Presentiment of the Civil war in Siberian bourgeois 15 and cadet periodical press of the end of 1917

The purpose of the article is to analyse cadet and bourgeois agitation-and-propaganda system of impact on local population of Siberia at the beginning of establishment of the Soviet power in the region. Positive interpretation of our subject gives additional material for consideration of controversial issues of the history of the October revolution in Siberia. Besides, this subject has been insufficiently considered in the monographs by A.L. Posadsky and V.V. Shevtsov and in the articles by S.A. Krasilnikov and V.V. Shevtsov. Considering low extent of prior research and also scientific importance of the subject, we have tried to create a complete, generalized picture of the attitude of the bourgeois and cadet periodical press of the late October-early November, 1917, to the October Revolution. That periodical press really influenced the population and imparted certain social and political attitudes to its various layers. The source base of our research was made by a wide range of various sources: current records, reference works, periodical press, materials of a personal origin. The main source is the all-Russian and Siberian newspapers and magazines of the end of 1917. The methodology and research technique include the principles of objectivity and historicism; historiographic, comparative historical, genetic historical and bibliographic methods have been used. While conducting the research, the author came to the conclusions: the Siberian bourgeois press took a grave view of the October revolution in Petrograd. Since the mid-October, 1917, cadet ideologists had begun writing about the run-up to the Civil War, about the plot of Bolsheviks and about preparation of riots and anarchy by them under the conditions of the World War. A series of such materials on the pages of the oldest and the most influential beyond the Urals bourgeois and cadet newspaper "Sibirskaya Zhizn" (Tomsk) was especially impressive. It was written there that the conquest of power in the capital by Bolsheviks was a profound convulsion of bases of the Russian society and a new stage of the Way of the Cross of the Russian people. Cadet authors of local bourgeois newspapers and magazines did not stop only at the stage of fact ascertaining, the intellectual level of most of them allowed also analyzing the reasons of the victory of Bolsheviks. The truth without delay, they explained events generally with subjective attitudes, emphasizing personal indecision of the members of Provisional government and the Prime Minister A. F. Ke-rensky. But all ideological fight for the masses of population in the local periodical press was still ahead; and only in the first half of 1918 local Bolsheviks, taking the power in the region, would manage to make determined attack to the oppositional press.

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