The article examines the phenomenon of communication between the religious dissident movement of Russian Protestants led by the Evangelical Christian-Baptist Churches Council and power in the Brezhnev era. "Letters to power" of believers and documents of the Council for Religious Affairs under the Council of Ministers of the USSR for 1964-1982 reflect the formation of a new model of interaction between the Soviet authorities and Protestant organizations. Protestants reacted sharply to any restrictions of religious freedoms addressing collective written appeals to both the Soviet authorities and international organizations. As a result, "letters to power" have turned into an effective tool for public protection of the rights of believers. The authorities in turn closely monitored appeals of believers and reacted to them in order to correct state religious policy in a certain way.

The article describes the history of Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union in the first half of the 1970s. The desire of the Soviet leadership to limit the opportunities for emigration, especially for those people who got higher education, led to a confrontation with the USA. On the basis of archival documents, including the notes from the L.I.Brezhnev's personal diary, we can examine the pragmatic policy of the General Secretary of the CPSU which was aimed at continuing the «détente», taking into consideration the «Jewish question».

Paraphrasing Napoleon’s well-known statement that «politics is destiny», one could assert that economy became destiny of Volga Germans. The adoption of backward farming methods made disappear specific features of this population group, causing its factual «economic assimilation» or, so to speak, «economic acculturation» until early 20th century. As a result, the Volga German peasantry faced, during the 1905 Russian’s revolution and the years of the Stolypin agrarian reform, the very same problems and conflicts as their Russian counterparts. If they opted to evade the challenge of modernisation (e.g. by emigration) instead of meeting it in the same radical way, it was solely due to their status as a non-Russian-speaking national minority.