Amateur Magazines of Tomsk Seminarians: The History of Magazine “Soyus”

Abstract

The problem of publications made by students in the early 20th century recently became a matter of interest among scholars. The purpose of the article is to study one of them, “Soyuz” magazine, which was published by students of the theological seminary in Tomsk in 1907. The problem is that not a single issue of the magazine has survived to this day. Therefore, the research relies on the method of historical reconstruction based on the archival documents. The main achievements of this study are as follows. Based on the analyses of previously unknown archival sources, it reconstructs the history of the magazine, its team, printing equipment, and capacities, and the list of authors. It discovers a description of the magazine made by the Tomsk gendarme office. The article contains the contents of two issues of the magazine. It establishes that the magazine stuck to social-democratic ideas and was the structural element of the Tomsk branch of the All-Russian Seminary Union. It indicates the place of the magazine among other Tomsk periodicals. On the one hand, it fully fitted into the practice of the work of social-democratic organizations, on other hand, in terms of the methods of technical and organizational creation, it was a typical students self-published publication.