The project of the scientist-historian from Altai State University is again supported by the Russian Science Foundation

The project of Elena Bryukhanova, an associate professor of the Department of National History, won the project extension competition of 2019 youth groups of the Presidential Research Projects Program. The project is dedicated to urbanization processes in Siberia at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries. It analyzes the urban population based on the materials of the First General Census of the Russian Empire in 1897.

In July, the results of the 2022 competitions for grant support for the events "Conducting initiative research by young scientists" and "Conducting research by scientific groups led by young scientists" were summed up, as well as the competition for the project extension competition of 2019 youth groups of the President's Research Projects Program. Based on the results of competitions, the RSF supported 507 initiative projects of young scientists up to 2 million rubles annually, 403 youth research groups with funding up to 6 million rubles, and also extended funding for 147 similar projects started in 2019. Among them was Elena Bryukhanova’s project "Urbanization processes in Siberia at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries: an integrated approach to the analysis of the urban population based on the materials of the First General Census of the Russian Empire in 1897."

Elena has been working on the project since 2019 together with the scientific team. Scientists were guided by the idea: to collect personal data about the inhabitants of Siberian cities, their places of residence and family composition. The main source of the previous stage of the project was the unique materials of the First General Census of the Russian Empire in 1897. Over the three years of work, information was collected on more than 90 thousand people. The new stage involves the involvement of original historical sources: lists of households, lists of merchants, philistines, and other classes.

- Very little research has been done at the micro (personal) level. First of all, this is due to the complexity of processing a large amount of data and identifying the necessary specific sources. It was this difficult task that inspired me to research. Finding new historical sources, collecting information about people who lived more than a hundred years ago, and combining them into a single array of historical data is indeed a very interesting and important task. It will open up new opportunities for a number of historical studies and topics, for example, the history of urban families in the era of modernization changes in the late 19th and early 20th centuries,” says Elena.

To systematize a huge amount of information, scientists used an integrated approach that involves the analysis of macro (statistical) and micro (personal) data collected from different sources for different time slices. This will make it possible to obtain fundamentally new results on some issues of the development of cities and the urban population. The team includes historians and archivists who process a large array of archival data, IT specialists who develop the database, and geographers who help in creating electronic maps of cities. Students of the Institute of History and International Relations are also involved.

- One of the interesting facts was that the census sheets of the Tobolsk province were preserved in the archives of Finland. This is due to the fact that the Finno-Ugric society requested copies of the census sheets for part of the territory where representatives of these nationalities lived. These data appeared in the Arkhangelsk and Tobolsk provinces. By permission of Senator N.A. Troinitsky documents were donated to the Finno-Ugric Society and are still kept in the National Archives of Finland,” told Elena.

This year, research work will be carried out on the processes of modernization: changes in the economic sphere, socio-professional structure, resettlement of the population during the period of mass migration.

- In Siberia, these processes differed in a number of features due to forced and voluntary resettlement, the construction of the railway, the administrative factor in the creation of cities, etc. At the same time, the question of the nature of urbanization and its impact on the social and economic structure of urban population remained unexplored. An integrated approach to the analysis of statistical materials and personal information about the inhabitants of the cities of Siberia and the Far East in 1897-1917 will solve a number of issues. For example, to identify features and give a multidimensional description of the modernization processes in the region, to determine the general and special features of the transformation of urban society in the era of modernization of the early 20th centuries.

The received statistical information and personal data will be transferred into an electronic form. Scientists will make an extensive database open to all those interested in history and genealogy.

− This will be a unique electronic source that will allow the accumulation of data from various archives and published data. We hope to create an intuitive interface so that in just two clicks the user can find information of their interest, for example, about a person who lived in Siberia at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries: what he did, where he lived, what kind of family he had.

Now users have access to the information system “Population of Siberian cities at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries based on the materials of the First General Population Census of 1897”, created as part of the previous stage of the project. It will be supplemented and processed. At the moment, a database with information from the census sheets of the 1897 census on the population of the Siberian cities of the Tobolsk province, the Yenisei province, the Amur region, the Yakut region and Sakhalin Island is available on the site. There are more than 80 thousand records in total. Photographs and topography of Siberian cities of the late 19th century are also proposed, which is an identification of the location of households and courtyard places according to the 1897 census on modern maps (Yandex.map). The most detailed reconstruction of the settlement of residents is presented for Tobolsk.

See more information about the site here.

The Presidential Research Projects Program was developed by the Foundation in 2017 on behalf of Russian President Vladimir Putin, its main tasks are to support long-term projects of leading scientists and create career trajectories for promising young researchers. During the implementation of the program, the fund has supported more than 5,000 projects.