Governmental Discussion on the Private Capital Participation in the Trans-Caspian Railway Construction in the Late XIX Century

The ambivalence of the approaches of Russian ministries at the end of the XIX century is demonstrated, in relation to public-private partnership in the framework of the implementation of the railway project in the Trans-Caspian General Government.There is presented a system of arguments in support of this approach and against it; the author clarifies the reason for the government’s rejection of the idea of public-private partnership in the construction of the Trans-Caspian railway. The source base of the study is the protocols of the meeting of the government commission, letters from government officials, statistical information on the turnover of commodities with Persia and other materials stored in the Foreign Policy Archive of the Russian Empire and in the Central State Archive of Moscow. The author concludes that the formal basis for rejecting the application of entrepreneurs for the implementation of this railway was the ineffectiveness of the financial model of their participation in the framework of this project. The real reason for this decision was the position of the officials of the government departments that opposed attracting private investors to the implementation of this transport project in the Central Asian region due to the military-strategic and geopolitical aspects.