EARLY COLONIZATION OF THE EASTERN REGIONS OF RUSSIA: POLITICAL ECONOMIC ASPECT
The article gives a political and economic analysis of the peculiarities of the agrarian colonization of Russia’s eastern regions in the late 16th - early 18th centuries, when fur-trade was economic dominant of the state strategy for the development of the Urals and Siberia. The starting conceptual premise of the analysis is S. V. Bakhrushin’s concept, which singles out resource-functional priorities in a single process of developing Russia’s eastern regions that at certain stages formed the main strategic line of colonization. The auxiliary role of agrarian colonization in this strategy does not, however, change the fact that in the early stages of the development of the eastern regions it was agrarian, peasant colonization that maximally contributed to their strong settlement and creation of a broad foundation for self-sufficient and organic economic development. The article argues that peasant colonization constituted the most promising component of the colonization process and had during the 17th century the strongest demographic and geopolitical constraints, which caused a general lack of human resources, insufficient stability of agricultural production and manifested in the difficulties of transition of the state’s eastern outskirts to self-reliance in grain. Another factor leading to a slow, discontinuous, focal process of settling and developing the Urals and Siberia was a controversial and inconsistent government policy, which, based on its target priorities, implemented so-called minimalist approach and switched gradually to forced methods of colonization. These features make it possible to speak of the Urals and Siberia’s early colonization as a special institutional and economic model of frontier development.