The article examines the representations of Russian peasants who migrated to the Astarabad province of Iran in the narratives of officials of the Ministry of Agriculture. The process of agricultural colonization of the border province of Iran, which began on the eve of the Great War, attracted serious attention from the state, including its representatives in the region and the authorities in the capital. The ongoing internal and interdepartmental discussion of the issue, the development of a political line in this regard, etc., generated a significant number of documents, both published and unpublished. Officials of the Resettlement Department naturally played a particularly important role in the ongoing processes of discussing and implementing the decisions taken. In their texts, including printed ones, they paid significant attention directly to displaced peasants and, in addition to statistical data, also provided more general characteristics of the colonists. The latter – including narratives about the causes and motives of resettlement, psychological qualities attributed to the “Russian settler,” etc. – were intended to serve as a justification and legitimization of the intensification of Russian policy in the region. It is shown that although certain characteristics of this kind were often poorly consistent with the real facts of life, including those well known to these officials themselves, first, this was never considered a serious or insurmountable problem; and second, these characteristics fit well into the broader late imperial discourse describing the process of colonization of the periphery. In this sense, these representations of Russian settlers could successfully serve the role of constructing a holistic picture that had a distinctly instrumental function.
Resettlement Department; settlers; B.V. Bessonov; G.F. Chirkin; A.M. Sakharov; Russian Empire; Astarabad province; Iran.