Peopling the Russian Periphery: Borderland Colonization in Eurasian History, and: Sibir´ v sostave Rossiiskoi imperii [Siberia as Part of the Russian Empire] (review)

In the aftermath of the USSR's collapse, scholarship on Siberia and the Russian/Soviet periphery has increased, driven by post-colonial paradigms and greater access to former Soviet archives. Traditional scholarship is being subjected to revision, and new questions are being asked. Siberia's indigenes have received greater attention;¹ the journal Ab Imperio as well as recent collections by Jane Burbank and others have reconceptualized empire and imperial space;² and the resurrected interdisciplinary journal Sibirica provides a forum for discussion of Siberia and the Russian Far East. Sibirskii khronograf is publishing an excellent series of primary document collections,³ and every week sees new studies by Russian historians.⁴ Altogether, this scholarship variously addresses relations between center and periphery and between hegemons and regional ethnicities, the exploitation of resources, imperial aggrandizement, and conflicts between competing value systems and belief structures. Both books under review reflect this exciting period for scholars who are reconceptualizing Siberia and the Russian periphery.

L. M. Dameshek and A. V. Remnev's study of Siberia during the imperial period is most welcome, and it deserves translation into English and other languages. This volume from the Borderlands of the Russian Empire series of Historica Rossica partially updates the magisterial five-volume Istoriia Sibiri [History of Siberia] edited by Aleksei Pavlovich Okladnikov and others during the late 1960s.⁵ Though constructed within a Marxist-Leninist framework, Okladnikov's collection has yet to be entirely superseded. But in contrast to it, as well as to the several volumes of important essays later edited by Leonid Mikhailovich Goriushkin of Novosibirsk University,⁶ Dameshek and Remnev interrogate Siberia's functionality so as to subvert the very notion of it as an integral part of a supposed imperium. Post-Soviet surveys on Siberian history have tended to be secondary- or tertiary-level textbooks.⁷ Dameshek and Remnev's volume also targets university students, yet, despite several passages that dwell too much on facts, figures, names, and dates, their analysis and thematic conceptualization render it engaging for specialists as well.

They introduce two major themes for considering Siberia's history: its role in Russia's "imperial narrative" (5); and the disjunctures, both administrative and social, that arose between center and periphery. With regard to the first of these, the authors note that Siberia is a "mental construct" (13), not least because it is difficult even to define the region geographically. Some geologists disregard the Urals as a legitimate boundary between Asia and the putatively discrete continent of Europe; and present-day dal´nevostochniki (Far Easterners) will sometimes bristle at being called "Siberians." Under Peter I, the province of Siberia (Sibirskaia guberniia) included regions west of the Urals. Culturally, the relative ease with which Russians traversed the subcontinent to reach Kamchatka by 1700 indicated to some their "natural" right to it. Nikolai Ivanovich Nadezhdin even wrote that there were portions of Asia and North America where the "geography has a purely Russian physiognomy"; and he suggested that these areas could somehow be united with the "native Russian land" (korennaia Russkaia zemlia), the supposed "fundamental core" of the empire (17).

So the question is posed from the beginning: Was Siberia a colony or not? Was it part of a general Drang nach Osten, as G. Patrick March has argued,⁸ or did it constitute a "fundamental" part of the Russian state, like the erstwhile Riazan´ principality? Indeed, the question itself introduces the Andersonian notion of Russia as an "imagined community."⁹ Dameshek and Remnev do not explicitly argue in favor of seeing the Russian state this way, but it is telling that they...