This article discusses the underlying reasons for the start of the U.S. military operation in Iraq in 2003. It analyzes the key ideological, energy, economic, and political aspects that led the Bush Jr. administration to decide to invade the Iraqi state. The authors examine the influence of neoconservative figures, the role of oil, and the official motives of the White House. The article concludes the discrepancy between the declared American reasons for overthrowing Saddam Hussein's regime and the most likely drivers of the military operation.

The early 40s of the 19th century were marked by the growth of anti-Russian sentiments in Europe. It provoked a number of retaliatory measures from the Russian government. The article discusses one of the “projects” for the formation of a positive image of Russia in Germany, proposed by the poet, publicist and diplomat F. I. Tyutchev. We are talking about a note on the organization of pro-Russian propaganda in the German press, presented by Tyutchev to the head of the III Department A. H. Benckendorf in the autumn of 1843.

The article examines the causes, course and results of the Greek-Russian conflict that arose in the first half of the 1870s in the Athos St. Panteleimon Monastery. It is shown that the conflict was caused by the aggravation of a number of contradictions between different ethnic communities in the monastery itself, the general rise in the Greek environment of anti-Slavic and anti-Russian sentiments caused by Russia's position in the Greek-Bulgarian church issue, as well as the actions of British diplomacy which sought to weaken Russian influence in the Balkans and the Middle East. The article considers the emergence of the New Athos Simon-Cananite Monastery in the Caucasus, which became one of the results of the «Greek-Russian Panteleimon process».

The article deals with the analysis of the satirical images of Turkey in Russian satirical journals at the beginning of the XXth century, in the epoch when the Romanovs and Ottoman empires suffered of the acute social and political crises connected with the process of rapid state modernization. On the base of narrative and visual sources of the leading satirical magazines of that time the author discovers an interesting phenomenon: Russian satirical journalist’s criticism on the “Ottoman renewal” became a kind of mirror for the perception and estimation of the entire situation in Russian empire on the eve of the century of wars and revolutions. The “gender” images in the satirical interpretation of Turkey in this context demonstrate an “orientalist” specificity of the critical rhetorics in the address of the “Southern neighbor”.

The article is devoted to the history of relations between Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna and the head of the Moscow municipality K.V.Rukavishnikov. They collaborated in the field of charity from 1893 to 1915. Elizabeth Fеdorovna and her husband Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich provided Rukavishnikov a patronage of the royal couple, which led to his cooperation with Empress Alexandra Fеdorovna in the charitable sphere. The closest contacts between Elizabeth Feodorovna and Rukavishnikov occurred in 1900–1905, when he headed two organizations of the Grand Duchess: the Elisabeth Charitable Society and the Commission for accommodation of wounded soldiers, evacuated from the Far East. After 1905, Elizabeth Fedorovna repeatedly turned to Rukavishnikov for help in developing the strategic programs of her new organizations. In fact, Rukavishnikov can be called the mentor of the Grand Duchess.

The presented fragment of memoirs describes the adolescent years spent by the author after the end of the war in the Zaporozhye region. This narrative includes living with relatives in Pologi, staying in an orphanage in Kamenka Dneprovskaya and studying at the Zaporozhye Technical School of Agricultural Engineering. The text contains a number of everyday sketches, as well as episodes from the life of the young man, reflecting the stages of his growing up.

The article examines the problems of the relationship between the party and state authorities and the Soviet cinematic intelligentsia. The research focuses on the processes of control and censorship, repressive and informational and ideological impact on the largest cultural figures and workers in the film industry. It is shown that the selected chronological segment has conditionally symbolic boundaries. Conclusions are made about the functioning of the following methods and forms of control: institutional diversity, social mobilization, politicization of everyday life and media space. Their system-wide and universal-longterm, metahistorical nature of their application is substantiated. Their intensity influenced the state of modern collective / social memory and the perception of films that had a high ideological and artistic value, but indirectly contributed to the idealization of the Stalinist era in scientific historiography and public consciousness.

The era of Ivan the Terrible, complex and contradictory, like the personality of the tsar himself, has always attracted the attention of historians. Over the past decades, specialists of various professions have been actively working in the historical field. Their interest in history is associated primarily with the topic of corruption which has emerged since the end of the 20th century an immutable fact of real life. The study of corruption has emerged as an independent research area – corruptionology. Unfortunately, work in this area is often based on questionable information gleaned from the Internet. A new history of Russia is being created, written without studying the sources and knowledge of the era, without taking into account the results of the work of many generations of historians. This also applies to the reign of Ivan the Terrible.

The article is devoted to the problem of the development of party culture. It analyzes various trends that affect the growth of non-partisanship and voter distrust. One of them is party ideology. In the context of accelerating globalization, borders are blurring between different party ideologies. In Europe, left-wing parties are uniting with populists, lowering their reputation to a minimum. They also promote immoral and utopian initiatives to the masses that undermine the foundations of the existence of society and interest in any ideology that unites people of different statuses. This process can lead to the degradation of party culture which will affect the trust of citizens.