Moscow, Nauka Publishing House. 1970. 502 pp. The print run is 4000 copies. Price 1 rub. 88 kopecks. Over the past 20-25 years, no field of source studies has developed so rapidly or generated so much controversy as diplomacy. Publication of the main set of Russian acts of the XIV-early XVI centuries.1 with particular acuteness set the task of understanding the significance of acts as sources of socio-economic and political history from a Marxist-Leninist perspective. L. V. Cherepnin managed to reveal the class and political meaning of acts, to find out their origin. He also has the first experience of diplomatic codicology 2 . S. M. Kashtanov, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Senior researcher at the Institute of History of the USSR of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, discusses the theory, methodology and archeography of act source studies. S. M. Kashtanov repeats his earlier definition of acts as documents of a contractual nature, in which economic and political transactions are recorded in the form of legal norms, and considers it permissible a comprehensive method for studying acts. He defends the propositions put forward by him regarding diplomacy as an official source study, which are disputed by a number of Soviet and foreign authors .3 Thus, the American scientist E. Keenan defends the old idea of diplomacy as "the study of form, in its evolution, local variants, and cultural context." He considers the categories of diplomacy to be formal and in this regard criticizes the classification of documents proposed by S. M. Kashtanov, since this is a classification not of the documents themselves, but of certain relations, the regulation of which is reflected in them. According to Keenan, this is no longer diplomacy, but a historical interpretation. Not to reveal the driving forces of history, but to hide them, not to move from the source and through the source to real history - this is the objective meaning of E. Keenan's reasoning. S. M. Kashtanov proceeds from ... Read more