Published in Russian, see Russian pages of this website.

SUMMARY:

In his essay, Anatoly Remnev, editor of the volume Siberia Within the Russian Empire, explains the evolution of his own vision of Siberian history as part of the history of the Russian empire. He was among the first Russian scholars to seriously consider the idea of the region as an alternative to a national historical narrative and as an element of a complex new history of the empire. He insists on the model of center–region relations as the key to understanding the empire as a complex political mechanism. Remnev believes that this model allows a combination of nation-centered narratives that adequately describe the historical dynamic of some of the imperial borderlands, with other types of narratives centered on a region as the object of political imagination and governance, as a social and economic entity, and so on. In his view, while Siberia cannot be squeezed into a national paradigm, from the perspective of the imperial center, it was Siberia’s destiny in the empire to become an integral part of Russia, part of a “big Russian nation.” Remnev thus replies to Serguei Glebov’s criticism by stressing that the presence of an imagined “big Russian nation” in his Siberian volume is justified. He concludes that the volume reflects the best historiographic achievements and methodological limitations characteristic of its time.