Working paper
Academic Luck: General And Specific Scenarios Of Academic Attestation In Russia In The 1830s
“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 is based on the historical-sociological analysis of the models of science in Russia and Germany, which serves as a basis for separation of convergence and divergence phases in the process. “The turning point” from former to the latter is establishment of the soviet model of science which leaded to universities’ deprivation of research function and their transformation into clearly educational institutes.
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.