This issue of SibScript introduces the latest achievements in archeology, history, international relations, historiography, and historical research methods.

We start with the history of craft and industry: N. M. Zinyakov conducted a micro-analysis of 10th-to-13th-century cast-iron artefacts discovered in Jetisu and Southern Kazakhstan.

After that, we move on to the Social History of Russia in the 19th and 20th centuries. According to S. N. Podlesnykh, the Russian Empire failed to provide sufficient financial support to judges in 1801–1864. This material insecurity eventually eroded public trust in the rule of law as judges could not guarantee unbiased justice. K. Z. Ragimova chose the case of Tomsk Imperial University as a typical provincial university to demonstrate how corporate rituals, shared symbols, and alumni networks mediated professorial disputes before the Russian Revolution of 1917. A. N. Kabatskov studied authentic diaries written by Soviet high school students in 1945–1953. As a result, he managed to reveal some common patterns of social imagination and symbolic codes that transmitted the idea of an urbanized ideal socialism.

The section of Russian History, Historiography and Source Studies opens with A. V. Golubeva’s article that describes the main factors of summer tourism at the Sheregesh Resort, Kemerovo Region. She believes that the focus on the winter season and independent tourism, as well as scattered investments and poor summer marketing, may explain the one-dimensional status of this popular sports and recreation site. E. A. Filonova used local newspapers to trace the rise of Sheregesh Resort against the background of the turbulent social transformations in the Kemerovo Region in 1999–2010. M. Yu. Shlyakhov & N. V. Starikova provided a reappraisal of the early Russian historical studies performed by Prince Dimitrie Cantemir in the 18th century. A devoted Cristian and absolutist, Cantemir saw world history as a chain of powerful empires and envisioned Russia as the successive heir to Rome and Byzantium.

We make a long stop at a major knot of historical memory, i.e., World War II. In this part of our journal, V. A. Barmin analyzes the aid provided by Xinjiang to the USSR in 1941–1942. T. V. Evdokimova explores the biography of Colonel General Nikolai E. Berzarin, the first Soviet commandant of Berlin, and outlines German and Russian historical attitudes to this prominent historical figure in 1950s–1990s. Finally, V. V. Mironov revisits the perspectives on World War II and global military history provided by the English historians Basil H. Liddell Hart and Michael Howard.

Then, we move down the timeline to the Cold War. Yu. V. Varfolomeev studied the evolution of anti-Soviet projects forged by the Global West. He believes that secret military attack plans, Winston Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech, the Dulles Doctrine, and the Harvard Project constituted a long-term strategy. O. G. Lekarenko ventured into more knowledge-intensive economic spheres of the Cold War, namely the Euratom Project, which was part of US support for European integration and peaceful nuclear energy. G. A. Mayorov also appraised the nuclear factor: it created strategic stability born of mutual deterrence and stimulated the development of weapon control.

In its closing part, SibScript takes you across the globe and up and down the timeline. Here, I. N. Yeritsyan explains that the United Work Collective Council in Transnistria was the logical grassroots resistance to centralized discrimination. V. P. Rumyantsev & S. K. Ilin compared the US operations in Lebanon in 1958 and 1982–1984. The US military presence in the Middle East strengthened the influence of the White House on the Congress while fastening the interventionist logic in the ruling minds.

SibScript thanks the authors for their valuable contributions to domestic and international historic studies. We invite readers to explore fresh evidence, new methods, and reinterpretations that stretch across continents and centuries, connecting local experiences to sweeping historical transformations.