The author analyzes the peculiar way of political behavior which requires detaching ideals and motivations connected with them from a social system. Stability and soundness of a society depend on presence of ideals in this society. A system can be destroyed by employment of its inherent properties. It is very much like destruction of a bridge by a detachment marching in step. The author detects the cause of the USSR state collapse disaster precisely in initiation of the war against ideals of socialism and the ideal in general. In particular, this process activated certain syndrome which had been generated by the Western intellectuals' encounter with the Nazi ideology. During WW2 the pathology of the Nazi ideals system could be stopped only by the opposite wave of the Soviet society’s ideal. The regrettable format of our reality is explained by erosion of the Soviet ideals and lack of any other intelligible ideal.

What were the mysteries of German unification and how the policy was working out in Moscow and Washington in the end of 1989 when it had become clear that unification was inevitable? The author, who was at that time the Soviet ambassador and the USSR representative at the Viena negotiations on European security and reduction of the conventional armed forces in Europe, gives the answers on these questions based on his diaries of that time and new Soviet and Western declassified documents. The essay based on facts discovers such a picture. By that time the USA and FRG had taken the firm position that the unification was inevitable and as soon as possible. Moreover, the United Germany had to be in NATO. But a disorder prevailed in the Kremlin where different positions were advanced. Gorbachev had chosen the policy of “nothing to do”, obviously not making up his mind to take responsibility on himself and hoping that everything would be settled by history if not in 100 years but in no case during his life. And so he had taken a two –faced position. Depending on his interlocutors he told one that we had not to loose GDR in any case, and to the other that any country had the right to choose its own way.

The idea to dissolve the Comintern started to ripen since spring of 1941 but after German attack on the USSR it was forgotten for a while. The Soviet leadership revived to the idea in May, 1943, when it took pains to strengthen cooperation within anti-Hitlerite coalition and to provide for consolidation of all anti-Nazi forces in their struggle against Nazi Germany. Functions of the dissolved Comintern were vested in International information Department of the All-Union Communist Party Central Committee. Until his departure to Bulgaria in autumn, 1945, the Department was headed by G. Dimitrov who presided over the body actually at first and later on officially. Prior to his leave for Bulgaria Dimitrov renounced his Soviet citizenship. While in charge of the most important state and Party positions in Bulgaria Dimitrov often visited the USSR for medical treatment and kept the permanent contact with Stalin whose instructions Dimitrov took as guidance.

The diary of Prince V.M.Golitsyn, a Moscow liberal public figure contains diversified information on life of Moscow and Russia in pre-revolutionary years. This valuable source also allows making an opinion on the personality of Golitsyn. In spite of his aristocratic ancestry Golitsyn’s views made him closer to bourgeois circles than to the gentry. From the diary a researcher may derive new data on the progressists' party which emerged before WWI and on progressism as a social-cultural phenomenon. Golitsyn’s reflections covered a wide range of problems that excited him and his contemporaries. These included social, political, moral problems. Taken together, observations and opinions of Golitsyn create a multi-dimensional picture of the Russian reality of the early 1900s with all its inherent principal antagonisms.

In the final part of his article the author seeks for studying the evolution of canonical Christian ideas, common for medieval Russian literature, in some famous sources of the 17th century. Two autobiographical Lives of the first ideologists of the Old Belief schism, archpriest Avvakum and coenobite Epiphany, written in Pustozersk earthen prison, prove to present two different models of relations between man and God. While Avvakum followed the traditional hagiographical patterns in descriptions of miracles that had happened to him, Epiphany created a story, filled with bright ideas that appear to be both typical and new for the Old Russian literature. The phenomenon originally reflects the process of evolution that kept altering medieval Russian culture throughout the «transitional» century.

Using oral versions of the Armenian folk epic ‘David of Sassoun' the author explores the first part of the epic which contains the narrative on birth from the rock of two ancestors of the Sassoun tribe heroes. Details given in these oral versions allow diving deep into mythological sources of this episode. These sources can be traced back to the most ancient periods of the Armenian nation formation and, at same time, have much in common with mythology of neighboring peoples and even of ancient Slavs. The author demonstrates that legends that emerged around the Armenian St. Grigor Narekats’i, are not just permeated with these mythological images but, in their turn, brought to bear mutual influence on the further development of the epic itself.