The article is devoted to the design of the historic space. The territorial scope of historical research has an operational character. We can select the basic structural opposition, which characterizes the studied historical space, this is a country — region and state as an administrative and territorial unit. In this connection, it is possible to study the various historical events, for example, a part of the Tobolsk province or Western Siberia. Depending on the subject of a research territorial limits define the scope and nature of the view of the relevant portion of the historical reality. As a result, there are different images of this reality. The correctness of the established spatial boundaries is defined by semantic accents in the formulation of the subject of historical research. The word “Zauralye” was started to use steadily from the first half of the XIX century and originally it named the eastern agricultural district of the Perm province, speaking spatio-semantic opposition to the mining area Urals. The term Zauralye became associated with the Kurgan region from the 1990s. The use of the modern spatial concepts should be under the strict rules. In particular, they (the concepts) should have operational character, and we must always be aware of the danger of reification, that gives an ontological (existential) status of this ideal constructs.

На примере Зауралья рассматривается вопрос историко-географического пространства.