Academic literature on the topic 'Coins, Soviet'

In the framework of the New Economic Policy (NEP) and the currency reform of 1922-1924 the USSR currency was introduced, which was fully convertible into gold. Actually, the reform was supposed to re-introduce the old gold currency, which was in circulation in the Russian Empire before the beginning of the WWI. New Soviet copper and silver coins had the same metrological parameters as the corresponding coins before the war. Banknotes were really convenient abroad duringr 1924-1927 years and freely exchanged for other currencies, but promised to free convertibility of banknotes for gold coins has never been implemented. The reason of that was the golden blockade of the USSR and the refusal to accept these coins in the West. For this reason, the old 10-ruble coins with the portrait of Tsar Nicholas II had to continue to be minted. However, there are also internal reasons which prevented the planned exchange rate of the gold coins. The regulatory quota for issuing government bills for 500 million gold rubles was soon exceeded twice, which triggered the development of inflation. On October 1, 1926, the free export of banknotes abroad was prohibited, and in 1928 – also free entry into the USSR. Thus, the free convertibility of the new Soviet currency was abolished, and the Soviet currency became only internal. In this article we review and analyze internal instruction, which stated quite openly that the promised guarantees on new bank notes convertible into gold is in reality only a tactical maneuver relatively to other countries. From August 1, 1926, free export of the Soviet currency was prohibited in foreign countries and in 1928 it’s import from abroad. The Soviet government at that time has made some effort to foreigners who were in the USSR and were carrying Soviet money legally, they can freely convert. At the same time, this effort can be seen as an indication of the responsibility of the Soviet authorities for those who in a very short time provided free convertibility of the Soviet currency. This is evident from the passports of Czechoslovak citizens who have been visiting the USSR for 30 years. Whether its owners are not in the USSR, they were close to Soviet entry visa with a special stamp, followed by the Czech text: "Import and transfer of Soviet currency on the territory of the USSR provided to August 1, 1926". From the results obtained to date from the old passports it is not clear how the Soviet embassy began to give these stamps in the passports. Trips in the USSR were quite rare for foreigners in the interwar period. Exchange of foreign currencies in the USSR was very unprofitable for foreigners in the second half of the 1930's. However, the amount of the money received in rubles, had a much lower purchasing power than the equivalent amount in exchange currency abroad. Accordingly, in the Polish border areas of the USSR, the Soviet currency was offered much cheaper on the black market. But modern authors have noted that any purchase of Soviet money was very risky, as black markets were well controlled by the Soviet secret services. Consequently, all these documents show that the Soviet currency was very uncertain in the interwar period.

Construction of the Church of the Icon of the Mother of God, “The Life-Giving Spring,” was completed in 2008. The church was built next to a small spring that has been venerated by the local population since the 19th century. A large number of coins from the 19th and 20th centuries were discovered in the bed of this spring. These coins serve as evidence that local people have venerated this spring throughout the imperial and Soviet periods. In the 19th century, the official Church imposed strict control over popular Orthodox traditions. Yet, at the beginning of the 20th century, the Turkestan Diocesan Committee decided to recognize the veneration of the spring. In the Soviet period, very little documentary evidence of this tradition was preserved, but this evidence suggests that popular Orthodox practices were far more widespread than commonly assumed.

The article is dedicated to the history of one of the largest and most well-known academic numismatic collection of Russian Empire - the Coins cabinet of the University of St. Volodymyr. It was created in 1834 by combining collections from educational institutions closed after the Polish uprising of 1830-31. Over the years this institution gathered a collection of more than 60,000 coins and medals. During its existence, it was overseen by: P. Yarkovsky, M. Yakubovich, A. Krasovsky, Ya. Voloshinsky, K. Strashkevich, V. Ikonnikov, V. Antonovich, Y. Kulakovsky, P. Smirnov. The collection was studied by such famous numismatists as H. Mazurkevich, E. Gutten-Chapsky, B. Dorn, A. Kunnik, I. Tolstoy, Y. Iversen, M. Bilyashevsky, K. Bolsunovsky and others. The work on the collection of the Coins cabinet produced a number of numismatic scientists who made a significant contribution to the development of numismatic science - Y. Voloshinsky. K. Strashkevich, V. Antonovich, M. Bilyashevsky, K. Bolsunovsky. Because of the work of these scientists Kyiv became one of the centers of numismatic research. They have a credit for a considerable amount of fundamental works on numismatics, the discovery of new coins. During Soviet times in the 1920's, University of St. Volodymyr was reorganized into the Institute of People's Education. The outstanding numismatic collection was considered unnecessary for this institution. Since 1924 the collection was under the control of Ukrainian Archeological Commission at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. For 20-30 years Ukrainian Archeological Commission has been trying to find a place for coin repositories and create a numismatics museum based on this collection. Unfortunately, these plans have not been implemented. After a decade of transfers and calamities, the numismatic collection of the university was given to the Central Historical Museum. As a separate collection - the Mints cabinet of the University of St. Volodymyr ceased to exist.

Combining ideas from cultural studies, psychoanalysis, and literary criticism, this essay proposes an interdisciplinary approach to the emerging field of post-Soviet memory studies. Sociological polls demonstrate that approximately one-fourth of Russians remember that their relatives were victims of terror, yet the existing monuments, museums, and rituals are inadequate to commemorate these losses. In this economy of memory, ghosts and monsters become a prominent subject of post-Soviet culture. The incomplete work of mourning turns the unburied dead into the undead. Analyzing Russian novels and films of the last decade, Alexander Etkind emphasizes the radical distortions of history, semihuman creatures, fantastic cults, manipulations of the body, and circular time that occur in these fictional works. To account for these phenomena, Etkind coins the concept “magical historicism” and discusses its relation to the magical realism of postcolonial literatures. The memorial culture of magical historicism is not so much postmodern as it is, precisely, post-Soviet.

The purpose of the article is the analysis of the main parts of the state protecting politics over the process of the coins and banknotes counterfeiting in Russian Empire. Research methods: analytical, synthetic, logical, retrospective, mathematical and illustrative. Main results. The article reveals the processes of coins and banknote counterfeiting in the Russian Empire referred to the material from state historical archives, official government laws and pre-Soviet periodicals (newspapers). The authors paid main attention to the question of state policy against money counterfeiting that includes legislative analyses of that time, in particular Conclusion of Criminal Punishment and Penitentiary, issues of 1845s and 1866s, Monetary Statute, issue of 1857 as well as nominal imperial edicts, regulations and manifestos of Senate as to forgery counteractions and coins protection, published in Complete Edition of Collected Laws in the Russian Empire. Practical significance. The material presented in the article will allow a thorough analysis of the aspect of counterfeiting money in Ukraine in the imperial period. Originality. The corpus of analyzed sources allowed us to form conclusions as to efficiency state in fighting politics against money forgery in Russian Empire in the 19th and the beginning of 20th century. The perspective of the further research we see in the widening of sources base that will help us to conduct deeper aspect analyses on money forgery in Ukraine as part of Russian Empire. Scientific novelty. The basic constituents of public policy are considered in relation to a fight against forgery counteractions, which is population informing of imitations appearance with the list of their signs; implementation of investigation features based upon population encouragement to the malefactors’ exposure; state expert assessment implementation of suspicious and forged money extracted during the investigation; legal procedure and punishment for committed crimes in money and banknotes counterfeiting; in investigation cases of State Archives Fund some unknown before facts within state fight against money counterfeiting have been found and a new stamp on physical evidence has been implemented into the scientific circulation, the absence reasons for money and loan-bills forgery in the Fund of State Museums have been estimated. The research is based upon unknown sources, most of which have been implemented into the scientific circulation for the first time. Analyses of legislative system of that time against money forgery, peculiarities of investigation, trial and sentence helped us to find out some misconceptions in factual decisions from those, fixed in laws and layouts. Article type: analytical.

Among the objects excavated in 1978 at the site of Tillya Tepe (Northern Afghanistan) by the Soviet-Afghan archaeological expedition led by Victor I. Sarianidi, the twin golden clasps from Burial III attract special and instant attention of any military historian or a researcher of ancient arms and armour. The identity of the personage(-s) on the Tillya Tepe clasps has quite rarely been studied. Scholars are usually satisfied with a generic term a “warrior”. Kazim Abdullaev has identified the personage as Ares-Alexander. Jeannine Davis-Kimball has identified the personage as Enaree, the castrated priest of one of the epiphanies of Great Goddess. Patryk Skupniewicz supported the latter identification associating the personages from Tillya Tepe clasps with the North Indian, mainly Gandharan iconography of Skanda Kartikeya who, as a war-god, was an Indian equivalent of Ares. This article establishes the correspondence between the images on Tillya Tepe clasps with the representations of enthroned and armed goddesses which are quite common in the iconography related to the discussed clasps. The armed and enthroned goddess has been identified as the Iranian goddess Arshtat on Kushan coins. The warrior depicted on the golden clasps from Tillya Tepe should be interpreted as a portrayal of Arshtat, whose image was borrowed from the iconography of Athena. The goddess is shown seated on the throne with griffin-shaped legs known already in the Achaemenid times in the pose developed in the images in the late Hellenistic period, which is in line with the date of the entire site.

Abstract In late 1956, the United Nations (UN) faced a remarkable test, as the Soviet Union invaded and crushed a burgeoning rebellion in Hungary, then a Soviet satellite. After the Soviet Union disregarded repeated UN calls to withdraw, the UN General Assembly established, in January 1957, a Commission of Inquiry (COI) to investigate the crisis. This article explores the forgotten story of the Special Committee on Hungary as a case study for the effects of COIs. This commission is of special interest for several reasons. Namely, it was one of the first mandated by a UN body to investigate a specific conflict, not least a Cold War struggle, in which a superpower was directly involved. Furthermore, it was clear from the beginning that the Committee was not likely to compel, in itself, the Soviet Union to change its behaviour. Moreover, 1956 was a time of global political transformation, as the non-aligned movement emerged as a key player in UN politics and, accordingly, became a target in the Cold War battle for influence. Under such circumstances, the effects of COIs are complex and difficult to gauge. While the Committee did not lead to the Soviet Union’s withdrawal from Hungary, it had many unforeseen and conflicting effects. These are grouped into two categories – effects relating mainly to times of ideological conflict and political transformation and effects that relate to parallel multilateral efforts and institutional dynamics. Among other effects, the article demonstrates how, under such political circumstances, COIs can create new points of contention and cause backlash precisely from those that they seek to influence. Having cascading and conflicting effects, the central conclusion is that COIs do not lend themselves easily to clean and linear theories. Recognition of the field’s inherent complexity is therefore needed in any attempt to study this international phenomenon.

The Prose (and Cons) of Vodka Drawing extensively on his own first-hand experience as someone who came of age during the prolonged “stagnation” of the Brezhnev years, and then witnessed the upheavals of perestroika and the breakup of the Soviet Union under Gorbachev and the wild-West capitalism of the 1990s under Yeltsin, the writer and journalist Dmitrii Stakhov explores the changing fortunes of vodka, Russia’s “alcoholic drink No. 1,” and its enduring significance as a symbol, “cultural yardstick,” and economic unit of exchange over the last quarter of a century in this hard-drinking and hard-pressed nation. Stakhov’s essay details Russians’ long love affair with vodka, as well their sometimes dangerous dalliances with various vodka substitutes (often of unknown or highly dubious origin) and their more recent infatuation, in a new era of seemingly unlimited consumer choice, with other, more manifestly “Western” alcoholic drinks (whiskey, beer, wine). Stakhov suggests that the recent shifts in drinking habits in Russia (with Russians developing more discriminating and highbrow tastes) has in certain important ways entailed a loss of cultural values and a diminished sense of community and camaraderie. No one looks after the local drunk any more, and no one is interested any longer in going in on the proverbial “threesome” of Soviet times (a bottle of vodka split three ways): now it is a Darwinian world of “every man for himself.” For better or worse the old poetry and mythos of vodka, Stakhov concludes, has died, replaced instead by the harsher (and less interesting) prose of the free market.

The Soviet system of knowledge production based on cooperation, knowledge sharing, but also intense competition was already an inspiration for innovation policymakers in the U.S. and in Europe back in the 1950 and 1960s. Nowadays, as the global economy is moving towards a new mode of production, the Soviet case may still play an important role to help to frame a better institutional approach to innovation. With the dramatic challenges already brought by the fourth industrial revolution and the tectonic economic and social shifts it is expected to cause around the world, the Soviet case with all its pros and cons is becoming more and more relevant for this debate as it provides necessary empirical data to consider other institutional approaches to innovation distinct from the established property-focused model. In this context, intellectual property and competition law scholars hopefully would better understand the Soviet innovation system through further academic studies.

This paper’s core concern is Boris Groys’ theory of the total art of Stalinism, which is devoted to rewriting Soviet art history and reinterpreting Socialist Realism from the perspective of the equal rights between political and artistic Art Power. The aim of this article is to decode Groys and the total art of Stalinism, based on answering the following three questions: 1) why did Groys want to rewrite Soviet art history? 2) How did Groys re-narrate Soviet art history? 3) What are the pros and cons of his reordering of the total art of Stalinism? Groys offers an effective paradigm that could rethink two theoretical genres: a) other Socialist Realisms inside or outside the Soviet bloc, during or after the Soviet era; b) the aesthetical rights of political artworks before, during and after the Cold War, and the historical debates about art, especially about art for art’s sake, or art for political propaganda. However, Groys’ total art of Stalinism and its core theory of the Socialist Realism frame hides some dangers of aestheticizing Stalin and Stalinism.

The relationship between Soviet power and the musical life of the nation is usually viewed in terms of the domination of the latter by their former. This paper considers the other side of the coin: how Soviet power could act as an enabler to those whose predilections and personalities made for a propitious adaptation to the regime and its affordances.