SUMMARY
Ilya Vinkovetsky recollects his first meeting with Anatoly Remnev in the summer of 2003 at the “History of Empire” conference in Moscow, where, using a new, unifying vocabulary, Remnev conveyed his insights pertaining to Siberian regional history in the empire. Vinkovetsky sketches the picture of Western Siberian studies and examines Remnev’s impressive body of works against major Western trends. He suggests that Remnev’s approach to the history of Siberia and the Far East did not resemble any of them. Rather, his constantly evolving methodology seems to have been drawn in part from his interlocutors in the New Imperial History forums: most of these interlocutors were Western scholars whose work focuses on the European parts of Russia, albeit in its provincial as well as metropolitan manifestations. The influence of New Imperial History can be deciphered in Remnev’s focus on the workings of imperial institutions and hierarchies on the local level – a dimension that was and is largely lacking in both Western and Russian historiographies of Siberia and the Far East.