THE PUBLIC SPHERE OF THE RUSSIAN PROVINCE IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE 19TH — EARLY 20TH CENTURY (BASED ON MATERIALS FROM THE PENZA REGION)

The relevance of the chosen issues is explained by the need to study the public sphere of Russian society during liberalization, the formation of parliamentarism, the First World War and revolutionary upheavals as the most important adaptation resource and indicator of the formation of modernity. The public space, acting as a consequence of the implementation of the enlightenment paradigm, evolving from the format of a government initiative to encourage self-Europeanization to the approval and adoption of practices of self-organization and initiative at the imperial and provincial levels, reflected the conditions for ensuring socio-political stability and sustainable development of society. The author examines the process of formation of the Russian province’s public sphere, reveals issues of periodization, the nature and specificity of the institutional design of social dynamics in this direction. The corpus of sources is formed by materials from the State Archive of the Penza Region, first of all, the administrative documentation of the Governor’s Office for Affairs of Societies and Unions. Assessing the functional purpose of the public sphere, the author focuses on the adaptive capabilities of civil solidarity and the need for self-identification of the local community. In this regard, the crisis-cyclical logic of the development of mass civic consciousness and corresponding forms of social activity is emphasized: the need to harmonize common interests was recognized by the authorities as the challenges of the external and internal orders intensified. The criterion for periodization is the intensification of normative activity in relation to the public sphere, which allows distinguishing two stages in the establishment of the civil society foundations in the Russian province: 1870s–1905 and 1906–1917.