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

The imperial governance system as a historical and legal problem has not lost its relevance for more than a century. The imperial problematics’ actualization at the early XXI century is determined by changes in the principles of relations between the center and regions. The researchers have moved away from the Lenin’s definition of periphery, and replaced it by the concept of “frontier”. In the modern historical science, the theory of “frontier” is widely used to study a vast array of problems in the history of foreign policy (“new frontier” factor), urban history etc. Two last decades in the Siberian historiography were marked by intensifying research interest in the special administrative bodies of the eastern regions in the XIX century - the First and the Second Siberian Committees, as well as the Siberian Railway Committee. Two main political institutions of the imperial Russia were investigated in details - the institution of Governor-Generals and the institution of Governors. The Russian Empire was an administrative space with complex structure from the governance viewpoint. The imperial regionalism is the subject of modern Siberian historians’ research. The focus shifted from the center to periphery in works published in the XXI century; the problems of ruling the Empire are viewed through the prism of the peoples inhabiting its margins, and influenced by the active integration into a single imperial administrative space. Each ethnic group inhabiting the empire had its own specific mentality largely determined by its relationship with the government. The issue of stability of the empire’s physical structure was related to the administrative system’s formation and evolution, which attracted the attention of modern historians. Recent scientific works are free from ideological clichés, which promotes active international cooperation among historians within the framework of joint projects. Appreciating the diversity of the imperial center’s models of the marginal regions’ management, many modern researchers see regionalism as a driver of the empire’s stability in the past and the guarantee of Russia’s prosperity in the future.