Settlement, after 1861

• In Event: Erasure and Resilience in Eastern European Architectures

Abstract

The year 1861 was milestone for the Russian empire: after decades of failed attempts, serfdom, which often amounting to slavery, was finally abolished. As my presentation will argue, the following state interventions to solve “the agrarian question”, which unfolded in the course of the second half of the nineteenth century following the gradual aggravation of the situation of liberated serfs culminating with the reform of 1904—a state-led mass resettlement of peasants in Siberia—was conceived in connection to the expansion of the empire. Focusing on the concurrent Russian penetration into Central Asia, the presentation will explore the legacy of Peter Semenov Tian-Shansky, a geographer, explorer, statistician, art dealer and connoisseur, and a key participant in the discussion around the emancipation of the serfs and the resettlement of peasants, to demonstrate that his entangled work laid the ground for the later development of human and regional geography within late-imperial and early-Soviet ideas about location and urbanism.

Author

• Alla Vronskaya, U of Kassel (Germany)