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At the Origins of the Don Military Propaganda: the Creative Work of M.Kh. Senyutkin
Authors: Artem Yu. Peretyatko
Number of views: 94
The paper explores a military patriotic component in the creative work of Mikhail Kh. Senyutkin, a person who, for the first time, organized structured military propaganda activities in the Don press in period of the Crimean War. The author shows that this was accomplished quite on the spur of the moment: M.Kh. Senyutkin, a trained lawyer, who built the major part of his career in the prosecutor’s office and courts, found himself working as an editor of The Don Military Gazette (Donskiye Voyskovye Vedomosti) in the 1850s and, shortly after the outbreak of war, allowed to print military patriotic publications in the paper. Proceeding from M.Kh. Senyutkin's own oeuvre, the paper concludes that his efforts to systematize military propaganda were, nevertheless, meaningful – the Don lawyer viewed history as a study area of vital importance, which provided patriotic models to be followed. In his opinion, the history of Don Cossackdom was primarily shaped by its warfare legacy and essentially exemplified by the military exploits of Don units and particular Cossacks. At the same time, the paper shows that the oeuvre of M.Kh. Senyutkin was typical of the emerging Don military propaganda, and his reasoning gave explanations for some of its peculiarities, for example, the genre non-specificity of texts and authors’ regular references to Russian poets, rather than professional historians.