Society · Paris · People
Joan of Arc, during the failed siege of Paris in which she was wounded, kept food out of the city for almost 20 days, unembarrassed that she was starving and sickening the Parisians. Of course, this looks like a perfectly normal part of siege strategy. But the point lies not
Faith · Monarchies · Society · Ethnography
Soothsayers, Blessed Ones and Holy Fools were not always revered in Russia, in fact. State persecution of them began in 1636, when first the Patriarch and then Tsar Alexey Mikhailovich pondered the harm they did to simple God-fearing folk, the latter issuing decrees expelling these enigmatic wanderers from Moscow
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
Archive · Science · Society
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
Faith · Science · Mores · Society · Rome
Pope Gregory XIII was an enterprising persecutor of the Jews. He came up with the idea of compelling Jews to attend Sabbath sermons in Catholic churches, where they were to be imbued with the bright ideas of Christianity. Many, it is true, stopped up their ears with wax. Gregory'
Books · Observations · Mores · Society
Is there no amusement here? Why, yes. Over the way, there is the lecture-room, from which shafts of light pour out, and then, three times a week or more, there are evening services for the ladies. For the young gentlemen there are the counting-house, the store and the
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
NB! · Archive · Books · Society · People
Stinking Democrats, cunning Communists, screeching liberals, idiots, suicides and thieves. Inna Lisnyanskaya on the events of October 1993, in a letter to her daughter
Archive · Mores · Society
A word on Russian justice. Under the Law Code (Sobornoye Ulozheniye) of 1649, cases of dishonour were punished not only by fines but also by imprisonment or corporal punishment. The severity of the verdict depended on the standing of the injured party and of the accused, or, to be more
NB! · Archive · Moscow · Society · People
A little on how Gorbachev secured the Central Committee's "consent" to his decisions. From the memoirs of V. V. Grishin
NB! · Archive · Moscow · Society · People