This festschrift was done in honor of Professor Anatolii Remnev’s fiftieth birthday celebration. Remnev is a Professor of History at Omsk State University, and is recognized as a leading authority both internationally and within Russia and the former Soviet Union for his studies of the history of the Russian Empire in Asia. Although he is only now at middle age, his academic accomplishments are staggering, and are recounted in a biographical essay in the back matter of this volume.
This collection of papers range somewhat widely in terms of time periods, methodological approaches, and subject matter, but all relate to the history of the Russian Empire in Asia, broadly defined. The Caucasus, Central Asia, the grand expanse of Siberian Russia, the Russian Far East, and the Arctic each receive attention. Central Asia, Siberia, and the Far East are the primary focus, though, reflecting the fact that many of the junior scholars seem to have been trained by Remnev and that several others are his colleagues in Omsk. Some of the essays overstep, in a most encouraging way, the immediate borders of Russia and the former imperial possessions and engage with the many international issues that one must deal with in writing histories of borderlands. Contributions to this collection are done mostly by academics trained and employed in the Russian Federation and Kazakhstan. The responsibility of editing this hefty volume of twenty-four articles was put on the shoulders of Natalia Suvorova, also of Omsk State University. Professor Suvorova deserves a great deal of credit for organizing such a massive study into a coherent fashion, though the volume lacks any sort of introductory or summarizing essay that would have brought clearer focus to the study.
Asiatic Russia is divided into four major sections. The first section, titled “In the Search for New Historical Narratives,” is the most theoretical section of the book, and the articles here also make the greatest effort to engage with contemporary North American and Western European historiography on the Russian Empire. Aleksei Miller’s article, “The Russian Empire’s New History,” focuses on the benefits and potential pitfalls of doing regional history. He argues that the best potential for regional studies is when they are approached from a thematic context which do not marginalize out-of-the-region, yet no-less crucial, historical actors or essentialize the region under study. Miller rightly calls for Russian imperial historians to embark on regional studies not for the sake of studying a particular geographic area, but to instead first choose a theme and work deductively to establish geographical parameters based on their relevance to that theme. Vladimir Bobrovnikov’s “Orientalism in the Literature and Politics of the Northern Caucasus” references Susan Layton’s work on literary elites and the Caucasus, and extends the assumption of a stagnated view of the region beyond Russia’s literary masters. He finds that similar assumptions were held by many individuals, like General A. V. Komarov, who carried out ethnographic research alongside his military duties in the region. Sergei Abashin’s thoroughly-researched and deliberately-argued article on the career of Turkestan orientalist Vladimir Nalivkin is a contribution to the debate on the applicability of Edward Said’s Orientalism to the Central Asian/Russian imperial case. Abashin argues that Nalivkin’s biography is exemplary of the multiple discourses that Russian orientalists of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries were forced to negotiate. His article is a substantive contribution to the main standard-bearers of the debate, Nathaniel Knight and Adeeb Khalid, and engages with the argument in a way that does not fall into the trap of oversimplifying it as a question of either/or. Abashin finds that the application of Said’s classification of orientalists in the Russian case is in part justified, but Nalivkin’s turbulent life under a crumbling empire and an ascending ideological movement defies simple pigeonholing.
The second section is titled “Imperial Institutions of Power: The Asian Context.” In this section, Remnev’s talent and intellectual vigor are on display. His two articles in this volume appear in this section, the second of which was co-authored with the editor Suvorova. Remnev’s “Steppe Governor-Generals in the Power of Imperial Geography” sets the tone for this section, which emphasizes the balancing act that those in positions of power in Imperial Asiatic Russia often found themselves. He builds upon Sapporo scholar Kimitaka Matsuzato’s argument that the governor-generals and their leadership styles differed, depending on the local geographic and cultural situation. Remnev demonstrates that the steppe Governor-Generals, as was the case with the other regional administrators in far-flung outposts, were forced to balance the interests of the central government and the local situation, which involved placating the local indigenes and immediate foreign interests as well as St. Petersburg. The Remnev and Suvorova article “The Volost Clerk: Servant of Two Masters, or Master of the Siberian Village” extends the complexities of being an administrator posted to the periphery even further, down to the lowest levels of the bureaucracy. The pisar’, or volost clerk, makes frequent appearances in Russian literature and is frequently the butt of satire and criticism. However, Remnev and Suvorova effectively argue that the pisar’ was a crucial translator of power across social classes, conducting power from the elite to the peasantry. These low-level officials “were a rarely recognized, but extremely important screw in the state machine.” Tatiana Sorokina’s article also develops the major theme in this section of the conflicted bureaucrat through a thorough culling of archival materials on the Priamurskii Governor-Generalship.
The third section, “People of Empire,” has strengths in archival research, something that is well done in nearly all the articles of this volume. However, there is in general less analysis here than one finds in the first two sections. There is still much here for scholars to draw from, primarily for their informative value. Karlygash Bizhigitova’s article in which she constructs the biography of steppe Governor-General G. A. Kolpakovskii is exemplary of the strong archival traits of the articles in this section. Dmitrii Vasil’ev’s study on the Turkestan Governor-Generals provides an useful overview of their relationship with elites in other regions of the empire and a substantive history of the position. Igor Lukoianov’s article reconstructs the career of high-ranking Far-Eastern bureaucrat E. I. Alekseev through archival and primary sources and demonstrates, as Remnev did earlier in this book, the numerous obligations and considerations that Asiatic officials had to negotiate. The section closes with the brief report by Anatolii Tolochko on the abuse of officialdom in the administration of Omsk and a comparison of the government of 1870 versus that of 1892, also mostly the fruit of archival research.
Asiatic Russia’s final section is titled “The Asiatic Space of the Russian Empire in Economic, Ethnic, and Social Dimensions.” These articles wed social-science approaches with traditional historical methods. The lead study here by Ekaterina Pravilova is one of the jewels of this collection, in which she discusses the Amu-Dar’ia River’s history in relation to empire. Pravilova’s article is theoretically sound (drawing on Daniel Headrick’s idea of “hydraulic imperialism,” which asserts that rivers make for an appropriate metaphor of empire) and relates the history of hydraulic efforts on the river, emphasizing that the process was carried forward on multiple governmental levels. Mikhail Shilovskii’s study of free trade in the Russian Arctic explores one facet of international history that could be explored much more in Russian Imperial historiography. Following with this economic theme, Sergei Beliaev emphasizes the strong economic motives of the respective Ministries of Finance of Russia, Western powers, and Japan on the verge of the conflicts of the Boxer Rebellion and the Russo-Japanese War. Svetlana Mulina and Anna Krikh’s respective studies on the Polish population in Siberia and the Cossacks provide useful reference points. The final two articles of the volume by Sergei Andreev and Vladimir Shuldiakov also deal with the Cossacks, which in recent years have been a rising subject of historical interest. Andreev’s article is a thorough discussion of the 1863 law regulating Cossacks in Siberia, and Shuldiakov provides a fine historiographical discussion of the Cossacks during the final days of the Russian Empire and the debates surrounding the “Cossack Question.”
This collection of essays range widely in terms of methodological, theoretical, and historiographical approaches, which makes it doubly difficult to draw a coherent picture of where the editor sees the volume going, given the absence of introductory comments. However, for researchers on Russian Empire in Asia, the collection should be useful for those looking to access information on particular events, personalities, or topics, given that the level of scholarship is high in most of the articles. Yet if one is looking to find a coherent and collective argument in this volume, they will be hard-pressed to locate it.