Peter I and Transbaikalia: Imperial Policy in Establishing Russian Identity in a Peripheral, Multi-Ethnic and Multi-Confessional Region
The article attempts to assess the policy of the authorities in Transbaikalia during the reign of Peter I as the realization of the imperial aspirations of Russia. The development of new territories in the east of the country in the Russian, and then the Russian state is nothing more than a serious geopolitical project aimed at expanding territories and objects of influence. Imperial identity, in the traditional sense, is the belonging of an ethnically and culturally heterogeneous territory to the empire with the organization of management along the vertical “center-periphery”. The purpose of the study is to identify the features of “imperialism” on the territory of the large macroregion “Transbaikalia”. It is quite interesting to trace this with respect to the beginning of the 18<sup>th</sup> century - the period of the first Peter I in power. Before that, Russian statehood was only “mastered” in the region, being represented in a number of prisons with Cossack detachments and the first Orthodox monasteries. Under Peter I, the Russian state has a desire to streamline the management system in Transbaikalia, to activate the economic development of new territories, industrial mining and processing of silver and lead began. In the future, there will be no such bright, sharp “jerks”. Moreover, the secularization policy of the authorities later led to the closure of one of the three Orthodox monasteries in the region, which was one of the centers for the promotion of Russian statehood in Transbaikalia. The author considers the policy of secular power under Peter I in Transbaikalia as the promotion of the Russian imperial identity, which is an integral part of a large domestic geopolitical project to annex and develop vast territories of Siberia and the Far East.