“In Accord with State Interests and the People's Wishes“: The Technocratic Ideology of Imperial Russia's Resettlement Administration

Abstract

In this article, Peter Holquist traces both the institutional culture and personnel of one key late-imperial era agency, the Resettlement Administration, based within the Main Administration of Land Management and Agriculture. Holquist examines the technocratic ethos of a close-knit set of officials within the Resettlement Administration's central office, a group who from 1906 to 1917 oversaw plans to develop the empire's peripheries as well as incorporate territories annexed during World War I. Crucial to all their plans was a commitment to the rational and scientific administration of the empire's people and resources under the aegis of the central state. This ethos informed policies during the last decade of the old regime and throughout World War I, and both this ethos and this cohort of officials influenced the state policy of Red and White governments during the civil war and laid the foundation for the Soviet state's colonization programs in the early 1920s.