The Resettlement Case in Asian Russia: Imperial Format/Modernization Challenge

This article examines the socio-political and governmental discourses surrounding the resettlement issue, which were framed by the conservative segment of Russian society's understanding of population policies and strategies on the country's eastern borderlands in the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries.Supporters of a "protective" approach to resettlement policy and agrarian migration in Russia, in the periodical press, presented a viewpoint according to which the spread of imperial influence in the borderlands served as a guarantor of social stability and national security, which was expressed in the advocacy of Russification patterns as a tool for cultural unification and the overcoming of separatist sentiments and social turbulence in peripheral regions.Consolidating this approach, the bureaucracy attempted to implement principles of domination and coercion over the population in the east of the empire, marking the Asian territories as a fiefdom -Russia's "own East".The imperial format of Russian presence in the country's eastern outskirts also extended to the process of agrarian migration, which included both representatives of the long-standing segment of the population, diverse in ethnocultural terms, and settlers from Russia's European provinces, who included other ethnic and religious groups.The imperial approach to organizing resettlement affairs in the post-reform period also contained some elements of modernization, which was achieved by overcoming the isolation of the eastern outskirts as a result of railway construction, the economic and cultural potential of part of the resettlement community, and the growing professionalism of a new generation of imperial resettlement bureaucracy.