By the early 1820s, Russia's image in Europe had undergone a series of transformations and combined opposing evaluative vectors. New positive and old negative stereotypes coexisted. Old propaganda clichés from the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars were either largely eliminated from discourse or acquired new meanings. These primarily concerned myths about Russian military expansion into Europe and the creation of a "universal monarchy" as a permanent foreign policy doctrine bequeathed by Peter the Great. During the public debates of the 1820s, these old myths acquired new, contemporary meaning. For Europeans, including Germans, the Russian state no longer served as a symbol of external aggression and a pretext for military mobilization, but rather as a tool for reflection on domestic problems, a projection of their own hopes and fears.

In the context of the geopolitical challenges of recent years and the Special Military Operation, the patriotic movement has intensified in Russian society, which has forced the political leadership of the Russian Federation to pay attention to issues of patriotic work and education, especially among young people. Recently, a number of monographs and articles have been published (listed as Uchaeva A. E. – 2 and Shalaeva N. V. – 2, Lazareva L. N. – 4, 5), which raised the problems of patriotism and its role in modern society. The International scientific and Practical conference «Theory and Practice of Patriotic Education: content, Principles, Technologies» was held on April 9, 2025 at the Saratov State University of Genetics, Biotechnology and Engineering named after N. I. Vavilov. The idea was that the authors of the presented article analyze the problems of patriotism as a political problem and a specific historical phenomenon, referring to the Soviet experience.

The "East" as a symbolic image, historical and cultural metaphor and bearer of certain spiritual traditions played a special role in the works of cartographers of different epochs. Especially if we are talking about the so-called symbolic maps of the world, designed since the early Middle Ages to serve as a guide for traveling not in geographical space, but in a metaphysical one, connected with religious, value and evaluative categories. In the 19th and in the beginning of the 20th century a kind of continuation of this tradition of figurative mapping became the satirical maps of the world, the authors of which recoded the content potential of symbolic maps, making their works an effective propaganda tool, and the “East” as an object of political and cultural invective.

The main topic of the article is the mechanisms and models of self-organization of the deputies of the Third State Duma of the Russian Empire. We examine how Duma factions were founded, who were their leaders, and what organizational structures were used by deputies to coordinate their work and consolidate factions in fundamentally new conditions of parliamentary activity. The author analyzes each of the 14 factions that existed during different periods of the third convocation. Three models of deputy organization are identified and their characteristics are analysed. None of the models showed a decisive superiority in terms of discipline or in the effectiveness of achieving long-term political goals. Nevertheless, the models themselves allowed the factions to organize their work in the way that was most preferable to them.

N. D. Postnikov's monograph is dedicated to the party history of the Grand Duchy of Finland during the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Based on significant factual material, the author has made the first attempt in Russian historiography to present a comprehensive picture of the origin, development and activities of the numerous parties of the Duchy. The narrative includes a wide panorama of the social, economic and public life of the principality during this period. Special attention is paid to the problems of relations with the imperial center. However, the factual richness of the study contrasts with the lack of a serious theoretical basis, when outdated terminology does not allow an adequate assessment of the essence of the phenomenon under consideration

The article attempts to analyze the evolution of Lenin's views on the relationship between the international and Russian labor movements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawing on the experience of the Western European labor movement, Lenin recognized that the Russian labor movement "stands on his shoulders". Combining revolutionary Marxism, as the ideological basis for building a just future for humanity, with the revolutionary practice of the Russian movement, he absolutized the class struggle, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the ideas of internationalism and world revolution. Without recognizing parliamentary forms of struggle, the leader of the Russian proletariat continued to insist on the priority of revolutionary methods as a universal form of struggle for a just state of the working people of the whole world.

The short period between the two Polish uprisings of 1794 and 1830, perceived in Germany as part of the liberation struggle of European nations against Russian tyranny for national independence, marked the emergence and development of German political Polonophilia as part of the liberal ideology of the first third of the 19th century. The chain of events – the adoption of the constitution by the Polish Sejm on May 3, 1791, the second partition of Poland (1793), the bloody suppression of the Kościuszko Uprising (1794), the third partition (1795), and, in particular, the 1830 uprising in the Kingdom of Poland – found a response in German political literature, manifesting itself in the form of sympathy for the defeated insurgents, as well as a reflection on the theme of unrealized constitutional reforms and the struggle for national independence. At the same time, it was a reaction to the rise of Russia in Europe and the fear of its territorial expansion further into German lands.

Using the example of the Cadet and Octobrist periodicals, the article examines the positions of the two leading Russian liberal parties of the early twentieth century on issues of public education. The author characterizes the October 17 Union as a "party of practitioners", concludes that the Octobrists were more successful than the Cadets in this area, and explains the reasons for this.