At present there is a transition to new research reference points in the Russian historiography; there is a reference to a various national experience. One of the most popular directions of a pre-revolutionary historical idea was the populism. The given direction has been presented on Altai by the exiled settlers: P.A. Golubev, N.M. Zobnin, I.E. Ovsjankin, N.M. Tyzhnov, L.S. Chudnovskij, S.P. Shvetsov. Real conditions in which they operated: (police surveillance, backwardness and a low level of a public life of Siberia), have caused the prevalence of the legal practical cultural-educational work in their activity. Researchers-populists were engaged in teacher#s activity, gave lectures, organized libraries, studied a history and a reality of the region, a life of local population, its essential problems, and organized sociological researches. Their activity comprised a clear democratic prospect. The desire to draw attention of the government to economic problems of the region, trying to convince it in the nece

ssity of granting the rights of this region on the access to the values of the universal culture, on the economic accomplishment and particularly on the civil development.