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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

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...

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

Medieval Lübeck: Harmony Within, Peace Outside # Displaced archival treasures from Hanseatic cities in Tomsk

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0300

The German city of Lübeck – the center of the Hanseatic League, a major medieval trade and economic coalition known as the First European Union, – and Tomsk, the oldest city of Siberia, stand by more than 4500 km and centuries of history apart. Back in 2011, the author of this article fortuitously discovered that the library of Tomsk State University keeps a small collection of medieval Western European manuscripts, which arrived in Siberia by a circuitous route as part of “displaced cultural valuables” after the end of World War II. The most precious part of this collection is city books and documents from the Archive of Lübeck dated to the centuries of the zenith of the Hanseatic League. By studying these materials we can learn more about the life and social structure of medieval society, which displays quite a few historical parallels with the present times

The Pazyryk Patient # A “frozen” burial on the Ukok Plateau stands as evidence of the skill of ancient surgeon

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0300

It happens sometimes that ancient burials that required much time and effort to excavate do not become the subject of further research or merit separate publication. One such forgotten site is the “frozen” burial of a woman discovered in mound 2 at Verkh-Kaldzhin 2, a Pazyryk burial ground on the Ukok Plateau in the Altai Mountains. Although the wooden frame was encapsulated in a lens of ice capable of preserving objects made of organic materials, not a single item was found within it. As the burial did not fit into the Pazyryk culture framework, it went “unclaimed.” But today the atypical nature of the burial is what arouses interest among researchers; moreover, a computed tomography scan of the buried woman’s skull revealed traces of a brilliantly performed maxillofacial surgery – evidence of the astonishing skill of ancient surgeons

To the Arctic in a Balloon. Flight to Severnaya Zemlya

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0300

This publication is the final one in a “trilogy” dedicated to the daring scientific idea to explore the vast expanses of the Arctic using dirigibles, or steerable airships. This idea had captivated European scientists since the late 19th century, but it was only the beginning of the second quarter of the 20th century that saw all the necessary components for the success of this mission finally coming together: impressive achievements in science and technology and a peace, albeit short-lived, that had settled over the Northern Hemisphere. Nevertheless, none of the countries was able to fulfill such a mission on its own. This bold endeavor required the combined efforts of scientists and specialists from different countries, including Soviet Russia, united under the banner of the Aeroarctic – the International Society for the Exploration of the Arctic Regions by Means of the Airship

Academician Dobretsov: Ideas and People