“Find Your Own and Feel Comfortable…”: Communicative Space of Russian Officials of the Resettlement Administration as a Factor of Professional Adaptation (Late 19th – Early 20th Century)

Abstract

Based on the published memoirs of the employees of the Migration Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the article reconstructs the communicative space of the Russian bureaucracy, which was responsible for organizing population migrations to the eastern outskirts of the empire in the late 19^th – early 20^th centuries. The research identifies the actors, conditions and channels of communicative actions of managers, who belong to the formed in the post-reform period generation and performed their duties under the influence of socio-cultural transformations of the second half of the 19^th century. It has been proved that the main features of the identity of the new type of imperial bureaucracy were: breadth of views and a democratic style of behavior within a professional group, a sense of responsibility towards society and the state, a categorical rejection of radical political ideas and ways of their manifestation. The research demonstrates that the cultural and historical background of organizing the communicative space of resettlement officials was a qualitative rethinking of the tasks of the “resettlement case”, which became an important element of the colonial policy in the eastern parts of the country. The concernes of the authorities on the agrarian issue gave the resettlement movement a priority status in the domestic policy of Russia. In this aspect, the significance of the bureaucracy that was involved in solving problems related to the organization and regulation of the resettlement process has also changed. The article establishes that, in contrast to the bulk of Russian officials, the employees of the resettlement department were characterized by greater mobility and intensity of contacts with various class categories of the empire’s population, primarily with the peasantry. It was the communication with the peasantry that named the considered category of officials “resettelers”, which eventually determined their identity as specific, different from the identity of other groups of the Russian bureaucracy. Thus, within the space of official and informal interaction of resettlement officials, the principles of paternalism and partnership underlied the communicative action, which contributed to the “soft” professional adaptation of young employees of the department, the collective adoption of conventions of mutual understanding, cooperation and maintenance of comfortable conditions for activity. All this, taken together, increased the efficiency of the work of the empire's representatives on the colonized territories, and raised the prestige of the Russian state in the Trans-Ural regions.