Abstract
The article analyzes the approaches to nature management of two departments responsible for the development of Siberia in the Russian Empire and the USSR: the Resettlement Administration and the Council for the Study of Productive Forces (Sovet po izucheniyu proizvoditel’nyh sil — SOPS). Both structures were established in the late imperial period, carried out practice-oriented research on the outskirts for the purpose of economic planning and development of Asian regions, and then, to varying degrees, were integrated into the Soviet system. Comparison of the views of the experts from these two structures makes it possible to reveal the peculiarities of understanding the problems of nature management in the late imperial and late Soviet periods, the development of Asian regions, continuity and gaps between the two regimes. Studying the approaches of the Resettlement Administration and SOPS to nature management demonstrates that the development of Siberia was a way to build not only a new society, but also new approaches to the interaction between society and the environment. The article concludes that the goals of the experts of the Resettlement Administration and SOPS were not purely commercial in nature, their expertise contributed to the solution of political, social, environmental issues, such as the shortage of land in the European part of the Russian Empire; the danger of transferring this problem to the east; dependence on resource exports; uneven distribution of hazardous industries and the associated with it excessive concentration of pollution in industrialized regions. Thus, the deconcentration of the population and industries and their more even distribution, according to the experts, would not only contribute to the development of regions on the periphery, but also weaken environmental problems in the center.
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