Socio-economic development of Stepnoy Krai in 1907-1914 in reviews of the official Omsk press

The study of the agricultural, commercial and industrial development of the provinces and regions of the Russian Empire at the turn of the 20th century is one of the popular areas of modern Russian historiography. One of the representative sources that give a number of diverse and fairly full-fledged characteristics on this issue is the official periodical press, which at the beginning of the 20th century was actually the only source of prompt information for society. The aim of this article is to study the dynamics of the socio-economic sphere of a large administrative unit of Asian Russia - Stepnoy Krai - based on the materials of the periodical press. The source base for the work was the key newspapers published in Omsk, the administrative center of the Governor-Generalship of the Steppes (Akmolinskie oblastnye vedomosti [Akmolinsk Regional Gazette], Omskiy telegraf [Omsk Telegraph], Omskiy vestnik [Omsk Bulletin]). The relevance of the publication is evidenced by the fact that the identified problem has not been considered by historians of the topic from a similar perspective. The methodological basis of the study was the principles of consistency, determinism, content analysis and the problem-chronological method. This theoretical set made it possible, after analyzing the content of newspaper materials, to study, with reference to a specific historical situation, the interdependent integral development in the region of the trade and market, banking, stock exchange and migration spheres, the situation among the proletariat and the peasantry, and other issues. As shown by the reference to the periodicals, it was these social, economic, and financial aspects that were the most important for the regional authorities, determining its then current and future policy in this regard. Summing up the results of the study, the authors emphasize the dilatability of the issue, saying that publications in the official periodical press, due to their operational content purpose or censorship, make it possible to highlight the most important trends and problems of the socio-economic development of the region, giving, mainly, a general dynamic picture, but not in all cases fully covering the details. At the same time, understanding the socio-economic processes in Stepnoy Krai on the basis of the periodicals of 1907-1914 plays an important role in the interpretation of subsequent events of the military revolutionary period.

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