Home – Home – Jornals – Humanitarian sciences in Siberia 2018 number

Over the decades, the Western scholars (mostly representatives of English- and German-language historiography) have been attempting to clarify the issue of possible alternative development of the Russian state and society during the pre-revolutionary period; to determine the causes of the collapse of monarchy and to identify factors that eventually led to the Bolsheviks’ rise to power. While focusing on the events in European Russia, Western historians have just recently turned to studying the social-political processes in the Asian periphery of the empire. The objective of the paper is to analyze the major works of Western authors on the history of social and political development of Siberia and the Russian Far East in the second half of the XIX - early XX centuries and to evaluate their contribution to the study of this topic. The paper shows that their research covers a wide range of issues, such as: the evolution of ideas and activities of members of the Siberian regionalist movement (S. Watrous, D. von Mohrenschildt, W. Foust et al.); the history of protest movement (M. Melancon, H. Reichman, D. Wolff); social and political processes in the region during the Russian Revolution of 1905 (E.-M. Stolberg, A. Wood, D. Dahlmann) and inter-revolutionary period (R. Snow et al.). The researchers draw on the theories of “frontier” (S. Watrous, E.-M. Stolberg et al.), “regionalism” (W. Faust) and “modernization” (D. Dahlmann), in the last decades - concepts relating to the “cultural and spatial turns” (S. Stuch) in historical science, “new imperial history” (D. Rainbow). The author proves that Western scholars specified and revised some conclusions of the Soviet historiography, in particular - better assessed the role of members of various social movements and political parties in the revolutionary events in the early XX century.