Cultural and educational activities amongst peasants of the Tomsk province (1880-1917)

The article examines the cultural life and “out-of-school education” in the Tomsk province, which in those years occupied the territory of the modern Tomsk, Kemerovo, Novosibirsk regions and the Altai Territory, i.e. in the most populated part of Western Siberia, where peasants accounted for more than 90% of the population. The source base of our research was made by a wide range of the archival and published sources, various on capacity and content: current records, reference works, periodical press, materials of a personal origin. The methodology and research technique include three main levels: general scientific, general historical and concrete-historical; our scientific text is based on the principles of objectivity and historicism; historiographic, comparative historical, genetic historical and bibliographic methods have been used among concrete-historical ones. Due to the lack of zemstvos in the Tomsk village until the summer of 1917 and the insufficient interest of the government in enlightening the peasantry, public-cultural societies were initially engaged in the organization of out-of-school education. The most widely used of the Society for the care of primary and public education. They were engaged not only in elementary schools, but also in setting up Sunday schools for adults, they organized free libraries and reading rooms, opened amateur theaters. The activities of many of them went beyond the scope of cities and encompassed the countryside. During the First World War, trying to protect out-of-school education from the influence of democratic and revolutionary forces, the government sharply increased the number of popular readings and free libraries in the village, which was largely facilitated by the activities of non-commercial cooperatives. As a result of the penetration into the cultural and educational organizations of representatives of the revolutionary parties and the establishment of political education of the people, they ultimately led to the politicization of the peasantry, which the government tried so hard to avoid. After the February Revolution, the struggle for influence over cultural and educational organizations began to spread between various political forces in order to attract the peasantry to their side, whose purely cultural inquiries were largely forgotten. The cultural life of the rural population of the provincial, trans-Ural Tomsk province of the late XIX and early XX centuries, especially the period of the First World War and the Revolutionary 1917, is a vivid illustration of the famous Bloc Triad about the inseparability and at the same time the unfolding of life, art and politics in the culture of the revolutionary time.

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