The natural resource potential of the Central Asian outskirts regional development in the plans of Russian imperial political elite (second half of the 19th – early 20th centuries)

Abstract

The article analyzes the plans of the imperial political elite regarding the use of the natural resource potential of the Central Asian outskirts in the post-reform period on the basis of regulatory legal acts and office documentation. It was revealed that the political leadership of Russia was faced with the need to revise the traditional principles of imperial politics related to the satisfaction of exclusively geopolitical interests by the 60s 19th century. Increasing the profitability of regional economies was recognized as more rational. In the context of the multinationality of the country, the civilizational and socio-economic asymmetry of ethnoregions, the transition to solving internal problems aimed at integrating and unifying the imperial space. The state followed the path of using exclusively land spaces during the period of modernization and the creation of grain and cotton farms, while having an objective idea of the natural resource potential of the Steppe Territory and Turkestan, a significant number of copper, oil, gold and coal deposits. An obstacle to the full-scale industrialization of the Central Asian outskirts was a number of circumstances: the frontier of the territory and, as a consequence, the dilemma of the central and regional authorities regarding the priority of external expansion or internal development; a difficult ethnoconfessional situation associated with the "Islamic factor" and the possibility of threats to Russia's presence in the region; artificial containment by imperial circles of modernization processes to prevent the growth of national ideologies; lack of financial opportunities for the state and entrepreneurs for active investment.