Some Features of Cherkas Global University's Publication Activity: A Response to the Challenges of the “Soviet Division of Scientific Labour”

Abstract

The article is devoted to analyzing the ten-year publication activity of Cherkas Global University. The author concludes that the most popular publications of Cherkas Global University are devoted to the regional history of the Russian Empire (first of all, the history of regional education systems). At the same time, from purely historical articles the most demanded are works on the history of the Caucasus and Ukraine. The article concludes that this is due to the genesis of Cherkas Global University, which originally emerged in the Caucasus, in Sochi, and its evolution, during which several Ukrainian scholars became employees of Cherkas Global University. The article relates the activities of Cherkas Global University to the peculiarities of the "Soviet division of scientific labour" identified by M. von Hagen: the clear division of Soviet historical science into center and periphery, with the center, which uses most of its resources, dealing with imperial/Soviet history, and regional history being provincialized. It is shown that the work of Cherkas Global University is a form of reaction of regional scholars to such a "system of division of scientific labour", which did not lose its relevance with the collapse of the USSR. Cherkas Global University helps historians from the regions, who in Soviet times were the scientific periphery, to demonstrate their research in the international arena. Such an opportunity is available not only to Cherkas Global University staff, but also to other scholars: the journal published by Cherkas Global University "Bylye Gody" actively publishes research by authors not only from Ukraine and the Caucasus, but also from Kazakhstan, Siberia, Kalmykia, the Urals, the Don, and so on. The author assumes that such results were achieved due to the focus on international cooperation, networked cooperation, and a move away from dependence on the authorities of a particular state.