Registration REQUIRED by 4pm on February 5, 2026 in order to attend this event.
Please join the Harriman Institute for a Russian History Workshop with Susan Smith-Peter. Moderated by Catherine Evtuhov.
This talk argues that Mikhail Lomonosov’s work on economic geography in the 1750s and 1760s took place within a larger group interested in reforming Russia domestic policies that existed around Emperor Peter III. Their goal was to move beyond Peter the Great’s harsh approach to taxation while also carrying out his larger vision of Russia as a great power. Influenced himself by the physiocrats, Lomonosov’s work informed Peter III’s legislation and statesmanship, including the dissemination of a questionnaire to the regions that had a transformative effect on local historical writing. The questionnaire gave legitimacy to the work of local historian Vasilii Krestinin and a group around him in Arkhangel’sk known as the Society for Historical Investigations (est. 1759). The Lomonosov questionnaire placed economics at the center of local history, and its search for how the state encouraged local economic development also made possible a critique of the state for hindering this development. This was particularly acute in Arkhangel’sk, whose international trade Peter the Great had suppressed in favor of St. Petersburg. The paper also discusses the creation of myths around both Mikhail Lomonosov and Peter III that have hindered our understanding of this topic.
Susan Smith-Peter has published widely on the subject of Russian regions and regionalism. Her first book, “Imagining Russian Regions,” was published with Brill in 2018. She is currently working on a new project dealing with Siberia during the Russian Civil War as a laboratory of statehood.
Interested participants should contact Erin Forrest (ef2847@columbia.edu) for a copy of the paper, to be distributed no earlier than two weeks before the workshop.
Image: Robert R. Crease and Vladimir Shiltsev, “Pomor Polymath: The Upbringing of Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov, 1711-1730,” Physics in Perspective 15 (2013): 391-414.
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