis of the methods of sociology, history and cultural studies of everyday life. The methods of hermeneutics are used, first of all, general approaches to the interpretation of a historical source: understanding the general meaning of the text and the socio-cultural context, taking into account the knowledge of the chronotope of events and everyday practices. Results. In the course of the study, the specifics of the official representation of the region’s identity were revealed and the images of extreme everyday life in the mass consciousness were reconstructed. Conclusions. For the local community, the formation (restoration) of a regional identity (the formation of Penza region as an independent subject of the RSFSR dates back to 1939) coincided with the start of the Great Patriotic War, which was a key factor that greatly complicated this process. Migration mobility, the relocation of dozens of enterprises and over 150,000 evacuated citizens to Penza region, coupled with the mobilization efforts of the authorities and the most severe centralization of management, deformed the familiar background of provincial everyday life

Pyre Fuel for the cremations of the middle of the first millennium AD in the middle volga region

The paper presents results of charcoal and macrofossil analysis of the cremation burial grounds of the Imenkovo culture that occupied the Middle Volga region in 400—650 CE. We analyzed assemblages from four necropolises: Bogorodski, Maklasheevka 4, Komarovka and a burial ground from Zhigulevsk 2 site. Charred remains were recorded at the bottom of burials, among cremated bones or in the in-fill of graves and mortuary vessels. The assemblages contained charcoal, caryopses and stems of millet and cereals, seeds and stems of grasses and weeds, and shoots of thorny shrubs. The size of the charcoal pieces did not exceed 3 cm, being much smaller in most burials. The species composition of charcoal from cremations indicates that all locally-available woody taxa were used for the funeral pyre, instead of choosing certain types of trees for ritual purposes. Thus, the composition of the cremation fuel reflected the vegetation composition of the encasing landscape. Dominant charred taxa in the Imenkovo cremations were Tilia and Betula (linden and birch), the typical components of the “slash-and-burn landscape” of the Middle Volga region during this period. Despite the fact that all the burial grounds were located at the higher grounds in the landscape, the presence of riverine taxa — Alnus, Salix, and Ulmus (willow, alder and elm) and abundance of charred herbaceous remains in the charcoal spectra points at floodplains or mouths of gullies as a probable location of cremation platforms. An important detail of the funeral rite, revealed by the research, is placing unhulled millet, soaked and germinated before cremation, into the funeral pyre