The article studies the religious policy of the Russian government in the Early Modern era. It reviews some latest domestic historiographic sources dealing with irregular troops in the service of Russia, including Cossack ones, identifies most significant topics and segments of respective studies, characterizes the role assigned by contemporary historians to the mentioned military units within campaigns for the defense and development of peripheral lands. The work provides an insight into ethnoconfessional issues of emerging Cossack communities that was quite a concern for authorities. It resumes that there is enough historiographic evidence to conclude that throughout the 18th century the authorities seriously feared Cossack Old Believers might revolt and sought to reduce the threat establishing new Cossack-ranked units
consisting of Buddhists, Muslims, and representatives of other ethnic groups culturally and mentally resistant to ides of Old Believers.

The article celebrates the 95th anniversary of Praskovia E. Alekseeva, a major bibliographer of the Kalmyk Scientific Center of the RAS and the oldest worker of Kalmykia’s science and culture institutions. The paper analyzes her impact – widely accepted as essentially significant and even crucial — on studies of Kalmykia’s history during the Russian Civil and Grate Patriotic Wars. It is the author’s opinion that the most precious work here is that dealing with annotated lists of participants of the Great Patriotic War (referred to different categories) conscripted from the former Kalmyk District of Rostov Oblast, and lists of soldiers of the 110th Kalmyk Cavalry Division. The project was extremely difficult and required long years of meticulous work, but P. E. Alekseeva did manage to solve the assigned tasks.

The article deals with peculiarities of the political and legal status of Kalmyk Autonomous Oblast as a federal subject of the RSFSR within Stavropol Krai (1957-1958) after the restoration of autonomy. The study applies historical and legal research methods to examine provisions of respective Soviet constitutions, statutory acts issued by the supreme governing institutions of the USSR and RSFSR. It also analyzes views of Soviet political scientists on the federal nature of the RSFSR, the place of autonomous regions in the ‘hierarchy’ of Soviet autonomies, peculiarities pertaining to the regulation of their legal status during the specified period. Given that the Autonomous Oblast proved shot-lived enough, the paper characterizes Kalmykia’s autonomy of that period as a transitional form towards the former status of Autonomous Republic.

The article characterizes activities of Kalmykia’s National Archive aimed to popularize its fonds. The paper provides an insight into various means and methods applied by the Archive to take advantages of and popularize archival documents. It also contains data about publications prepared in cooperation with academic researchers affiliated with other institutions.

The article examines one rare manuscript book which is a school primer for children of emigrant Kalmyks that resided in Pfaffenhofen DP Camp (Germany) in the late 1940s. The paper analyzes and describes the book in detail, special attention being paid to its design and contents. The surviving copy of the primer reveals an important aspect of educational practices in the history of emigration of different peoples within DP camps and during the early years of their permanent residence in respective countries that hosted multi-ethnic expatriate groups in the aftermath of World War II.

The article describes archival materials from a personal fund of P. E. Alekseeva, the founder of the scientific library of Kalmyk Scientific Center of the RAS, a major bibliographer and researcher. On the basis of the archival materials of the fund numbering 426 items – according to the guidelines for on archival affairs – the fond was divided into three sections. The present analysis of each of them (except for the third one containing photographic materials) makes it possible to trace the creative biography of the developer of the fond in detail. The largest group of documents is ‘Scientific Works and Creative Materials’ contains drafts of published articles and monographs, and was divided into four main subgroups (history, folklore, ethnography and religion, and Kalmyk expatriate community). The second group is ‘Correspondence’ which contains working letters, namely, between Praskovia E. Alekseeva and Russian and foreign scientists (A. Bormanzhinov, J. Krueger, E. E. Langerfeld, F. D. Сhulman , S. Yu. Neklyudov, etc.). A review of this section provides an opportunity to trace the immense and hard work done by Praskovia E. Alekseeva to increase the fonds of the institution’s scientific library, as well as to identify new facts in problems of Kalmyk studies. In general, the analysis of the archive fond allows represents a wide range of creative interests of the scientist, and outlines P. E. Alekseeva’s significant contribution – a tireless researcher – to the development of Kalmyk science.

The article examines bibliographic activities of P. E. Alekseeva, a major bibliographer of the Kalmyk Scientific Center of the RAS. The work provides an insight into her intensive efforts aimed to collect and preserve all publications available for the library, and describes her key bibliographic works.

The article publishes a diary kept by the author during the Soviet-Mongolian Comprehensive History and Culture Research Expedition. The expedition began its work in 1969, and the diary covers the events of the first half of September.

The article deals with felt viewed in the synthesis of national rites and traditions. The subject sphere of the nomads formed by ethnic culture manifests the spatio-temporal picture of the world onto relics of rituals and traditions. Their preservation among the Kalmyks and other Turko-Mongols is clearly reflected in the subject symbolism, an important part of which is constituted by felt products. Traditions and rituals in everyday life and economic structures make it possible to identify the dominant constants of material and spiritual cultures of the nomads, to trace mechanisms of their functioning. The latter can be traced in artistic crafts accompanying the sphere of ritual culture. Despite common origins with other nomadic cultures, the traditional heritage of Mongolic peoples is original enough. This is the case with decorative patterns of Kalmyk felts preserving the archaic layer of nomad ornaments. Due to the natural and ethnocultural landscape, art is interconnected with ritual culture enriched with ethnic peculiarities of Kalmykia’s artistic traditions.

The paper analyzes the explanation of language sounds in The Lotus Sutra, a traditional grammatical writing of the Mongolian language, viewed from the perspectives of the theory of the Five Elements (‘Five Wind Branches’) – and compares the former with the sound producing ways and positions in modern Mongolian. As is shown in The Lotus Sutra, the vowel sounds used to be classified into ‘masculine’ <a, o, u>; ‘feminine’ <e, ö, ü>; and ‘neutral’ <i>, however, a strong masculine sound <i> lost its fundamental phonetic role and turned into a neutral one. Analyzing the ways and positions of sound production properly prescribed in the ancient grammar, it can be concluded that there were several ways and positions to produce consonant sounds, for instance, the labial sounds ― ones resulting from lip-to-teeth contact; labiodental sounds ― ones resulting from lip-to-teeth contact; dental sounds – front ones articulated with the tongue touching the front teeth; and finally, alveolar sounds – ones made with the tongue touching the alveoles. The comparative study basically concludes as follows: observing some special features of the sounds <a, ŋ, q, g, g> in Indian and Sanskrit languages it has properly classified the ways of sound production as those typical for ‘wind element’. For example, the vowel <e> in Modern Mongolian has been clustered with velar (guttural) vowels, such as <a, ŋ, q, g, g>. This classification, in turn, is based on the natural evolution and production of the sound <e>. According to Sh. Luvsanvandan and U. Mandakh, the sound <e> could have been pronounced as a mediolingual and post-mediolingual sound. Also, the scholar Phagpa Lama clarified how the sound was pronounced in his Square Script: as Nicholas N. Poppe defined clearly, there had existed two different types of the sound <e> – long (open) and short (narrow) ones.