Asian Russia as the "Own East" in the imperial program of frontier development in the second half of the 19th – early 20th centuries

Based on the materials of the office work and personal texts of imperial experts, forming the communicative space of the discourse of Asian Russia, reveals the ideas of the authorities and society about the status of peripheral territories on the eastern frontier of the Russian Empire in the second half of the 19th - early 20th centuries. The aim of the work is to explain the reasons for the assertion of the proprietary approach of the imperial authorities and part of Russian society to the reception of Asian spaces as an organic part of Russia, and not a colony in the traditional sense of this concept for European polities. Achieving the aim and solving the tasks set is ensured in methodological terms by turning to the tools of discourse analysis, which made it possible to identify the key patterns of ideas of imperial experts - officials, travelers, publicists, public figures - about the ways and means of incorporating Western Siberia, the Steppe Region, and Turkestan into the common imperial space. In the course of the study, the historical and cultural circumstances and factors of the territorial expansion of the empire in relation to the eastern frontier were described and characterized; the logic in the formation of the category of Russia's "Own East" was revealed. It was suggested that for Russia as a dynastic state, the accretion of new territories with their subsequent administrative and political arrangement was a primary factor in ensuring the political legitimacy of the autocracy, while the practices of cultural integration of the peoples inhabiting the outlying territories were considered as an instrument for their incorporation into the pan-imperial space. It was established that the model of Asian Russia as its "Own East" was formed in a long historical retrospective and was worked out during the development of the West Siberian territories. The comparative ease of the incorporation of territories adjacent to the European part of Russia led to the resumption of the forms and methods of activity of imperial structures in other outlying regions - the Steppe Territory and Turkestan. The stereotyped ideas about administrative practices and population policies in remote areas of the Asian periphery were formed under the influence of Orientalist discourse and "protective" ideology, in the coordinate system of which the frontier was considered as a source of maintaining stability and security of the empire, and the peoples inhabiting them as state subalterns. Faced with the situation of cultural diversity outside Western Siberia, political and social elites actively developed scenarios for the cultural homogenization of the outskirts by means of agrarian resettlements, religious enlightenment, education according to Russian-European standards, which did not give the expected effect in the implementation of the concepts of "Own East" and "great Russian nation" in the Asian part of the country, but contributed to the solution of the then current political tasks of empire-building in the East. The authors declare no conflicts of interests.

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