Neutrality by Absence: Overseas Americans at the Beginning of World War I

The purpose of the publication is to restore the event and the ethno-psychological aspects of mobilization of 1914 in Kazan province within the territories that are currently administratively make part of the Republic of Tatarstan. The novelty of the work consists in studying the issue of soldiers’ unrest and illegal actions of other social strata of Kazan governorate during soldiers’ conscription in July 1914. Unpublished archival sources of the State Archive of the Republic of Tatarstan were the basis for studying the aspects of the issue of coordinating the actions of power and municipal state structures in the person of municipal government and local military leadership with various ethnic and social groups of the local population during conscription at the beginning of the First World War. The destructive component of soldiers’ unrest and riots is considered in the context of social conflict theory developed by the political analyst T. Skochpol and the concept of functional intra-ethnic conflict created by the cultural studies scholar, sociologist and ethnologist S.V. Lurie. The issues of the dynamics in the expression of deviant behavior of conscripted servicemen in Kazan, Laishevsky, Spassky and Chistopol uyezds of Kazan governorate are elucidated. Attention is paid to the social, ethnic, psychological and religious motives of the lower ranks’ riots in the region. Such an important aspect of the problem as the causes of unfavorable mobilization course within the borders of the governorate at the beginning of the war is studied. The article identifies and touches upon the issue of the main forms of social aggression in the soldier masses, the trigger of which was introduction of the “prohibition law”.

With the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, Soviet education system was subjected to severe tests. It was necessary first to transport, and then to ensure the functioning of schools, boarding schools, orphanages in the conditions of evacuation. By the beginning of the war, there were various types of schools in the USSR, including closed ones. Among the closed ones there was a school that gave 14-17 years old boys special musical and general education. This school has its roots in the 19th century, when the inspector of military choirs (orchestras) of the naval department N. A. Rimsky-Korsakov founded the Navy Musical School. In the 20th century, the Navy Music School became a closed educational institution. The pupils lived in conditions of a boarding school. From the beginning to the end of its existence, the school trained not so much individual performers as groups of musicians for military orchestras. During the Great Patriotic War, the Rimsky-Korsakov Naval Music School was evacuated to the village of Syola in the Verkhne-Gorodkovsky district of the Molotov region (Perm Territory). Despite the wartime, the school carried out annual admission and graduation of pupils. Future pupils were selected in orphanages on the basis of musical abilities, excellent and good academic performance and discipline. The pupils were fully supported by the state. The school administration made great efforts to provide pupils with the most necessary things: clothes, uniforms, shoes, school supplies, food, tolerable living conditions.

The article deals with the transformation of the marriage and family structures of the population of Udmurtia in the period between 1939 to 1959. Attention is paid to the study of the infl uence of the Great Patriotic War on the family and marriage in the republic. Sources used include census materials from 1939 and 1959 and statistical records from the period in question. With the beginning of the war, the number of marriages in Udmurtia sharply decreased. The smallest number of marriages was observed in 1942. In the countryside, this was a reduction of more than three times, indicating a unusually great shortage of men. A direct consequence of the war was a reduction in the average family size as well as an increase in families headed by women. By 1959, 38.5 % of families in the countryside were led by women. With the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, remarriages became more frequent in Udmurtia. Between 1944 and 1951 they were mostly concluded by women who presumably had lost their husbands in the fi ghting. The extramarital birth rate also sharply increased. In the post-war period, particularly in the rural areas many children were born out of wedlock. The extramarital birth rate reached its peak in 1950, when every third child in Udmurtia was born out of wedlock.

The article deals with one of the most important unofficial imperial symbols of Russia - the Russian bayonet. For quite a long historical period, 1790-1945, the bayonet remained a metaphor for military, state, and national power. In the historical perspective, it had three main meanings: 1) the glory of the Russian Army, and then the Red Army; 2) the greatness and strength of the Russian Empire; 3) courage, determination, and the Russian man’s contempt for death. The cult of Suvorov and the myth of the Russian bayonet were formed in Russian poetry at the same time - at the end of the XVIII century, and they supported each other. Suvorov’s bayonet charge training remained relevant in the tactics and military theory of the Russian Army until the end of the 19th century. The idea of the mythical Suvorov’s “bogatyr”, a Russian soldier, was poeticized by the commander himself in The Science of Victory (1795) and was continued primarily in the patriotic poetry of the 1830s. The mythologization of the Russian bayonet in Russian poetry and battle prose reached its apotheosis in the early 1830s, at the time of Russia’s confrontation with Europe over the Polish Uprising. The literary myth of the bayonet is presented in its most complete form in Pyotr Yershov’s poem “The Russian Bayonet”. Patriotic lyrics with their collective lyrical subject and nationwide sublime pathos and the battle prose of the 1830s both played a decisive role in the creation of the myth. The hyperbolization of the Russian hero wielding the bayonet in the prose of the 1830s is usually linked with the motif of national superiority. The ideological imperial myth of the invincible and all-powerful Russian bayonet was used primarily within Russia itself. During the Crimean War, the poetical hope that the bayonet would help to win the war with the most well-armed armies in Europe was in vain. In addition, the destruction of the myth was influenced by the spread of the personal point of view in the psychological prose of Leo Tolstoy and Vsevolod Garshin. In Tolstoy’s battle prose, the war rhetoric and the valorization of war are devalued, this “demythologization” also includes an unusual description of the Russian bayonet charge. This trend continues in the prose of Garshin, who gained the experience of an ordinary volunteer soldier in the Russian-Turkish War. In the last third of the 19th century and before the beginning of the First World War, the bayonet in Russian unofficial literature became a metaphor for the repressive state apparatus. Nevertheless, at the beginning of the war, the suppressed national semantics of the bayonet was actualized again. The same thing happened at the very beginning of the Great Patriotic War when the very existence of Russians as an ethnic group was called into question. Soviet poets once again turned to the myth of the all-conquering Suvorov’s Russian bayonet.

The appearance of A.A. Blok’s poem “The Petrograd sky was blurred by rain...” was preceded by his meeting with L.M. Delmas, the lyrics dedicated to her, the beginning of the First World War, the solar eclipse in August 1914 and the renaming of St. Petersburg to Petrograd. Working in the Committee for Assistance to Families of Reserve Troops, preparing a volume of poems by Apollon Grigoriev for publication and seeing off echelons to the war, where his stepfather, the lieutenant general, and his wife, as a nurse, went — such was the life of A. Blok after the beginning of the war. The poem reflects the impressions of the echelon’s departure from Peterhof, where Blok’s mother lived, but in the poem the sky is called “Petrograd sky”, which expands the space of the city and, at the same time, reflects a certain moment in Russian history. The analysis of the poem traces the edits in the text that were made in September 1914, and after the publication of the book “Poems about Russia”, which included this poem. The changes in the text made it possible to strengthen the sense of the historical turning point that occurred with Russia’s entry into the war. The fourth verse plays an important role in understanding the poem, where the poet managed to convey both modernity and a sense of the inevitable future. As a result of working on the text, Blok’s poem, on the one hand, reflected a moment of history and, on the other, became a word about the fate of Russia.

The article deals with one of the most important unofficial imperial symbols of Russia - the Russian bayonet. For quite a long historical period, 1790-1945, the bayonet remained a metaphor for military, state, and national power. In the historical perspective, it had three main meanings: 1) the glory of the Russian Army, and then the Red Army; 2) the greatness and strength of the Russian Empire; 3) courage, determination, and the Russian man’s contempt for death. The cult of Suvorov and the myth of the Russian bayonet were formed in Russian poetry at the same time - at the end of the XVIII century, and they supported each other. Suvorov’s bayonet charge training remained relevant in the tactics and military theory of the Russian Army until the end of the 19th century. The idea of the mythical Suvorov’s “bogatyr”, a Russian soldier, was poeticized by the commander himself in The Science of Victory (1795) and was continued primarily in the patriotic poetry of the 1830s. The mythologization of the Russian bayonet in Russian poetry and battle prose reached its apotheosis in the early 1830s, at the time of Russia’s confrontation with Europe over the Polish Uprising. The literary myth of the bayonet is presented in its most complete form in Pyotr Yershov’s poem “The Russian Bayonet”. Patriotic lyrics with their collective lyrical subject and nationwide sublime pathos and the battle prose of the 1830s both played a decisive role in the creation of the myth. The hyperbolization of the Russian hero wielding the bayonet in the prose of the 1830s is usually linked with the motif of national superiority. The ideological imperial myth of the invincible and all-powerful Russian bayonet was used primarily within Russia itself. During the Crimean War, the poetical hope that the bayonet would help to win the war with the most well-armed armies in Europe was in vain. In addition, the destruction of the myth was influenced by the spread of the personal point of view in the psychological prose of Leo Tolstoy and Vsevolod Garshin. In Tolstoy’s battle prose, the war rhetoric and the valorization of war are devalued, this “demythologization” also includes an unusual description of the Russian bayonet charge. This trend continues in the prose of Garshin, who gained the experience of an ordinary volunteer soldier in the Russian-Turkish War. In the last third of the 19th century and before the beginning of the First World War, the bayonet in Russian unofficial literature became a metaphor for the repressive state apparatus. Nevertheless, at the beginning of the war, the suppressed national semantics of the bayonet was actualized again. The same thing happened at the very beginning of the Great Patriotic War when the very existence of Russians as an ethnic group was called into question. Soviet poets once again turned to the myth of the all-conquering Suvorov’s Russian bayonet.

The question of the liberation of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes from Austro-Hungarian rule, and of their uniting with Serbia and Montenegro to form one state, was raised at the beginning of the first world war. It was submitted to the Entente powers by Croat, Serb, and Slovene politicians under the leadership of F. Supilo and A. Trumbic, who had fled to Italy at the beginning of the war and had later established the Yugoslav Committee.1 Their action was supported by the Serbian government, which had declared on 7 December 19I4 that the war forced on Serbia by AustriaHungary had now become a war of liberation and unification for all Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. But there were big hurdles to surmount, and the creation of a Yugoslav state remained uncertain right up to the end of the war. It was not only that the victory of the Allies still hung in the balance, but that Italy was decisively opposed to the union of the South Slavs. Moreover, the Allies for a long time were reluctant to adopt a definite policy on the disruption of the Austro-Hungarian empire, which was an essential condition for the creation of an independent Yugoslav state. When Italy entered the war on the side of the Entente, the Treaty of London of 26 April I915 stipulated not only that after the war she should get a bigger share of the territory on the eastern Adriatic inhabited predominantly by Croats and Slovenes (except for Gradisca and Trieste), but also that the remaining territory should be distributed between Montenegro, Serbia, and Croatia, which meant that the South Slavs would remain divided into petty states, thus excluding the creation of one Yugoslav state. Italian foreign policy as conducted by Sonnino held rigorously

Originally I was asked to talk about how it was in physics a long time ago when I was young. Indeed, physics was a little different from what it is now. I have decided to begin by telling you not about what I did in physics, which was not much, but about how I learned physics. I will finish just at the beginning of the second world war. Once a physicist, always a physicist. But after the beginning of the war, the world and physics never again were the same for me.

The article examines various aspects in the history of the Russian interior land using the example of peculiarities of the mobilization of 1914 in Kazan governorate within the borders of the republics that are currently part of the republics of Chuvashia and Mari El. On the basis of unpublished archival documents kept in the State Archive of the Republic of Tatarstan, the authors study the problem of interaction and coordination of executing the decisions of the center of regional police, military and city structures with the masses of conscripted soldiers and the local population during implementation of mobilization orders at the beginning of the First World War. The driving forces of the future socio-economic, political and spiritual crisis in Russia, which ultimately predetermined the fall of the monarchy and unprecedented cataclysms in the country, are considered. The event and ethno-psychological aspects of carrying out the conscription campaign in July, 1914 in the territory of Kazan governorate as an important rear area are reconstructed. The article covers the issues related to manifestations of deviating from the norm actions taken by mobilized servicemen in the Tsarevokokshaysk, Tsivilsk and Yadrin uyezds of Kazan governorate. Attention is paid to tough measures to neutralize radical forces in the region in the form of a paramilitary situation of the previous decade and strict enforcement of mandatory regulations in the territory of the governorate. The authors studied the issue which is of paramount importance, namely that of the source and factors of aggressive behavior shown by mobilized soldiers during the conscription campaign in the mentioned uyezds of the governorate at the beginning of the war. The article provides statistics on illegal actions committed by conscripted soldiers.

In my view, the publication of Iu.A. Gor'kov's "Was Stalin Preparing a Preemptive Strike Against Hitler in 1941?" [Gotovil li Stalin uprezhdaiushchii udar protiv Gitlera v 1941 g.?]1 in Novaia i noveishaia istoriia and of M.I. Mel'tiukhov's "Disputes over 1941: An Attempt at Critical Interpretation of a Debate" [Spory vokrug 1941 goda: opyt kriticheskogo osmyleniia odnoi diskussii]2 in Otechestvennaia istoriia may give a strong impetus to research on the events preceding and accompanying the beginning of the Great Patriotic War of 1941-45. More than half a century has passed since then, but a great deal remains unknown, and certain stories and problems have not been touched. Until recently, for example, it would have been difficult even to imagine that any historian in our country would make public such an issue as whether the Soviet Union was preparing to attack Germany. Even the attempt to address such a question would have proved costly to any writer or speaker. So it is little wonder that the claim of V. Suvorov, author of the nationally known book Icebreaker [Ledokol], to the effect that the Soviet Union was preparing to attack Germany in 1941 has provoked such fierce rebuttals from Russian historians: the very idea, viewed in light of the events at the beginning of the war, so tragic for the USSR, seems blasphemous.

Introduction. During the great Patriotic war (1941–1945) to encourage soldiers at the front and workers in the rear, the state established a large number of awards in addition to those available at the beginning of the war. Awarded persons by many orders and medals received a monthly material payment, differentiated depending on the significance of the award, as well as various benefits for travel, payment of taxes, etc. Only two years after the end of the war, all benefits and payments were abolished. The article attempts to consider the circumstances of cancellation of payments for state awards against the background of the difficult economic and political situation in which the USSR found itself after the war. Materials and Methods. Archival materials, published data of official statistics, as well as scientific literature were used to solve the research tasks. The theoretical and methodological basis of the study were the methods of socio-economic history. The study was conducted on the basis of the principles of historicism, objectivity and consistency. The need to process quantitative data led to the use of the statistical method. Results. On the basis of the study of archival and published sources, as well as available scientific literature, the conditions, factors and main parameters of the economic situation in the Soviet Union were considered. For the first time in the postwar years, the USSR was in a difficult economic situation. This was facilitated by the following factors: huge material costs during the war, comparable to the costs of the main allies combined; drought and crop failure 1946–1947 leading to starvation and a dramatic deterioration of the standard of life; economic and financial assistance to countries “people’s democracies” of Central and Eastern Europe; the enormous costs of Armed forces and the “atomic project” in connection with the beginning of the cold war. Discussion and Conclusion. The amount of payments for orders and medals was simply huge, in 1945, amounting to 1.2 % of the total state budget of the country. Despite recognition of merits of veterans in a victory, the state in the hardest post-war economic situation was simply not able to provide material payments on awards. On the one hand, the redirection of significant financial resources, as well as a number of other measures, allowed to improve the economic situation relatively. Already in 1948, the card system was abolished and prices for many vital goods were reduced (for example, in the UK, cards were abolished only in 1954). On the other hand, the abolition of benefits undermined the prestige of state awards in the eyes of veterans.

The tension between Russia and the Ottoman State has been going on for a long time. At the time of this tension, both states had also set various strategies against each other, military and politically. The basis of the strategy was to weaken the other side economically, military and strategically. As a matter of fact, XIX. By the 20th century, Russia had engaged its political side, mobilized ethnic structures that would cause unrest within the Ottoman State, so it wanted to break the power of the Ottoman State. He tried to lure the political and war-path regions into the region where they would have acquired the ethnic structures by recognizing some concessions, and began attempts to weaken the Ottoman with the rioting of these ethnic structures. Russia has implemented this policy in the Eastern Anatolian region, and is politically motivated to achieve its precedent. As a matter of fact, these initiatives have come to an end, I. After the beginning of World War II, Armenians who have lived in peace with Ottoman subjects for centuries have moved to Russia's side, and have started to slaughter against the Muslim people in the Ottoman lands. One of the scariest of these massacres was in Mus. With the beginning of the war, the geographical proximity was also given by the Russians, who provoked the Armenians here against the Muslim people, and used them to commit a massacre. With Russia's support, Armenians have brokered religious schools to awaken national feelings and bring Armenian subjects to face Muslim people. So, the Armenians, who were strengthened by these support, increased the dosage of pressure on Mus and the surrounding locals, tried to overwhelm the Muslim people through the massacres and make massacres.

The run of military operations on the one of the strips of the Eastern front – Pokuttya as a part of the Western Ukrainian land territory is studied in the article. The preconditions of the war are shown by the author; the characteristic features of the military mobilization of the Austrian and Hungarian army on the territory of Pokuttya on the eve and at the beginning of the war are defined; the peculiarities of the Russian regime formation on the land are revealed; not simple relations between the occupying authority and the local population are traced.The eve and beginning of the World War I showed the escalation of mass political hysteria on the part of the Austro-Hungarian authorities. The official authorities were prejudiced against the population of the region, accusing it of Russophilia. At the same time, local authorities tried to demonstrate their loyalty to the Austrian emperor by holding a series of «patriotic» events.The capture of Pokuttya by the Russians in the autumn of 1914 was accompanied by the requisition of inventory and property, the persecution of representatives of the Ukrainian national movement and residents of Jewish nationality, and the brutality of Russian Cossack units. The hostilities of 1915 showed the weakness of the positions of Russian troops in Pokuttya. In some parts of the front, the positions of the warring parties often changed, which, in turn, depleted the material resources of the inhabitants of the region. In the early summer of 1915, Austrian troops liberated Pokuttya for a time. However, the events of 1916 will show that the front in the territory of Eastern Galicia will «come to life» and this will lead to a brutal, but short-lived, occupation of Pokuttya by Russian troops.The problem of Russian occupation in the current foreign policy situation is more important for our country than ever, and the occupation practice used on the Crimean peninsula and in Eastern Ukraine has its historical analogies with the period 1914-1915. That is why from the standpoint of protection of state sovereignty, national security, the study of this problem becomes especially relevant.

Introduction. The article is about capital construction in the Volga River transport industry at the beginning of the Great Patriotic War. In the mid-1930s, the Upper, Middle, and Lower Volga autonomous steamship lines were organized. At that time and up until the beginning of World War II, infrastructure facilities were intensively erected in the Volga river transport industry. Methods and materials. The study is based on objective principles and applies general scientific as well as specific historical methods. Research is done using archival materials. Analysis. In the second half of the 1930s, the material base of the Volga steamship lines was reconstructed. Capital construction in river transport included new shipbuilding, major fleet repairs, the building of pier facilities, and the acquisition of equipment. The goal of the study is to establish the capital investments in the Volga Steamship Lines and the general situation of capital construction in the river transport industry. The planned and actual data before the Great Patriotic War are considered in detail. Results. Capital construction in the Soviet river transport industry (the Volga included) in the second half of the 1930s suffered from interruptions, underfinancing, shortages of building materials, and bad planning. For those reasons, many construction projects got delayed. Besides, the outdated equipment of river transport needed a larger investment to be renovated, as it was much inferior to that of railway transport. All of that affected the work of the Volga Steamship Lines at the beginning of the Great Patriotic War.

The article considers various historiographical approaches to the treatment of the beginning of the Second World War. The author notes that the collapse of the great empires, defeating the imperial consciousness and the emergence of new countries from their remains and a completely new global balance of powers as the immediate consequences of the First World War reconfigured the geopolitical and strategic map of the entire European continent and have created hopes for a new global order of the post-war Europe based on equal national rights and peaceful coexistence among peoples, democratization and humanization of the European society. Unfortunately, many hopes and expectations of millions of people have been left unfulfilled pursuant to imperfections in the Versailles system of the post-war arrangement of Europe. 1918-1919 seemed the start of a new democracy in Europe, but soon the situation has changed to the opposite. In Europe totalitarian regimes were established. Two decades later, during lifetime of participants of the First World War, those very states led the whole world into the Second World War, the most terrible and bloody conflict. The paper indicated that the genesis of the Second World War received significant attention in an enormous corpus of scientific literature, whose scope is growing rapidly. The Soviet and Russian historiography focuses on the Munich Agreement (1938) as a pivotal event which “opened the way to the Second World War – the greatest tragedy of the twentieth century” and “provided justification for the USSR's rapprochement with Germany” as a forced step from J. Stalin. However, the Western historiography asserts that Non-Aggression Pact between Germany and the Soviet Union of 1939 became turning moment which has plunged the world into war and led to the so-called Fourth Partition of Poland, the seizure by Germany of large parts of Europe (Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, Belgium, Netherlands, France, Yugoslavia, Greece), the Soviet-Finnish War of 1939-1940 (the Winter War), Soviet occupation of the Baltic states, Bessarabiya and Northern Bukovyna as a logical consequence of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The author does not exclude the possibility that the starting date of the Second World War may be revised in the near future. Brutal military campaigns of Japan in Asia (the 1930s) and Italy in Africa (1935-1936), the Japanese-German Anti-Commintern Pact of 1936, to which Italy had acceded in 1937, the 1936-1939 Spanish Civil War, the battle of Lake Khasan (1938), the battles of Khalkhyn Gol (1939), the Anschluss Österreichs (1938), the Munich Agreement concluded on 30 September 1938 which has led to accelerating the occupation of Czechoslovakia, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (Non-Aggression Pact between Germany and the Soviet Union of 1939) were a prelude to the Second World War. These tragic and great events not just have paved the way for a new stage of historical development, but also have provided a long-term programme for human history.   Vidnyanskyj, S. (2019). The World on the Eve of the Second World War: Historiographical Interpretations of the Beginning of the War. Mìžnarodnì zv’âzki Ukraïni: naukovì pošuki ì znahìdki – The International relations of Ukraine: scientific searches and findings, 28, 8-26 [in Ukrainian].