Южный И Восточный Фронтир Россиив XVI – XVIII Веках

Abstract

SUMMARY: The concept of the “frontier,” conceived by F.J. Turner for North America and applied to Eurasia by O. Lattimore and others, does not refer to a state border, but to a transitional zone between different geographic, socio-economic, political, religious and cultural spaces. From the15th to 18th centuries, the Russian steppe frontier in the south and southeast was a relatively stable military frontier between the sedentary Christian Russians and the nomadic Muslim Turks and Lamaist Mongols. The frontier was simultaneously a zone of intensive commercial and diplomatic interaction. Only during the 18th and 19th centuries did the steppe frontier become an area of settlement and extraction. Another example, the forest frontier in Siberia, was extractive frontier from the beginning, an area where an economy based on furs and precious metals pushed the frontier rapidly forward. Only its southern sections gradually became a settlement frontier. On the steppe frontier, Russians and the militarily superior nomads were generally on equal terms through the 18 th century, whereas the Siberian indigenes were quickly subjugated by Russia and had to pay tributes in furs. Along the rivers of the steppe frontier, the military frontier communities of free Cossacks emerged on the forest frontier as trappers. Cossacks, tradesmen and settlers developed a “Siberian mentality” of free, enterprising pioneers. So the famous “Turner thesis” can be applied to Russia, but only to the peripheral regions of the Cossacks and Siberia, and not to Russia as a whole.

How to study frontiers today? Discussion on the article by D. V. Sen’

“…Т. Урушадзе: Возможность применения концепта фронтир к анализу российской истории убедительно доказана историографической практикой. Фронтир результативно применяли и применяют для исследования расширения границ Российского государства и колонизационных процессов как в масштабе национальной истории 25 , так и для анализа прошлого отдельных регионов 26…”

Frontier research in present-day Russia: Shaky boundaries of the academic dialogue

“…All that occurred along with the flourishing of the so-called regional historical approach and regional historical narratives 20 , including narratives that deconstructed previous versions of the Russian empire's national policy. Fourth, publications by several authoritative foreign researchers produced a beneficial effect on the development of the frontier studies, especially in the South of Russia 21 . Discussions continue in Russia on the heuristic potentials of frontier theory and the theory of contact zones 22 .…”