SUMMARY:

The article traces the evolution of subjecthood’s semantics in Russia in the second half of the nineteenth century using the example of the so-called Manchurian Wedge in the Amur region. By the Treaty of Aigun, signed in 1858, in the area where the Zeya River merges with the Amur near Blagoveshchensk, Russia acquired a long-established agglomeration consisting of “the sixty-four villages,” which was part of the Manchu Eight Banner military-civilian organization and remained under the jurisdiction of the Qing authorities. Back in 1858, the Russian side was quite satisfied with this traditional imperial – multilevel, contextual, and mosaic – sovereignty in the region. However, the intertwining of territory, property, and subjecthood set processes in motion that led to the substitution of imperial subjecthood for de facto national citizenship, which allowed no special arrangements or exceptions. The newly arrived Russian colonists had no idea about the established informal arrangements regarding the land use in the region, and the Manchus had a vague idea about the new settler villages’ boundaries. This led to frequent land conflicts that took on an international character since they had to be settled through negotiations between the local Russian and Qing authorities. Systematic mapping of the Manchurian Wedge in the 1870s–1880s and the growing trend among the Russian colonists toward the registration of land in private ownership with detailed cadastral maps of individual plots stimulated Russian settlers’ subjectivity. Now they were defending their private homesteads and coveting the Manchurian land in their own interests while continuing to act as representatives of the Russian state. They found themselves in the role of citizens representing an ethnoconfessional nation and determining state policy in the region, as well as colonialists interested in expelling the local noncitizen population – simply put, they turned into settler colonialists. This transformation culminated in the Blagoveshchensk massacre of 1900, when, amid moral panic over the Boxer Rebellion in Manchuria, Russian settlers carried out a brutal ethnic cleansing of the Manchurian Wedge. They killed or expelled the inhabitants of the sixty-four villages and seized their land.