The last phase of the Russian Empire’s expansion into East Asia, and of the consolidation of its far eastern frontier, was marked by the building of the Chinese Eastern Railroad (CER) in 1896 and the Amur Railroad in 1908. Completed in 1902, the CER traversed the Chinese territory of Manchuria to connect the Siberian Railroad to Russia’s Priamur frontier and the Pacific Coast, establishing, at the same time, a Russian colonial sphere of influence in China. Its builders, equating the extension of the railway tracks with the forward movement of historical evolution, saw in the railroad the advance of “Europe” into “Asia,” and the strength of the “Russian nationality” that enabled Europe’s eastward march. Conceived in the aftermath of Russian defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, the Amur Railroad represented a two-fold disenchantment – with the explicitly “colonial” vision of territorial expansion embraced by the advocates of the CER, and with the efficacy of such a strategy for Russifying the distant frontier. Having as its stated goal to help “Russians” appropriate the Priamur, a region whose Russianness was supposed to have already been ensured by the CER, the building of the Amur Railroad signaled a clear turn toward an exclusionary and racialized mode of frontier management and population control to prevent what the very existence of the CER had promoted, the migration of “yellow labor” into the Russian Empire.
This paper argues that racialist ideas and practices emerged in this final phase of Russian expansion in part as a means for confronting multinationality at the eastern frontier of an empire that was being reconceived as a nation. The building of the railroads highlighted demographic concerns relating to the source of labor for frontier development and frontier “colonization,” and relating to the composition of the frontier population. These concerns, in turn, reflected increasing ambivalence among Russians regarding the empire’s multinationality and demographic diversity, and growing efforts to construct a national identity for the empire based on a Russianness that was itself being reinvented. In an age when European domination over non-Europe seemed natural and inevitable, the CER helped define for its builders Russia’s place in the world, which they perceived in geographical and civilizational terms framed by the Europe-Asia divide. By the time of the construction of the Amur Railroad, this essay suggests, Russian perceptions of the eastern frontier, as well as the place of Russia in the global context, became more sharply defined in demographic and racial terms shaped by the imagined opposition between the “yellow race” and the Russian “nation.” The second part of this essay discusses some of the moments when this new sensibility of Russianness emerged. The first formulation of Russianness, produced in conjunction with imperial visions that inspired the CER, affirmed Russia as European. The second, produced in conjunction with the Amur railway, worked to posit a racialized limit to the notion of the empire’s multinationality. Both visions of Russianness helped to assert the boundedness and cohesiveness of the Russian Empire as a national community, at a time when the mutually necessary projects of railroad building and imperial expansion pointed to both closer ties between far-flung places and peoples, and the erosion of preexisting geographic sense of place and demographic groupings.
Planning the extension of the Siberian Railroad, Russian officials first traced out a route on the Russian side, following the course of the Amur River that marked the boundary between Russia and China.^[1] In 1896, taking advantage of the opportunity presented by Chinese defeat in the Sino-Japanese War the year before, the planners of the extension chose another route, a shorter and almost “direct line” lying entirely on the Chinese side of the Amur River.^[2] The Amur Railroad returned to the original plan for the Siberian Railroad extension. Critics of the project, however, objected to the “extravagance” of the project, given its high construction cost and the redundancy of offering similar transport connections already provided by the CER.^[3] Moreover, the Amur Railroad was tied to a colonization agenda that promised to be costly: the settlement of Russian peasants in the often difficult terrain of the Priamur frontier,^[4] on the one hand, and, on the other, a labor policy reserving railroad work for Russians – who in general were significantly better paid – by excluding Chinese and Koreans, or “yellow labor.”
The building of this railroad was undoubtedly spurred by Russian defeat in 1905; or, as an official account of the railroad put it, the “changed situation in the Far East.”^[5] But the extravagance of the project cannot be explained by strategic defensive considerations alone. This paper offers a reading of the Amur Railroad as a counterpoint to the visions of empire embraced by the builders of the CER, itself an extravagant project that, I argue, marked a departure from previous modes of Russian imperial expansion. Taken together, the two railroads reveal seemingly contradictory conceptions of Russianness, which sometimes cast “Russians” as an agent of European expansion, and sometimes as an object of state protection against the “yellow race.” At the same time, the railroads pointed to a cumulative progression of defining Russianness that built on defining Russia as European in order to construct the “yellow race” as a policy category that helped to delimit the boundaries of Russianness.
In speaking of race, I refer to a categorization of humans that, in theory, explained difference by biology. Unlike nationality (narodnost’)^[6] – which Russian ethnographers often defined in terms of mutable cultural characteristics, such as language, clothing, and “way of life” (byt’), and which allowed for assimilation as a process of transformation – race was often construed as a category that implied the permanence of difference. Yet racialized boundary making almost always carried judgments based on culturally shaped notions of behavior, propensity, and social character. As Ann Stoler shows, race, relating to the definition of Europeanness and whiteness in the colonial context of the Dutch East Indies, was bound to cultural and social attributes such as demeanor and economic status, attributes that needed to be cultivated and maintained.^[7] Racial categorization was thus in practice neither inalterable nor permanent. This lack of fixedness regarding race was the case as well in the Russian far eastern frontier.
Examining both incipient racialist conceptions, based on cultural and civilizational categories referring to Europe and Asia, and explicitly racialist articulations referring to skin color, this paper highlights the tension between the clarity of classifying difference promised by reference to race, and the actual indeterminacy of the content of racial categorization. This tension helps to explain both the appeal for a number of Russian publicists and Russian policy makers to focus on race, even though the content of the category of “yellow race” remained unstable. As employed by Russians regarding the far eastern frontier,^[8] “yellow race” most frequently referred to Chinese and Koreans. At times Japanese were included, and at times some Koreans were exempted. Suggesting that race was envisioned as a tool for separating the populations within from those outside the Russian Empire, the inorodtsy groups of the region were, as far as I know, not included in the category of the “yellow race.”

THE CHINESE EASTERN RAILROAD

Following China’s defeat in the Sino-Japanese War of 1895, S. Iu. Witte, as the finance minister of Russia, concluded a financial and alliance treaty with the Qing government in 1896. The financial component of the treaty offered to help service the Qing’s debt to Japan. In exchange for procuring foreign loans for the Qing to pay the war indemnities, Witte obtained from the Chinese government an agreement allowing a Russian railway, the Chinese Eastern Railroad (CER), to be built on a territorial concession in Manchuria.^[9] The historiography on the significance of the CER at the level of international relations, (Russian) domestic politics, and European imperialism in China is extensive.^[10] This section takes a different turn from the existing historiography to highlight how Witte’s views departed from previous Russian understandings of imperial expansion. Witte envisioned the making of an explicitly “colonial” space in relation to the empire proper, which he recast as the territorial extent of the Russian “nation.” Incorporating ideas that positioned Europe and European nations at the pinnacle of evolutionary development, Witte’s rethinking of the spatial organization of the empire was, in turn, integral to his program for transforming Russia into Europe, and for asserting Russia’s identity as European. The CER, instrument and product of Witte’s policies, embodied his visions of Russia’s Europeanness.
Witte’s concern with nation-building, understood as the building of a “Russian” nation, was reflected in the functions he assigned to the Siberian Railroad, a central project of Witte’s policy before he turned toward China. Inseparable from a resettlement program to populate Siberia and the Priamur with peasant-settlers,^[11] the railroad was seen by Witte as an economic and cultural agent for transforming frontier territorial possessions into an integral part of Russia. The railroad, according to Witte, would break down the “centuries-old immobility” of Siberia, due to an isolation that left the region in a “low level of civil development (grazhdanstvennost’),” and “its aborigines [lacking in] the basic traits of Russian nationality (russkaia narodnost’).”^[12] Spatially, the railroad was to “unite (soedinit’) Siberia… with the European Russian rail network”; it was to “join (priobshchit’) it to Russian life and bring about the very conditions of existence and development that are prevalent in other parts of Russia.”^[13] Thus for Witte, uniting Siberia to the Russian railroad network also meant “Russifying” it, in the sense of imparting to the region and its inhabitants the economic and cultural traits of the Russian nationality. As a policy goal, the Russification of Siberia was echoed in the resettlement officials’ perception of railroad building as enabling, in Steven Marks’s words, the “eastward movement of the Great Russian ‘tribe.’”^[14] This goal was also echoed in the work of the Siberian Railroad Committee, which, according to Marks, built Orthodox churches and Russian schools in new settlements, and “actively encouraged the conversion of Siberian natives” – to prevent the “Iakutization” and the “Buriatization” of Russian settlers.^[15]
Regarding Manchuria, rather than giving priority to peasant resettlement, or the “colonization” of the region, Witte envisioned the creation of a “colony.”^[16] In various discussions on the subject when the CER was nearing completion in 1900 and 1901, Witte argued against proposals to settle “the Russian element” in the railroad concession zone in Manchuria. At times citing similar observations that brought others to a contrary conclusion, Witte pointed to the presence of an already large local population, the lack of security and stability in the region following the Boxer Rebellion, and the supposed scarcity of available arable land.^[17]
How Witte imagined differentiating Manchuria from Siberia, and situating Manchuria in relation to the empire, was an outgrowth of his contemplation on nationhood, articulated in a pamphlet on “nationalism” and the “national economy” that was both a translation of and a tribute to the German thinker Friedrich List.^[18] Appropriating List’s concept of “national economy,” which challenged the ideology of free trade by privileging national interest in the shaping of the international market, Witte emphasized the “colonial” dimension of this concept. Understanding the nation as a given, and drawing on ethnographic views, Witte defined the nation (natsiia) as “an organic whole, tied to faith, distinctness of territory, blood, language, literature, the creativity, customs and mores of the people; to the state principle and state institutions.” Emphasizing the economic dimension of this community of humans, Witte further defined the nation as the “unique (osobaia) economic unit” that mediated between “individuals” (otdel’nyi chelovek) and humanity.^[19]
The task of a nation was to strive for “national independence and power.” Witte, following List, classified nations according to economic form and evolutionary status. An industrial nation was one that could make use of its industrial power to better “the general well-being of the population, state income, and state power,” allowing the state “to extend its activities to all parts of the world and establish colonies (kolonii) [Witte’s emphasis].” By contrast, bound to the less advanced, agrarian stage of evolution, “a purely agricultural nation” was a stagnant nation that could neither “develop its internal and external trade,” nor achieve “intellectual, social, and political” success. It could not acquire “a political significance that corresponds to its place in nature,” nor “exert its influence on the civilization and progress of backward peoples and found colonies.”^[20] Informed by this perspective, Witte’s commitment to peasant colonization in Siberia thus did not translate to Manchuria. In Witte’s scheme, Manchuria, separated from the territories of the Russian Empire by a formal national boundary, was to become the colony that Russia would establish.
Writing in 1899, three years after Russia obtained the CER concession and as many before the opening of the railroad, Witte saw Russia as an agrarian nation providing “advantageous markets” to the industrialized Western European metropole, and serving Western Europe as “colonial countries” served “their metropolises.”^[21] In Manchuria, Witte saw the opportunity for Russia to evolve from a “handmaiden” of industrialized Europe to becoming “a metropolis herself.”^[22] As is well known, Witte envisioned Russia’s transformation from “backwardness” through industrialization.^[23] Less recognized in Witte’s industrialization program is the place of “colonies,” a site where – coded as unindustrialized and, in Russia’s case, Asian – Russian “losses in the European trade” could be turned “into profits in the Asiatic trade.”^[24]
Whereas nation-building pointed to the production of homogenized space, the acquisition of colonies presupposed the making and the reproduction of uneven space.^[25] This unevenness referred objectively to the differential extent of industrial development and financial integration into the European controlled world market, and subjectively to perceptions of civilizational development that was racially inflected, and that in turn impinged on Russians’ self-perception as European. In Witte’s view, Siberia was to be “joined” with the rest of Russia, and to be made into Russia. By contrast, Manchuria’s difference from Russia was to be preserved for the region to function as the “handmaiden” to Russia.
Becoming the metropole of a colonial empire, Russia would also take its place among European nations, Witte suggested in a report on his visit to the Far East in 1902. Speaking of what the CER could accomplish, Witte observed that, in time, the Russian people, a “European race (evropeiskaia rasa) [separated] from the nations of Asia (narody Azii),” would carry out their civilizing mission and push the border of Europe to “the endpoint of the Chinese Eastern Railroad.”^[26] But this civilizing and Europeanizing mission did not imply a leveling of spatial and cultural difference, as did the Russifying agenda that Witte envisioned for Siberia. Positioning Russia from the vantage point of Manchuria, Witte observed that rail connection between Europe and Asia enabled the “coming together (sblizhenie) of the yellow and white races (zheltaia i belaia rasy).” The railroad “opens a gate for Europe into [a] hitherto closed-off world” of “numerous tribes of the Mongol race… Further isolation of the peoples of the East would be virtually impossible.” As the privileged “intermediary” between Europe and Asia that enabled the East-West exchange (of commodities), “holding in its hands the road along which this coming together [of races] will take place,” Witte proclaimed, “it falls to Russia’s lot a serious responsibility in dealing with this coming together.”^[27] Russia’s task, Witte suggested, was not to promote integration, as in Siberia, but to stand “on guard at the gates from Europe to Asia that it opened, [so that] it can regulate and direct this coming together in the direction that is the most favorable for it.”^[28]
For Witte, standing on guard at the gate between Europe and Asia translated into the use of a network of railway cities to control the flow of trade. Where he referred to the populations of these cities, Witte imagined that the coming together of white and yellow races would take the form of segregated cohabitation. Witte objected to peasant colonization in Manchuria, as mentioned above. However, he envisioned that the newly built city of Harbin, the CER administrative center located at the midpoint of the railway line, should have “the character of [an] exclusively Russian settlement.” Selecting the migration of the most suitable estates and personal statuses to the city, Witte aimed to settle Harbin “primarily… by solid trade and manufacturing firms and desirable private persons (nadezhnyia chastnyia litsa),” who, by transforming the city “into a major trade and manufacturing center,” would also help implant “a large Russian city in the very heart of Manchuria.”^[29]
Complementing Harbin, Dalnyi – another new city, one that was to serve as a port at the terminus of the southern branch of the CER – was planned as a “center of international trade” divided into three sections, an administrative center and two trading quarters, one “European” and the other Chinese.^[30] Intending for “Russian commercial forces” to become a prominent presence in Dalnyi, Witte also asserted the Europeanness of Russians by placing the city’s Orthodox church in the European quarter.^[31] Vladivostok, an existing city located at the eastern terminus of the CER and on Russian territory, was to combine the functions performed by Harbin (a closed commercial city) and Dalnyi (an open port). Witte argued for establishing the city’s port as a “free harbor” (vol’naia gavan’) to attract European and Japanese trade. To prevent the goods of these countries from “flooding” Priamur and “further penetrat[ing] into the Zabaikal” region, the border of the free harbor was to be secured by customs checkpoints and the interior of Russia by a tariff system.^[32]
Speaking in particular of Dalnyi, where extensive construction work was planned, Witte saw Chinese workers and craftsmen as “extremely indispensable.”^[33] He maintained this view for Russian territory as well, defending the need for Chinese labor in frontier development.^[34] The racialist component of Witte’s conception of this commerce and commodity-market driven colonial empire thus emerged as an inclusionism that nevertheless articulated a hierarchy of difference through the appropriation of the colonial European mode of spatial segregation.
With regard to the Russianness of the frontier with China, Witte’s concern was with the “penetration” of foreign goods into Russia. Others, however, increasingly focused on the “penetration” of foreign labor, especially as the vision of Russian commercial primacy Witte promised appeared to be far from realization. By 1903, critics of the CER project began to voice their doubt over the usefulness and the purpose of the railroad network. The war minister A. N. Kuropatkin pointed to the 40 million rubles in annual deficit incurred by the CER.^[35] Dalnyi was deemed, according to Theodore Von Laue, a “conspicuous failure.”^[36] The construction of the CER, like that of the Siberian Railroad before it, depended heavily on equipment, contractors, and technical help from Europe, Japan, and the United States,^[37] rather than channeling state investment into Russian industry. Observing the demographic changes since its construction, many believed the railroad benefited the Chinese at the expense of Russian workers and Russian state interest. Around 60,000 Chinese were recruited for the construction of the CER; several thousands more crossed the border into Russian territory to work on the section of the Siberian Railroad near Lake Baikal.^[38] In addition, according to a Japanese magazine report in 1902, some 40,000 Chinese were hired by the Russo-Chinese Bank – founded by Witte to finance the CER – for seasonal employment in Vladivostok every year.^[39] Kuropatkin, in particular, fearing that the CER facilitated the growth of Chinese settlements in Manchuria, warned against Chinese domination of the neighboring Primorskaia oblast,^[40] where Vladivostok was located.
One critic, S. D. Merkulov, an entrepreneur and public figure in the Priamur,^[41] rejected altogether the notion of making Russia into a colonial empire. Challenging the view, by then commonly held, that “Russia, by its historical tradition and by its geographical position, had and has a natural inclination to the Far East,” Merkulov insisted that “China proper [south of Manchuria] was not and cannot be our market.”^[42] According to Merkulov, railroad building in Manchuria, the emblem of the efforts invested in making the region Russia’s bridgehead into China, only succeeded in “destroy[ing] the natural barriers” – that is, a vast territory without transport arteries – that prevented the “penetration of foreign goods” into Manchuria, and in holding back the “colonization” and industrialization of the neighboring Priamur.^[43] Faulting especially the building of the southern branch of the CER, which connected Harbin to the port of Dalnyi and opened northern Manchuria to central China, Merkulov went so far as to hypothesize that the “destruction of the entire southern branch [of the CER]” would “return us to our previous favorable position” in Manchuria.^[44]
The Portsmouth Peace Treaty of September 1905, signed to conclude the Russo-Japanese War, in effect “destroyed” Russian control over the southern branch of the CER, as the treaty turned over to the Japanese government a good portion of this branch, from Dalnyi to Changchun. Along with the southern branch – renamed the Southern Manchurian Railroad by the Japanese – the Russian government also lost to Japan the Liaodung Peninsula in southern Manchuria, and the two warm-water ports at the tip of the peninsula, Dalnyi and Port Arthur.^[45] Expressing disenchantment with the colonial project vested in the CER, Merkulov’s critique also anticipated a new Russian policy and discursive orientation that turned away from envisioning China proper and the “East” as Russia’s natural colony. The new turn reflected a heightened concern with the “penetration” of foreignness into Russian territory, and with the “colonization” and Russification of the Priamur.

THE AMUR RAILROAD

Between 1906 and 1907, geological surveys were again conducted to investigate the feasibility of a railroad line connecting the last stretch of the Siberian railroad to the Far East that would lie entirely on the Russian side of the Amur River. In June 1908, approved by the Duma and confirmed by the tsar, funds were allocated for the “immediate” construction of the Amur Railroad, as the new railway was named.^[46] The terms for the construction budget stipulated that the Amur Railroad was to be “completed exclusively by the labor of Russian workers.”^[47] Aziatskaia Rossiia, an official publication of the Resettlement Department in the Ministry of Agriculture, clarified this exclusionary term: “without the least participation of the yellows (zheltykh).”^[48]
The building of the Amur Railroad was often justified by its strategic function in the event of a war in the region, as the Portsmouth Treaty banned the transport of troops on the CER.^[49] But the Amur Railroad was also intended by its advocates as the instrument for reversing policies and practices associated with the CER. The CER, built on a Chinese territorial concession, was, in theory, to be eventually returned to China according to the concession agreement.^[50] The Amur Railroad, to be built on Russian territory, would be securely and permanently Russian. The construction of the CER relied heavily on Chinese migrant workers. The Amur Railroad was to employ only Russian workers, so that “tens of millions of rubles in wages, instead of disappearing into China, [would remain] in Russia.”^[51] Witte envisioned the CER as a centerpiece in the formation of a colonial empire that profited from differentiating between national and colonial space. P. A. Stolypin, an “ardent supporter” of the Amur Railroad and successor to Witte as prime minister in 1906,^[52] saw the new railway as a nation-building project that was, in effect, to produce a homogenized national space at the frontier, through agricultural colonization.
However, arguing for the construction of the Amur Railroad against those who questioned the soundness of a policy focused on the Far East after the 1905 defeat, Stolypin articulated a vision of nationhood that, like that of Witte, identified the “East” as an object of Russia’s national mission. Echoing Witte’s insistence on the railroad as a peaceful tool for attaining this mission, Stolypin dismissed the concern that the Amur Railroad would serve to provoke a new war at a time when “profound peace” was needed: “we have to be strong in our Far East not for fighting, but for defending our national cultural work (natsional’naia kul’turnaia rabota), which is also our historical mission.”^[53] Calling the railroad project a “national construction” (narodnoe stroitel’stvo), Stolypin justified the return to a focus on the far east: “the Russian nation (russkii narod) has always been aware that it inhabited and grew strong on the border of two parts of the world, that it pushed back the Mongolian invasion, and that the East is dear to it.”^[54] Moreover, the Russian nation, for Stolypin, was an organic whole of which the far eastern frontier was a part. “If we lack sufficient vital sap (zhiznennye soki) for the work of healing all the wounds inflicted on [Russia],” he warned, “then the most distant, the most lacerated (isterzannye) parts of her, rather than strengthening the center, would fall off, dry up, slip off without illness and unnoticed, as if hit by gangrene.” The East is tied to Russia by blood, Stolypin suggested, for “our eagle, the legacy of Byzantium, is a two-headed eagle,” and “cutting off a head from our Russian eagle, the one turned to the East, you will only make it to bleed.”^[55]

YELLOW PERIL

Witte anticipated with caution the “coming together” of nations and races, enabled by the CER, but he also saw increased cross-border population mobility as a new opportunity for securing the labor needed for the frontier. Contrasting with Witte’s privileging of labor needs, the Amur railroad signaled a new commitment to erect a demographic barrier between Russia and China. Stolypin pointed to the high population density of neighboring China as a threat to the immense riches of the far eastern frontier. Warning of the “infiltration” of “aliens” (chuzhestranets), and a quasi-biological invasion by “an outside body (postoronnee telo)… wedging into our state organism (organizm),” Stolypin called for vigilance at the frontier. “If we continue to sleep our lethargic sleep, then this frontier would be immersed with alien sap (chuzhoi sok), then when we wake up… it would seem Russian in name only,” he asserted.^[56]
Russian fears of demographic threats coming from China and Korea were articulated since the 1880s, after the Priamur was formally established as an administrative region separate from Eastern Siberia.^[57] Efforts to prevent new in-migration of Chinese and Koreans to the region were inconsistent, however, as frontier administrators often found, the need for settlers and food producers outweighed their aim to Russify the frontier.^[58] The use of the term “yellow race” in the context of the frontier appeared by the 1890s. An issue of the Journal of the Siberian Railway Committee, for example, cautioned against the “waves of the yellow race,” and appealed for “increas[ing] the supply of lands where [Russian] peasants can be settled” in order to prevent the settlement of “foreign elements” in Siberia.^[59] War Minister A. N. Kuropatkin, who oversaw the construction and operation of the CER, frequently expressed concerns that the empire’s far eastern territories would be invaded by a “yellow tidal wave.”^[60]
Kuropatkin’s racialized views of the danger at the frontier have often been noted.^[61] Less known are the writings of those based in the Priamur and Manchuria – such as Benevskii, the acting governor general of the Priamur during the years marked by the violence of the Boxer Rebellion (1900 and 1901), and I. S. Levitov – who helped to supply the yellow peril discourse with the authority claimed by knowledge of the local situation. In 1901, a proposal submitted by Benevskii to the minister of interior attempted to establish systematic immigration control. The term “yellow race” – used in the explanatory note for the proposed legislation to refer to Chinese and Koreans in the Priamur – seems to have first appeared in official policy discussions in this proposal. The proposal reaffirmed the regulations that were already implemented, such as the requirement for passports and residence permits; it recommended tightening existing prohibitions, such as those against Chinese and Korean ownership of land and real property; and it introduced new restrictions based on health and fitness for labor. Arguing for the need of these restrictions, Benevskii noted that similar measures directed against “the representatives of the yellow race” had long been adopted in “European colonies in East Asia and in America.”^[62]
Levitov, described variously as a CER official and a journalist based in Port Arthur,^[63] was probably an engineer employed by the CER for the railway workshops in Harbin.^[64] His view of the yellow race reflected an ambivalence shaped by the fear of Chinese dominance, on the one hand, and, on the other, by an appreciation for the economic value of Chinese labor. In his 1900 pamphlet, Yellow Race, Levitov saw – in Andrew Malozemoff’s words – “a triumphal march of the yellow race, specifically the Chinese, into the north and… eastern parts of the Russian Empire” as a result of the CER and other Russian constructions at the frontier.^[65] Evoking his own personal experience as a carpentry workshop supervisor in Harbin, Levitov observed in his next pamphlet, Yellow Russia, published in 1901, that Chinese workers received about one-third the pay of Russians, but learned to do the same work so quickly and with such “great success” that they could “drive Russian artisans away completely” in two or three years.^[66]
Levitov tempered his anxiety over Chinese dominance by presupposing an innate “moral” divide between Europeans (including Russians) and Chinese, and by proposing a geographical-administrative barrier. The Chinese, Levitov asserted, were incomparably endowed with “such lesser moral qualities as endurance, [capacity for] mental and physical labor, and persistence at work,” but lacked the “loftier moral qualities” possessed by the “European worker,” such as “the sense of duty, public spirit (obshchestvennyi dukh), true strength of character (nastoiashchee muzhestvo).” Levitov predicted that the use of Chinese labor would lead to an “economic revolution” promising unprecedented productivity, provided that the Chinese were placed under the “direction of Europeans and expert European managers.”^[67] To neutralize the danger this source of labor posed for Russia, Levitov designated Lake Baikal as the “natural barrier” for separating the “wave of yellow race” from Russia proper.^[68] Levitov called the territory to the east of this barrier – that is, the pre-1906 administrative unit of the Priamur General Governorship that included the Zabaikal, Amur, and Primorskaia oblasts – “Yellow Russia.”^[69] In Yellow Russia, “the strictest registration” of the Chinese would be enforced, such as that “set up by the French in Saigon” that included taking “anthropological measurements.” For Levitov, the containment of Chinese labor would be a superior solution to exclusion, as demonstrated by the American import of Chinese labor to the Philippines twenty years after instituting the exclusion of the Chinese. Levitov anticipated with hope that Chinese presence would turn “the Amur and the Ussuri region… into Russian India.” The Chinese, the “Egyptian slaves” of Russia’s colonial empire “who so willingly offer us their service,” could not be a danger to Russia so long as “not one Chinese be permitted to cross the Baikal,” he insisted.^[70] Yellow Russia was thus conceived to be both a labor “reservoir,” to use David Wolff’s term,^[71] and a migratory buffer zone. In serving these functions, Yellow Russia was also imagined as an overseas colony of Russia, with Lake Baikal recast as an ocean protecting the Russian metropole from the colonial population invasion.
The report “Yellow Bosporus,” which Levitov presented to a St. Petersburg industry and trade society in 1903, offered a more alarmed view of the Chinese that reflected an awareness of the increasing militarization of Japan, as well as of China. This revised view turned Levitov’s attention to the immigration regulations in the “lands of the Anglo-Saxon race” (zemli anglo-saksonskoi rasy) such as the United States, Canada, and Australia.^[72] Levitov’s interest in immigration laws followed on Benevskii’s. In turn, a similar interest was echoed by the ministry of the interior, which presented a study of these laws – from Canada, Australia, the United States, and Great Britain, dating from 1886 to 1907 – to the Duma in 1908, in discussions considering immigration restrictions for the Priamur.^[73] This interest also reverberated with the governor general of the Priamur, N. L. Gondatti, who, in 1912, inquired with the U.S. consul-general in Vladivostok about the exclusion of Orientals in the United States.^[74]
The report’s title referred to the Korean Strait, whose strategic importance Levitov equaled to that of the Bosporus.^[75] Linking geopolitical competition at both the European and East Asian frontier to a global racial struggle taking the form of Chinese and Japanese migration, Levitov observed that this racial struggle was already won by the “Anglo-Saxon race” in their countries, such as Canada and the United States.^[76] As before, Levitov dismissed the danger of using Chinese labor in Russia, believing that the numerical superiority and the low cost of the Chinese would soon give way to faster European population growth and increased formation of Chinese industries and unions.^[77] Nevertheless, Levitov now also saw the low wage demand of Chinese (and Japanese) laborers as a “social” (sotsial’nyi) threat arising from the cultural and civilizational differences that set Chinese and Japanese apart from Europeans. Chinese and Japanese workers lived on several kopeks a day, Levitov noted, while “the European must spend rubles.”^[78] Characterizing the anti-immigration movement in Australia as “the struggle of the working class in Australia for its social rights (sotsial’nyia prava),” as a fight “until death” to protect high wages, Levitov applauded the Australian workers who took up this fight and who “succeeded in stopping the migration of the yellow race.”^[79]

THE STOLYPIN WAVE

In speaking of the “social rights” of Australians, Levitov equated the “working class” with this “European” people. This conflation of “workers” with the “nation” found an echo in the insistence on hiring only Russians workers voiced by the advocates for the Amur Railroad. Identifying “Russian labor” first as “Russian pioneers,” then as “Russia” itself, Stolypin asserted that “the Amur railroad must be built by Russian labor (russkie ruki)… these Russian pioneers will build the railroad; they will settle near this railroad; they will move to the frontier and, with them, move Russia there.”^[80] A Duma member argued that the Amur Railroad, “a new artery for infusing and concentrating our forces,” must be built to give aide to “our Russian workers” in the Far East, who are surrounded by Chinese and Japanese workers.^[81] Another member, repeating Stolypin’s pledge to build the railroad by “Russian labor,” elaborated that “we understand this in the broad sense, not only regarding workers,” but also “Russian people (russkie liudi), who will settle there and be the first to lay down the stone in the settlement of this marvelous, fertile, splendid land.”^[82]
The two Duma speakers were V. M. Purishkevich and Markov II, one a leader of Duma’s right wing and the other known for his virulent anti-Semitism.^[83] Most of the support for the railroad came from the right-wing, to judge by the applause during Stolypin’s speech.^[84] Stolypin did not identify with the right wing, nor was he anti-Semitic, as Abraham Ascher notes.^[85] But he shared with these Duma representatives an idealized, and theoretically populist, vision of the Russian nation represented not by the elite, but by the “people” in general. In thinking of the Amur Railroad, Stolypin emphasized not only the negative goals of strategic defense against the Japanese and economic defense against the Chinese, but also the positive one of building the Russian nation. For Stolypin, nation-building also meant the formation of a new citizenry. This was to be accomplished by a “social revolution” (sotsial’naia revoliutsiia) – through agrarian reform and the institution of property rights – that would lead to the submission of “the interests of all other strata of the population” to “the interests of one, albeit the [most] numerous class.” This revolution would also favor the “talented, strong, capable” over the “lazy” and “slow-witted,” and, in this way, “raise” (podniat’) the peasantry to a “farmer class” (zemledelchekii klass).^[86] Stolypin suggested a new “civil and legal rights relation” (grazhdanskie pravootnosheniia) of equality among citizens would result from his revolution, replacing the present highly differentiated, estate-based regime.^[87] In a newspaper interview, Stolypin explained “our great mission” as the creation of “the citizen” (grazhdanin) through “the creation of the strong individual proprietor (edinolichnyi sobstvennik),” who is “the most reliable bulwark of state order (gosudarstvennost’) and culture,” and thanks to whom “civil consciousness (grazhdanstvennost’) itself will reign in Rus.”^[88] This mission meant the strengthening of the “lower classes” (nizy). “The entire strength of the country is in them! They are more than 100 million! They will be the healthy and strong roots of the state,” Stolypin proclaimed.^[89]
In Stolypin’s view, the making of a citizen-farmer class depended not only on establishing property rights on land, but also on the migration of peasants from European Russia to the frontiers. Migration would relieve population pressure, weaken peasant communal ties, and increase the likelihood of setting up sizable farmsteads (khutory), especially at the frontier. Whereas land allotment in European Russia was, roughly, calculated at ten desiatinas (27 acres) per household in 1907,^[90] in the Priamur around the same time, the allotment for peasant settlers was fifteen desiatinas (40.5 acres) per male soul.^[91] Thus, in a household of five, with two or three males, this allotment would amount to about thirty or forty-five desiatinas (81 to 121.5 acres). Stolypin followed Witte in pushing for the eastward migration of Russian peasants. But it was under Stolypin that “the most intensive settlement and economic appropriation of the Far Eastern region” took place.^[92] Tying his agrarian reform to the economic defense of the Priamur, Stolypin founded in 1909 a new committee under the Council of Ministers that was organizationally linked to the building of the Amur Railroad, the Committee for the Settlement of the Far East, and served as its chair.^[93]
A major concern of the Far East Settlement Committee was the Chinese and Korean population in the region. In April 1910, a special meeting of the Committee, chaired by the minister of agriculture A. V. Krivoshein, and attended by Priamur’s governor general at the time, P. F. Unterberger, was held to discuss “measures for fighting the influx of the yellow race in the Priamur region.”^[94] The renewed concern with this fight (bor’ba) following the Russo-Japanese War perhaps spurred the formation of the Committee. In one report to the minister of finance, probably dated 1908, the writer, N. V. Sliunin, noted that for decades “the settlement of the Russian element (russkii element) here had no economic or political significance,” for there were years when for every two or three thousand Russian settlers who arrived in the region, “the influx of Chinese and Koreans into Vladivostok alone numbered in the tens of thousands.”^[95] After the Russo-Japanese War, with an “energetic and enterprising” Japan and a China “awakening to the reorganization of its government and troops,” the colonization of the Priamur region could no longer be delayed, he argued. “Given our current position in the Far East,” he insisted, colonization offered the only “possibility [for us] to defend [this] vast empty frontier.”^[96]
Another report of the Far East was submitted to the government by Prince G. E. L’vov, a prominent figure in St. Petersburg’s political and social circles, who spent four months in the Amur and Primorskaia oblasts to study the area.^[97] Making a distinction between the terms “resettlement” (pereselenie) and “colonization” (kolonizatsiia) that drew on their equivalence in common usage,^[98] L’vov maintained that resettlement, as it was being carried out, was in clear contradiction with the goals of colonization, which was to strengthen the frontier “by means of implanting a strong Russian state presence (russkaia gosudarstvennost’).” Perhaps picking up on Sliunin’s report that a sudden vast increase in the number of settlers arriving in the Far East after 1906 found the local administration unprepared to find land for many of them,^[99] L’vov observed that despite the large expanse of the frontier, only a small amount of land was surveyed and partitioned for distribution to settlers, leading to squatting on “wild” taiga land by newly arrived peasant-settlers.^[100] Suggesting that the present settlement policy was haphazard, L’vov cautioned that such a policy would only bring a “weak element for agricultural colonization” to the frontier. Meanwhile, “all our colonization efforts and national investments (narodnyia zhertvy)” led instead to the “inflow of the Chinese, who seized all the branches of trade and labor.” The region was thus “settled” by Russians, but “colonized” by the Chinese, he declared. Abruptly turning to include Koreans in his concern, he judged “the entire [region’s] economic life [to be] in the hands of the Chinese and Koreans.”^[101] Concluding, L’vov hinted at a broader struggle between Europe and the yellow race. “The yellow wave is rising! Europe sees in our frontiers that bulwark which must stop this wave.” Referring undoubtedly to the pacification of the Boxer Rebellion by Russian troops in 1900, he observed that “more than once we guarded Europe and took upon ourselves the blows of this wave.” This time, however, the repulsion of this wave must be accomplished by other means. “Our task,” he wrote, “is above all peaceful. And in this sense we have an immense responsibility for our policy… We must live with the Chinese in peace… This is necessary for us and for all humanity.”^[102]
Discussing “measures for fighting the influx of the yellow race,” the 1910 meeting of the Far East Settlement Committee did indeed point to a “peaceful” means for carrying out this fight. “The most effective way for solving the question indicated is the legislation of a general immigration law,” according to the conclusion of the meeting. But, to “avoid diplomatic complications,” this law would act on “specific categories of foreigners (inostrantsev) without differentiation by subjecthood.”^[103] This would mean, for example, that restrictions for the admission of “foreign unskilled workers” would be based on “age, health, and a minimum of cash” – a combination of qualifications that could be selected to affect mainly “work forces from China, Korea, and, in part, Japan.”^[104] Although much attention, perhaps because of the building of the Amur Railroad, had been focused on workers, the Committee recognized that a substantial portion of the Chinese and Korean populations in the Priamur farmed land leased from peasant settlers, Cossacks, private owners, and the state.^[105] To remove both “yellow workers” from the frontier industries, and “yellow tenants” (zheltolitsye arendatory) from land, the Committee recommended establishing a legal structure to limit Chinese and Korean access to both land and employment by prohibiting the leasing of land to “foreign subjects,” and the hiring of “foreign unskilled laborers” in all state-funded work.^[106]
Two months after the meeting, the Law of June 21, 1910, with strong support from Stolypin,^[107] was passed. Without employing the term “yellow race” and without referring to Chinese and Koreans, the law prohibited the leasing of state land to “foreigners,” the engagement of foreign contractors for state-funded work, and the hiring of foreign workers in government projects.^[108] But this was not an immigration law, as it did not impose restrictions on the entry of Chinese and Koreans, as a report critical of the law complained.^[109] Moreover, the employment prohibition of the law was weakened by an exemption clause that was no doubt a concession to persistent supporters of the use of “yellow labor” – among them local Russian entrepreneurs, mine-owners, and manufacturers, and, in the central government itself, the minister of finance and Witte’s successor, N. I. Kokovtsov.^[110] The exemption allowed for lifting the hiring prohibition in “exceptional” cases, subject to approval by the Council of Ministers. In practice, this exemption opened up a legal channel for the employment of Chinese and Koreans, as both Russian officials overseeing frontier construction projects and Russian private entrepreneurs contracted by the state made use of this exemption clause almost as soon as the law was passed.^[111]
Nevertheless, the June 21 Law provided a legal framework for restructuring Chinese and Koreans’ access to employment on Russian territory, and for reducing both urban and rural Chinese and Korean settlements. Kokovtsov, objecting to the prohibition against hiring “foreign workers,” pointed out that “from the example of Germany, which gave Russian workers broad access to East Prussia, we see that the temporary use” – not prohibition – “of a foreign work force can only enable the economic rise of a country.” Elaborating on the notion of “temporary use,” Kokovtsov argued that a more beneficial policy would be “directed against the settlement of yellow people (zheltolitsykh) [emphasis in the original],” not at keeping them from being hired by the “fledgling industries in the young frontier.”^[112] In practice, the June 21 Law proved to function like a policy advocated by Kokovtsov. By means of a general prohibition that nonetheless allowed for the employment of Chinese and Koreans in “exceptional” cases, the law permitted periodic or seasonal employment, but prevented the permanent, or long-term settlement of Chinese and Koreans on Russian territory.
Another way that the June 21 Law aimed to reduce Chinese and Korean settlement was through land-leasing restrictions. This law worked in conjunction with an administrative measure taken by the Far East Settlement Committee, which, in effect, confiscated for the “purpose of peasant colonization” a vast stretch of land granted to the Amur and Ussuri Cossacks.^[113] The retraction of land grants to the Cossacks suggested the growing doubt of policy makers over the usefulness of Cossacks for occupying the frontier space. This decision reflected the officials’ preference for a “peaceful” colonization policy, as L’vov recommended, to the militarized one relying on Cossacks. It also reflected the policy makers’ view of the coming obsolescence of the cavalry in warfare, a lesson they drew from “the experience of the last war” – that is, the Russo-Japanese War.^[114] Finally the decision highlighted the perception that Cossack presence undermined the Russianness of the frontier, as well as the hope that turning the land over to peasant settlers would avert further “penetration into our territory by the representatives of the yellow race who are farmers (zemledelcheskie predstaviteli zheltoi rasy).”^[115]
In the 1890s, Cossacks in the Priamur were granted large tracts of some of the best land in the region, along the Amur and Ussuri rivers, according to a report compiled by Krivoshein in January 1910. The Priamur Cossacks troops became “the master of more than 14 million desiatinas (37.8 million acres) of state land.”^[116] The Cossacks themselves often received up to fifty desiatinas (135 acres) per male soul, whereas peasant settlers received between ten to fifteen (27 to 40.5 acres) from the resettlement land reserve. If “Cossacks troops leave this land,” the report noted, four to five times more inhabitants could be settled in their place. The report also assessed the Cossacks to be “a very unsatisfactory colonization element.”^[117] Holding on the average two hundred desiatinas (540 acres) per household, too much to farm on their own, Cossacks “inevitably” rented out their land. The leased land “naturally concentrated in the hands of the Chinese and Korean populations,” the only ones available to take the lease. Who actually farmed the land was reflected in the landscape, the report suggested. Chinese and Korean fanzas^[118] spread across the districts belonging to Cossack stanitsas. By contrast, fanzas were rarely seen in the areas settled by new peasant migrants.^[119] Concluding this section of the report, Krivoshein asserted that “to use the troops for the consolidation of [this] vast territory… would inevitably be accompanied by the legalization and even the spread of the inorodtsy element in the region.”^[120]
The Far East Settlement Committee resolved to turn over Cossack land for redistribution to new settlers in its first meeting.^[121] As was recognized in discussions leading to the June 21 Law, the “fight against the influx of the yellow race” was to be accomplished by both legal and administrative means.^[122] Concerning land use, the June 21 Law provided the legal framework for carrying out the “fight” against new migrants, and the administrative decision to take back the land granted to Cossacks, the extra-legal tool for removing Chinese and Korean tenant farmers already in Russian territory. This combination of legal and administrative measures also worked to produce a new frontier order that privileged peasant settlers, the future farmer-citizens of the Russian nation, over the military estate.
The “Stolypin wave”^[123] of peasant migration brought a peak in the settlement of European Russian migrants in the Priamur. Calculated from the numbers compiled by V. M. Kabuzan, between 1907 and 1910, the years when Stolypin could have personally overseen the migration process, 114,757 migrants settled in the Primorskaia oblast, almost three times as many compared to the 40,560 during the previous peak years from 1895 to 1898. In the less populous Amur oblast, where the construction of the Amur railroad began, but where land was less fertile, 67,764 migrants settled, almost four times as many as the 17,547 for the years 1895 to 1898.^[124] From the census year of 1897 to 1910, the absolute number of the Chinese and Koreans (those who were counted) also grew, but their proportion compared to those counted as “Russians” fell. For the Primorskaia oblast, for example, the number of Chinese in 1897 was 25.5% of that of Russians; and the number of Koreans compared to that of Russians, 20.2%. In absolute numbers, the Chinese were 30,699, Koreans, 24, 297, and Russians, 120,514. In 1910, the number of the Chinese compared to that of the Russians was 17%, and for the Koreans, it was 13.4%. That is, the Chinese numbered 65,409, Koreans 51,554, and Russians, 384,591.^[125] The actual number of both Chinese and Koreans in the Priamur was undoubtedly higher than those counted, while that for the Russian settlers was more likely to be accurate. Nevertheless, the percentages probably do indicate the direction of the trend, reflecting some measure of success in the “fight” against the yellow race, and in the “‘nationalization’ of the Priamur frontier,” as an official pamphlet on the construction of the Amur Railroad proclaimed.^[126]
Arguing for the Amur Railroad, Stolypin identified the “national cultural work” of the “Russian” (russkii) as that of settling the frontier: “the foreigner (chuzhestranets) will penetrate [the Priamur], if the Russian does not get there first.”^[127] By 1910, as John Slocum points out, “Russian” was understood by many officials, including Stolypin, to mean not only Great Russians, but also Ukrainians and Belorussians. For example, ministerial conferences on education for non-Russians in the empire, convened by Stolypin, implicitly equated language with nationality, and followed the Russian nationalist thinking of identifying Ukrainian and Belorussian as Russian dialects.^[128] In resettlement policies, which promoted frontier colonization by the “Russian element” since the 1890s, “Russian” was seen by the government to include Ukrainians and Belorussians.^[129] In the Priamur, settlers from Ukraine predominated among “Russian” settlers since the 1880s. After 1906, the predominance of settlers from Ukraine ceded to a rising proportion of arrivals from throughout the fifty provinces of the empire. This meant a larger part of the migrants were from the Central Black Earth region and Siberia – who were probably ethnic Russians – and from Belorussia. Those who arrived after 1906 included settlers from non-Russian regions in the western part of the empire, such as Lithuania, the Baltic provinces, and Poland.^[130] “The contingent of the settlers flowing into the frontier from 1906 to 1910 was most varied,” Unterberger observed, noting that in 1909, “Little Russians” were 38% of the new settlers, and “the rest were migrants from the western, central, and northeastern provinces.”^[131] This “most varied” contingent of settlers emerged in policy discussion as one group, however. Identified as “new settlers” (novoselets), they were grouped into the category of “Russian subjects,” which was distinguished from “foreign subjects” and Chinese and Koreans who became Russian subjects.^[132] Thus, apart from Ukrainians and Belorussians, non-Russians from European Russia also became “Russians” when they were placed in opposition to the “yellow race.”

DOCILE LABOR

The construction of the Amur Railroad received Duma and imperial approval in June, 1908, with the condition of hiring only Russian workers for the project. By October of 1909, over 76 million rubles were appropriated for the western section of the railway, the first of three construction phases. For the middle section, the transportation minister S. Rukhlov estimated about as much would be needed.^[133] “There is no basis for expecting a reduction in the unit cost” of the second section, Rukhlov reported, because 75% of the work force would have to be brought over from European Russia, to work sites whose surrounding environment was as harsh and unpopulated as that for the western branch.^[134]
The employment of Russian workers, whether recruited from European Russia or locally, as it turned out, also brought with it labor disputes that caused delays, additional expenditures, and other problems associated with what railway and frontier officials generalized as the “worker question.” In May of 1910, massive strikes were reported at construction sites along the western branch of the railway.^[135] At the end of this wave of strikes, 25% of workers hired for railway construction left their jobs, without – official reports maintained – returning wages advanced and transport cost spent on their behalf.^[136]
Railway and frontier officials recognized that the employment restrictions, in addition to the remote location of the construction, placed those hired for the work in a stronger position to bargain for better terms. Acknowledging that the strikes were an “economic struggle between the workers and the employers [the contractors who recruited the workers],” official reports nevertheless blamed the strikers for abusing the stipulation to hire only Russian subjects. The workers’ “awareness of the impossibility of using the labor of the… inorodtsy [here referring to Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans] for the construction work played a substantial role” in the strikes, the director of the Amur Railroad E. Vurtsel’ asserted.^[137] Believing themselves “the master of the situation,” other official documents observed, the workers made “disproportionate” and “unacceptable” demands.^[138] To prevent further abuse, Vurtsel’ suggested recruiting the workforce from groups that he deemed less likely to cause labor trouble. One group would be discharged soldiers of the frontier troops. These discharged soldiers, Vurtsel’ argued, would help instill “discipline” among workers, contribute to forming a “desirable cadre” for the railroad’s future employees, and be “transformed into the first colonists (kolonizatory)” of the region.^[139] A second group would be Korean-Russian subjects. To ensure that they could be legally employed by the railroad, Vurtsel’ requested a clarification of the June 21 Law stating that this group of Russian subjects “did not belong to the restrictions stipulated” by the law.^[140] Vurtsel’ did not think these two groups could be drawn to railroad work in large numbers, however.^[141] The most reliable source of labor, Vurtsel’ believed, would be prisoners. By August, 1910, over 3,500 convicts were employed in both the western and middle sections of the railroad, amounting to more than 10% of the number of workers that would be needed for the next (1911) construction season. The convicts performed their work “without any complications,” Vurtsel’ observed, so much so that “the success obtained through [the use of] convict labor” proved to “reflect favorably on the regulation of the worker question.”^[142]
Advocates of convict labor for railway construction at times conceived of the use of this labor as a social reform project aimed at the transformation of the convicts themselves. How Russian officials (and the Russian state) rethought the prison – in this instance, to rehabilitate prisoners for useful labor and potential membership in the nation – can be fruitfully informed by some of Foucault’s insights. One is that in the transition to (Western Europe’s) modernity, the shift from conceiving of penal sentence as a spectacular event involving the infliction of pain to inspire horror – to a technology for re-forming the prisoner’s body and self – was critical. Another is the concept of biopolitics, which explores the modern state’s exercise of positive, productive power in controlling biological resources located in the body, and in producing docile bodies.^[143] For Russian officials contemplating turning prisoners into a substantial labor source for the railroad, the modernity, productiveness, and humaneness of this project was not in doubt.
Regarding the Amur Railroad, prison officials emphatically reimagined the negative, punitive purpose of forced labor in terms of the positive goal of service to the state. Documenting the employment of convict labor at the railroad, a 1911 pamphlet published by the prison administration explained the principle for using prison labor: “convicts (arestanty) are the slaves of the state,” whose primary purpose was to serve the state. The pamphlet pointed to England to suggest the status of this principle as a European norm – by equating the English term “penal servitude” (rendered into Russian as katorga) with “penal slavery” (ugolovnoe rabstvo).^[144] Russian precedents were also evoked to justify this principle. The pamphlet noted that convicts were used for railway construction since the 1860s. In the 1890s, they were sent to the Central Siberian, the Zabaikal, and the Ussuri sections of the Siberian Railroad.^[145] Looking to the project at hand, the Amur Railroad, the pamphlet affirmed that convict laborers would likewise render a significant service to the state. Here, the convicts would help lay down “a path [that] will naturally facilitate the colonization of this region, give it access to culture, develop its productivity, and make a presently empty and defenseless frontier into a bulwark against any encroachment by [Russia’s] eastern neighbors.”^[146]
The officials’ concern with using prison labor to shape body and subjectivity was reflected in the choice of the convicts sent to Amur Railroad, the perception of the prisoners’ submissiveness, and the physical and social environment of the prison camp that officials believed to be recuperative. Carefully selected, the convicts were “completely healthy, of a strong build, suitable for carrying out heavy earth work under the conditions of the severe Siberian climate, and, in addition, have no inclination to run away even in situations that make this possible.”^[147] One penal camp featured by the pamphlet – “Razdol’noe,” or the Open Space, and apparently intended as a model camp – was located in “an isolated place (urochishche) in the mountains… on the very shore where the Amazar River flows into the Amur.”^[148] Wood being plentiful and the main building material, the prisoners’ barracks, as well as the administrative and other auxiliary buildings, had the look of large log cabins and farm sheds, giving the entire prison camp complex, according to the pamphlet, a “cozy, welcoming appearance.” Seemingly thoughtfully planned, the complex straddled the Amazar River, its two parts connected across the river by a small, well-engineered wooden bridge.^[149]
As described by the pamphlet, this “convict colony” (arestantskaia koloniia), also referred to as a “convict settlement” (arestantskii poselok),^[150] mimicked the social world outside the prison. A prison shop was set up for inmates to purchase such items as sugar, soap, tobacco, and paper; and a “convict garden” (arestantskii ogorod) of fifteen desiatinas allowed them to grow their own food, which, the pamphlet pointed out, also reduced the cost of feeding them.^[151] A number of inmates worked as cooks, bakers, stable hands, cleaners, tailors, cobblers, and blacksmiths for both the railroad and the camp itself.^[152] The convicts’ service to the state was recognized by a possible reduction of their sentence by a third – with every two days worked on the railway counted as three served in prison. To “incline (prikhotit’) them to labor,” convicts were paid up to sixteen kopeks per day.^[153] In addition to habituating individual convicts to labor, Razdol’noe was organized to encourage the productivity of the prison camp as a whole. A tar extraction plant was built, and a steam saw was installed to turn logged trees into such construction material for the railroad. In this way, even in the winter, too cold for construction work in open air, inmates could carry out “not only productive, but also profitable work.”^[154]
The physical health and mental disposition of the prisoners benefited from the penal labor organized for the Amur railroad, the pamphlet suggested:

“thanks to the convict workers’ almost constant exposure to fresh air… even the sanitary situation of the convict teams on the Amur railroad leaves nothing to be desired. The rate of illness among them is no higher than 3 to 5%. The majority looks healthy, cheerful. And if they are not full of joy for life (zhizneradostnye) – which, of course, cannot be expected of penal laborers – they are, in any case, not resentful and not dispirited.”^[155]

Railway and frontier officials also found the use of convict labor beneficial for the frontier. Vurtsel’, quoted in the pamphlet, remarked that he “did not dream” that the employment of convict labor for railway construction “would be justified to such a degree.” Likewise cited by the pamphlet, N. L. Gondatti – explorer of the Amur region, protйgй of Stolypin, and future governor general of the Priamur – expressed his conviction that the use of convicts would enable the speedy completion of the railroad.^[156] The use of convict labor is thus conceived as mutually benefiting the state and the prisoners. In the context of the “struggle” against the yellow race, the rehabilitative intention behind reforming prisoners also pointed to a potentially integrative project. At the far eastern frontier, by virtue of not being “yellow,” the prisoners selected for railroad work embodied a potentiality for becoming members of the “Russian” nation – with this potentiality signaled by their participation in the “national” project of the construction of the Amur Railroad.
The pamphlet anticipated that the success of convict labor would increase the railroad’s employment of prisoners, whose number was expected to reach eight thousand by 1911.^[157] Yet prison labor did not prove to be cheaper than “yellow labor.” Railway engineers overseeing the cost of construction feared that the rate charged by the prison department for the work of convicts – at R1.40 per day per person – would still lead to deficits of tens of thousands of rubles each year.^[158] Nevertheless, the Far East Settlement Committee stood by the policy of using convicts to set the labor issue on the “correct” footing. In an October 1910 meeting, the committee resolved to employ convict labor for the Amur Railroad “as extensively as possible,” rejecting a proposal to allow a quota for “workers of the yellow race who are foreign subjects” (rabochie zheltoi rasy inostrannykh poddannykh).^[159]
Despite reiterating the prohibition against yellow labor, the meeting also revealed that the category of “yellow race” was still uncertainly defined. Apparently addressing Vurtsel’s suggestion regarding Korean-Russian subjects, the committee granted permission for employing these Koreans, provided they had obtained Russian subjecthood before June 21, 1910.^[160] As if intending to enlarge the pool of workers who could be used for the Amur Railroad, the meeting further instructed the governor of Iakutia to recruit “Iakut inorodtsy.”^[161] The category of “yellow race” was thus subject to sudden redefinition by administrative decree. That some Korean-Russian subjects, and Iakuts, as inorodtsy, were not included in the prohibited category suggests that the term was used mainly to refer to those seen as external to the empire. Unlike the idea of “nationality” (a term that emerged as an official category in the 1897 census^[162]) and the conception of an empire composed of various nationalities (which revolved around questions of assimilability, whether desired or dreaded), “race” pointed to a focus on the immutability of difference and otherness. In the context of boundary-making in the Far East, racial categorization was not, for now, applied to those whom Russian officials, whether historically or out of expediency, accepted as non-Russian subjects of the Russian Empire. But the notion of race did contribute to the reconception of the Russian Empire as a Russian nation, thereby putting in question the meaning of multinationality in the empire.

TEMPORARY LABOR

Scheduled to finish in 1912, the Amur Railroad was not completed until 1916.^[163] The prohibition against yellow workers persisted, as an official history published in 1914 still referred to the exclusion of “yellows” in the railroad’s construction.^[164] But following Russian mobilization for war in 1914, the labor prohibition enacted by the June 21 Law finally broke down. Not only in the Priamur, but also in the interior of the empire, owners and managers of factories, mines, and large farms submitted petitions to the Council of Ministers for exemption from the June 21 Law – for hiring large contingents of Chinese or Korean workers.^[165] Responding to these demands, Russian agencies were set up in Chinese ports, in Harbin, and in Vladivostok to recruit Chinese workers for the Priamur, the Urals, and South Russia.^[166] In 1916 alone, according to John Stephan, fifty thousand Chinese were recruited to work in the Priamur.^[167]
Even as the Russian border opened up, Russian officials’ tendency to identify Chinese and Koreans racially seemed more entrenched, as shown by the more insistent and frequent use of racial terms in ministerial-level documents.^[168] To prevent the “penetration of the Empire by yellow peoples (zheltykh)” resulting from the sudden surge in the employment of “yellow labor,” the agriculture ministry drew up “Regulations Concerning the Employment and Transport of Workers of the Yellow Race” in 1916.^[169] These regulations required the recruited workers to be transported in large teams on special trains assigned for this purpose. The workers were not allowed to disembark at any point other than the destination listed in their passport. From the moment of their departure until their repatriation – whether during their transport or while at work at the site of their job – these workers were to be closely supervised by their team elder and by Russian government agents.^[170] In addition, as established by the internal and war ministries, “yellows” would not be allowed west of the Volga.^[171]
The wartime reversal of policy on the “yellow question” might have seemed a capitulation to Russians engaged in the struggle against the yellow race taken up since Stolypin. An internal official letter dated 1916 called the reversal a “wicked irony of fate.” The writer, speaking of the Priamur governor general Gondatti’s effort to set up labor bureaus (biuro po rabochemu voprosu) in Harbin for recruiting Chinese workers, remarked that

“it cannot but seem a wicked irony of fate that the hiring of yellows is being headed by that very official [Gondatti] who – having taken as his watch-word the expulsion of yellows from the region entrusted to him – led an energetic struggle to this end for five years.”^[172]

Nor was it less ironic, the writer continued, “that the instrument for executing this new mission are to be the very bureaus that were created by Gondatti for organizing Russian labor to replace yellow [labor] in the Priamur.”^[173] The writer judged the role of the Priamur governor general and the labor bureaus he created to be marginal in the current matter of labor recruitment, since Harbin had become the new center, now that the Priamur had no “available reserve of Chinese labor.”^[174] Criticizing Gondatti, the letter in fact also suggested the success of the exclusion policy Gondatti supported. It was no doubt because of the experience of the earlier “struggle” against the yellow race, spearheaded by both the Priamur and central government officials, that effective regulations and practices were quickly established to ensure the containment of the recruited Chinese after 1914, when the border opened up.

CONCLUSION

The thinking behind the building of the two railroads, the CER and the Amur lines, pointed to two conceptions of racial orders. The conception of race articulated by Witte was couched in civilizational terms suggested by references to “Europe” and “Asia.” This conception – expressive of a confidence fostered by the building of the CER – placed Russians among Europeans as masters of backwards peoples. This view of Russia’s Europeanness conception translated into inclusionary practices, or schemes, that nevertheless safeguarded the distinction between European and Asians through segregation, as Witte’s description of Dalnyi and Levitov’s of Yellow Russia show. The other vision of racial order was exclusionary and explicitly defined in terms of phenotype, in particular color, as a criterion for social ordering. To what extent this exclusionary and racialist vision was shared by policy makers, publicists, and popular sentiments in the interior, and in other frontiers of the empire is open to research, particularly at the sites where ambivalence regarding the empire’s multinationality – and perceptions of multiethnic polities as premodern – might be articulated. Regarding the Far East, the exclusionary racialist vision reflected, in part, uncertainty over the position of Russians as the master with regard to the non-Russians at the frontier. This uncertainty produced the new policy category of the “yellow race,” which was in turn constitutive of a Russian identity in the Far East that asserted Russianness as Europeanness and whiteness.
Russian efforts to establish an exclusionary racialist order also encouraged experimentation with the integrative potential suggested by the social rehabilitation of convicts, and by the transformation of the lower strata of the empire’s ethnic Russian population, that is, workers and peasants, into active participants in the Russian nation. This democratizing potential of the idea of nationhood promised to serve as a basis for unifying the empire. But it was, in this case, a promise of unity and community that was constructed by dividing Russians from the “yellow race.”