Book chapter
Zemsky Educational Establishments: Development of the Database
The process of transformation, which began in the Russian Empire in the second half of the XIX century, as one of the important social problems put forward the question of literacy. The problem of literacy in Russia intensified and became more prominent after the abolition of serfdom in 1861 when peasants were granted personal freedom and some civil rights. The elimination of illiteracy was one of the most important conditions for the further development of the country. The spread of literacy in the Russian Empire in the late XIX-early XX centuries was largely associated with the activities of local self-government bodies. For them one of the most important areas of work was public education. The well-known fact is that the local self-government reform was carried in 1864. In Russian, these local self-government bodies were called Zemstvo.
The article is devoted to historical continuity in the state governing. Issues of existing analogies in the process of forming of system and structure of executive bodies in Russia are considered. The special attention is given to a combination of branch and functional approaches to the organization of executive bodies at different historical stages. In the context of the presumption of "Ideally uniform government" questions of a parity of powers of monarch and ministers in the Russian empire and of the President and the ministries in the Russian Federation are mentioned.
The volume present papers on different aspects of the history of Russian Empire.
“Empire Speaks Out” is a result of the collaborative international research project whose participants aim to reconstruct the origin, development, and changing modes of self-description and representation of the heterogeneous political, social, and cultural space of the Russian Empire. The collection offers an alternative to the study of empire as an essentialized historical phenomenon, i.e. to those studies that construe empire retrospectively by projecting the categories of modern nation-centered social sciences onto the imperial past. It stresses dynamic transformations, adaptation, and reproduction of imperial patterns of sociability and governance. Chapters of the collection show how languages of rationalization derived from modern public politics, scientific discourses of applied knowledge (law, sociology, political economy, geography, ethnography, physical anthropology) and social self-organization influenced processes of transformation of the imperial space.
Article devoted to analysis the role and significance of Tatar-born Russian officials in gathering information about state and law of the Central Asian khanates – Bukhara, Khiva, Khoqand in the 18th-19th cc. on the examples of M.Bekchurin, M.Aitov and I.Batyrshin. All of them served as officials of the Orenburg Frontier Commission, two of them were diplomats in Bukhara and Khiva, last one contacted with informers from abovementioned khanates. The common feature for them was that they were Turks and Moslems. Firstly that fact provided Central Asian population’s sympathies to them (including favor of representatives of the ruling elites of the khanates) and gave an opportunity to gather more useful information. Secondly, as representatives of the Turkic-Islamic culture they could better understand and estimate the level of political and legal development of the Central Asian khanates and prepare impartial reports for their chiefs. Also it’s necessary to notice that their affiliation with Turkic-Islamic world didn’t influence on quality of fulfillment of missions by such officials: they tried all ways to contribute to realization of the Russian policy in the Central Asia and advance of the Russian Empire in this region.
The article constitutes a part of author’s studies on regions and mental geography of the Russian empire. The military actions within own territory normally produce a dramatic and long impact on the spatial imaginations. The Crimean war with its center in newly incorporated New Russia has helped to include this region to the mental maps as the Russian space. The article shows the new symbolic geography formation. It also analyses the efforts of propaganda aimed at maintaining the imperial durability. A special attention is paid to the state militia. The citizen soldiers – nobles and law classes representatives – had the unique opportunity to visit a number of regions. For the inhabitants of Central Russia the border with Little Russia was essential. The perception of Jews has demonstrated xenophobia long before pogroms. Although the authorities had enough reasons to be afraid of separatism, the final conclusion was that the imperial construction is rather healthy. As a result of such a conclusion an elaboration of this construction hasn’t become a part of common program of reforms in Russia. The author used unpublished documents, in particular those preserved in Kiev. The article is a part of the most significant recent international project on the Crimean war. The English translation of the article is published in USA.
This paper is timed to the 150th anniversary of the abolition of serfdom in Russia and dedicated to the heritage of A.P. Shchapov (1831-1876) - one of the distinguished historians and public figures of the epoch of «great reforms» of 1860s, a creator of zemstvo-regional conception of Russian history, who contributed significantly to federalistic and local history thought.