The current paper adopts a comparative historical perspective (the time frame end of the 19th - beginning of the 21st centuries) and investigates the historical practices of Russia to use the (il)legal transborder trafficking for political goals. In particular, it looks upon the Russian borders with Finland, and the Baltic states. It considers such instances, as regulating the korobeinki trade and the smuggling in the territory of the Great Duchy of Finland and the Baltic states in the 19th – beginning of the 20 centuries to augment failing Russification; to support and to organize smuggling to Finland and to the Baltics in the early Soviet years as a disguise for espionage; the Soviet attempts to administer illegal trafficking at the end of the 1920s – beginning of the 1930s and the reasons for closing it. It investigates the “unintended consequences” of creating a “politicized contraband” corridors, and looks for an explanations of why eventually it turned out to be ineffective. The paper dwells upon the administered semi-legal trafficking of “transparent” borders of the 1990s and ends up with the discussion of the most recent Russian state’s incidents of using an illegal migration as as political tool. The paper is based on the archival sources, official documents, and the press. The assumption of the current work is that the present-day Russian policy of border controls, as well as the peculiarities of its actively (ab)used transborder traffic, has visible parallels with the matrix dating back to the Russian imperial, and then Soviet border management policies.

Between 1960 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, over 43,500 students from Sub-Saharan Africa graduated from Soviet universities, with Nigerians comprising about 12 percent of this group. These Soviet-sponsored educational programs were a key component of Moscow’s cultural diplomacy, designed to establish a Soviet-friendly intelligentsia in postcolonial Sub-Saharan Africa. Despite three decades of educational exchanges between the Global South and the Soviet Union, the perspectives and agency of Nigerian students remain understudied. A notable research gap exists regarding their cultural encounters, including friendships, experiences of racism, and their freedom to travel within the Soviet Union and to Western Europe. At the Congress on Universal and Global History in Växjö, I will examine the friendships Nigerian students developed with Soviet and international peers. Their residence in shared dormitories fostered interaction, while Russian language proficiency became essential for navigating life behind the Iron Curtain. These experiences often led to significant cross-cultural relationships. Moreover, Nigerian students had travel freedoms that Soviet citizens lacked, which impacted their status in complex ways. This micro-level analysis will decenter the dominant Soviet perspective, instead foregrounding the personal experiences of Nigerian students. By drawing on oral history interviews and private archives, I aim to uncover the dynamics of interpersonal encounters and the formation (or absence) of friendships. This approach will offer fresh insights into the significance and limitations of international friendships forged in this unique historical context.

This paper explores the controversy around mumie, an organic mineral substance used in traditional medicine across Asia, during the late Soviet period (1960s-1980s). Local physicians and medical administrators in Soviet Central Asia actively promoted mumie’s efficacy, which contributed to its widespread popularity throughout the country. At the same time, the officials at the Ministry of Health in Moscow often remained skeptical and decried the “mumie craze” that they saw as motivated by irresponsible marketing and facilitated by illegal black-market sales. As Alexey Golubev has recently observed, in the period under discussion the southern Soviet Union was often seen as an Orientalized space which can produce no credible scientific knowledge. However, Soviet bureaucrats also had to adhere to the party line that stressed the "friendship of the peoples" and encouraged grassroots inventiveness (izobretatel'stvo).

Building on archival collections of the Pharmacological Committee, the main Soviet drug regulator, at the State Archive of the Russian Federation, as well as medical publications of the period and ego documents such as letters and diaries that reflect the consumption side, I explore broader themes of indigenous knowledge versus state-sanctioned science, highlighting the clash between local practices and central authority and analyzing how differing epistemic models shape perceptions of reliability and efficacy in medicine. Additionally, the paper provides a different angle on the history of consumption and the history of the self in the USSR, tracing the practices of neoliberal subjectification and pharmaceutical self-optimization back to the 1960s and situating the Soviet experience within the global framework

The annexation of the Crimean peninsula in March 2014 and the start of Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine on February 24, 2022, demonstrated that the historical consciousness of Russians was consistent with these actions. After 2014, however, their epistemology showed completely new elements, which stem neither from the repertoire of the Soviet era nor from the repertoire of the tsarist era.

It is an explicit end-time expectation that de-secularizes Russia, i.e. removes it from the political discourse. Instead, new narratives are created that make use of the theological imagination - e.g. by conceptualizing Russia as "holy" and the West as "diabolical." Moreover, nuclear war is increasingly semanticized in terms of salvation history, i.e. with reference to the apocalyptic. In this political-theological coordinate system, "Russkiy Mir" appears as a point of reference compatible with recent Russian historical consciousness, but which is no longer comprehensible with the usual cognitive tools of political theory or contemporary history.

This historical-epistemological bifurcation point could be operationalized as an indicator of a possible turning point in Russia's recent history, which ultimately has the potential of a global history, since Russia's self(re)invention as a de-secularized world power and as a guardian of Orthodoxy aims at the oikumene in toto.