Search

The paper analyzes the proposals and projects elaborated in 1894-1895 by the Minister of Agriculture and State Properties, Alexey Yermolov, for developing the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Urals, and Siberia. The article aims at disclosing to what extent and in what aspects the general trend to modernizing the country’s economy influenced the policies of settling and developing the imperial outskirt regions, thus submitting them to the logic of “frontier” modernization. The materials surveyed are diverse in content. In the Caucasus, the main attention was paid to the resettlement problems, in Turkestan – those of economic development; and in Siberia both directions of colonization policies were combined. Meanwhile, the general approaches can be revealed in Yermolov’s proposals. This is, first, overcoming the economic isolation of the regions and opening them with laying the transport communications; second, combining the resettlement colonization with the intensification and specialization of economics turning to more rational methods of natural resources development; third, paying emphasis to preparation and organization of the resettlement, optimization of the land use in terms of relations between immigrants and natives; fourth, starting the transition from agricultural development to industrialization of the outskirt regions. A special place among the regions belonged to the Urals, which, due to the long tradition of the mining industry, had lost the frontier features by the end of the 19th century. In the Urals, the tasks coming to the fore were concerned with the structural policy aimed at adapting the region to market.

This article is devoted to one of the most complicated issues of Russian history, i. e. the challenges of modernity, which are viewed through the prism of the concept of modernisation (used to describe the transition from a traditional agrarian society to an industrial and urban one). A historical challenge is a complex category, not a simple action “to spite the arrogant neighbour”. One of the main reasons for its emergence is technological revolutions that fundamentally change the conditions of human communities. Typologies of challenges vary from natural and climatic to social and political. Russia has come across many of them. Civilisational, geopolitical, technological, socio-political, cultural, and ideological challenges are the most typical of the imperial period. Their research discusses the characteristics of the essence of a challenge, the need to understand it, respond to it, the struggle of opinions about the reaction to them, and the evaluation of the results achieved. As an example of this approach, the authors consider two of the aforementioned challenges. In Russian historiography, the concept of “challenges” is not uncommon, but quite often the reaction to them did not take into account the dynamics of modernisation. The method put forward by the authors, based on the “challenges and responses” scheme, makes it possible to bridge this gap and provides practically meaningful results without them being ready-made recipes. Preliminary conclusions about two of the indicated challenges demonstrate that they were only slowly understood by the Russian ruling elite, which resulted in the cataclysms of the First World War and the Revolution of 1917 that put Russia on the brink of a civilizational catastrophe, although one should not forget that in the course of the period under study the country turned into a power of world significance., Вызовы Нового времени в российской истории рассматриваются сквозь призму концепции модернизации – перехода от традиционного аграрного общества к индустриально-урбанизированному. Одна из главных причин возникновения исторических вызовов – технологические революции, принципиально меняющие условия существования человеческих сообществ. Показано, что типология вызовов, с которыми сталкивалась Россия, очень разнообразна – от природно-климатических до социально-политических. Наиболее типичными для имперского периода были цивилизационные, геополитические, технологические, социально-политические, культурно-мировоззренческие. Их исследование включает характеристику сущности вызова, необходимость его осознания и возможности ответа, борьбу мнений по поводу ответа, оценку достигнутых результатов. Обращено особое внимание на цивилизационный и геополитический аспекты. В российской историографии понятие «вызовы» не редкость, но ответы на них часто давались без учета модернизационной динамики. Предложенный метод анализа по схеме «вызов – ответ» поможет преодолеть такую ситуацию и дать практически значимые результаты. Вызовы с опозданием осознавались российской правящей элитой, что и привело в конечном счете к катаклизмам Первой мировой войны и революции 1917 г., поставивших Россию на грань цивилизационной катастрофы. При этом, по мнению авторов, надо оценивать усилия, приложенные населением страны, в результате которых она за рассматриваемый период добилась значительного прогресса, превратившись в державу мировой значимости.