SUMMARY:

As in Western Europe and in America, the railroads had far-reaching effects on the economy, culture, and ordinary life of Imperial Russia. They initiated social processes and fostered the expansion of the Russian Empire. While the role of the autocracy and the imperial elite in this seems to be evident, this article focuses on a broader social group that was interested and involved in bringing railroads to their regions and to their cities. Of special interest are the ways in which regional actors did communicate and bargain over the railroad construction in the 1860s and 1870s, the period of railroad fever in Russia. The analysis of petitions and publications of local representatives from the provinces of Tambov, Saratov, and Vologda suggests that nobles, merchants, and entrepreneurs sketched out diverse mental maps, using concepts from “locality” (mestnost’) to “Empire” to promote their political interests. Their determination to get a viable connection and the competition with other regions and cities forced the actors to re-construct their regions and to re-conceptualize them as an integral part of Russia. The railroad construction provoked a polyphony of concepts – for example, Povolzh’e, Saratovskij or Severnyj kraj – which the actors borrowed from scientific discourses and from the emerging voices of the “local”, later to be called kraevedenie. Thus, the different actors not simply relied on well known geographical or administrative units. In setting the railroad connection to their regions on the political agenda, the actors remapped the Russian Empire: The chorus of regional self-definitions created an Empire consisting of diverse spatial entities, whose organic interrelations would be strengthened by the railroads. With this discourse, the representatives of the local self-governments and city communities contributed to the process of empire building.