SUMMARY:

This is the introduction to an archival publication – a memorandum on the agrarian question and resettlement policy penned in October 1907 by Fyodor Stepanovich Umnov, a longtime official in the Ministry of State Domains resettlement administration. The introduction highlights how Umnov’s memo, written at the start of the Stolypin reforms, offers a unique perspective on the period and underscores lacunae in the modern historiography of the Stolypin reforms and the colonization of the Steppe Region. The document’s legal and “managerial” focus does not fit the technocratic or settler-colonial interpretations of colonization that prevail in modern historiography. The introduction also points to the deliberate archaism of Umnov’s prose, which employed the clearly outdated discourse of imperial particularism to resist the rising nation-centric political language of the post-1905 era.