Imperial Power and The Policy of Transformation of the Outlying Lands

Abstract

The article examines the structure and content of the monograph “Center and Regions: Economic Policy of the Government on the Outlying Lands of the Russian Empire (1894–1917)” which was prepared by a team of St. Petersburg and Moscow historians under the editorship of M.V. Khodyakov; it analyzes the characteristic features of the authors’ approaches and the significance of this work for current practices of studying the Russian Empire’s outlying areas. This monograph is a non-ordinary historiographical phenomenon in terms of its goals (to give an integral, comprehensive view of the economic policy of the center in relation to the “outlying regions”), the number of tasks implemented and the total extend of the work done. The monograph includes 31 paragraphs, each devoted to poorly studied or entirely unexplored problems. However, due to the unsatisfactory elaboration of fundamental theoretical and conceptual issues, as well as the scale of the project, and the limited time span set for its implementation, the reviewed work contains a number of shortcomings: a weak introduction (especially a historiographical survey), superficial conclusions (or their absence in paragraphs), the inconsistency of the subject of some paragraphs with the matter of economic policy. But despite of all the shortcomings, this work represents a significant contribution to the study of the frontier spaces of Russia as regards both the concrete historical material introduced into scientific circulation, and the non-trivial attempt itself to create a generalizing picture of imperial economic policy on the outlying areas of Russia in the late 19th – early 20th centuries.