Forest guard and foresters through the eyes of the rural population of the Altai district after the events of the February revolution

The article analyzes the situation of the forest guards and foresters of the Altai district after the events of the February Revolution. The purpose of the article is to reconstruct the perception of the forest guards and foresters by the peasant population. The sources for the article were the materials deposited in the State Archives of the Altai Region: the office documents of local authorities, decrees of peasant committees and village assemblies. One of the objectives of the article is to identify the reasons for the widespread negative attitude of the population towards the employees of the Altai district. On the basis of the studied materials the authors show that after the February Revolution the population considered the forest guard and the administration of the forestry as the main obstacles in the liquidation of the land ownership of His Majesty's Cabinet in the Altai. The reasons for the removal of the forest guards from the service were in most cases political, because district officials were associated by the peasant mass with the monarchy that had collapsed. In the opinion of the authors an important role in the negative attitude towards the forest guard was also played by the personal dislike of the population towards its representatives. The second direction of the study was the concretization of circumstances due to which the forest guard was unable to perform service under the new conditions. The authors argue that the population did not already perceive seriously the foresters, their assistants and riders. The article presents the facts that testify to the widespread dependency of the lower forest ranks of the district on the local peasant population and new authorities. They independently changed the local officials of the district, deprived them of their means of self-defense, accused them of various malfeasances, obliged them to coordinate their actions. The authors suppose that the volatility of the forest guard and its regular replacements did not form a stable relationship between the forest guard and the population. In such conditions the service of forest ranks became dangerous for their life. Therefore, in December 1917, the foresters and the ranks of the forest guard were allowed to leave the service in cases of impossibility of further management of the economy, which caused their mass leaving the service in some forestry. As a result of the research the authors came to the conclusion that the considered reasons, factors and circumstances created in the eyes of the population the image of the forest guards as pathetic, incapable of resisting, having no real power authorities. The forest guard of the Altai district in the period of revolutionary upheaval proved incapable of performing the service, which was facilitated by the deformed image of the district employee in opinion of the population.

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