Home – Home – Jornals – Humanitarian sciences in Siberia 2014 number

At the turn of the XIX - XX centuries the foreign authors paid increasingly greater attention to Russia’s successes in the Arctic territories development. This topic was covered mostly by periodicals published in the United States, Great Britain and Germany - the leading naval powers of the time. The present article attempts at reviewing major works published by the English- and German-language researchers in order to reveal main trends in studying the history of the Russian Arctic development in the XIX - early XX centuries. Describing Russia’s activities in the Arctic (F.Schwatka, G.Melville, A. Hrdlicka) Western authors contributed to the overall picture of the imperial expansion and power of Russia. The first decades of the XX century were marked by the growing activities of European countries in the Arctic region raising a topical question of these territories’ legal status. One of the ways to claim the rights to these areas was to organize expeditions (described in the works by R. Bartlett, V. Stefansson, N.A. Transehe, H.Abel, W. Barr). The history of the Northern Sea Route exploration and development was studied by C. Crypton, T.Armstrong, W.E. Butler. In the 1990s - early 2000s the Arctic policy of the Russian empire in the pre-revolutionary period was analyzed by P. Horensma, J. McCannon, D. Dahlmann. Problems of relationships between the Russian population and aboriginal peoples of the Far North were discussed by A.Kappeler, Yu.Slezkine, D.Anderson. The contemporary research is focused on the negative aspects of the Russian “paternalist” policy and tends to reject the “russocentric” approach and to describe the history of indigenous small-numbered peoples of the North from their point of view.