Ethno-Economics of the Kazakhs of the Steppe Region in the Modernization Plans of the Russian Empire (second half of the XIX - beginning of the XX century)

The article analyzes the policy of the Russian Empire in relation to the traditional economy of the Kazakhs of the Steppe region in the 80s years of XIX - the beginning of XX century. It is marked that bourgeois transformations accompanied by mass relocation of peasants to the Steppe region and creation of commodity agricultural economies demanded considerable land resources. Therefore, the mass settlement was seen as the main mechanism of transformation of the Kazakh nomadic farms. The transition of nomads to agriculture was seen as a natural and progressive process. During numerous interdepartmental discussions at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, an opinion was established that the settling should be carried out naturally, under the influence of new objective economic conditions caused by mass migration of peasants and withdrawal of pasture lands from the Kazakhs for land resettlement of migrants. Thus, the expediency of increasing the scale of resettlement flows to the Steppe region was recognized. The regional administration, as a whole, recognizing the regularity of transition of Kazakhs to a settled way of life, called to refuse mass settling of nomads and mass spreading of agriculture among already settled ones, mainly because of the limited land resources coming for farming. Therefore, the regional officials connected sedentarization with intensification of cattle breeding and development of an industry for processing livestock products in the region. The mass settling of Kazakhs in the beginning of XX centuries, reorientation of their farms on the market with application of various agricultural tools, gave reasons to believe that the chosen course on sedentarization turned out to be correct.