Modern Historiography of Industrial Personnel of Pre-revolutionary Siberia

The article evaluates the state of historical knowledge about industrial personnel of pre-revolutionary Siberia. The author makes a review of the published historical literature and comes to the conclusion that this area of historical research is marginal in modern historiography. However, it is noted that the high level of the previous research allows this area of historiography to keep up with the other ones. Along with the negative trends, the author points out positive changes in the historiography of the Russian working class and Siberian regional industrial workers. It is also noted that the end to consider the proletariat to be the hegemon of the liberation movement and the only social demiurge provided historians with the opportunity to make an impartial assessment of the level of development of Russian industry in the early XXth century, and the degree of social maturity of the new industrial classes - businessmen and workers. Nowadays, this ideological motive doesn't press historians to search for the preconditions of the October Revolution in each region. It was replaced by a new ideological imperative to search for the historical origins of the formation of civil society, to search for the answer to the question why the development of civil society in Russia is going so slow and hard? The need to explain the phenomenon of the Russian Revolution of the early XXth century remains valid as well. The author also mentions the expansion of research topics related to industrial personnel, which now include the history of everyday life, family history, professional studies, history of office workers and managers. The last Russian center conducting an active research on the proletariat and the labor movement is the Institute of Russian History that published in the years 1992-2008 a fundamental series «The Chronicle of the Labor Movement in Russia» edited by I.M. Pushkareva. The chronicle of events goes through the end of 1904. The monograph by N.A. Ivanova and V.P. Zheltova gives a summary evaluation of industrial personnel of pre-revolutionary Russia. Problems of social and economic conditions of the workers'life are also analyzed within the economic history of Russia. Since 1996, the Center for Economic History at the History Faculty, Moscow State University, published 14 collections of the series «Economic History. Review» edited by Professor L.I. Borodkin. The Centre considers the study of «the history of labor market and labor relations in Russian industry» as one of its priority objectives. Monographs on the history of pre-revolutionary Russian working class are part of the series «Economic History. Documents, Studies, Translations» brought out by ROSSPEN publishing house. The trends of the development of the all-Russian historiography are similar in the Siberian region. There is no coordination of research, the generalization of the previous results has taken place, and individual topics of the history of industrial population have been studied. Tomsk, Altai, Novosibirsk, Omsk, and Irkutsk universities as well as the Institute of History at the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences remain centres of research into industrial personnel.

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