What Is Asia to Us?: Scholarship on the Tsarist “East” since the 1990s

Abstract

It was 1997, and editors of a collection on of Russian Orient were excited. For years they had been forced to make do with published sources or whatever materials their archival handlers would allow them to see in Moscow and Leningrad, but now USSR had collapsed and it had suddenly become possible to venture out to erstwhile and experience what only being there can provide. The famished, as they described themselves in their introduction, were finally sitting down to smorgasbord. Imperial Russia was being revisioned. Scholars were being reborn. (1) Oh, yes, those were days. As a graduate student at time, I remember feeling some of headiness myself. The Party was over, world was young. Of course, looking back now, one cannot help but feel a little naive. Important changes were indeed taking place in field, but it is not clear how much of this was related to access to archives or even to seemingly magical shift of end of USSR. A interest in tsarist Russia as a multinational had appeared somewhat earlier, along with funding to support it. (2) Yet, regardless of exactly when or how it happened, Daniel Brower and Edward Lazzerini were right that a era was dawning. Even then, there was a sense that a boom had begun, which, for better or for worse, still continues today. As Stephen Kotkin put it not long ago, only half tongue in cheek, Apply for a grant on 'borderlands,' and you get grant even before you hit send button. (3) The study of eastern regions and peoples of Russian Empire has been central to this ongoing turn. In this essay, I survey literature on East and offer some reflections on what we have gained as well as what still seems to be missing in field. On one hand, situation is clear--research on tsarist and on eastern borderlands in particular has grown exponentially over last 20 years, both in volume and in terms of depth and sophistication. Yet it is also true, much as with most rapid expansions, that growth in field has been uneven, with enormous concentration on some periods and questions--perhaps too much--and not enough on others. Indeed, it's worth asking how exactly our knowledge has changed since 1991 and especially over last decade or so as boom has intensified. Despite sense that we have somehow ended up with a new imperial history, there is no single school or normative interpretation of to speak of; nor is it entirely clear what new imperial history actually amounts to. (4) Is it simply a focus on that draws on more sources and perspectives, in particular a wider range of non-Russian, nonmetropolitan views? Is it work that prioritizes methodology of the cultural history over more traditional political and social historical approaches? Or is it a way of approaching that reaches beyond the limits of national paradigm to examine political, social, and cultural actors and spaces of their activity, while offering an archeology of empire as a construct and acknowledging unique blend of modern and premodern identities that defined course of modernization in Eurasia? (5) We know more about tsarist Russia's eastern than we did 20 years ago, but do we understand it any better? What more do we need to know? Background to a Boom Though historians in West studied aspects of empire's past prior to 1990s, there was no field of Russian imperial studies to speak of, much less a special concentration of interest in empire's eastern borderlands and peoples. Instead, focus was on what could loosely be called nationalities studies, which generally meant study of national groups other than Russians. According to wisdom of day, Russians were norm and presumption was that we knew a lot about them already. …