Senina L. Russia and the “Eastern Question” in the 19th century in the English-language Historiography (the late 19th – early 21st centuries).

The dissertation is devoted to the comprehensive study of Russian imperial policy in the solution of the nineteenth-century Eastern Question in the English-language historiography from the late 19th – early 21st centuries. The author makes an attempt to review the existing binary schema of historiographical analysis of this intellectual heritage, which marks it as a russophobic one and therefore fails to represent the historiographical picture in its full scope. For this purpose the process of the academic institutionalization, the conceptual and methodological aspects of the English-language historiography of the Eastern Question are considered. The periodization of the academic formation of the English-language historiography of Russian policy in the Eastern Question is suggested in accordance with public expectations in Great Britain and the United States about Russia's present and future. This approach reveals that the impetus to study Russian history was given in the periods when Russia gained positive qualities in her present and especially future in the scholarly recognition and expectation. Though the “Cold War” period is an exception from this tendency. In turn this alternation of the attitudes resulted in the formation of a pluralistic vision of Russian imperial policy in the solution of the Eastern Question, as well as the notion of the Eastern Question itself. n the basic principles of narratology and conceptology the analysis of the English-language historiography of the single episodes of the Middle East problem and its ideological dimension (Russophobia and pan-Slavism) is conducted. The author states that though the variety of the appraisal of the Russian foreign policy the English-language historiography conducts the tsarist projects to solve the Eastern Question without underpinning their ideas with russophobic hypotheses. The latter entered the inquiries only as the material to built the narration alone but not the conception of the historian. This way of construction of the narrative is defined as a conservative narrative strategy. Another mode to build the narrations includes not only the reference to the British nineteenth-century expectations of Russian threat in the Middle East and Central Asia but broad explanatory plots of the economic, strategic and ideological aspects of the Great Powers’ rivalry. Such mode of narration is defined as a liberal narrative strategy. In turn this demarcation makes it possible to state the confusion of the narrative hierarchy between the author (the historian) and the subject he writes about (British beliefs in the Russian treat to India) which was set in the Soviet binary schema of historiographical analysis. The author proposes a binary mode of the historiographical analysis in accordance with the vista of the problem by highlighting the traditional and revisionist trends. Conservative and liberal narrative strategies are analyzed as the formal components of these drifts. The comparative analysis of the Soviet and English-language historiography of the Eastern Question reveals a set of similar appraisals of the tsarist foreign policy. Contemporary inquiries of Russian scholars of this international problem slightly differ in its thematic aspects from the British and North-American ones.