Оранжерея на краю света: Проекты развития земледелия на Камчатке и восприятие дальневосточных окраин Российской империи в 1820-е – 1840-е годы
A greenhouse at the edge of the world: The projects for developing agriculture on the Kamchatka peninsula and the perception of the Russian Empire’s Far Eastern periphery in the 1820s – 1840s

Summary/Abstract: A greenhouse at the edge of the world: The projects for developing agriculture on the Kamchatka peninsula and the perception of the Russian Empire’s Far Eastern periphery in the 1820s – 1840s Summary: The article examines agricultural development projects on the Kamchatka Peninsula during the 1820s–1840s — a period marked by intense but ultimately fruitless efforts to introduce farming in this remote region. The initiatives were driven primarily by local administrators such as P. I. Rikord and A. V. Golenishchev, supported by metropolitan institutions including the Imperial Botanical Garden and the Moscow Agricultural Society. In the absence of reliable climatic data, officials in St. Petersburg tended to trust optimistic reports from naval officers who had lived on the peninsula and were perceived as experts in the matters concerning local conditions. However, by the late 1840s, emerging systematic climate research within the Ministry of State Domains began to reveal the complexity of acclimatizing agricultural crops. A persistent obstacle was the lack of labor: project authors consistently advocated resettling Siberian peasants, yet the central government repeatedly refused, signaling that agriculture on Kamchatka was never a strategic priority. The peninsula’s remoteness and poor scientific understanding turned it into a «blank slate» for speculative administrative visions. Even the officially approved greenhouse project in Petropavlovsk was never completed due to its mismatch with local realities. The only tangible outcome of nearly two decades of activity was the significant enrichment of the Imperial Botanical Garden’s collections: over three field seasons, gardener Egor Rieder collected and dispatched specimens of more than 200 plant species from Kamchatka. Many of these samples survive today in the virtual herbarium of the Komarov Botanical Institute.

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