Russian students in Tomsk University and the national policy of late Imperial Russia

The article examines the process of intellectual colonization in Russian Siberia in the late 19th - early 20th centuries. A nuanced approach to the national policy repertoire of the late imperial Russia allows tracing how similar political actions caused different effects on the western and eastern outskirts of the empire. The Russian majority of the student body formed at the Imperial Tomsk University (further referred to as ITU) in the late 1880s, when the trustee of the West Siberian Educational District Vasily Florinsky proposed to enroll graduates of Orthodox theological seminaries. This method was also used to russianize Warsaw and Yuriev (Derpt) Universities. However, this decision, initiated in relation to ITU, did not meet with unanimity in the ruling circles, since there were planty of radical leftists among the clergy students, who championed an autonomous Little Russian self-consciousness and became activists of the Ukrainian Students Zemlyachestvo during 1909-1910. The admission of seminarians to universities in the western outskirts of the empire, which, unlike Siberia, were never destined to become Russian, had similar consequences. However, the strategic effects of these manipulations differed. It is assumed that the radicalism of ITU students was often exaggerated. The conspiracy interpretations of their activity in historical sources are explained by the atmosphere of distrust and confrontation between the ITU professors, the trustees of the West Siberian Educational District, and the Ministry of National Education. However, the consequences of FLorinsky's project implementation manifested themselves over a long historical distance, when the educated class of Russians, who graduated from ITU, dispersed across Siberia. It was Florinsky's strategic aim, since he believed that the future of Siberia as a “flourishing Russian province” was guaranteed not so much by the mechanical migration of Russians to the east, as by the expanding cultural hegemony of the Russian nation.

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