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Humanitarian sciences in Siberia

2014 year, number

DESCENDANTS FROM WESTERN OUTSKIRTS OF THE RUSSIAN STATE IN SIBERIA (XIX - EARLY XX CENTURY): FOREIGN HISTORIANS’ VIEWPOINTS

D.A. Ananyev
Institute of History of SB RAS, Russia, 630090, Novosibirsk, Akad. Nikolaev str., 8
Keywords: Russian Empire, Siberia, colonization, modernization, Ukranians, Poles, Belarussians, exile and penal labour

Abstract

In the course of several centuries a complex and multi-ethnic society was formed in Siberia. It comprised people of various nationalities, including descendants from Belarussian, Ukranian and Polish lands (before 1917 - Western outskirts of the Russian Empire). Researchers of Siberian history face the task of going into a more profound analysis of interethnic contacts and evaluating of the role played by different ethnic groups in colonization of the region. Along with Russian scholars this topic is actively studied by researchers from Poland, Belarus, Germany, USA and other countries. The author of the present paper aims at revealing main approaches applied by foreign researchers to studying historical links between Siberia and Western outskirts of the Russian Empire and defines prospects for future research. Having analyzed the range of problems studied by foreign researchers the author comes to conclusion that the most topical issues connected with descendants from Poland, Belarus and Ukraine in Siberia are the history of exile and penal labour; mass peasant migrations beyond the Ural; problems of ethnosocial and confessional development. Special attention is paid to the period of XIX - early XX centuries when Siberia experienced a huge influx of migrants from European Russia. During the last several decades the foreign historiography dealing with this topic witnessed a gradual shift from studying universal patterns of history (e.g., within a “modernization” approach) to a more close attention to ethno-cultural aspects of colonization, problems of “national identity”, specifics of “civilizational” development and “building an empire”. At the present stage a more profound analysis of the actual role played by Ukranians, Belarussians and Poles in Siberian colonization is possible on the basis of joint research projects combining efforts of representatives of various schools of scientific thought and trends in historiography.