ORGANIZATION AND PROVISION OF MEDICAL AND MEDICAL ASSISTANCE TO PEASANTS-MIGRANTS OF AKMOLINSKII AND SEMIPALATINSKII REGIONS OF THE STEPPE TERRITORY (80 YEARS OF THE XIX – EARLY XX CENTURY)

Based on a wide range of sources, the article analyzes the process of organizing and providing medical care to peasant migrants in the Akmolinski and Semipalatinskii regions of the Steppe Territory of the Russian Empire. It is noted that in the 80s XIX century at the legislative level it has been adjusted peasant resettlement process in the Asian part of the country, which greatly increased the migratory flows. The organization and control over the resettlement were entrusted to the Resettlement Administration, which was specially created in 1896 under the Ministry of Internal Affairs. It was revealed that one of the central tasks of its work was the organization of medical and sanitary assistance to displaced persons on the way to the places of expulsion. The practical implementation of the task found expression in the creation of special medical and sanitary points at railway stations, where the trains, which transported the migrants, stopped. Such trains were provided with medical personnel, medicines and medical equipment. In the resettlement distribution points where the settlers arrived, medical and nutritional centers were created. This centers providing medical assistance to the newcomers, providing hot meals and clean water. It is emphasized that in the process of organizing and operating the medical and nutritional centers, the Resettlement Administration had to face a number of problems, the main of which was the lack of medical personnel. Nevertheless, thanks to the established medical and sanitary service and the professional activity of medical personnel, the Resettlement Administration managed to bring the epidemiological situation under control and reduce the percentage of mortality among the migrants on their way to the places of exclusion.

Lange, Dorothea (1895–1965)

Dorothea Lange is best known as a documentary photographer for the United States Department of Agriculture’s Resettlement Administration (later the Farm Security Administration) during the 1930s. Her photographs are often characterized by an empathetic focus on individuals as representatives of larger social conditions. During the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, her work increased awareness of economic and environmental disasters in order to garner public and governmental support for Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal relief agencies. Lange’s most famous photograph, Migrant Mother (1936), depicts a woman and three of her children at a pea picker’s camp in Nipomo, California. Although the family is clearly destitute, dirty, and hungry, the mother’s gaze makes her appear resolute and hopeful, as if she is envisioning her own survival. Lange also documented the Japanese internment camps of the Second World War, created photo essays for Life magazine, and was the first woman photographer to win a Guggenheim Fellowship. She died of oesophageal cancer in 1965.

Portrait of a Consultant in Hard Times

John Nolen was one of the first planners to build a national consulting practice focused on new towns. However, his office began to struggle financially in the late 1920s. Despite a thirty-year record, Nolen had no paying private-sector clients after 1931 and finally had to downsize his office. He survived on New Deal contracts for a while. But eventually he could not obtain work even from the Resettlement Administration, where his former protégés were implementing his ideas. Modern new town ideas from Clarence Stein were ascendant. Seen as a relic, Nolen died without a single project pending in his portfolio.

On “Colonial” Forms and Functions

In the many works published on the imperial dimension of Russian history during the past decade, it is often the mechanical or “nuts and bolts” aspects of the empire's administration that are least discussed. So it is impressive to see two articles with a common focus on a practical institution—the Resettlement Administration—both of which argue for a strong connection between technical expertise and a colonial style of rule in the eastern Eurasian steppe and borderlands. But in spite of this common denominator, Willard Sunderland's and Peter Holquist's pieces could not be more different, in part because they approach the matter from opposite directions: Sunderland from a broad discussion of colonialism, Holquist from an analysis of a specific field of expertise.

The Ministry of Asiatic Russia: The Colonial Office That Never Was But Might Have Been

The late tsarist state was a colonial empire, Willard Sunderland argues, yet it never established a colonial ministry like the other colonial empires of the era. Sunderland asks why this was the case and proposes that, while there are many explanations for Russia's apparent uniqueness in institutional terms, historians should also consider how the country's institutional development in fact approximated western and broader international models. The late imperial government indeed never ruled through a colonial ministry, but an office of this sort—a Ministry of Asiatic Russia—might have been created if World War I and the revolution had not intervened. Sunderland sees the embryo of this possibility in the Resettlement Administration, which emerged as a leading center of Russian technocratic colonialism by the turn of the 1900s.