“There is Something Inevitable, Fatal in Our Relations to the Orient…”: Yevgeny Frantsevich Shmurlo and Asian Russia

Abstract

Yevgeny Frantsevich Shmurlo (1853—1934), a Russian Historian, Corresponding Member of the Imperial St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, is known primarily as an outstanding specialist in the history of Russian-Italian relations and the era of Peter the Great. Meanwhile, his works related to the Russian presence in the East have not yet been analyzed and studied properly. This article attempts to consider the scholar’s views on the phenomenon of contacts between Russia and the world of the East by analyzing his expeditions to Asian Russia since the late 1870s to the beginning of the 1910s. Few Russian historians have traveled as much and as often as Shmurlo. Trips to the Turgai steppe or the foothills of Altai, sailing along the Volga and Kama or Irtysh invariably gave him reflections on the Russian imperial project. The article shows that these routes were associated not only with the search for aesthetic impressions, but also with specific scientific tasks. Author analyzed the views of Shmurlo on the Russian resettlement colonization of Asian Russia, its successes and difficulties, complex relationships with the local population. The study of Shmurlo’s reflections on the Asian province once again demonstrated how complex and varied the construction of Orientalist and Imperial discourses in Russia was, how many contradictory concepts were woven into this process. The author of the article featured a historian of Polish-Lithuanian origin who acted as a Russian nationalist. Shmurlo admired the colonists of the Steppe region and the foothills of Altai, but criticized them for seizing the lands of the indigenous population. He called the “Kyrgyz” savages and barbarians, but at the same time avoided racist statements. He loved Europe with all his heart, but at the same time he rebelled against attempts to demonize Russia and the Russians. All this once again gives an idea of the specifics of relations between Russia and the East in the era of colonialism, which were very different from their European counterparts.