Archive · Faith · Museums · Mores
What Did the Common People of Ancient Rus' Die Of? Of wild beasts, the elements, disease and clumsy cookery. The synodikon, a handwritten church book listing names for commemoration, is recorded in Rus' quite early. In theory, a synodikon ought to name every Orthodox Christian who had ever
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"The post is a hole hewn by foreigners, through which they see plainly all our affairs of state and of trade." And therefore the post "must be abolished as soon as possible. The Russian people know nothing of foreign goods or of their prices, so let the
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Archive · Museums · Mores
On 11 November 1918 a father brought Muriel Stella Williams, then two or three years old, to the Assembly Hall in Brimingham in this dress, made to mark the long-awaited victory. The description of the exhibit says that in honour of the occasion the little girl's skirt
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A flayed angel? From Jacques-Fabien Gautier d'Agoty's book "General Anatomy of the Internal Organs"
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Let them say there is no such thing as female friendship. Not for these witches from a fourteenth-century manuscript: while two of them prepare a brew for the devil, their girlfriends have already stolen a baby for him
Archive · Faith · Society · Ethnography
The sect of the Podpolniki ("Undergrounders"), which arose in the nineteenth century in the Saratov district, recognised only the pre-Nikonian church and came out rather categorically against the everyday manifestations of secular life: it proposed not to attend schools and reading huts but instead to live in
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Jurists call the written-protocol form in the Russian, and before that the Soviet, criminal process a relic of earlier preliminary judicial procedures. It turns out that the modern rules for drawing up protocols are inherited from the Statute of Criminal Procedure of 1864, which entrenched the written character of
Archive · The East · Books · Monarchies · Moscow
The German Olearius witnessed a visit by a Kabardian delegation to the Tsar's court in 1634. What particularly struck Olearius was that the Kabardians arrived in modest array and with no particular occasion or pretext for conversation with the Tsar's officials, yet were presented with silk
Archive · Observations · Society · Humour
November 1919. Exceptionally hard conditions of life for employees. Salaries out of all proportion to the price of food, clothing and fuel. Institutions grant their workers loans to tide them over several months. At a meeting convened by the head of the Chief Archive Administration (Glavarkhiv) the opinion is voiced
Archive · Heritage · Society · People
The Social Democratic Party of Germany once assembled an impressive archive of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, comprising the extensive correspondence between Marx and Engels, other letters, and their manuscripts and notes. In 1933 the Russian historian Boris Ivanovich Nikolaevsky managed to get the party's archive out of
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