Vol 43, No 4 (2024)

The paper is devoted to the analysis of the content of the complex of cases on the appointment of auditors in the units of the Russian regular army in Siberia in the 2nd half of the 18th century. In total, 23 cases from the General Audit Expedition fund of the Of ce of the Military Collegium, stored in the Russian State Military Historical Archive, were used. The source-analysis aspects of the study include the identi cation of the composition and structure of paperwork documents, the establishment of their relationship with each other and the identi cation of those parameters of the functioning of bureaucratic mechanisms of military administration that have not yet been subjected to special study. It is found out that in the 2nd half of the 18th century, the appointment of non-commissioned of cers to auditor positions became a frequent phenomenon, contrary to the order established in the preceding period. A prerequisite for lling the position of a regimental or battalion auditor was to be the candidate’s participation in the review of judicial and investigative cases, the results were subsequently submitted for consideration to the Military Collegium. In some cases, it is possible to trace the continuity between speci c individuals who have consistently lled the same position. The information contained in the studied cases may supplement the data about the career of army of cers, known from their of cial (service) lists.

He author has published an unpublished work of one of the leaders of the Soviet science of the ancient world, S. I. Kovalеv (1886-1960), entitled “The Formation of the Soviet School of Historians of Antiquity”. This work was originally prepared for the “Reports of the GAIMK”, and is now held in the Scienti c and Historical Archive of the St. Petersburg Institute of History. Kovalеv’s article is of interest for the history of science for several reasons. Firstly, the text is two-layered, and secondly, it is the earliest version of the account of the history of Soviet antiquity. The various editions are timed to the anniversary of the October Revolution. The rst edition refers to 1932, while the second edition refers to 1933. Stalin’s reference to the “slave revolution” during his address on 19 February 1933 at the First All-Union Congress of collective drummer farmers compelled S. I. Kovalеv to implement signi cant revisions to his article and to extend the period of the formation of the science of antiquity in the USSR until the summer of 1933. This was due to the fact that in the spring, the primary discussions about the slave-owning mode of production took place in the GAIMK. The analysis of the edits allows us to identify certain peculiarities in the work of the classical scholar of the 1930s, who is known to have made a number of theoretical generalisations. S. I. Kovalеv’s selection of the institutional aspect as a unifying theme and the fragmentation of periods into only four for the 16 years allowed him to demonstrate his leadership and the leadership of Leningrad GAIMK in the science of the ancient world, while also asserting the rmness of the conclusions obtained by the sector of the history of slave-holding society of the GAIMK. The article also devotes considerable attention to the 1920s. The period is depicted as dynamic and characterized by the struggle of Marxist historians to establish a “correct” understanding of the historical process.

The publication «“LA PRINCESSE D’ASCHKOW” UNDER THE SUPERVISION OF THE FRENCH POLICE» is dedicated to a dossier of Parisian police of cers discovered in a Paris archive, which focused on the famous participant in the 1762 coup, Princess Ekaterina Dashkova, who was traveling around Europe for educational referring to his son and for the others purposes. A little more is known about this second stay of Dashkova in France than about the rst, but also only from her “Memories”, rst published in the original in 1881 (Moscow). It is known that again the princess visited Parisian sights, often met with Denis Diderot, but it is not known when exactly she arrived in Paris from United Kingdom and where she stayed. The dossier published for the rst time in accordance with the accepted rules for publishing 18th-century documents. The publication is preceded by an article about the history of the French Royal police in the 18th century, about a special service for monitoring foreigners, including those from Russia and about the some textual features of the published document. The document is of particular interest for a number of reasons, including the level of awareness with which police agents began monitoring foreigners arriving in the French capital. The publication is accompanied by an article about the French police in the 18th century and a translation of the dossier into Russian with detailed commentary on the text of the document.

In the second half of 1944, after the liberation of the western regions of the Leningrad region from the Nazis and their allies, the NKGB Directorate prepared a “Collection of materials on German devastation and atrocities, the activities of enemy intelligence and counterintelligence agencies in the occupied areas of the region”. A separate section was called “The Church in the Service of the Germans”. It discussed the destruction of monuments of Russian ecclesiastical architecture by the Nazis. Particular attention was paid to various forms of cooperation between Russian priests and the German occupation administration. The collected materials could then be used to initiate criminal cases.