The author concentrates on the geopolitical struggle for domination in the Caucasus among Russia, other regional states, Britain, and France late in the 18th-first half of the 19th century. Russia, which had been actively involved in the Caucasus since the early 18th century, managed by the end of it to squeeze the Ottoman Empire out of the Northern Black Sea littoral and the Northern Caucasus. The British Empire, Russia's uncompromising rival, sought ways and means to check Russia's progress in the Caucasus. London pinned its hopes on Scottish missionaries prepared to move to the region from Edinburgh. St. Petersburg, likewise, looked at the Christian missionaries from Scotland and Basel as potential social and spiritual allies in the Caucasus. This was the rationale of the Russian Empire's settlement policy in the region.
1928 patients with implanted stents were examined for the purpose of identifying the regularity of restenosis development after stenting occluding and nonoccluding lesions of coronary arteries (CA). After six months check coronary angiography was per-formed for 1276 patients with 274 occlusions and 1442 stenoses of CA. To carry out a comparative analysis of the study results, a computer algorithm of selecting pairs of cases with CA occlusions and stenoses was developed, which took into account a patient's age, presence of diabetes, affected vessel, lesion type (primary one or restenosis), as well as types of stents used. In the course of studying no significant difference was disclosed in the occurrence of restenoses for the groups with occluding and non-occluding lesions (33% и 28% respectively)) and in the occurrence of reocclusion development ((4.8% и 2.7% respectively). Neither was there any significant difference in the measures of a late lumen loss factor. The impact of CA...