Actors of agrarian colonization of Asian Russia in the second half of the XIX – early XX centuries in the scientific and journalistic discourse of the Siberian regionalism

Tokmurzayev Bakyt ORCID: 0000-0003-3972-2329 PhD in History Acting Associate Professor of the Department of National and Foreign History of Syrdarya University 160500, Kazakhstan, Turkestanskaya oblast', g. Zhetysai, ul. M. Auezova, 11 b.tokmurza@gmail.com Other publications by this author

Meirbekov Myrzabay ORCID: 0000-0001-5968-6690 PhD in History Associate Professor of the Department of National and Foreign History of Syrdarya University 160500, Kazakhstan, Turkestanskaya oblast', g. Zhetysai, ul. M.auezova, 11, of. 1 Meyrbekov2020@mail.ru Other publications by this author

Introduction

The history of the Russian Empire's advance towards the Asian periphery is as relevant as it is polemical, having become an indispensable plot of domestic and foreign historiography for many years. One of the most hotly debated issues has always been the topic of communication between the "center" and "periphery" in the conditions of the imperial situation in Russia and the definition of the territories of the Trans-Urals in the categories of "colony" / "outskirts" ^{[2, 5, 9, 11, 14]}, what determines the importance and scientific relevance of the appeal to the socio-political discourse of the second half of the XIX – early XX centuries, which clearly reflected the competition of projects for the organization of the administrative space of Russia in the process of its territorial increment.

The purpose of the article is to identify channels of representation and content of the discourse of the Siberian regionalism about the status and opportunities of social groups and ethnic communities in the colonization of the eastern outskirts of the Russian Empire in the second half of the XIX – early XX centuries. The choice of the chronological framework of the work is due to the fact that during the period under study, due to the crisis processes in the agrarian economy of the center of Russia, there is a reorientation of the vector of migration movement in the direction of the Asian part of the country, which contributed to the development of versions and counter-versions of projects of agrarian colonization of the outskirts.  The provisions and conclusions of the study are based on the scientific and journalistic texts of the leaders of the Siberian regionalism, which captured the ideas of the liberal part of the Russian and Siberian intelligentsia about the colonization prospects of Asian Russia as part of the empire in connection with the definition of the socio-economic and cultural potential of the main actors in the colonization process - the Cossacks, migrant peasants and the indigenous population of Siberia and the Steppe Region.

The main part

  The beginning of an important ideological dispute on the actors of colonization was laid in the 1860s by representatives of the national-conservative spectrum of socio-political thought in Russia and became a kind of reaction to the situation with the western outskirts of the empire, most susceptible to separatist sentiments (the uprising of the Polish gentry in 1863). In the discourse of Russian "guardians", represented on the pages of such Russian Russian publications such as the newspaper "Moskovskie Vedomosti" and the magazine "Russkiy Vestnik", edited by M.N. Katkov, considered the problem of protecting the interests of the titular group – the Russian people from the hostile environment, which was traditionally personified by Western states, as the central one. So, M.N. Katkov, in one of the editorials of his newspaper, wrote: "Everything in the world has its enemies. There is no such modest, small, insignificant life that would not be threatened by mortal dangers. And the oyster has its enemies: can such a huge and powerful state as Russia not have them?" ^{[1, p.67]}.

The protection of the fundamental interests of the Russian people in the rhetoric of M.N. Katkov and his like-minded people was strictly correlated with the need to expand and strengthen the state territory, which required not only decisive military actions, but also the formation of ideas in society about the role of the suburbs in the political life of the country, as well as forms and methods of their incorporation into the all-Russian space.

As a result, the leaders of the "guardians" formulated the foundations of the political program of Russia's national security, a significant place in which belonged to the idea that the suburbs were considered as an integral part of the general imperial body, requiring decisive administrative and managerial measures. Among such state-significant territories, the national conservatives, along with Poland, Finland, the Baltic provinces, the Caucasus, also included Siberia, which was a mosaic region in ethno-confessional terms, the development of which, in their opinion, should have been carried out exclusively by the forces of the Russian nation (peasantry, Cossacks) under strict intellectual and bureaucratic patronage imperial administration ^{[1, p.71]}.

An alternative version of the actions of the Russian state on the eastern outskirts of the empire was voiced in the liberal discourse, most substantively formulated in the 1860s - 1870s. political activity and journalism of figures of the Siberian regionalism (N.M. Yadrintsev, G.N. Potanin, A.P. Shchapov, S.S. Shashkov, etc.). It is noteworthy that that the views of the oblasts during this period experienced a rather complex evolution from political radicalism to moderate liberalism. Having experienced in the second half of the 1860s the drama of arrest and subsequent restriction of rights in connection with accusations of calls for the separation of Siberia from Russia, the leaders of the movement refocused on finding options for a "soft" path of socio-economic, political and cultural development of the region as part of the Russian Empire. In our opinion, two factors had a decisive influence on the reformatting of the concept of oblastnichestvo.

Firstly, the theorists of the regional movement, being not so much practitioners as theorists (journalists, publicists, writers), in the conditions of exile received a unique chance to make great progress in the study of the colonial question in a broad global context. Thus, N.M. Yadrintsev was impressed by the works of the classics of the theory of colonialism A. Leroy-Beaulieu ^[4] and V. Roscher ^[10], who developed a model of paternalistic relations between the colony and the metropolis, in which the complete liberation of subordinate territories from colonial dependence was fixed as a distant prospect.

Secondly, the federalist ideas of N.I. Kostomarov ^[3] and A.P. Shchapov ^[13], which allowed the original development of individual regions as part of a single state organism, became a significant agent of influence on the views of the oblasts. At the same time, the federalists assigned a decisive place in state-building to the so-called "regional" factor. A.P. Shchapov, speaking at Kazan University, said: "I will say in advance: not with the idea of statehood, not with the idea of centralization, but with the idea of nationality and regionality, I am joining the university department of Russian History" ^{[15, p.37]}. In addition, one of the components of the federalist theory was the belief in the historical and ethnographic basis of state life, which acquired a special sound in the conditions of the suburbs.

The main conclusions of the Siberian regionalists were as follows: the Asian part of Russia is not a suburb, but an imperial colony that needs constant economic care, which should be expressed in providing the region with favorable opportunities for agricultural, industrial and commercial development; administrative practices of colonial administration require a special policy of the population, taking into account the polyethnicity and polyconfessional nature of the region, which excludes and sometimes makes it impossible for the Russian ethnos to dominate; the decisive factor in colonial activity is the cultural register of the empire, which contributes to the normal functioning of local society, which is achieved through the dissemination of universal education (gymnasium and university) and free press.

The key issue in the discourse of the Siberian oblasts was the question of the main actors of the agrarian colonization of Asian Russia. Unlike the conservatives and the imperial authorities, who saw in the agricultural development of the trans-Ural territories only an instrument of Russification of the outskirts and a way to resolve the agrarian and ecological crisis in the center of the country, the leaders of the oblastnichestvo emphasized the importance of proper organization of the resettlement business based on recognition of the interests of all groups of the population of the region, drawn into the "whirlpool" of migrations. N.M. Yadrintsev, for example, he pointed out that peasant resettlement needs constant "support" by the authorities, the organization of assistance to migrants at all stages of the resettlement movement, including at the stage of settling in Asian Russia, when peasants from European Russia come into close contact with old-timers, as well as representatives of the indigenous population, different from Russians in cultural terms in relation to ^{[16, p.196; 161]}.

We emphasize that the most detailed concept of agrarian colonization of Asian Russia was developed and presented in the works of representatives of the early oblastnichestvo - N.M. Yadrintsev and G.N.Potanin, who paid close attention to the problem of the main characters in this process: the Cossacks and the peasantry. Reflecting on the problem of the main actors of the agrarian colonization of the region, N.M. Yadrintsev comes to the conclusion, according to which, by the 1870s, the Cossacks, having finally joined the old-resident segment of the population, ceased to be an active subject of the colonization process, giving this function to the peasantry, which is largely explained by the "opening of the colonization valve" after the reforms of 1861. ^{[16, p.168]}. The resettlement issue, according to representatives of the oblastnichestvo, was important both for the outskirts and for inner Russia, as was unequivocally reported in the main organ of the press of Siberian oblastniki, the newspaper "Eastern Review": "it is not for nothing that voices are heard in some Voronezh province speaking in favor of resettlement to the East" ^{[6, p.2]}.

From that moment on, the oblast official states, "as a counterbalance to foreign blood and the living force of renewal, the colonization flow of free migrants from representatives of all provinces is always moving to Siberia" ^{[16, p.123]}.

At the same time, characterizing the Russian peasantry as the main actor of the colonization process, N.M. Yadrintsev highlighted some features that accompanied the economic activity of the community of farmers in Asian Russia. First of all, he noted the ambiguity of the fact that displaced peasants achieved economic success in the region, which he attributed not only to the natural difficulties of migration (travel expenses, lack of financial resources at home), but also to the primitiveness of peasant farming technologies that limited the land use opportunities of immigrants from European Russia on new lands ^{[16, p.126]}. No less significant factor for the oblast, in the context of assessing the prospects of peasant farming, was the question of the ethno-cultural identity of the estate and its evolution in new life circumstances. N.M. Yadrintsev stated that in the conditions of colonization, the Russian man "not only assimilated the physical type and mental characteristics of the alien, but also his culture" ^{[16, p.101]}, which reoriented him from agricultural practices to fishing and gathering, thus depriving him not only of the awareness of class affiliation, but also of the status of a cultural trader, which was so treasured by the "guardians".

G.N. Potanin, being a native of the Cossack environment, in his journalistic writings, paid a prominent place to the assessment of the significance of the Cossacks in the agrarian-colonization process. At the same time, speaking about the period of the second half of the XIX – early XX centuries, the researcher pointed to the vector of colonization of Asian Russia that had changed since the 1870s in the direction of the Steppe Region, where migrant peasants came into contact with both the indigenous population and the old-time element, composed mainly of the Cossacks. In his notes on the Siberian Cossack army in the steppe regions, G.N. Potanin, in particular, wrote: "The inhabitants of the Cossack villages located in this area, from birth, do not see bread on the vine…This non-agricultural country occupies about three hundred plus versts along the Irtysh (from the Cherlatskaya Stanitsa to Lebyazhya) and completely separates the agricultural district of the cities of Ust-Kamenogorsk and Semipalatinsk from the agricultural district of the city of Omsk" ^{[7, p.303]}. According to G.N. Potanin, one of the misconceptions of the authorities and part of the social forces in the middle of the nineteenth century was the thesis about the use of the Cossacks as a material for colonization of the Kyrgyz steppe, despite the fact that the peculiarities of the consciousness of the community of Cossacks, who traditionally performed defensive and offensive functions in the frontier zones, and also growing exponentially, were not taken into account peasant resettlement movement to the region of maximum concentration of the military estate ^{[7, p.315]}. Describing the Cossack village of Kokbekty, located in the vicinity of Ust-Kamenogorsk, G.N. Potanin, pays special attention to the unsatisfactory state of agriculture and the shortage of grain products compensated by grain products produced by settled foreigners ^{[7, p. 328]}, while the residents of the village try to support household economy by smuggling fish ^{[7, p.328]}. The researcher's general conclusion boils down to the belief that there are practically no military dangers left in the region, while the Cossacks, while maintaining their military status, are the source and detonator of ethnic conflicts, so the situation can change for the better only if more professional farmers from the European part of Russia are attracted to the Steppe Region ^{[7, p.330]}.

In his arguments about the agricultural potential of the steppe regions of Asian Russia, G.N. Potanin, dissuades supporters of the view of the Steppe Region as a space unsuitable for agricultural pursuits: "most of the territory is barren, but there is almost no area where there is an oasis for arable land, and convenient arable land is easily enough for the entire current population of the steppe" ^{[7, p.331]}. The regionalist demonstrates confidence that agricultural occupations, in which both representatives of the indigenous population and displaced peasants can be involved with equal success, will contribute to the beneficial process of interethnic communication, which will have a positive impact on the entire colonization process.

Conclusion

Summing up, it should be noted that in the discourse of the Siberian regionalism, a liberal version of the colonial incorporation of Asian Russia into the state field of the empire was represented, taking into account the specifics of the lifestyle, economic and cultural interests of the Cossacks, indigenous peoples and Russian settlers as actors of agrarian colonization. However, it should be noted that the oblasts were inclined to think about the weakening of the socio-cultural role of the Cossacks in the colonization process and the decisive importance of joint farming practices of Russian settlers and settled representatives of indigenous peoples.  

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