Discourse about Gorny Altai in the newspaper Altai during 1917

In this article, the Altai Mountains as a Siberian territory that voluntarily became part of the Russian Empire in the 18th century and already in the 19th century became the subject of active mythologization in the discourse of Russian Orientalism is considered. The authors of the article take into account that a stable circle of concepts has developed in Russian and European culture that determine the key characteristics of this territory: terra incognita, border, periphery, Eldorado, Switzerland, bear’s corner, wild land (inhabited by a wild people), Belovodye, earthly paradise. In the late 19th - early 20th centuries, an “explosion” of publishing activity took place in various cities of Siberia. Thousands of large and small newspapers and magazines appear, on the pages of which mentions of the Altai Mountains and Altai tribes are scattered, forming a rich discourse about the mountain frontier of Siberia, which is also perceived as the Russian gateway to Asia (China, the Kazakh steppe and Mongolia). At the moment, this large-scale area has been little studied from the perspectives of imagology. This article makes an attempt to supplement this area with new artistic and journalistic material from the point of view of the authors included in the discursive practices of Biysk, a city located in close proximity to the compact residence of the aboriginal population, during the collapse of the Russian Empire. As a result of a frontal viewing of 285 issues of the daily newspaper Altai, published during 1917, rare texts were discovered that had not been taken into account until now in the study of the imagology of Altai. Arranging the material chronologically, the authors suggested looking at the publicistic image of Altai from the point of view of its evolution in the context of the February and October revolutions. The study revealed that, in the Biysk newspaper Altai, in the period from January to October 1917, the image of Gorny Altai and its non-Russian population changed greatly depending on the political and ideological understanding of the revolutionary events. The extremely gloomy, Gothic images of the pre-revolutionary Altai gradually changed to lighter ones. The aboriginal population acquired the features of a people consciously awakening from imperial and church oppression. Therefore, by the end of 1917, the problems of education among the Altai tribes became the main ones. At the same time, the evolution of the Altai image took place within the limited framework of the image formed in the imperial period: of an exalted poetic place inhabited by a wild people, which Russians cannot (or do not want) to lead to civilization. The authors declare no conflicts of interests.

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