COLONIZATION TREND IN THE HISTORY OF IMPERIAL RUSSIA: DYNAMICS OF “CHALLENGES” AND “RESPONSES”

In this article, historical peculiarities of the Russian colonization are analyzed in the light of Toynbee’s conceptual scheme “challenge - response”, the use of which gives an opportunity to reveal both the internal and external factors having stipulated the dynamics and paths of development of the Russian colonization process throughout several ages. On this basis, explanations are given for such characteristic features of the Russian colonization as its unevenness, fragmentariness, regularly renewed character. Also grounds are laid for admitting a critical role of distinctive colonization stages in shaping the Russian civilization. Defining the “challenges” as the crisis situations threatening the existence of the society, the author argues that a long-lasting external “challenge” embodied in the threat from nomadic hordes of the Eurasian steppes, had predetermined for a long time the colonization shift of the Russian population to territories being relatively unfavorable for agrarian development. This circumstance, in turn, had given a birth to the long-lasting internal “challenge” concerned with the lack of resources and low norm of surplus product, and it was a factor which made a colonization practically permanent process for Russia’s history. The given conclusions have a tendency to explain convincingly a transformation of the “challenge” situations as regards the colonization of Russia’s eastern regions; the former now are focused mainly on an opportunity to compensate various sharpened resource needs of the state at the expense of the extensive involvement of new territories into economic turnover. That trend explains both the succession of distinctive colonization “tides” in the development of the Urals and Siberia (trapping, mining, and agrarian ones) and their conjuncture, narrowly functional trend. As it is argued in the article, the consequence of that became uncompleted character of colonization processes in the country’s east - the condition which is kept until now. Meantime, toward the end of imperial period, the chief “challenge” for the Russian government becomes the need to increase the economic output from enormous empty territories acquired by Russia, and it was a consideration giving the impetus to the mass agrarian colonization of the lands beyond the Urals. Such a “response” was, in fact, a transition toward a deeper and more multi-faceted development of the eastern territories, but again mainly by the means of resettlements, i.e. at the expense of manual labor instead of the capital funds. Those circumstances are underlining exceptional importance of colonization in a strategy of the country’s development.

colonization, resettlement, Russia, the Urals, Siberia, furs, agrarian development, mining industry