Anti-German campaign in the First World War in the "center" and "on the ground" of the Russian Empire: the implementation of measures against German dominance in the Tomsk province

Any decision of the central government passes through the local authorities. And often, in varying degrees, this leads to distortion of the solutions. For Russia and Russian history, because of the size of the country is always very important to take into account the regional dimension, because the reconstruction of the past on the basis of the analysis of the decisions and actions only by "center" will be incomplete and one-sided. An excellent illustration of this statement is the "anti-German campaign" that took place on the territory of the Russian Empire during the First World War and subsequently directed against the three categories of the population: subjects of states fighting with Russia, Russian citizens of German origin and members of religious creeds, also referred to as "German" (Lutherans, Mennonites, Evangelical Christians, Baptists and others). "Anti-German campaign" included a whole range of different activities, such as the prohibition of teaching the German language, with the exception of the Germans from public organizations, renaming towns with German names (Petersburg became Petrograd), confiscation of property, liquidation of the German land tenure, deportation and other. We should also note the role of the press in the "anti-German campaign". Radical newspaper made a real information war against "German domination". Criticism and allegations on the pages of newspapers in many ways formed public opinion in the country, increasing the scope of Germanophobia. However, the main force to "fight against German dominance" was the central government. At the level of provinces its decisions turned into a set of specific administrative actions not always coincide with the "general line" and often different from each other. As an example, this article examines the Tomsk province, where, because of a number of circumstances, implementation of the "anti-German" actions had its own specific. First of all, this specific was due to the remoteness of the province from the center and the front, as well as the position of local authorities, which did not seek to tighten the discrimination of the German population, dictated from the "center". The case of Tomsk province shows that not the entire country was covered by Germanophobia. A huge role in the implementation of the "anti-German campaign" played the position of local authorities, which could execute the orders of the center without much eagerness, but rather formally.

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