The Twentieth-Century Urals Economy in Historical Perspective

The article discusses major works on economic history published by Urals scholars over the past few decades and outlines the main stages of their research development. The analysis of these works leads to the theoretical conclusion that there has been a recent upsurge in the scholarly interest in economic history. This trend is related to the multimethodological approach gaining popularity among these scholars and the two disciplines, economics and history, drawing closer together. There is a popular belief that history can prove useful to any economist as a storage of economic facts tested by life itself and as a collection of various economic experiments. History, however, is also very important as a source of economic ideas. Thus, there is a process of genuine ‘cross-disciplinary communication’, which manifests itself in economists and historians’ exchanging theories developed within the framework of their disciplines. In its modern stage, the economic history of the Urals focuses on the problems which were not previously covered by historical studies for a number of objective reasons: some sources were classified and unavailable due to security control; and some topics were considered inappropriate to raise in studies of national history. Historians have now turned to such questions as the creation and development of industry-specific territorial production complexes, which used to be predominantly studied by economists. Nowadays, economic history discovers new topics for research, expands its database of sources, applies diverse methodology, and uses conceptual approaches and methods developed both by Russian and foreign economists.