On chronicling public movement in Siberia

Historians believe that making chronicles of events is one of the mostefficient methods of studying the social and political developments as the statistical processing of chronicles allows representing thepublic movement in its diversity and complexity. The authors give an overview of the state of the research in the history of publicmovement in Siberia in the late 19th - early 20th centuries. It is noted that the research is done in Omsk, Novosibirsk, Kemerovo,Tomsk, Irkutsk, but its intensity is lower than in the Soviet times. However, the field of the research has expanded. Earlier the researchfocused on the activities of revolutionary parties and the mass movements of the basic classes, the proletariat and the peasantry. Sincethe late 1980s studies of liberal, monarchist, national movements and non-political organizations intensified, but the studies on thehistory of the movements of workers, peasants and social-democrats lost intensity. The motivation for studying the public movementalso changed: earlier, historians mostly looked for the preconditions of the October revolution, now they search for the roots of the civilsociety in Russia. The paper puts an objective of making the chronicle of the public movement in Siberia from the late 19th century upto 1919. It was a period of rapid social and economic transformations in Russia when the development of the civil society began. Atpresent studies are based on separate illustrations and do not provide a true picture of the country's public life. In Siberia there areserious studies on public life but no general picture of the social activities of all the population strata is available. There are chronicles ofworkers' and peasants' movements, of the activities of different parties, of various forms of political and non-political activities (strikes,demonstrations, gatherings of social and political organizations, conferences, conventions, other forums). The studies of the prerevolutionaryperiod of history and the period of the Revolution of 1917 and the Civil War were separated which complicated theanalysis of the social developments. Relying on the experience of Siberian historians, the authors suggest that statistical studies shouldbegin with the making of regional chronicles, in particular with the chronicle of the public movement in Tomsk province, sharing theintegrated methodology of recording the events, the uniform terminology and the interpretation of facts. The authors find it reasonable tocover the whole period of social and political changes in the country from the 1880s up to the end of the Civil War.

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