Mark Bassin’s Imperial Visions offers an accessible, captivating and extremely well-researched study of the intricate interplay between national imaginations and imperial conquest in nineteenth-century Russia. As Bassin points out, one of the most interesting facets of this linkage is the fact that “nation and empire could coexist in what can be almost called a symbiotic relationship, and for most people there was almost no point for trying to disengage them” (P. 15). The understanding and the explanation of the perceptions underwriting national self-identifications usually tend to focus on shared values, beliefs, attitudes, norms, and roles. In this respect, the interaction of self-regarding individuals leads to the construction of collective conceptualizations of the past, the present, and the possible future(s). Therefore, the dynamic aspects of these interpretations articulate the boundaries that distinguish the members of one particular national community from others. These boundaries, however, are not only dependent on subjective interpretations. Instead, they play a central part in molding an awareness of the appropriate territorial expanse of a nation. In this respect, the patterns of identity construction inform the outlines of state frontiers.
Imperial Visions addresses this ambiguous relationship between the constructed and the geographical expansion of national imagination. Bassin’s book focuses on the narratives of Russia’s acquisition of territory in the “Far East” along the Amur and the Ussuri rivers in the mid-nineteenth century. As such, Bassin’s study is not merely interested in an empire’s expansion into a particular geographical region and the historical occurrences involving this region. Instead, his investigation is informed by an interpretative endeavor to understand just what the “Amur euphoria” (P. 3) meant, where it came from and why it petered out. In other words, Imperial Visions traces the unexpected spotlight on a remote (if not obscure) region, whose discursive constructions seemed to animate Russian society for two decades.
As Bassin points out, the fervor of those years led a number of intellectuals to refer to the region as the “Siberian Mississippi” or the “Russian Mississippi” (P. 143), the “Russian Kentucky” (P. 159), the “Crimea of the Far East” (P. 175) and the “Russian America” (Pp. 60-65). In this respect, incorporating the Amur region into the Russian Empire was constructed in terms of the possibilities that it makes available. For instance, it was envisioned that it would provide Russia with access to the “Mediterranean of the future” (P. 144) – the Pacific Ocean – and, thereby, would mark “one of civilization’s most important steps forward” (P. 2). However, just twenty years after its emergence, the enthusiasm and the excitement that prompted the grandiloquence of the period evaporated. Thus, the promises and the prospects articulated within the narratives of the distant Amur region seemed to disappear.
Such focus on the “Far East” seems to have been informed by the defeat in the Crimean War, which caused Russian nationalists to alter their perspective. As Bassin points out, the focus of their endeavors relocated from Europe towards Asia. As a Russian scholar wrote at the time, “Let the European peoples live as they know how and arrange themselves in their own countries as they wish, while half of Asia – China, Tibet, Bukhara, Khiva, Persia – belongs to us if we want” (P. 67). The volume indicates that such shift of vision reflected a deeper urge to re-legitimize the geographical aspirations of the national self in the post-Crimean War period. In this context, the prospect and desire for territorial expansion in the Amur region was intended not so much out of thirst for the possession of foreign lands, but as a reassuring sign of positive national qualities. The “Amur euphoria,” therefore, assumed significance for the national psychology of Russia since the narratives of conquest and incorporation could be read as discursive articulations of a contested self and a “mechanism of compensation for backwardness” (P. 13).
The assessment of the Russian drive into the “Far East” allows Imperial Visions to examine the dominant impulses and the most powerful preoccupations underwriting social imaginations at the time. Such interrogation of the “geographical visions” (P. 5) that accompanied the discourses of expansion offers considerable insight into the intertwining of the Amur region with the complexity of nationalism, imperial outreach, and social reform. As Bassin explicates, it was largely the remoteness and the obscurity of that region – i.e., it was a virtual “terra incognita” (P. 6) – that allowed the Russian imagination to endow it with meaning; and it was the intricacies of this interaction that helped to galvanize public opinion in the mid-nineteenth century. In this respect, Imperial Visions approaches the image of the Amur region as a particular cultural construct created by processes internal to Russian society at the time. It proved to be a rather amorphous geographical concept that facilitated the salvaging of the national ideal in the wake of the Crimean debacle, and open the prospect for its reassertion through further expansion. Inferences like these lead Bassin to conclude that “geographical regions are perceived and signified ideologically” (P. 6) – that is, the object of their representation mirrors the convictions, hopes, prejudices, and frustrations of the society which produces them.
The volume’s exploration of these topics is divided into two parts. The first part investigates the discursive expectations from a Russian conquest of the Amur region. The four chapters in this section are quite adept at showing the messianic undercurrents of the suggested prospects. In fact, the advance into the Amur region was constructed as the fulfillment of a Russian “Manifest Destiny… [which] could be envisioned as the natural culmination of a millennial process of movement and settlement by the Russian nation” (P. 82). Such articulations of Russian geographic vision rests on the belief that Russia was the chosen bearer of a special mission of deliverance and civilization underwriting the quest to “demonstrate Russia’s national exclusivity and superiority as well as illuminate an illustrious path into the future” (P. 46). Through this messianic impulse, an active desire for the export of national and political influence became part and parcel of the envisioning of the Amur region.
The second part of Imperial Visions concentrates on the confrontation of the images produced during the “Amur euphoria” with the reality of the Amur region. As a nineteenth-century writer observed, for Russian revival to occur, it was necessary to give “space to the Russian mind and Russian strengths, so that there would be some place for us to spread out and square our shoulders after a long stagnation” (P. 142). The explorations and incorporation of the territories along the Amur and the Ussuri rivers urged a number of commentators at the time to declare that Russian conquest should proceed “nothing short of the Wall of China” (P. 221). However, by the end of the 1850s the excitement about the annexation of the Amur region began to give way to skepticism and reservation, if not outright incredulity towards the dizzying vistas prompted by the Russian drive eastwards. A number of concerns were raised in regards to the way the conquest was conducted, but as Bassin points out, ultimately the Amur region remained peripheral, and as circumstances changed, so did its perceptions. In the final analysis, therefore, Imperial Visions suggests that the very marginality which had made it possible to invest “such extravagant hopes and expectations in the Amur region in the first place was precisely what allowed the region subsequently to fall back into complete and utter obscurity” (P. 273).
In this respect, Bassin has produced a book of an impressive scope. As he describes it, his volume “crawls along the border between the fields” of intellectual history and geography (P. 15). The “excavation of geographical vision” allows Bassin to synthesize the complex interaction between geography, messianism, nationalism, and the imaginary in the Russian exploit of the “Far East” during the middle of the nineteenth century. One of the central inferences of Imperial Visions is that the narratives of the “Amur euphoria” bring to light a particularly vulnerable aspect of Russia’s view of itself as a nation – namely, “the fact that there was no clear and commonly accepted notion of exactly, or even approximately, what its geographical contours were” (P. 14).
Such inference makes possible innovative engagements with Russia’s borderlands and contextualizes the reexamination of center-periphery relations in the country. One of the undoubted achievements of Imperial Visions reflects Bassin’s meticulous and dedicated “excavation” of documentary evidence as well as making available in English texts and themes that have remained outside of the purview of Western scholars. The volume, therefore, offers an absorbing story of the mid-nineteenth century enthrallment of Russia with the Amur region. It is expected that Basin’s book will be riveting both to researchers of the Russian Empire and its extension into Asia, as well as scholars from the fields of intellectual history and human geography.