Abstract
“The cotton project”, which became part of the modernization processes in the Russian Empire, caused a boom in publications in Russian historiography in the late 19th — early 20th centuries. The purpose of the article is a brief systematic review of Russian research on Turkestan cotton growing at the turn of the 19th — 20th centuries. Based on the research of Russian agrarians and officials of various departments, this article contains a brief overview of the issues of cotton growing development in Turkestan and ways to solve them.The author singled out four groups of researchers/studies and chose the depth and degree of cotton problem coverage in Russian works as a criterion, focusing in more detail on the analysis of the last two groups. The stated problem began to be developed more specifically in the following two groups of special studies — agricultural scientists/major cotton specialists and officials of the local colonial administration or central structures. The author notes that this division has a fairly conventional nature, since many of the officials of various departments (assigned to the second group by us) were both first-class specialists and researchers in agronomy. The authors of the first group include M. M. Bushuev, G. S. Zaitsev, R. R. Schroeder, V. I. Yuferev, V. I. Malakhovsky, N. M. Studenov and others. The authors of the second group are V. I. Masalsky, S. V. Ponyatovsky, N. P. Verkhovsky, A. I. Knize, A. I. Shah-Nazarov, A. V. Krivoshein and others.