Practices of adaptive behavior of officials of the Resettlement Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in the context of expeditionary everyday life at the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th centuries

The article reconstructs the conditions and content of the expeditionary regulations of the employees of the Resettlement Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The study is based on the memoirs of Aleksei Tatishchev, an employee of the Department. The author of the article argues that these memoirs can be viewed as a symbolic linguistic structure, whose decoding makes it possible to recreate the way the local community perceived and interpreted the realities of the resettlement process. The aim of the work is to identify the structures of the daily life of officials of the institution as a space for the formation of practices of their adaptive behavior and professional identity. To reach the aim, the author employs the research experience of the “history of everyday life” and new research approaches and directions (“new imperial history”, “new cultural and intellectual history”), which opens up prospects for the discovery of new meanings and going beyond the narrow framework of “legislation-office-workimplementation” when discussing a wide range of issues of “internal” colonization of Russia during the imperial period. In the course of the study, the author identified the sphere of the public everyday life of the Department's employees where the practices of their adaptation to the outside world were implemented. He has established that comprehending the pointless life of government officials involved in the solving of important problems of empire building opens up prospects for a further study of everyday practices of the Russian bureaucracy. The author shows that within the limits of the expeditionary everyday life of the bureaucracy of the Resettlement Department, an important property of the noble-bureaucratic ethos was reproduced: the awareness of the enduring importance of service and responsibility to the state. This feature, reflected in the recollections of employees of the Resettlement Department about the practices of everyday behavior during the periods of expeditions, served as a basic characteristic of the officials' socio-cultural identity, ensuring high productivity of resettlement activities in the east of the country in the second half of the 19th - early 20th centuries.

Keywords

Authors

References