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The First Kamchatka Expedition by Commander Bering # 300 years of the geographical discoveries under St. Andrew’s flag

Fri, 15 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0300

After the victorious end of the Great Northern War (1700–1721) with the Kingdom of Sweden, which the Russian Tsardom fought in coalition with states of Northern Europe, Peter I expanded the borders of Russia from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean. Meanwhile, Siberia as well as the entire northeastern part of the newly formed Russian Empire remained terra incognita. The expansion necessitated systematic geographical and naturalistic research over a vast area, mapping of the shores of the new empire, and laying down a marker of Russian presence at the convergence of Asia and North America. This task was entrusted to a geographical mission that was sent eastward to the ocean by order of Peter I under the commandership of Captain Vitus Bering. This mission was called the First Kamchatka Expedition

Genrikh Manizer: “It’s Decided! This Year I Am Embarking on a Global Journey” # Revisiting the Second Russian Expedition to South America after 110 Years (1914–1915)

Fri, 15 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0300

Plentiful documents stored by St. Petersburg Branch of the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences also include small and obscure personal collections, which, nevertheless, relate to great personalities and might tell incredible stories. One such collection contains documents attributed to Genrikh Genrikhovich Manizer. Passed away under twenty-eight years of age, this talented and versatile man had shown himself as an ethnographer, anthropologist, linguist, traveler, as well as a musician and artist. His principal and most meaningful achievement in his short yet fulfilling life was his participation in the Second Russian Expedition to South America, which began several months before the First World War

Vsevolod Roborovskii: Spy and Scholar Tracing Hidden Trails of Asia

Fri, 15 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0300

Vsevolod Ivanovich Roborovskii belongs to the heroic cohort of Russian pioneering explorers of the late 19th – early 20th centuries. At that time, European geographers still knew very little of Mongolia, Western China, and Tibet, with the latter being an actual terra incognita. The Russian explorers of Central (Inner) Asia transcended their roles as mere travelers and researchers; they served simultaneously as military officers and emissaries of the Russian Empire. The name of Roborovskii bears close ties to the famous names of Nikolai M. Przhevalskii, who laid the foundation for the scientific study of this vast region, and Petr K. Kozlov. Unfortunately, a serious illness took Roborovskii out of action and led to his early death. Today we seek to revive the memory of this outstanding yet presently overlooked explorer, for whom journeys to distant lands were “not only a form but also the meaning of life”

Books of the Old House # A Portrait of Russia’s Most Important Library

Fri, 26 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0300

Today, in our Bookshelf section, we focus on the inner workings of our country’s most important library, i. e., the Russian State Library (RSL), known from 1925 to 1992 as the USSR Lenin State Library, or simply Leninka. Among dozens of millions of printed and handwritten publications, the RSL, one of the world’s largest libraries, keeps a lot of children’s books. This publication was inspired by the interactive exhibition “Books of the Old House: Childhood World in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries,” which ran from October 23, 2018, to March 3, 2019, in the library’s Ivanovsky Hall

WANGFUJING: A Story of One Street

Sat, 01 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0300

What is a street? It is a passage between two rows of buildings for walking or driving through – an academic dictionary is, as always, laconic. While most of the streets are just ordinary ones, some deserve to be written with a capital ‘S’. Broadway in New York and Arbat in Moscow, Champs Elysees in Paris and Deribasovskaya in Odessa, Nevsky Prospekt in St. Petersburg, Khreshchatyk in Kiev, Piccadilly in London…

The list of great streets in the most famous and visited cities around the world strikes imagination, and so do their appearances, which differ as much as the faces and languages of the tourists who are filling them. But all these streets have one thing in common – being a quintessence of national spirit, they are essentially cosmopolitan and serve as global “crossroads,” where people of different nationalities and cultures can get to know one another better and feel themselves to be part of a single humanity.

An exploration now awaits the reader, a guided tour of the past and present of Wangfujing, the most ancient and famous trading street in Beijing, a face-to-face meeting spot for tradition and modernity, for the mysterious East and the pragmatic West. And the role of the guides is assumed by Novosibirsk academics, who have repeatedly shared on the pages of our magazine their travel impressions of China, our great neighbor with a history of more than three thousand years

The Fellowship of the Ring # Burial Mounds of the Katanda Valley

Fri, 26 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0300

Archaeological expeditions are always unpredictable, and it goes beyond their results. After traveling with her husband, an archaeologist, Agatha Christie wrote: “All digging is a gamble <…>. Luck is the predominant factor.” Not only the outcome is unpredictable but life itself: What will it be like? What will the camp and the team be like? In the summer of 2020, we, the South Altai Team of the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography SB RAS, managed to escape the world of COVID-19 masks into the wilderness of the Altai Mountains to conduct excavations near the Katanda Kurgan, a well-known burial site of the Pazyryk culture. The mound we excavated turned out to be more than 2000 years older...

A Sealed History

Sat, 01 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0300

In our lives we all have to deal with numerous seals and stamps. Primitive communities could place a certification stamp directly on one’s body in the form of a tattoo; a more civilized society could put it on a document. In fact, animal tracks on wet soil, the ones followed by Pleistocene hunters and their Holocene descendants, served as natural seal imprints that certified the virtual presence of the creature that had left them. An example of humans coming into awareness of this phenomenon might be the handprints found on the walls of caves (e. g., Cueva de las Manos, or the Cave of the Hands, in the south of Argentina), which can be interpreted as a personal sign of the individual who left the imprint, i. e., as that person’s substitute or stamp. The earliest examples of actual seals and stamps appeared in the Near and Middle East and gradually spread to the territories of modern China and Japan. In the new issue of SCIENCE First Hand, our regular authors from the SB RAS Institute of Archeology and Ethnography in Novosibirsk, attempt to consider this phenomenon using examples from the history of the Far Eastern civilization

To the Arctic in a Balloon # A Discovery in the Archive Collection of the Polar Commission

Fri, 26 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0300

To the Arctic in a balloon… This idea possessed the minds of many European researchers in the late 19th century. Even today, when we know a lot about the Arctic and tourists can travel to the North Pole by icebreaker, a balloon flight over the vast Arctic Ocean seems a bold adventure. In the past, only the bravest ones could even dream of such a mission. Although the amazing flight to the North Pole made by Swedish polar explorer Salomon Andrée in the summer of 1897 ended in a tragedy, daring scientists and explorers continued to make plans for conquering the Arctic

The Various Colors of Jade

Sat, 01 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0300

Even early humans, on the eve of evolution, desired to decorate themselves with ornaments made of rare materials (be it boar fangs, shark teeth, or ostrich feathers). In the Stone Age, as befits the epoch, colorful minerals were especially well-liked. Suffice it to recall a find from Layer 11 in Denisova Cave—a bracelet of dark green chloritolite, dated to about 30 000 years before present (Derevyanko, Shunkov, and Volkov, 2008). It seems that people of those days must have already developed an aesthetic perception of such things (“It really looks good!”). What is beyond doubt is that the decorations meant prestige and high status, as evidenced by a large body of ethnographic data. Another practical—from the perspective of traditional culture—purpose of colored stones is their magical effect as amulets, including for the treatment and prevention of diseases as well as hex and evil eye. Publications on these topics swarm all over the Internet, but in this case home-grown astrologers and healers illicitly exploit truly ancient beliefs

China, diverse and eternal

Sat, 01 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0300

Nearly all of our frequent and diverse trips to China have dealt with working on long-term research projects supported by the Russian Scienitfic Fund for Human Studies, and later the Russian Fund for Basic Research. Of all these brief travel notes, we will focus on some of our priority subjects…

The town and the dogs (La ciudad y los perros): the Chinese version

Sat, 01 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0300

Leizhou is a small (not only by the Chinese, but by Russian measure too) cozy town in the far south of China, which looks exactly like hundreds of other coastal towns and villages. There is a difference though – many centuries ago it was captured by a myriad of stone dogs. They peer out of bushes growing near bridges, wells and crossroads, guard the still of the cemeteries, but mostly bunch together in parks and gardens. Over 10,000 sculptures of dogs were found in and around the town (Chen Zhijian, 2008). The authors went on a visit to these remarkable stone kennels urged by their extensive study on the role of dogs in the Chinese material and spiritual culture