Academic Periodical

This article considers the reform populists’ views on the issue of religious persecution of Old Believers as a factor having contributed to the colonisation of marginal territories of the Russian State in the late XVII – first half XVIII centuries. The author comes to the conclusion that populists considered colonisation as a part of the general problem of social progress in the country. The exploration of the new territories by Old Believers was regarded by populists as distributing in Russia social forms of activity that denied state centralisation and based in non- bourgeois principles.