Abstract: The article is devoted to the main historical and historiographic researches of Professor P.A. Kuzminov. It conventionally singles out several main blocks of research by the scientist, including works devoted to the historiographic study of the liberal reforms of the 1860s–1870s. in the North Caucasus, the processes of implementing reforms in the region, its socio-economic and political and legal development; works that analyze the methodological and organizational problems of modern Caucasian studies, the scientific and social activities of individual pre-revolutionary, Soviet and modern historians, etc. The article also considers the work of P.A. Kuzminov on the collection and publication of historical sources on the history of the development of the North Caucasus at the end of the 18th - 19th centuries.
The novelty of the article lies in the fact that in modern Caucasian studies there are no works devoted to the scientific biographies of individual scientists who, in their works, determine the course of development of research on certain problems of historical science. According to the authors, in the course of studying the biography of a scientist, it is possible only not to find interesting information about the life of an individual, but also to better understand the course of the organizational, institutional and methodological development of all science.
The authors come to the conclusion that P.A. Kuzminov, on the basis of modern theoretical and methodological approaches, conducted a comprehensive historical and historiographical analysis of various problems of modern Caucasian studies. Most of the scientists works are devoted to the history and historiography of the liberal reforms of the 1860s-1870s. in the North Caucasus, various socio-political and agrarian issues of the development of the region during its integration into the Russian Empire.

Abstract: The subject of this research is the conceptual grounds of Slavophilic ideology that formed under the influence of European sociopolitical thought of the late XVIII – early XIX centuries, and undergone substantial transformation in the process of adaptation to the Russian sociocultural reality. The article analyzes such concepts as nation, collective subject, national spirit (Volksgeist), special path (Sonderweg), etc., which were partially borrowed by Slavophiles from intellectual production of the German national romanticism, and gained further development having become the theoretical framework for studying different problems of Russian society and the state. Methodology is based on the comparative and historical-genetic methods, which allowed determining and examining the elements of similarity between the ideas of European and sociopolitical thought and Slavophilic conceptual ground, as well as their modification within the Russian intellectual environment. The main conclusion consists in the thesis that Slavophilism cannot be unequivocally attributed to liberal or conservative ideology. It combined the principles and postulates of both philosophical systems that acquired new synthesized content within the framework of Russian intellectual space. Slavophilic attitude toward Russian society, which marked the defining meaning of spiritual beginning of social life, also drastically differed from the national patriotism in the context of the theory of official nationalism, with its vividly expressed statist principle.