: This introductory note explains the tasks of the section “1939 in the USSR: Self-awareness of a Transitional Epoch”. It discusses signifcant differences in the social perception of historical time between Soviet, Eastern European and NorthAmerican societies. In the USSR, the year 1939 became an epoch colored not only with anticipation of the forthcoming war, but also with the stress of the social and anthropological catastrophe — the Great Terror — that had already engulfed the country. After considering the special traits of historical imagination characteristic for Soviet society in 1939, we are able to defne more exactly certain analytical constructs that are relevant to notions of the future in societies going through a crisis.

The subject of the study is the reaction of the Soviet population to international events in the fall — winter of 1939–1940. On the basis of reports and memoranda of local departments of the NKVD in the Perm region the author undertakes an attempt to reconstruct the range of opinions about the radical turn of Soviet foreign policy: the “liberation march” to the West, the SovietFinnish War, cooperation with the German Reich, etc. The article also analyzes estimates and judgments about the beginning of the process which was easily recognized as a new great European war. Particular attention is paid to prison conversations about the war. The blockade on information in Soviet prisons and jails was never complete. Prisoners awaiting sentence or under investigation were well aware of events in the outside world, discussed them with each other, expressed sharp criticism of the new direction of Soviet foreign policy. The content of prison debates about war was largely infuenced by the atmosphere of uncertainty: a mixture of hope and despair, fatigue and frustration characteristic for people who had been held for more than a year in the investigative jails of the NKVD, who had suffered through the excruciating investigation, who had morally suffered, and who had gradually liberated themselves from the mental oppression of the “Stockholm Syndrome”. In the workers' milieu everybody was actively discussing the threat of a Soviet-German armed confict. There were suggestions that after defeating Poland Hitler would attack the Soviet Union. NKVD informants reported expressions of doubt in the local queues regarding the correctness of the decisions taken by the top Soviet leadership and the ability of Soviet leaders to “fght” Hitler. People did not believe Molotov's reassuring statements about the abundance of food in the country, and started to stock sugar, salt, matches, and soap. The author comes to the conclusion that the Great Terror turned out to be unable to destroy habitual disputes on political issues among Soviet citizens and did not change their traditions of co-interpreting reality both in prisons and barracks.

This paper attempts to analyse the treatment of time in the “Kolyma Tales” of Varlam Shalamov: in particular, we investigate “the case of the year 1939”. As a date, as a number the year 1939, the time in which many of the key KT stories are set, a period that is very important within the general structure of the events, is for all practical purposes absent from the narration. This problem, in our view, is part of a more complex issue: Shalamov is portraying time in general and historical time in particular as a biosocial category. The very ability to perceive time and relate to it in KT depends directly on the social status of the character, and (therefore) on their physical state. However, if this social lack of cohesion with time and history is to be noticed by the audience, the very same time and history have to be a noticeable part of the general landscape — as objects of rejection. One of such objects that are present and absent at the same time happens to be the year 1939 — a period that represents, as we believe, the model, “perfect” prison camp year in Shalamov.

This article is an attempt at a microhistorical study. Through analysis of documents from the personal archive of social activist, pedagogue and military expert Boris Ivanovitch Zhurin (1890–1964), the author demonstrates that the year 1939 turned to be very important in his career. It was precisely in 1939 that Zhurin changed his previous “modest” profession of an engineer-constructor specializing in concrete buildings for the profession of military expert and for the role of social activist and publicist. As a military expert, he spent the years 1939-1940 writing a monograph about the interaction of different combat arms, including artillery and air reconnaissance, during the Russian offensive in June, 1917. He was convinced that learning from this experience would be vital during the next war. As a social activist and publicist, Zhurin invented, described and promoted a new social institute which he called “parents' committees in multi-family dwellings,” insisting that such committees would be the best instrument to control and improve family education. This second “know-how” was also based on the idea of interaction, since the parents' committees had to establish close relationships with district executive committees (ispolkomy), local Komsomol cells, school administration and school parents' committees, as well as the management offces of apartment buildings. Detailed study of Zhurin's archive and publications, combined with a reconstruction of the historical context of both 1939 and the “Thaw” years, lead the author to conclude that Zhurin saw Soviet society after the Great Terror as completely atomized, as demoralized by the low competence of the new army chiefs and state offcials, and as lacking channels for transmitting knowledge and experience. During 1939, as well as during the subsequent years of his professional and social activity, Zhurin sought to rebuild and intensify “horizontal” social ties.

The article examines some peculiarities of architectural representation of the USSR in 1939, on the eve of World War II. The differences between the image of the country ‘for internal use' and ‘for external use' are emphasized. The program of the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition in Moscow demonstrates a similarity to Western commercial and colonial fairs. This might be considered as an illustration of the outdated and even archaic nature of the Soviet regime. The architecture of the Pavilion of Mechanization reveals the hidden militarism of Soviet culture. The architectural solution and the exposition of the Soviet pavilion in New York demonstrated a stylistic compromise with the mainstream of Western exhibit practice. The volumetric solution of the building was similar to the Palace of the Soviets in Moscow, then under construction. The New York pavilion was a model representing the main edifce of the USSR to the international audience. In order to affect the visitors, designers employed a synthesis of sculpture and architecture, frst utilized in Paris in 1937, as well as very simple tools: the structure exceeded the height restrictions and was the tallest pavilion at the New York Fair. Ideologically, the Soviet exhibition broke the rules too: whereas the slogan of the Fair was ‘The World of Tomorrow,' the pavilion of the USSR demonstrated propagandistic images of ‘the Soviet present' as the future that had already arrived.

The authors of this article have undertaken a critical analysis of basic methodological principles of urban digitalization studies. We argue the relevance of the “digital connection” concept since our feld research confrms the discrete nature of mobile digital practices. At the same time, a generic anthropological approach brings a universal logic to discontinuous cases: the starting point of our speculations is the human being in a changing urban environment.

This article is concerned with affordances of smartphone applications for collecting data in anthropological research. The empirical base is a project dedicated to experiences of urban commuting in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia, which was carried out in summer 2014 with the help of timetracking mobile apps. Firstly, we consider the methodological benefts of partial automatization for the “boring parts” of ethnography, such as somewhat easier recruitment and data processing. These are counter-weighted by the dangers of unrefective use of digital interfaces. In particular, the software design tends to impose established frames of experience narration and standardized temporalities, as well as to “cut off” data that could be presented through a less structured interface.

Mobility is one of the main tendencies in media development in recent several years. But the results and the process itself remain unclear. What features of users' practices are transformed and how does this infuence new services' advent and transformations? We suppose that one of the main signs of mobility increase is the expansion of messengers. New technologies appear to our everyday life with such processes as synchrony, intimacy transformation, the defnitive erasure of borders between online and offine. We offer an analysis of these technologies in comparison with social network sites and a review of primary tendencies in the spread of messengers.

This article examines the specifcs of the crisis in today`s media, which is manifested as a general technological and ideological gap from the principles of participatory culture. After briefy considering the international experience of media corporations, the author pays special attention to recommendations from the feld of Media Studies, which are concentrated on tuning managers` attitude towards the audience and on solving the relevant problems of the industry. As part of the study, the author analyses the case of the Russian media and concludes that multiplication of content production by involving Pro-Am witnesses does not work properly. The Russian media still operate on the basis of authoritarian and moral statements that stimulate the entrenchment of rigid principles of representation and problematisation of sociocultural realities and community practices, and downplay the value of civic refection as part of an individual and collective culture of thought and life.

In the present commentary the compiler of the cluster explicates the hybrid design of the Obninsk project. Within the project's framework a combination of classical fieldwork techniques and digital humanities provides new options for knowledge production in the era of computation.

Implementation of the Soviet nuclear program involved the concentration of a large number of scientifc and technical specialists in nuclear cities that were geographically removed and politically isolated from “civilian” administrative centers. They were managed within the system of the First Chief Directorate, and then of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building, which directed the nuclear developments in emergency mode, making use of nearly unlimited resources. This particular mode of authority weakened the position of party organs in atomic centers and hampered the implementation of ideological control over the scientifc and technical intelligentsia. The subject of this article is the city of Obninsk in Kaluga region, which grew out of the secret laboratory “V”. The author examines the history of the local organization of the Communist Party, which because of nuclear secrecy was isolated from the oblastlevel leadership. This disconnection was not fully overcome even after the “opening” of the city in 1956, which was manifested, in particular, in the composition of the City Party Committee. The presence of liberal-minded people from the scientifc milieu among the party bosses allowed activists from various institutes to set up in the 1960s an urban public space aimed at freedom of self-expression and discussion, using, inter alia, the party network and resources. This model of urban development was destroyed in 1968 due to changes in central policy and the subsequent reformatting of the local political feld.

The author puts to use the challenge of social knowledge`s digitalization in order to discover gaps and unrefected areas in qualitative research techniques and theories. The focus is on feedback of the interviewee to interview transcripts before this data is put into an open electronic archive. The article reconsiders the idea of an interview transcript as a stable text in the domain of the researcher`s unshared power. Techniques of transcript processing are problematized in relation to the era of digital collaboration. The concept of “co-authorization” is introduced to describe the rights and responsibilities regarding the text, which are shared and digitally distributed between researcher and informant during the preparation of an electronic publication. Co-authorization is considered as both an apparatus and an effect of digital transformation of research activity in social sciences.

This paper presents a Russian translation and an interpretation of a manuscript by K. A. Sederholm, a Protestant pastor in Moscow, which contains the draft outline of his unpublished utopian novel “The Church. A story from the last quarter of the twentieth century” (“Die Kirche. Eine Erzählung aus dem letzten Viertel des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts”), together with a reconstruction of the connection between Sederholm's utopian vision, his religious and philosophical ideas and his claims to the distinctive role of a mediator between German and Russian cultures.

This is a review of the conference “The local politics of big science: The human being and social orders of knowledge production in the late USSR” that was held at the School of Advanced Studies in the Humanities, RANEPA, on July 4–6, 2013. Issues regarding the political, social, cultural and intellectual functioning of Soviet versions of Big Science were discussed.

This is an overview of the conference «Urban media studies: concerns, intersections and challenges», held at the Faculty of Political Science, University of Zagreb (Croatia) on 24–25 September 2015. The review includes a description of the basic theoretical, methodological and empirical studies presented within the framework of the thematic sessions and plenary presentations.