Terre dello zar o Nuova Russia? L’evoluzione del concetto di kolonizacija in epoca tardo-imperiale

The idea of a progressive ‘colonisation’ of the extensive borderlands of Asiatic Russia became a fundamental political priority in the last ten years of the Tsarist Empire. Prime Minister P.A.Stolypin attributed to it a central place in his program of reforms. On the eve of the First World War the catchwords ‘resettlement and colonisation’ covered a vast and complex literature, a body of knowledge built over time also through a careful consideration of the various foreign colonial models. It comprised theoretical treatises, manuals and specialised periodicals such as ‘Questions of Colonisation’ (1907-1917). In 1914 an authoritative semi-official publication peremptorily proclaimed that “the lands of Asiatic Russia are an indivisible and inseparable part of our state and at the same time they are our only colony”. Just how did this terminology become part of the imperial lexicon? What did they mean exactly by ‘colonisation’ and what diverse nuances did the meaning of the word assume in the last decades before the revolution? This essay explores the colonisation discourse articulated by the Tsarist intellectual and administrative elite in its broadest meaning, that is including both official and unofficial or dissident, oppositionist components. It traces how and why the vision of resettlement formulated at the eve of the First World War developed during the previous decades, at the intersection of older patterns of territorial transformation, the reception of Western colonial knowledge, and the need to respond to the challenges created by the political and intellectual context of the post-reform era.