According to the author, vital political philosophy is developed along the paths of overcoming of the gap between names and reality. There is a connection between the external positioning of the power and a state of affairs which may either contradict or correspond the positioning. Now experience of Confucian philosophy may be more instructive for the present-day Russia than the Western experience. Russia is at crossroads. A deep rift has teethed between shibboleths and ‘slogans' the highest ranks use and the deplorable condition of horizontal social ties. And every day this rift is widening and getting deeper. Only change of macro- and micro strategies the political elite pursues may overcome the gap. The elite must acknowledge and recognize how dramatic was the path passed through by Russia in the recent decades. The vital popular political philosophy is a philosophy of action and of meaningful deed.

The situation with the European security is one of the most acute problems in world politics today. Мany European leaders declare about constructing the new Europe that is based on juridically obligatory agreements. This reminds in many ways the 20-years old statements, when an attempt was made to build such a Europe in Paris 1989. The base of that Europe had to be the CFE Treaty, the European Security Treaty and a new agreement on CSBM’s. The author who participated in those negotiations undertakes a systematic and holistic analysis on how this base was build at that time. The readers of the article can themselves make conclusions on the result of the Paris summit.

Training of the population for acceptance of a ‘new world order' presupposes a leveling of human conscience by way of creation of a global and comprehensive religion. Nowadays ‘New Age', an occult and spiritual movement makes a claim for the role of such religion. The distinctive characteristics of ‘New Age' movement are syncretism, pluralistic universalism, and global thinking. Spread of this movement in the Western society is carried on under disguise of various new religious movement and sects activities. In Europe these activities have acquired a threatening scale. In conditions of the European liberal moral tolerance domination occult sects employ flexible and mobile methods of penetration. In fact, the sects are penetrating with all spheres of the social, political and economic life and create a parallel network society. Heading for, first of all, education, science, culture, public health, and informatics the sects also actively integrate in the entrepreneurship and develop close contacts with the business world, the more so because the present-day multinational corporations are increasingly acquiring features of quasi-religious entities. Commonness of basic assumptions chiefs of sects and corporation business elite use in appraising a human personality and their own ultimate goals makes sects reliable economic partners of multinational corporations. Actually, sects borrow from multinational corporations their methods of management and control of individual conscience.

In the Russian historiography studies in the field of technological history are traditionally ‘equidistant' from investigation of its impact on social, economic, and cultural development of a society while foreign historians have investigate interaction between technology and socio-cultural environment which is contemporary to a particular technology. Russia has accepted innovations that came from the West in waves selectively. It should be noted that a series of national development peculiarities proved to act as brakes to introduction of some technological innovations. The countryside turned out to be the least adapted for acceptance of Western technologies. Peasants and landlords were not ready for transition and latter-day methods of agronomics and cattle breeding. A feeling of lagging behind the West engendered a peculiar cultural phenomenon which the author takes liberty to designate as ‘Levshism'. The designation is derived from the name of N. S. Leskov’s short novel hero Levsha, a craftsman from Tula who hacked the English flea.

The author reproduces and comments a set of little known book and epigraphic sources that are used as the basis for a detailed reconstruction of the most ancient phase of the Russian Church organization history. A set of measures aimed at assertion of the church organization autonomous from Byzantium is analyzed by the example of activities and creative works of Lukas Jidyata. The author appraises Lukas as the ally of Ilarion, the autocephalous Metropolitan. Lukas and Ilarion jointly substantiated the sovereign ideology of independent state power and of the Church independent of Greeks. The author concludes that there were contradictory tendencies in interrelationships of the Body of Priesthood and the Temporal Power that resulted in acute fluctuations of Prince Yaroslav the Wise that ended with the autocephaly winding down.

In the first part of the article the author considers reactions of the Czech-Slovak emigration and the Czech public in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia to the negotiations Great Britain, France and the USSR held in summer, 1939, to the Soviet-German non-aggression pact of August 23, 1939, and the drastic twist of the Soviet foreign policy as well as to resulting changes in strategy and tactics of the Communist International. The article is based on archive materials, published documents, memoirs, and on results of the author’s studies of the problem.