Home – Home – Jornals – Humanitarian sciences in Siberia 2019 number

The issue of colonization tasks in the context of imperial building became an important element of the public discourse and state policy in the second half of the XIX - early XX centuries with growing migration movement to the eastern outskirts. Under conditions of peasantry mass migrations to West Siberia and steppe region (Steppe Krai), activity to define the colonization potential of settlement areas and to assess the capacities of resettlement territories for immigrants came to the fore. Solving current tasks and creating projects for “internal” colonization, the imperial authorities pursued ideological goals trying to put into practice certain elements of the “Russian cause” policy that were not implemented on the empire’s western outskirts. Mass relocations made it possible to implement a nationally conservative plan to create a “big Russian nation”. Special functions in this program belonged to the institution of imperial experts, which was the main conductor of imperial ideas in the eastern regions. The peak of migration movement to the region chronologically coincided with the approval of the governance principles of the country’s eastern outskirts, the meaning of which was to establish the empire’s special powers in russification; it gave chances to overcome the cultural distance between Russia and West Europe. Two periods can be traced in the imperial experts’ activities. Initially, the organizer of the expert activity was the West Siberian Department of the Imperial Russian Geographic Society (ZSOIRGO). However, along with intensifying peasant migration and reanimating nationally conservative ideas, as well as emerging institutions, which claimed the colonial ministries status, the need to re-format the institution of imperial experts appeared. In the 1890s new criteria defining the content of this group of persons were approved, which included strict adherence to instructions of sending institutions, servility, mobility and desire to correlate results of their expeditionary activities with the current state tasks of colonization.