Forgotten Page of the Disciplinary History of International Relations in Russia: Eastern Department of Foreign Relations of Faculty of Social Sciences of Irkutsk State University, 1921–1924. Part 2

The article on the example of the Eastern Department of External Relations of the Faculty of Social Sciences of Irkutsk State University, which existed in 1921–1924, considers a forgotten, and perhaps simply ignored by historiography, attempt to build in the early Soviet period in domestic science and the formation of the disciplinary field of international relations. The study focuses on considering the form that international relations have taken as a field of study and teaching, influenced both by social, explaining the history of its formation, and by intellectual factors that define and reflect the internal dynamics of the emerging disciplinary field. The latter in the case considered in the article developed in the process of interaction between international law and the history of international relations with oriental studies, which set the object of study — the interaction of the countries of the Far East (Northeast Asia) with the leading powers of the world and/or with each other. Disciplinary identity (objectivity, specialization) of the field was ensured by relying on Marxist political and economic methodological foundations common to its disciplines, as well as the theoretical concept of imperialism/colonialism (international political economy). Beginning in the second half of the 1920s. radical transformations in the study and teaching of social sciences sharply cut short not only the institutionalization of international relations as a promising area of social knowledge, but also the whole line for its construction on the basis of creative, academic Marxism, giving rise to infertility, which it still suffers.