The article is a rejoinder to the contemporary demands of the Right radicals that receive certain support of the Russian Orthodox Church. These forces demand a new repentance of the Russian nation under the circumstances of the global crisis. The Right radicals pedal the theme of the tsar’s family shooting and in this connection a new round of de-Bolshevization of the Russian society. It would seem where to and for what this preaching is performed? But the White Truth zealots do not quiet down. Sure, the Russian Orthodox Church as one of the state frameworks of the here-and-now enjoys the right to have its point of view. Finally, the spiritual assessment of the past belongs to people striving to restore the historical justice. However the repentance has two aspects. And what is moral from a preacher’s point of view may by utterly immoral from a politician’s point of view. That happens not because politics is the dirty business a fortiori but because politics has its own logic different from logic of preaching. A new round of repentance is a move which is politically detrimental and dangerous. In the short run it poses a threat to Russia’s political independence. The blockade circle is contracting. In these circumstances manipulation with symbols and values is fraught with new disaster for the Russian people. Is there any use in such preaching?

The present world economic crisis and its diverse influence on the U.S. economic, social and political life make every observer to look after the experience before 1929 when America was a society in which a small number of very rich people controlled a large share of the nation’s wealth and the next wretched years of the Great Depression and bewildering changes brought by Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal. Some economists think the New Deal imposed norms of relative equality in pay that persisted for more than 30 years, creating a broadly middleclass society. Those norms have not survived being replaced by an ethos of the superrich, the genuine core of the reaganism. Princeton economist Paul Krugman showed that the country’s economic disparities are as stark today as they were in the 1920's and that the effort devoted to maintaining that inequality leads directly to a deep poverty, underconsumption and in the end to the second edition of the Great Depression. He concludes his forecast with a grim warning: either democracy must be renewed or wealth and its political fellow-champions are likely to cement a new and less democratic regime. The Obama’s phenomen is considered by the author in the corresponding context.

The article provides an analysis of Japan’s image that Tokyo was projecting in the countries of the West in the Meiji era (1868−1912), mainly on the eve and during the Russo-Japanese war. The negative character of Japan’s image in the West («yellow peril») was recognised as one of the major security threats for the country, especially in war conditions, and an energetic public relations campaign was launched to improve it. The article explores the core elements of this «constructed image» and image-making techniques. Finally, it considers the implication of the ambition to create this «desired» image for Japanese foreign policy.

The author examines Stalin’s attitude to tsar Ivan the Terrible as it was revealed and evolved in debate with film-maker Serge Eisenstein. Traditionally it is presumed that the point of view expressed by the leader of the Bolshevist party was unique Stalin as the creator of the Great Terror simply liked tsar Ivan and his cruelties. The author argues that this interpretation is wrong. Stalin did not express any unique point of view. He just repeated what Soviet historians wrote not just in their general works but also in textbooks. Traditionally it is accepted that Sergey Eisenstein, the creator of ‘Ivan the Terrible' movie expressed the view which was quite typical for his time. However the author argues that the film-maker's position differed from the conventional scientific explanation of Ivan the Terrible reign. Stalin refused to add any psychological motives to Ivan’s image and deeds and presented him as the embodiment of the objective process of the Russian national state formation. Stalin was quite satisfied conventional positions of historians as well as content of textbooks that formed the stable stereotype of Ivan the Terrible epoch perception. Stalin did not abandon dialectics. Therefore he did not disclaim the tsar’s cruelty or atrocities. According to Stalin, any super-task is more important than instruments and ways of its attainment and efficiency expiates ‘subjective' errors. While Eisenstein emphasized contradictions inherent to the tsar Stalin was strong in stating the facts that were obvious for the contemporary historical sciences. As a big artist Eisenstein could not please the power to the full, he was more sympathetic to pre-revolutionary historians. Beneath collisions of Ivan the Terrible Eisenstein guessed a Shakespearian psychological drama. So ideology and creative work ran against each other.

The confessional dimension of the ‘my own / alien' opposition is one of the principal factors of self-identification. This peculiarity is most vividly manifested in multiethnic and multiconfessional areas where the tradition of Christian Slav population’s neighborhood with representatives of other religions persisted for centuries. Regions where the field studies were carried out (from Bukovina to Grodno region) are exemplary in this respect because Orthodox Christians, Catholics, adherents of Eastern rite Roman Catholicism, and Jews resided in close neighborhood in such regions for a long time (up to World War II). Experience of direct neighborhood could not but leave traces in the popular perceptions of ethnic neighbors' faith and religious rites. Image of a minister in the popular world picture acquires folklore and mythological features.

This year, it will be exactly 20 years since the opening of the border between the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany that took place on 9 November 1989. The world saw in this event mainly the «fall» of the Berlin Wall that for 28 years had divided East Berlin, the capital of GDR, from West Berlin that maintained the nature of a territory occupied by the victorious powers of World War II. The legal status of the border between the sectors in Berlin, theoretically considered to be within quadrilateral responsibility, was not equal to the status of the «Germano-German» border, which, from the outset, had been the border between the autonomous zones of occupation, that in 1949 became (with a number of caveats) independent states. The inclusion of the Berlin sector border in the decision taken by the GDR authorities in November 1989 to liberalise the regime of the crossing of the border with FRG by East Germans was an unforgivable international-law mistake that resulted in serious domestic political problems. By midnight 9 November, the situation at the Berlin Wall border-crossing points became explosive: crowds of GDR citizens demanded to be allowed to cross to West Berlin, while the border guards had not yet received any clarifications of the new border regime. Those dramatic events that nearly degenerated into armed violence are described in the journal notes of the then Minister-Counsellor of the USSR Embassy in Berlin that are complemented by the memoirs of other participants and eye-witnesses of this turning point in post-war history of Europe.