How to Write a Region: Local and Regional Historiography
Author(s)
Smith-Peter, Susan
Abstract
Long before the current fashion for regional history in the West, there was a tradition of local history in Russia. From its beginnings in the 18th century, kraevedenie was an interdisciplinary exchange between geography and history. Russia’s medieval and early modern chronicle tradition intermingled with 18th-century regional geography to create the intellectual context for the earliest local history association (indeed, the first voluntary association in Russia) in Arkhangel´sk in 1759, about which more below. Until the mid-19th century, the influence of descriptive geography remained dominant, partly because the Russian state was one of Europe’s most active in sponsoring description of its far-flung regions and resources. Only in the 1860s did history make major contributions, particularly with Afanasii Prokof´evich Shchapov’s development of the “federal school” of history and of Siberian regionalism. By the 1920s, rightly called kraevedenie’s “golden age,” geography and history were used in tandem to study the landscapes of provincial life in detail. After a crackdown in 1937, local history went into a decline, from which it began to recover only in the 1960s, when it found shelter within the subdisciplines of historical geography and source studies. Since the 1980s, local history societies and publications have proliferated, becoming one of the most accessible and widespread fields of intellectual activity in the post-Soviet era. Thus, while I translate kraevedenie as “local history,” it is really an interdisciplinary study of the local, drawing mainly on history and geography.
