Lyubov Pisarkova and Anna Goryacheva publish a document from the Russian State Historical Archive (the fund of the Economic Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs), which contains information from the late 1880s on the number and class composition of urban vowels of 612 Russian cities where the City Regulations of 1870 were in effect. These data make it possible to study the composition of provincial and sheading city dumas at the regional level; compare the state of urban public administration in different provinces; get an idea of the level of economic development of Russian cities, taking into account their administrative status.

The published excerpts from the memoirs of F.A.Pisarkov (1917–1991), the author of the memoirs of the Great Patriotic War published in 2017, give an idea of the life of the population of Donbass in the rapidly changing economic and political situation in the country. The author's early childhood memories are connected with the famine of 1921 (then the family lived in the Orenburg province, since 1923 – in the Donbass). Then a description of life during the NEP period with an abundance of food and goods, which in the late 1920s ends with a general shortage and the introduction of bread cards. The situation stabilizes by the mid-1930s, when the cards were abolished, and the Sunday bazaars in the abundance of goods reminded the author of the bazaars of the mid-1920s. The memoirs contain many vivid sketches that characterize the life of the population and its attitude to state politics.

We continue to publish excerpts from F. A. Pisarkov (1917–1991), the author of memoirs about the Great Patriotic War published in 2017. The proposed fragment is part of the biographical story “Parents”, which in many ways supplements the memories. The story is based on the stories of his mother, Pisarkova (Safonova) Elizaveta Ignatievna (1889–1958), about her life in the Ryazan village and her impressions of life in mining village of Donbass. The story contains many vivid everyday sketches and details that are of considerable interest for studying the way of life and ideas of people in the first quarter of the 20th century. Also, the proposed material will help to trace the dynamics of changes occurring during this period in the agricultural and industrial sectors.

The era of Ivan the Terrible, complex and contradictory, like the personality of the tsar himself, has always attracted the attention of historians. Over the past decades, specialists of various professions have been actively working in the historical field. Their interest in history is associated primarily with the topic of corruption which has emerged since the end of the 20th century an immutable fact of real life. The study of corruption has emerged as an independent research area – corruptionology. Unfortunately, work in this area is often based on questionable information gleaned from the Internet. A new history of Russia is being created, written without studying the sources and knowledge of the era, without taking into account the results of the work of many generations of historians. This also applies to the reign of Ivan the Terrible.

This article presents an analysis of the complex and largely contradictory process of developing reforms of the local government (peasant, zemstvo and city) performed in the 1880s - 1890s, which has started with the senatorial revisions of 1880 and ended with their implementation under the governance of Alexander III. There are two distinct stages of this development pro-cess, performed by the Kakhanov commission and the Ministry of the Interior, holding opposite points of view.The question of the nature of the transformations worried both the government and split into two factions society. The first one hold believe that a way out of the crisis based on the further expansion of the pro bono basis, while the second one saw it in the strengthening of a local government. Presented work aims to consider the process of transformations, known as "counter-reforms" of the 1880-1890s, from the standpoint of their historical conditionality. Also, it reveals the degree of influence of these reforms on the organization of local governance.

M.M.Speransky and A.D.Pazukhin, the developers of important reforms, went down in history with opposite signs: one is the “great reformer”, the other is the creator of the “counterreforms”. The author of the article sees the reason for such a different assessment not in the results of their activities, but in the socio-political climate prevailing in post-reform Russia and the specific perception of the reforms themselves.