Published in Russian, see Russian pages of this website.

SUMMARY:

Sergei Glebov reviews the volume Siberia within the Russian Empire and assesses both this volume’s contribution to existing scholarship on the history of Siberia as well as the volume's attempt to analyze the history of Siberia with the help of new methodologies; including the new history of empire as it is explicated by the editors of the series Borderlands of the Russian Empire. Glebov contends that the premise of the new history of empire is rather conventional in that it projects the view of empire as a structure of relations between an undefined imperial center and peripheral societies. Inadvertently, this structural premise revives national narratives, insofar as in the course of historical development the legitimation of both the imperial center and peripheral societies were bound to involve the discourse of nationhood. Glebov praises the included analysis of symbolic geography and history of signification of the space of Siberia in alternating discourses. However, he notes that this aspect of the volume suffers from the exclusion of the eighteenth century from the history of “cognitive conquest” of the space of Siberia. Bringing the eighteenth century into the narrative alters the overall picture for the center of the authoritative knowledge in the eighteenth century was not in Russia but in Western Europe with whose participation Siberia was conceptually conquered while the Muscovite Tsardom was itself reframed into the Russian Empire. Furthermore, Glebov does not see any reason to reduce the symbolic geography of Siberia to administrative mapping alone and enunciates the history of confessional mapping and proselytizing activities, which offer a different dimension of the history of imperial diversity. According to Glebov, the volume’s main shortcoming is its tunnel-vision narrative of a seamless process of Siberia becoming part of the Russian space. He contrasts this tunnel vision narrative with the complex history of rule by difference directed at indigenous peoples of Siberia and criticizes the authors of the volume for simplistic comparisons with the history of colonization and the indigenous population of North America.