Modern domestic historiography pays special attention to the history of everyday life, and especially that of peasantry. Peasants constituted the bulk of the country’s population, including in Southern Russia, for quite a long time. The article aims to investigate social contexts of peasants in national autonomies of Southern Russia in 1920–1930s.

The paper investigates archival materials and examines the beginnings of Khosheutovskaya Party Organization. It reveals that in 1918 there were a number of Communist sympathizers in Khosheutovsky Ulus who had some organizational ties with Kalmytsky Bazar Party Nucleus and Astrakhan Uezd Committee of RCP(B). Those included G. Kolpachkov, the Secretary of the Aimag Executive Committee of Khosheutovsky Ulus who subsequently headed the Ulus Militia. In terms of social structure, the organization consisted of workers and peasants, remaining weak enough qualitatively.
The article concludes the establishment of Khosheutovskaya Party Organization made it possible to tackle certain challenges within the district, such as revival of the national economy, eradication of illiteracy, organization of Soviet construction, trade union and youth movements, intensification of party awareness-raising work, increase in the number of Communists, party personnel training. At the same time, the activities of Khosheutovskaya Organization of RCP(B) were characterized by certain shortcomings, namely, weak control over minor local associations of RCP(B), trade union and Komsomol groups, inefficient management of activities undertaken by peasant mutual benefit societies.

The paper aims to examine the role of acts of constitutional significance within the administrative system of Kalmykia — one of Russia’s autonomies — between 1920 and 1935 when the region ranked as an autonomous oblast. Unlike autonomous republics, autonomous oblasts adopted no constitutions and related laws; still their activities were regulated by internal documents — in addition to laws and decrees of central authorities — and a most important role among the latter was played by acts of constitutional significance that determined the status of autonomous oblasts, structure and powers of their government bodies, issues of national self-determination, territories and borders of autonomies, etc. Though in the early Soviet period the RSFSR’s constitutional legislation acknowledged the right of autonomous oblasts to adopt respective Statutes of Autonomy, virtually none of them — for various reasons — passed such acts. Like the case with any other autonomous oblast, Kalmykia’s documents were fragmentary enough, this hampering the identification of acts of constitutional significance. The article concludes only a few unrelated regulatory resolutions virtually served as acts of constitutional significance that, coupled with federal ones, delineated a somewhat non-consolidated ‘minor constitution’ of the region.

The article studies the traditional culture of Mongolic peoples, examines superstitions and dream imagery, defines and highlights their main typological patterns. Traditional folk culture performs such an important function as predictive action which is usually based on intentional knowledge and, in some cases, on externally derived signs or phenomena that require interpretation. Such signs may be ‘good’ or ‘bad’, and their interpretation depends upon an individual and his / her traditional backgroumd. 
Traditional folk culture has a set of tools required to interpret positive or negative signals and signs that have been accumulated and developed by the ethnic group throughout millennia.
The article aims to investigate superstitious signs and dream imagery of Mongolic peoples mirrored in minor forms and being echoes of archaic ideas about the world structures. The paper deals with signs and night images prognostically associated with animals, birds, insects, and is based on their behavioral patterns, appearances or encounters with them.
Signs and dream images convey stable forms of creative thinking and behavioral models of cultural agents, and in the cultural aspect most adequately – and as widely as possible – cover and mirror the ethno-linguistic picture of the world. Studies of different spheres of traditional folk culture are of great interest.

The work deals with studies of Russia’s peripheral territories that advanced within social discourse during the post-reform era. Those were a reaction of Russian society to the rapid disappearance of so called ‘internal peripheries’ — regions of the Russian Orient that had retained a certain level of autonomy and characteristic economic lifestyles since their annexation by the Russian state. The paper contains an excerpt from Kalmyk Steppe of Astrakhan Governorate: a Statistical and Economic Description (St. Petersburg, 1868) by K. I. Kostenkov that has become a classic of Kalmyk studies. The published fragment of Chapter Four characterizes livestock breeding practices — a major economic sector of traditional Kalmyk society. The fragment is actually a key one since it provides an overview of approaches and methods that took shape in national science — including history, ethnology, and sociology that touched upon domestic agriculture as a basis of traditional cultures in general — during the period under consideration. 

According to archaeological data, the social status of Scythian women was lower than that of men. Still, due to some contradictory evidence obtained from a number of female burials the revealed subordinate position of the woman in Scythian society cannot be recognized as a final conclusion. Those include mound burials that are similar enough in terms of prestige to those of men by a number of criteria, namely: those are central or accompanied by horse graves, or are situated along the same meridian line as the central tomb; and they were even disturbed in the same manner during post-burial rituals. The most characteristic female burial of the type is that of the Melitopol´ kurgan, the former was aligned with that of a male, has additional large-scale earthwork and reveals traces of a post-burial ritual disturbance. 
It is noteworthy that in traditional nomadic cultures — especially those unaffected by Muslim religious ideas — women were recognized equal to men upon reaching advanced years or a particular life-cycle stage since the earliest times. 

The Nartiad is an epic monument of spiritual culture inherent to a number of Caucasian peoples differing in their genesis, historical destinies, languages, and traditional cultures – the Abkhazians, Circassians, Balkars, Karachays, Ossetians, Ingushes, Chechens, Kumyks, Svans, Rachans, Khevsurians – that has been handed down from generation to generation for many centuries.
Since the mid – 19th century, the Nart sagas were actively recorded, published and studied by authoritative central and regional scientific journals. By the early 20th century, quite a bulk of materials remarkable in both volume and artistic merits had been collected and published.
The comparison of the Nartiad to epic monuments of other peoples with typological features similar to those of the Nart epic of the Caucasus (Russian bylinas, Western European, Iranian, Mongolic, Armenian, and Karelo-Finnish epics, heroic poems of Turko-Mongols) shall help reveal both original features and common ones, the latter bringing it together with other epic traditions at different levels.

The history of recordings, publications and investigations of the Kalmyk epic of Jangar dates back more than two centuries. Special attention of domestic scientists has been paid to the search of archival materials containing information about recordings and respective texts of certain chapters of the epic. The very first publication gave rise to another topical research issue — the emerged written (manuscript) tradition and related problems. A number of facts make it possible to conclude that there had been some Kalmyk-language manuscript texts of the epic by the early 19th century already. Still, no available data confirm any book publications. One newly discovered material is a 1908 report by N. Ochirov written immediately after he had recorded nine Jangar songs from the Kalmyk jangarchi Eelyan Ovla. The revealed source — though not that extensive — contains interesting research information revealing new aspects of the prominent Kalmyk rhapsode’s tale-telling tradition.

Attempts to present the historical development of folk poetry had been undertaken long before A. N. Veselovsky, but only he succeeded in developing a theory of the history of the epic, and systematizing general knowledge on the issue. A. Veselovsky’s ideas are still relevant, and his hypotheses are confirmed, including in studies of the Mongolic heroic epics.

The article discusses some early poems by Kalmyk poet Mikhail Khoninov that have been no subject of any special analyses yet. His lyrics of 1939–1941 mirrored the style and language of the era in genre, topical, and socio-cultural perspectives. The themes of new life, forthcoming war, art, and love expressed the young poet’s attitude toward modernity, the vocabulary being typical enough for that time. The twelve poems by M. Khoninov combined the national versification tradition and the author’s new view of the reality.

The article investigates fiction, folklore, journalese sources and research materials to reveal some structural and grammatical peculiarities of use of the comparative particle -шң. The source materials have been selected from the Kalmyk National Corpus with the aid of TextAnalyzer program. The paper primarily aims to provide a comprehensive insight into structural and grammatical peculiarities of use of the comparative particle and applies a number of new linguistic approaches. It examines the frequency use of the particle when combined with nominal and verbal parts of speech and also adverb, distinct features of their grammatical forms.