Russian smallholders in Russian historiography in the second half of the 19th - early 21st centuries: socioeconomic status, class identity, migration mobility

The present article aims to identify and systematize the approaches in Russian historiography to the place and a role of local ethnic groups in the social processes of the Russian Empire. The analysis of the historiographical tradition of the question showed that problems of behavioral strategies and practices of the local smallholders community with its ethnocultural and economic originality was in the sphere of professional researchers' attention extremely seldom. At the same time, smallholders of the agricultural provinces of Russia represented a group with evident signs of a sociocultural identity. In historiography, this category of the South Russian population, whose representatives were descendants of the service class people of the 16th-17th centuries, was identified both as the nobility and as the peasantry. The complexity of identification generated research approaches within which authors focused attention only on the economic aspects of smallholders' activities. Nevertheless, it is already in the second half of the 19th century that authors gradually shifted their research attention from economic forms of smallholders' life to the cultural elements of the daily life of a local group. This tradition was interrupted during the Soviet period of historiography when, due to the ideological circumstances, local ethnic groups were excluded from research practices; the tradition was restored in modern Russian historiography. The approaches which are formed at the turn of the 21st century give historians and ethnographers an opportunity to have a more complete idea of behavioral practices of local communities in particular smallholders, in the sociocultural life of Russia. Researchers can study problems of migration mobility of the community, the strategy of adaptive behavior in the resettlement process (the smallholders were part of this process along with the state peasantry of different provinces of the empire), specifics of daily life and traditional culture. So, Russian historiography had long studied the problems of the social and economic status of the smallholders' local ethnographic group. Meanwhile, in the context of the general historiographical tendency there are approaches that allow researches to note features of the smallholders' sociocultural identity differing from the peasant one, which opens real prospects of filling the gaps in the problem.

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