The eight-volume edition of the History of the South Urals, published several years ago by the Publishing Centre of South Ural State University, has been awarded the 2024 National Prize "Cultural Imperium. Books and Projects" in the "Encyclopaedias" category. The awarding ceremony took place at the Novy teatr (New Theatre) in Moscow on February 26th. The prize has existed for a quarter of a century now. Its founders are the Russian State Library (RSL) and the Literaturnaya Gazeta newspaper.
Eight volumes of the big-scale project had been created by SUSU scientists with the involvement of other universities in our region and federal district. The project had been headed by the then President of our university, German Vyatkin, while the current SUSU President, and the then Rector, Aleksandr Shestakov, had taken a leading part.
"The creation of the multi-volume History of the South Urals is a serious step in the process of building a new image of our region, which played a significant role in the history of Russia. The formation of such an image is a very complex and responsible task - political, economic, social, and moral one," says SUSU President Aleksandr Shestakov.
The first volume dedicated to the archaeology of the Stone Age in the South Ural region had been written by Vadim Mosin. The second volume on the Bronze Age had been created by a team of authors headed by Deputy Director of the SUSU Institute of Media, Social Sciences and Humanities Andrey Epimakhov. The third volume on the Iron Age had been written by scientists under the supervision of Director of the SUSU Eurasian Studies Research and Education Centre Aleksandr Tairov. The fourth and fifth volumes on the Ural Middle Ages from the 1st to the 15th centuries had been written by a team of authors under the supervision of SUSU Professor Sergei Botalov. The sixth volume tells about the beginning of Russia's development of the Ural lands - from 1430 to the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway. It had been written by SUSU Senior Research Fellow Gayaz Samigulov, Director of the KSU Institute of Humanities Denis Maslyuzhenko and Maxim Moiseyev from the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The seventh volume is dedicated to the pre-revolutionary history of the Gornozavodsky Urals, and the eighth one is dedicated to the 20th century and the present day of our region. They had been written by a group of historians, including SUSU scientists Igor Sibiryakov, Nikolai Antipin, Nelli Zhuravleva and others.
Not every region in Russia can boast such a fundamental presentation of its history. It is noteworthy that the victory in the "Encyclopaedia" category was shared by SUSU scientists with other residents of the Ural region – the team of the eight-volume History of the Khanty-Mansiysk Autonomous District, working under the leadership of a legendary historian Rudolf Pikhoy.
The printed version of the History of the South Urals can be found in the SUSU library. And the electronic version of this fundamental work is available on the university's website at the following link. For now, these are ordinary PDF files, but historians have plans to give the encyclopaedia a more structured look with an interactive interface.