SUMMARY:

This essay is framed by the author’s decision to invent a historical document – a fictitious guide to colonization management written by the imagined bureaucrat Andrei Ivanovich Korotich – to visualize the real but unsystematized Russian colonization ideology of the 1840s. Focused on peasant resettlement (pereselenie) as a bureaucratic tool for rationalizing the relationship between land and people, this invented “Guide to Russian Colonization Management,” highlights the chaos, corruption, and “unauthorized” movement of state peasants. This thought experiment synthesizes a nonexistent bureaucratic manual based on the general governmentality of the era, as represented by Nicholas I’s legislation and numerous instructions. Published alongside a real analytical memo on colonization penned in 1907 by the longtime colonization expert Fyodor Umnov, this essay exposes the limitations of applying settler colonialism models based on clear binaries and homogenizing the “colonial mind” as suggested by settler colonial theorists. The complex and historically evolving semantics of settler colonization in the imperial context renders those binaries uninformative – whether these are empire versus subject or resettlement versus the state.