Kabardino-Balkaria is a republic with a rich archaeological heritage. It represented archaeological sites from the Paleolithic era in its territory. The article proposes a classification of burial structures of the Koban archaeological culture in this region. It is noted that their study makes it possible to identify the features of the funeral rite of the local population and trace the dynamics of its ritual-ritual activity throughout the entire period of the existence of this culture. To do this, the article attempted to specify the typology proposed in 1989 by V.I. Kozenkova, considering the specifics of the funeral structures of the Koban culture identified on the territory of Kabardino-Balkaria. The work notes that the need for such a revision and clarification of known classifications with the definition of local features on KBR materials is increasing against the background of a sharp increase in the number of burial structures discovered and the appearance of new studies of Koban cultural monuments. During the study, funerary structures are classified considering their differentiation into simple and complex ones. There are considered 2 types of simple (burials in soil pits of oval, rectangular or underground rectangular forms and burials in stone boxes) and 3 types of complex burial structures (mounds with a stone cover with soil burials, mounds with stone boxes and stone cover from cobblestones and stone tombs). Each of the proposed funerary structures is characterized considering the division into subtypes. It was revealed that almost no burial ground of the Koban archaeological culture on the territory of the KBR can be traced to the observance of a single type of burial structure.

This article is about the office documentation management of the Center of the Caucasian Line in the 30-50s. XIX century. The study is based on an analysis of materials from the administration of the Center for the Caucasian Line, higher and subordinate organizations. A meaningful and structural analysis of various groups of documents is carried out: circulars, instructions, reports, petitions, nominal, conduit and form lists, reports of the head of the Center for the Caucasian Line, addressed to the Headquarters of Troops on the Caucasian Line and the Black Sea Coast. Attention is drawn to the order of interaction between the head of the Center with the subordinate ones (the Provisional Kabardian court, bailiffs, heads of fortresses and fortifications) and higher institutions (the Headquarters of the troops on the Caucasian line and the Black Sea coast). The article touched upon the features of the formal interaction of the head of the Center for the Caucasian Line and local judicial and administrative control bodies with representatives of indigenous ethnic elites and dependent strata of the population. The article analyzes the features of implementing office work in the development of the judicial and administrative apparatus in the Central Caucasus, and an attempt is made to determine the place of the head of the Center of the Caucasian Line in the vertical of military-administrative control, which continued to build up in the Central Caucasus in the 30-50s. XIX century. The article analyzes the informative value of individual groups of documents in the study of different directions of the activities of the administration of the Center of the Caucasian Line. A conclusion is made about the practical significance of the materials studied and the prospects for their further study. A range of areas is outlined, for the study of which the identified groups of documents can be useful: the reconstruction of fortresses and fortifications that were part of the Center, the identification of the personnel of the management of the Center of the Caucasian Line, etc.

The article deals with issues related to the administrative-territorial structure of the Tersk region during the revolution and the Civil War of 1917-1921. This article concluded that various regional regimes have tried to implement their national-territorial projects. However, neither the Gorskо-Cossack Provisional Terek-Dagestan Government, nor the Bolshevik Terek Soviet Republic, nor the liberal-nationalist Mountain Republic, nor the White Guard Terek-Dagestan Region could adequately capture the sympathies of the bulk of the local population. The conclusion is given that only the Soviet project related to the creation of the Gorskaya ASSR could attract the mountain peoples of the former Terek region to its side, intercepting the political agenda of the mountain liberal-nationalist political direction, and to ensure a minimum of loyalty to the new government.

In the article, based on the analysis of historiography on the study, the problems requiring study are identified, the goals, objectives, and methodology of the study are defined. Based on new archival documents and other sources, the problems of organizing material and financial assistance by enterprises, collective farms, state farms and workers of the rear of the Red Army are analyzed. The main directions, forms and methods of activity of state, party bodies and public organizations in raising funds for the National Defense Fund and purchasing military equipment, subscribing to State military loans, collecting warm clothes and gifts for soldiers and commanders of military units and formations are considered. This article analyzes the motives of the patriotic movement of Soviet citizens aimed at helping the front. It was concluded that the main areas of material and financial assistance to the rear of the Red Army were those that arose at the initiative of the workers of the movement: raising funds for the country’s Defense Fund and the purchase of military equipment, subscribing to State military loans, creating a bread fund, collecting warm clothes, gifts for fighters and commanders of military units and formations.

The paper considers the issue of anti-Soviet manifestations in the North Caucasus during the Great Patriotic War as a vector for assessing the political situation in national autonomies developed in the academic space to describe the political situation in national autonomies. It is argued that ethnic coloring in “mass betrayal” theses is influenced by primary sources and facts – wartime documents and their data. The authors emphasize complexity of the research discourse transition from the categories of “mass anti-Soviet actions” and “support for the Germans from villages, regions or peoples”, and calculation of the “unacceptable” level of ethnic collaborationism and banditry to the conceptualization of the anti-Soviet underground issue through attempts to qualify the composition of political crimes. The paper turns to the analysis of state’s reaction and decisions in the context of the political situation in national autonomies. Taking into account not only theoretical aspects, but also the practical results of Germany's policy aimed at unleashing the anti-Soviet struggle in the North Caucasus proves valuable. The main conclusion of the study is that against the backdrop of post-Soviet methodological pluralism and the revival of heroic concept, it is relevant not so much to avoid inconvenient issues as to substantiate the scientific inconsistency of the “mass betrayal” theses addressed to the North Caucasus national autonomies.

The article analyzes the lyrics of the classic of Balkar literature KaisynShuvaevichKuliev. The presence of the concept of time in the poet’s works is a peculiarity of the author’s individual style. This concept shapes the surrounding reality, focuses on poetic aestheticism, deeply personal experience. The study examines a whole list of issues associated with the theory of sped up development, the specificity of poetic thinking, personification of time, the search for promising ways of development of aesthetic consciousness of the people at the stage of transition from traditional reflective models based on folklore ideas, archetypes of ethnic thinking and ideological opposition to the structures of new formation. It is argued that the emergence of a special images and their transition into transversal symbols, it was Kuliev’s models of reflexion that allowed to expand the narrow semantics of ideological temporal binary and overcome the logical attribution of the concept “time”, creating for it a vast associative halo that addresses the reader’s consciousness to the realities of everyday life. Searching for stable style-forming constructions in overcoming the borders of established apperceptive models allowed K. Kuliev to create special poetic structure, describing time in the coordinates of his personal gnoseology, his individual manner of perceiving the environment, allowing the national reader to imagine temporal definitions beyond the rational and conceptual emblems, interpreting them with the help of familiar and mastered at all perception levels up to the sensory. Artistic concept of time in the works of K.Kuliev is formed gradually, together with the poet, with the era. Following its artistic realization and transformation, the author of the article brings us closer to the unraveling of how the great Balkar poet perceives, realizes, and comprehends time to the unraveling of his inner world. On the material of poems of Balkar writers (K. Kuliev, K. Otarov, H. Temmoev) the author shows several ways of verbalization of the concept “time” in Balkarian literature.

In this article, the text of FazilIskander’s novel “Sandro from Chegem” is considered from the point of view of its correlation with the realities of Abkhazia in the 1900s-1960s, the structure of Abkhazian life and cultural phenomena that had a significant impact on the artistic originality of this work and the creative method of the author. It seems important to pay attention not to those factors that are often perceived by the reader (following critics and literary critics) as a decoration or an exotic decor for the semantic content the author implies when working on a novel. It is necessary to look at Iskander’sChegem epic from a new - Abkhaz-centric angle: that is, when reading the text, taking as a starting point the history and ethnography of the Abkhazian people (mainly the twentieth century), folklore tradition, the mentality of the people and many other factors.

The presented article concerns only some of the showed aspects, in particular: attribution of the hero by one of his main social roles (toastmaster); definition of the boundaries of the chronotype of the novel - time and action (what is more in the first case, not only abstract Abkhazia is of great importance but also a very specific Abkhazian estate - its structure and functioning); features of the language of the novel and an attempt to determine which language the characters speak - Russian or Abkhaz. All this seems especially important in connection with the conclusions about the possibilities of self-preservation of the nation in the modern world, which the author cites in his literary testament, a kind of postscript to the novel “Sandro from Chegem” - the story “Sofichka”.

The article focuses on a comprehensive, conceptual analysis of the novel Z. Tolgurov’s “Blue Tipchak”, a holistic presentation of various semiotic levels of the work. The work determines conditionality of the epic beginning and the principles of implementing the author’s plan by the historicism of the writer’s thinking. Important in interpreting semantic perspectives of a literary text is the category of time. The dominant storylines are considered through the correlation of the destinies of the main characters with the dramatic nature of the depicted era of the 40-50s of the last century. The study emphasizes the multi-aspect nature of the problematic of the work (ideological, moral, psychological). In conjunction with the designated thematic blocks, the article explores the potential of the symbolic imagery of the novel. The idea of how the ideological situation can influence the fate of a person, cause internal transformations in him, followed by complete depersonalization, separation from ethnic roots (the image of the boy of the Crimea is indicative in this regard) acts as a nodal content line. The narrative space of the epic canvas contributes to the disclosure of a powerful mythological layer, realized through parallels with the animal world (for example, the images of the stallion Alakez and the wolf Gazhai). The ambiguous interpretation of the Soviet era is guessed in the meanings of the symbol displayed in the title of the work. The blue tipchak in the writer's interpretation personifies the deceptive appearance of communist ideology, implying the danger hidden in it. In the research's course, the multilevel nature of the novel context is revealed, because of the historical approach to understanding reality.

The article reflects the specifics of Balkarian prose during the period of domination of socialist ideology, the canons of normative aesthetics. The consequence of the destruction of conceptual categories was the displacement of ethnically marked constants by the problems of the ideological, “Soviet” plan. In pre-war Balkarianprose; binary-opposition (“positive” - “negative”) aesthetic representation was preserved as the primary method of fixing and comprehending the sur-rounding world, the ideological content of the described completely and unambiguously determined its axiological position.

The ethical and ideological conceptualism of Bolshevism remained the motivational basis for the psychological states of the heroes of national prose in the first post-war decades. Therefore, it is also unnecessary to speak of a pronounced national component in the imagery of the works of this period: this is manifested both in the characters’ lives and in the plot's localization. It is practically impossible to determine how much the type of highlander depicted by M. Gettuev corresponds to real prototypes, questions of socialist construction supplanted how much in the minds of people. However, this type was replicated in a huge number of works of that era. The sublimative behavioral motives depicted by the authors of the 1950s and 1960s practically seem to be a direct continuation of the prose of the pre-war years. This situation of aesthetic predetermination gave impetus to the development of a narrative skill, which consisted of the textual justification of the actions of the characters. Understanding the need for this justification prepared the appearance in the works of a specific national component, embodied no longer in the names and external surroundings, but in the psychological characteristics of the characters.

Research methods: historical-typological, comparative, epistemological.

In the proposed article, based on the material of the story of Kabardian prose writer B. Mazikhov “It’s Time for leaf Fall”, techniques for depicting the appearance of heroes are considered. This article proves the manner of portraiture plays an important role in the transmission of one of the end-to-end ideas of the story. In a small volume of the work, there is a variety of means of depicting the appearance and spiritual world of the characters, the author’s penchant for pictorial laconism becomes obvious. In the usual techniques for transmitting an external impression, including different points of view, a technique conventionally designated as “erasure of features” plays the image of individual or progressively increasing details. It is characteristic that the greatest semantic load falls on the images drawn with the greatest completeness. The relevance of the presented work is because the work of B. Mazikhov currently remains both in terms of his poetics and the concept of the personality represented in it.

Review of the book by R.S. Kandor “The process of incorporation of traditional forms of government of the Adygs (Circassians) The North-Western Caucasus in the structure of the Russian administrative and political system (XIX - early XX century.”) examines the main research conclusions of the monograph. The relevance and high level of scientific work is noted. It is stated that the author gave a well-founded analysis of the specifics of the interaction of traditional and imperial political systems in the process of incorporation of the Adygs into the administrative structures of the Russian Empire. It is concluded that the monograph is a significant research contribution to the Adyge studies.