Our third issue covers three centuries of national history. The topics range from local living history, memoirs, and the legal system in Russian Central Asia in the XIX century to Russia's current foreign policy. Several publications were supported by the Russian Research Foundation and the Research Committee of the Ministry of Education and Science of Kazakhstan.

Section One featured the education, social culture, and everyday life in the USSR. It introduces a wide range of issues: military medical education at the Central Institute for Advanced Training of Doctors, Moscow, before World War II; gender equality in Dagestan in the 1960s; local history and everyday life of a provincial school in the 1930s.

Section Two includes articles about the international relations and foreign policy of the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation. They reveal various aspects of the international interaction between Russia and the West: the role of the United States in the Quadripartite Agreement of 1971; O. Scholz’s Program of the Future vs. Russia's European policy; the USSR, the USA, and the Euroatom program of the Federal German Republic; the role of children's diplomacy and the missions of Samantha Smith in the USSR (1983) and Ekaterina Lycheva in the USA (1986); the political socialization of schoolchildren in the Soviet Union. A. A. Sindeev describes the new concepts the West developed to build a system of international relations, as in the case of O. Scholz's Program of the Future. The author invites historians to participate in the formation of Russia's foreign policy towards Europe.

Section Three focuses on the history of Western and Eastern Siberia in XIX – early XX century. E. A. Berman’s research introduces a chain of studies that feature Jewish necropolises and epitaphs in the Irkutsk Region. A. V. Blinov describes the education system in Kuzbass in 1885–1917 and how the changes in economy, demography, and values increased the role of education in the life of the local population. E. V. Komleva studied the travel diary and correspondence of the famous statesman M. M. Speransky, who expressed his ideas about Siberian merchants when he was crossing Siberia in 1819–1821 as the Siberian governor-general. A. V. Lityagina explains how photography entered the entrepreneurial and everyday life of Western Siberians in the late XIX – early XX century.

Section Four concentrates on the scientific heritage and modernization processes in Central Asia. It covers such issues as the legal policy of the Russian Empire in Kazakhstan in the second half of the XIX century; the archival heritage of Mir K. Kadyrbaev, a Soviet archaeologist who studied ancient stone sculptures in Central Kazakhstan; the role of Bukharan Jews in the cotton trade between Turkestan and the Russian Empire.

We express our deepest gratitude to all our authors and invite specialists to publish articles on archeology, national and world history, international relations, etc.