“The province bulletin” in Soviet and post-Soviet historiography: main directions of research

Russian historiography includes many works devoted to the research of the province bulletins nowadays. Having started in the middle of the 1960s the study locates in the place of the bulletins' publishing mainly and is conducted by the researchers from the Urals, the Volga region, Southern and Northern Russia and Siberia. The works of the Soviet period were continued and detailed in the post-Soviet period; they had built the foundation for some new research directions in spite of their methodological specificity. Therefore, it is possible to avoid customary strict division into the Soviet and post-Soviet periods and define some thematic directions of the research, such as history of the provincial press; social movement; the system of governmental periodical press; relationship between the press and the local province administration; province bulletins as a source for local history research; ethnographical publications in the province bulletins; regional study of literature; the history of publishing; source study and bibliography of the province bulletins. The bulletins were used as a source for some regional ethnography research; they had also helped to illustrate the process of the liberation movement's development in the context of the investigation of public and cultural life of the province. The governmental press was not explored enough and thus not used as a historical source to its full extent. The researchers often applied to a single aspect of some problem (which was remarkable at some stage of the bulletins existence), which was not enough to reveal all the diversity of the bulletins' content and was rarely accompanied by a complete and detailed research of the whole history of the bulletin's development. The ideological approach of the Soviet period resulted in biased conclusions made on the material of the bulletins and the limited and selective use of the information. The problem is being solved nowadays by direct application of the bulletins texts, as well as by starting some new research, using central and local archive sources, developing new research approaches, turning the theoretical statements into discussed issues and making adequate conclusions on the history of the regional press, though the history of the province bulletins of the Russian Empire is not comprehensively pictured in all the studies we have by now.