SUMMARY:

The concept of region remains relatively rarely used by historians when they talk about Russia. Most problems concerning the political, social and economic history of the country are routinely analyzed on the basis of aggregate data. When scholars do talk about regions they usually address specifically the issues of nationalism, national policy of the Russian state or the rise of competing nationalisms of the non-Russian ethnic groups. Thus regions seemingly exist only on the borders of the country. But what about Russia itself? Are there any regional divisions in Russia which would be something more than mere admin­istrative divisions? For a long time these questions did not attract scholarly attention, as the principal task of writing history was to establish and legitimize the rise of the modern state. The history of Russia was no exception in this case. However, with the post-communist transformations in the political geography of the Central and Eastern Europe, the ongoing process of European integration, and the parallel rise of regional identities and politics, regions and regionalisms emerge as a new focus of professional research in both the humanities and social sciences.
Marina Loskutova focuses on the ways in which post-elementary and secondary education in the Empire encouraged or discouraged students to think about their country in terms of particular regions and localities. Formal education and schooling has long been considered as one of the major forces promoting the making of a nation by imposing upon the pupils relatively standardized views and practices, forging a sense of belonging to a large collectivity”. In particular, such subjects as modem literature, history and geography gained their significance as the vehicles for the very idea of a nation. However, if the role of formal schooling in the process of national formation has long been acknowledged, there are still few detailed studies on the transformation of various courses and curricula in specific national settings, and even less has been written on the changes in the curriculum and textbooks in nineteenth-century Russia. The article focuses on Russian secondary and post-elementary textbooks on geography and the ways they portrayed or constructed the regional divisions of the Empire. Acknowledging a generally limited impact that schooling might have had upon students everywhere, and especially in the late imperial Russia, where post-elementary education was available only for a very thin stratum of the population, Marina Loskutova argues that the ways in which the regions, regional divisions and the interrelationships between a locality, a region and the country as a whole were conceptualized in the pre-revolutionary decades, left a deep imprint upon subsequent school practices well into the twentieth century, and their legacy is still perceptible even today.
This article examines the way divisions of imperial space were represented in the most commonly used Russian school textbooks and readers through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Particular attention is given to the gradual emergence of local studies in the school curriculum as part of a broader movement that sought to establish an intermediary space between the individual and the Empire as a whole.
Although the idea that immediate locality and the native region could be used as the best medium to make children familiar with their country as a whole was already present by the mid-nineteenth century, for a long time it remained only an abstract proposition. For a course of “motherland studies” of sufficient academic credibility to be developed “from below”, provincial public had first to take an interest in preserving local nature and history. Indeed, mid-nineteenth century attempts to establish “motherland studies” at school failed due to the lack of supporting social structures in the provinces. It was only in the last decade of the nineteenth century when local initiative matured enough to give a boost for provincial museums and voluntary societies. At the turn of the century, as progressive educators from the main centers of the Empire gradually ventured to take their students out of the school grounds to explore the wider world through direct experience, some cities and whole regions, such as the upper-Volga, the Crimea, Caucasus and Ural, began to attract organized groups of young tourists. A decade later, in the years immediately preceding World War I, provincial initiative in a few city centers of Russia had reached sufficient maturity to organize school excursion tours and even to launch a journal monitoring the progress in this area of public life. It was only with the advent of a local studies movement, which enjoyed a brief period of exuberant growth in the 1920s, when the concept of a local identity was employed in educational practices.