On February 8, 2012, the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences hosted a round table "Actual Problems of Modern Caucasian Studies", organized by the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Center for the Study of Central Asia, the Caucasus, the Ural-Volga Region and the Council of Young Scientists of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

The round table was attended by staff and postgraduates of the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Political and Social Studies of the Black Sea-Caspian Region, as well as the Kabardino-Balkar Scientific Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

V. O. Bobrovnikov, Head of the Caucasus Studies Sector at the Center for the Study of Central Asia, the Caucasus and the Ural-Volga Region, made an introductory speech.

The round table was opened by the report of Z. V. Kananchev (Moscow) "The history of Caucasian Albania: features of the development of modern Albanian studies". In his report, he paid special attention to the processes that are taking place in modern Albanian studies. Over the past 10 years, from 2001 to 2011, five international conferences on the history, culture, religion and other problems of the history of Caucasian Albania were held. This was largely due to the research of 3. Alexidze, who discovered in the monastery of St. John the Baptist. Catherine's Sinai Georgian-Albanian palimpsest, deciphered texts based on the modern Udi language. According to the speaker, modern research on the history of Caucasian Albania is carried out in two directions. The primary place is given to the study of writing in Caucasian Albania. A sufficient number of articles on this issue have appeared. The study of the written language and language of Caucasian Albania led to the need for a more detailed study of the history, culture and religion of the direct descendants of the Albans - Udins. Another important direction is the "Karabakhization" of the history of Caucasian Albania. The issue of ownership of the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh has long gone beyond the framework of a political settlement between Armenia and Azerbaijan and has spilled over into the pages of reputable publications. Publications on both sides are rife with accusations of falsifying the story. According to Z. V. Kananchev, Russian scientists are interested in objective coverage of the history of Caucasian Albania, since the history of this state entity is an integral part of the history of the peoples of Dagestan and Russia as a whole.

A.D. Vasiliev's report (Moscow) "Documents from the Ottoman Archive of the Cabinet of the Prime Minister of Turkey on relations between the Ottoman Empire and the peoples of the Caucasus" was devoted to the analysis of official publications and documents on the history of the Caucasus published in Turkey. It should be noted that the Turkish government pays considerable attention to historical and documentary support of foreign policy actions. As a rule, publications of archival documents by the General Directorate of Archives of the Cabinet of the Prime Minister of Turkey indicate certain priorities in the country's foreign policy. Turkish archivists carefully select documents on the history of the Armenian question in the Ottoman Empire. In addition, Turkish historians are interested in the relations of the Ottoman Empire with the khanates located on the territory of modern Azerbaijan.

In the second part of the report, the author undertook a brief review of the most important archival collections of the Ottoman Archive of the Cabinet of the Prime Minister of Turkey, which contain archival materials on the history of relations between the Ottomans and the peoples of the Caucasus and Russia.

In the report of V. A. Ivanov (Institute of Politics. and social networks. research. Black Sea-Caspian Region) "On the national liberation movement in Syunik in the first third of the XVIII century."

translation of the source from Grabar into Russian with comments to the text. However, the speaker did not avoid some bias, identifying this uprising as a factor contributing to the weakening of the influence of the Ottoman Empire and Iran in the Caucasus.

In her report "On the problem of repatriation of Syrian Abkhazians", E. A. Gurgulia (Moscow) examined the process of repatriation in historical connection with the history of the appearance of Abkhazians on the territory of Syria. Although Abkhazians retain a certain ethnic identity, young people no longer speak their native language. Nevertheless, a certain ethnic isolation is observed - the preservation of generic surnames, the formation of professional niches where representatives of this diaspora realize themselves, and their close connection with the motherland. Thus, during the 1992-1993 war in Abkhazia, the Syrian Abkhazians provided her with some assistance, and in connection with the tense situation in Syria, the Abkhazian Foreign Ministry expressed deep concern about the fate of their compatriots. Among the main difficulties preventing their return, the author names a difficult economic situation. Improving the economic situation in Abkhazia, creating the necessary infrastructure for repatriates, ensuring the regime of free entry to and exit from Abkhazia, determining the place of residence, accommodation, organization of medical services, employment and much more will contribute to the return of the diaspora.

In the report " On the demographic situation in the Republic of Abkhazia. A brief analysis of ethnic and religious composition " E. D. Eshba (Moscow) considered the dynamics of demographic changes in the republic since the collapse of the USSR. Based on official statistics, it showed a change in the number of the main ethnic groups-Abkhazians, Georgians, Russians, Armenians, Greeks, etc.In fact, the population of the republic has grown, but there is a slight decrease in the number of titular nations. Difficult for Abkhazia is the "Gali district problem", and with it the issue of returning refugees. Recently, the intensified process of repatriation of descendants of Abkhazian Muhajirs to Abkhazia has begun to have an increasing impact on the demographic and, at the same time, religious situation in Abkhazia. According to the State Committee for Repatriation of the Republic, 550 families from Turkey, Jordan, Syria, etc. moved to Abkhazia for permanent residence in the post-war period (since 1994).

The report of J. Y. Rakhaev (Kabardino-Balkaria) "Temgryuk Idarov in the historical memory of the Adyghe people: warrior, diplomat, national hero" analyzes the reasons for the growing interest in the personality of this legendary political figure and its place in the Adyghe cultural memory. The author focuses on the evolution of public perception of Idarov's personality and asks a number of questions: how did the image of Temgryuk Idarov change during its almost five-hundred-year history? What points in this story can be called turning points and how can they be explained?

At the beginning of the 19th century, with the inclusion of Kabarda in Russia, an objective need arose to understand the centuries-old experience of Russian-Kabardian relations, as a result of which the first works about Idarov's personality appeared under the influence of Russian historical literature.

The October revolution of 1917 and the subsequent civil war permanently removed the problems of the medieval history of Kabarda from the agenda. However, interest in the personality of Idarov returned already in the 40s of the XX century. in connection with the awareness of the Soviet leadership of the need for historical examples of patriotism. The thesis on the voluntary entry of Kabarda into Russia is put forward.

In the early 1990s, in the context of the democratization of public life and the formation of federalist principles, the historical community put forward a new interpretation of the events of the XVI century, which categorically rejected the phrase "voluntary entry", and Russia and Kabarda were now presented as two equal subjects of international relations, which concluded a mutually beneficial agreement in the person of Ivan IV and Temgryuk Idarov.

In 2007, there is a return to the traditional interpretation of events - the anniversary of the voluntary entry of Kabarda into Russia was again celebrated.

Analyzing how the myth-making about Temgryuk Idarov was constructed and used by the authors in different historical periods, by the state authorities, the aristocracy and the intelligentsia, the author comes to the conclusion that his image still influences the development of the collective identity of the Adygs.

6*

S. A. Pritchin's report (Moscow) "Regional security system as an important factor in determining the international legal status of the Caspian Sea" considered the issue of interaction of the Caspian littoral states in creating a security system in the region.

The status of the Caspian Sea has been the focus of regional policy for more than 20 years. So far, there is no reason to predict that the final adoption of the Convention on the Division of the Sea is possible in the near and medium term. Nevertheless, despite the many contradictions between the Caspian littoral countries, their security problems are being solved quite successfully. Against the background of the difficult negotiation process on the status of the sea, the results of the 2nd and 3rd Caspian summits, held in Tehran in 2007 and Baku in 2010, are of great importance for stability and security in the region. The documents signed as a result of them define the principles of building a multilateral security system in the region and the areas in which the parties intend to cooperate, for example, the fight against terrorism, poaching, organized crime, and smuggling.

But everything is not as smooth as it may seem at first glance. On the one hand, at the level of intergovernmental agreements, the countries of the region agreed on the principle of ensuring security and stability. On the other hand, not a single solution has been implemented in practice. Thus, the Russian initiative of the regional security system CASFOR is not supported by other Caspian countries. And although no one wants to quarrel and create a hotbed of tension, none of the Caspian littoral countries is ready to make serious concessions on fundamental issues and is building up their naval forces.

A. Z. Sarkarov (Federal Lezgin NationalCult, autonomy) in his speech " Lezgin communities of Russia: features and trends" paid special attention to the processes of formation of Lezgin communities in Russia in the 1920s. For example, the first Lezghian student circle set out to create a written language in the Lezghian language and change the language policy in Southern Dagestan. Thanks to the work of the circle, the Lezghian and Tabasaran languages have been officially written since 1928. According to all Soviet censuses, the Lezghin community of Moscow and Leningrad was second only in number to the Ossetian community of the North Caucasian peoples. The Lezgian population was very mobile in Soviet times. Within the Russian Federation, the share of Lezgins, as well as related peoples of the Lezgin language group living outside Dagestan and the Southern Federal District, was the highest, far exceeding the other peoples of the North Caucasus in this indicator. Lezgin communities are also more evenly distributed across all federal districts of the Russian Federation. In turn, Lezgin public organizations, along with all-Dagestani ones, began to be actively created throughout Russia. At the same time, other large Dagestani peoples (Avars, Dargins, Kumyks, Laks, and Tabasarans), with rare exceptions, did not have similar processes.

A. Z. Sarkarov noted that along with activities aimed at maintaining the native language and culture, Lezgian public organizations actively participate in political actions, which is associated with the presence of a large number of problems in the territory of the historical settlement of the Lezgian people (first of all, with the separation of Lezgians by the state border into "Russian" and "Azerbaijani"). At the moment, there is an increase in the activity of representatives of the Lezghian community, which, in addition to ethno-political problems in Dagestan and Azerbaijan, affects the historical and cultural heritage of Caucasian Albania. In Lezgin communities, there are processes of consolidation of Lezgins and increased interaction with other peoples of the Lezgin language group, including the Udin. There is a strengthening of ties between individual Lezgian communities in different regions of Russia and establishing contacts with Lezgian diasporas in foreign countries. On the basis of such interactions, the idea of creating an international Lezghian organization is being developed.

D. S. Ganenkov (Moscow) in his report "Corpus Linguistics and Caucasian languages" described that during the Soviet (since the 1920s) and post-Soviet period, literary languages of the North Caucasus (Avar, Darginsky, Tabasaran, Lezginsky, Lak, Kumyk, Ossetian, Chechen, Ingush) were published in the following languages: a significant body of prose texts of various genres (short stories, novellas, novels, fairy tales, jokes, journalism, spiritual literature). Currently, the vast majority of texts in these languages are presented in the form of books, a small part (mainly newspapers) - in electronic form on the Internet. The development of modern computer technologies makes it possible to use texts for a detailed study of the grammar and vocabulary of these languages. The report is devoted to an overview of the corpus resources available to the Caucasus expert. The first corps was the Eastern Armenian

Eastern Armenian National Corpus (EANC) (see: http://www.eanc.net/). In 2011, with the support of the Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences, pilot corpora of Ossetian and Lezghian languages were created based on the search engine of the Eastern Armenian National Corpus. In the near future, the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences plans to create corpora for other literary languages of the North Caucasus. Morphological markup of buildings is performed using the UniParser program. Each word form in the corpus is provided with information about the lexeme, part of speech, inflectional grammatical categories, as well as the translation of the lexeme. Corpora are based on the EANC search engine and allow you to perform various types of search by lexeme, lexeme translation, grammatical and semantic characteristics of both individual lexemes and their combinations.

Yu. A. Lander (Moscow) in his report "On typologically oriented studies of the Adyghe languages at the beginning of the XXI century" reviewed some modern projects on the study and description of the Adyghe and Kabardino-Circassian languages, paying special attention to linguistic expeditions that have been conducted since 2003 on the basis of the Russian State University for the Humanities. An important part of the report was the discussion of methodological and theoretical guidelines for describing Adyghe languages. On the one hand, these languages, due to their polysynthetic structure, reveal specifics that make it impossible to study them within the framework of descriptive systems developed for languages of the "Central European standard" (for example, Russian or English). On the other hand, for an adequate description of the Adyghe languages, it is useful to compare them with typologically similar languages, even if they are not related to these languages in any way areally or genetically.

During the presentations and discussions, participants and guests of the round table supported the idea of holding annual scientific conferences of young Caucasian scholars under the auspices of the Center for the Study of Central Asia, the Caucasus and the Ural-Volga Region of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The preliminary topic of the next February round table "Sources on the history of the peoples of the Caucasus as a factor in the formation of historical memory and identity" was identified.

Permanent link to this publication: