Russia In Asia Research Articles

Oxyrrhynchium speciosum (Brid.) Warnst. (Brachytheciaceae: Bryophyta) – new to the moss flora of India from the Western Ghats

Oxyrrhynchium speciosum (Brid.) Warnst. which was known so far from Africa, Europe, New Zealand and China and Russia in Asia, has been discovered in some pockets of the Western Ghats of Peninsular India. This discovery adds one more species to the moss flora of India. A description with figures, a distribution map and a key to distinguish O. speciosum from the other indigenous species are provided.

Material and metaphorical bridgework: Russia's Asian Pivot through Vladivostok

ABSTRACT A constituent feature of all bridges is their facilitation of movement. They are intentionally built not only to continue a road but to serve a special purpose – to join two sides previously separated. When, for example, a community with natural resources gains access to communities with production facilities the reciprocal movements potentially bring benefits to both sides. Bridges can be a key driver of economic activity and the Russian government considers Vladivostok's new infrastructure – material, administrative, financial, and even educational – critical for helping the region become more economically powerful by encouraging new investment from and facilitating business interactions with Asia. Consequently, this article explores the “Bridges of Vladivostok” as metaphor, symbols for potentially stronger relations, enablers of hoped-for partnerships, and as material constructions designed to link opposite sites.

How to work with China in our Far East? (on the eve of the Eastern Economic Forum-2021)

On September 2-4, 2021, the Annual VI Eastern Economic Forum will be held in Vladivostok. The forum is aimed at promoting Russia in Asia and attracting Asian investments to the Far Eastern regions. In applied economic terms, Russian-Chinese relations clearly need diversification of interaction, the formation of a number of additional economic, administrative, legal and infrastructural opportunities for more active attraction of China to the Far East on trade and investment tracks.

A Visitor's Guide to Shamans and Shamanism

In the late imperial era, the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (the Kunstkamera) in St. Petersburg produced a series of guidebooks for visitors that provided an account of the changes in the gallery spaces and collections within the museum. Among the changes was a reorganization of the collection that brought about the removal of a gallery dedicated to Russian ethnography, which had housed Siberian, Central Asian, and a small number of European Russian objects. Siberian and Central Asian materials were then presented by the museum in an Asian ethnographic collection. In this new Asian collection, shamanism emerged as a category that operated to unify Russia in Asia as a culturally contiguous space located in an imperial elsewhere east of the Urals.

Asia in the Russian Imagination

This special issue of Sibirica is devoted to exploring Russia’s complicated relationship with Asia. Along with an edited volume (Russia in Asia: Imaginations, Interactions, and Realities, forthcoming), it is an outgrowth of the “Asia in the Russian Imagination” conference that was held at the University of Utah in March 2018. This conference brought together an interdisciplinary body of scholars from the United States, Canada, and Russia to discuss how Russians imagined and interacted with the peoples of Eurasia. Chronologically this conversation spanned the Russian Empire, Soviet Union, and post-Soviet Russia, and included not just the geography and peoples possessed by Russia but also the bordering states of Japan, China, and the Ottoman Empire. This is certainly not a new line of inquiry, but there is still much to be understood about these complex relationships, both real and imagined.

Will Russia's Pivot to Asia Last?

Will the Russian Federation's current “turn to the East” have lasting significance? After the annexation of Crimea and the escalated confrontation with the West, Vladimir Putin's government declared it was turning to the East by cultivating ties both with the People's Republic of China and other governments. Russia has “turned to the East” repeatedly throughout its history, from the tsarist era to the present day. In the past, geopolitical and economic factors have hindered Russia's Asian Pivots and caused the Kremlin to turn back toward Europe.

The complete mitochondrial DNA sequence of Mongolian grayling Thymallus brevirostris

Thymallus brevirostris is a specific grayling species that naturally occurs in Mongolia and Russia in Asia. The complete mitochondrial genome of the Mongolian grayling T. brevirostris was determined (Accession number MH027384) with a total length of 16,653 nucleotides, of which 15,585 nucleotides are coding DNA and 1068 nucleotides are non-coding DNA. It has the common feature with those of other grayling with respect to genome structure and gene arrangement. It contained 13 protein-coding genes, 2 ribosomal RNA genes, 22 transfer tRNA genes, and 1 control region (D-loop region). The complete mitochondrial genome of Mongolian grayling T. brevirostris provides an important data set for further study on its classification.

D.I. Mendeleev about the cultural and historical tasks of Russia in the East

At the turn of the XIXXX centuries, the movement of Russia to the East became one of the topics discussed in domestic journalism and scientific thought. His views on this issue were also expressed by the outstanding scientist D.I. Mendeleev. In his works he stressed the historical necessity and inevitability of Russias access to the Pacific Ocean, the importance of its foreign policy development in the Far East direction. Showing the cultural and civilizational distancing of Russia from the West, he focused on the presence of eastern features in it, but at the same time he noted its cultural and historical uniqueness. In Mendeleevs discourses, a departure from Eurocentrism in the assessments of the East and Russia can be traced. Speaking about the cultural and historical tasks of Russia, the scientist stressed that it was more important to maintain the charm of the name in the East than to imitate Western states, especially England. In Mendeleevs papers, special emphasis was made on the peaceful strengthening of Russia in Asia and a friendly attitude towards the Eastern peoples. An interesting feature of Mendeleevs reasoning is the motif of a fairy tale: on the one hand, it is a half-sketchy east, on the other, a fairy tale as the image of an ideal future for Russia.

The Opportunity of a Thousand Years: Chinese Merchant Organizations in the Russian Civil War

The Opportunity of a Thousand YearsChinese Merchant Organizations in the Russian Civil War Yuexin Rachel Lin (bio) Historians have recently begun to engage more systematically with the regional and intercultural dimensions of the Russian Revolution and Civil War. Attention was first focused on Russia’s provinces, where revolutionary processes adapted to local economies, institutions, and structures of power. The revolution’s impact on various ethnic and religious groups—such as Ukrainians, Jews, and Muslims—has also been studied. The Russian Empire’s size, the diversity of its periphery, and its complex relationships with both European and Asian neighbors made non-Russian and cross-border interests impossible to ignore. Such perspectives are gradually making their way into the historiography of the revolution in Siberia and the Russian Far East. For a long time, scholars working on these vast areas have had the difficult task of tracing the general contours of the revolution and Civil War there. Their accounts of White militarists, the Kolchak regime’s misgovernment, and the diplomatic tug-of-war over Allied military intervention have traditionally centered on domestic or Western narratives. Until now, questions of ethnicity and nationality or of Russia’s position in the wider Northeast Asian region have been under-explored.1 Far less has been written about the revolution in the Far East as an Asian phenomenon, in which Russia was but one contender in a territory marked by powerful imperial conflict, and where porous borders led to significant minority populations in Russia itself. Two recent works, Willard Sunderland’s The Baron’s Cloak and Ivan Sablin’s Governing Post-Imperial [End Page 745] Siberia and Mongolia, have broken new ground on this issue, but many aspects of the revolution’s Asian dimension remain undiscovered.2 This gap is especially notable given the proliferation of such research on the late imperial period and in the field of émigré and East Asian studies. Several works have appeared on the transnational aspects of Russia’s colonial projects in the Far East, including David Wolff’s To the Harbin Station, Wolff’s and Stephen Kotkin’s Rediscovering Russia in Asia, and David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye’s Toward the Rising Sun.3 With rare exceptions, however, they usually conclude their narratives in 1917. Histories of Russian emigration to Manchuria, such as those of Olga Bakich and John Stephan, have also focused overwhelmingly on the Russian experience and less on Asian perceptions of émigrés.4 Finally, although the experiences of Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans in the Russian Far East have garnered attention among East Asian and Russian-language scholars, cross-pollination with mainstream Western historiography on the revolution has been limited. The formidable linguistic and cultural barriers to a sensitive study of the Russian Revolution’s trajectory in Northeast Asia only compound the problem. The prerevolutionary situation in eastern Siberia and the Russian Far East is now understood in a fair amount of detail. These territories were situated in a deeply contested frontier zone claimed by—among others—the Russian, Chinese, and Japanese empires. Tsarist policies of colonial consolidation were undertaken with the express purpose of fending off perceived Chinese territorial revisionism and Japanese ambition.5 Ironically, these same developmental policies led to a wave of Asian migration into the region. The Chinese formed [End Page 746] the majority of these migrants, making up 10–12 percent of the population in the Russian Far East in 1910 and a third of the population of Vladivostok in 1916.6 It stoked further fears of a “Yellow Peril,” in which the Chinese (and Japanese) seemed poised to out-compete the Russians demographically and economically. The Chinese, for their part, had lost the far eastern territories to Russia a mere 60 years before 1917, in a process beginning with the signing of the Treaty of Aigun in 1858. Aigun became a key episode in China’s litany of “national humiliation” (国耻, guochi), in which the once-great Qing empire came to offer multiple concessions to other imperial powers. Added to the list of territorial losses were the semicolonial China Eastern Railway zone in Manchuria, under Russian control; Russia’s persistent attempts to block China from accessing the Amur River; the imposition...

A Guerra do Iraque em perspectiva: um balanço da política externa neoconservadora e o ônus da guerra

O presente trabalho tem como objetivos: a) compreender o processo de ascensão do movimento neoconservador norte-americano e sua estratégia global de forma a compreender a Guerra do Iraque (2003-2011) a partir do contexto da Guerra ao Terror, protagonizada pela administração George W. Bush; e b) realizar um balanço do ônus da Guerra do Iraque para a economia dos Estados Unidos. Para tanto, o trabalho está dividido em três partes. A primeira debate a edificação do arquétipo do pensamento conservador na sociedade norte-americana. A segunda parte trata da Guerra do Iraque em si. A ascensão dos neoconservadores ao governo dos Estados Unidos e os atentados de 11/09 foram os eventos que significaram a possibilidade de colocar em prática o projeto de domínio do Oriente Médio e controle do petróleo no Golfo Pérsico, cumprindo vários objetivos necessários para a expansão do poder norte-americano. Entre esses objetivos encontram-se: a contenção da China e da Rússia no território asiático; o controle de recursos estratégicos como o petróleo; o posicionamento de bases militares em territórios chave; a intervenção em regimes contrários aos interesses norte-americano em todo o Oriente Médio; e o auxílio a aliados chave como Israel e Arábia Saudita no cenário geopolítico asiático. Por fim, faz-se um breve balanço das consequências do “atoleiro iraquiano” para a economia e sociedade dos EUA.

«Культурный» Панмонголизм или романтики начала ХХ в. = «Kul'turnyy» Panmongolizm ili romantiki nachala XX v.

This paper examines Pan-Mongolism, a socio-cultural and political phenomenon negatively perceived from the outset. This notwithstanding, Pan-Mongolism occupied a special place in ethnic Buryatia. Its development was strongly influenced by the Buryat national movement in the early twentieth century that pursued national autonomy as its major goal. To a great extent the development of Pan-Mongolism was intensified by the foreign policy interests of Russia in Asia, particularly, in Tibet, and by the religious, diplomatic and public activity of Dalai Lama 13th mentor Agvan Dorzhiev, a proponent of a “great Buddhist confederation” that ensured positive attitude of the principal hierarch of Buddhism toward Russia. External factors that contributed to the emergence of the idea of national-cultural autonomy and “cultural Pan-Mongolism” in the period when various political groups and autonomist scenarios shaped played an important role in the evolution of Pan-Mongolism. All this led to the fact that “cultural Pan-Mongolism” became a catalyst of development of humanitarian knowledge, a basic element of the further construction of national state of the Mongols. In the process of discussion Pan-Mongolism went beyond the Buryat area and started to ripen as a Pan-Mongolian movement that gradually grew into Pan-Mongolist ideology.

The Greater Game: Qing China in Central Eurasia

AbstractThis article surveys Qing China's expansion into Central Eurasia in the context of “The Great Game,” a geopolitical contest between the British and Russian empires in that region. It argues that Manchu activities, policies, and roles in Tibet and Xinjiang made Qing China a significant third player in the struggle for regional dominance, which can be regarded as “The Greater Game.” This article specifically refers to the geopolitical concerns of Britain, China, and Russia in Asia and Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to explain their effects on this Greater Game.

Eastern Motifs in the Ornamentation of Eighteenth-Century Siberian Church Architecture

Russia's engagement with Asian peoples and cultures forms a topic whose boundaries have yet to be thoroughly explored, particularly in the relationship between Russian and Asian architecture. As an artifact demanding significant resources as well as building skills, architecture involves numerous factors related to social, cultural, economic and technological history. The present article will point to specific instances, primarily in eighteenth-century Siberian church architecture that suggest a Russian receptivity to east Asian ornamentation. Russia is a Eurasian power, and it is plausible that the growth of trade between Russia and eastern Asia (especially China) in the eighteenth century would have fostered possibilities for cultural transference. Such exchange, it will be argued, seems to have occurred in the realm of architecture, in which decorative motifs could be observed, disseminated (even in printed form) and copied at significant points along Russia's Asian pathways.

The World Financial and Economic Crisis and Its Impact on China-US-Russia Triangle

The article analyzes the current state of relations in the triangle of Russia-US-China after the late-2000s global financial crisis from the point of view of their national interests, East Asian policy of the USA, China's growth and the strengthening of Russia in Asia. The author critically examines the existing approaches, foreign policy concepts and the latest initiatives which could shift the balance of power in the post-crisis period. According to the author, Russia still has all the chances to reshape its relations with China and the United States.

Russia's energy governance transitions and implications for enhanced cooperation with China, Japan, and South Korea

A Tokyo-based economist and a noted western economic geographer, both specializing in the hydrocarbon resources of Russia, apply the framework of governance studies in an effort to gain a deeper understanding of the recent changes in the country's energy policy-making. The authors argue that, unlike the international relations paradigm prevailing in studies of Russia's energy policy, the country's multiple roles in the international energy arena (as producer, consumer, exporter, importer, and transit state) warrant a more nuanced approach, reflecting Russian energy policy's flexibility over time and diversity across space. This paper endeavors, therefore, to apply a political economy and governance perspective to an understanding of the significant changes in Russia's energy policy-making regarding its dynamic energy relations with the Northeast Asia (NEA; China, Japan, and South Korea). In exploring the complex interactions between Russia's internal energy policy-making and its emerging energy relations in NEA, the authors addresses three key questions, namely: (1) how Russia's Asian energy policy corresponds to its domestic needs, (2) how much coherence in energy governance and cooperation exists between Russia and the Northeast Asian states at the institutional and organizational levels, and (3) the extent to which Russia's expectations for increased energy cooperation with the Northeast Asian states are likely to materialize.

Russia as the “Western Other” in Southeast Asia: Encounters of Russian Travelers in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century

This article explores an intriguing and unexplored angle of the evolution of Russia's Asian Mission in the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1869 the opening of the Suez Canal increased Russian shipping to the Far East and brought more Russian travelers to Southeast Asia where in an interesting coincidence of local interests and imperial views they interacted with the local rulers, officials in the region. As scholars, naval officers or government officials/advisors they wrote literary accounts or reports of their journeys and sometimes gave public presentations on their experiences which informed the Russian public and government about British and French expansion in the region and the local perception of Russia as a European power. One of these travelers included the heir to the throne and future tsar of Russia, Nicholas II and his mentor E. E. Ukhtomskii, later a prominent exponent of Russia's Asian mission. By examining the contact of Russian travelers with the rulers and officials of Burma and Siam this article reveals how the interpenetration of Russia's imperial myth of an Asian Mission with an Occidental view of Russia in Burma and Siam helped confirm the empire's notion of a “civilizing mission” and its claim of moral and cultural superiority to other Western powers.

The Trouble With Bibliographies: Where Is Mezhov When You Need Him?

This is a review of twelve bibliographies that reflect the holdings of the Russian collection in Hamilton Library at the University of Hawaii focusing on Siberia, the Soviet/Russian Far East, and Russia in Asia and the Pacific, especially Russians in China. The chosen titles represent a mixture of the great, the average, and not-so-good that the author has used over the past four decades. While there is a question about the usefulness of bibliographies in this digital age, most of the old standards should still play a role in academic scholarship.

Russian foreign policy: the return of great power politics

Introduction: The Guns of August Chapter 1: Contours of Russian Foreign Policy Chapter 2: Bulldogs Fighting Under the Rug: The Making of Russian Foreign Policy Chapter 3: Resetting Expectations: Russia and the United States Chapter 4: Europe: Between Integration and Confrontation Chapter 5: Rising China and Russia's Asian Vector Chapter 6: Playing with Home Field Advantage? Russia and its Post-Soviet Neighbors Conclusion: Dealing with Russia's Foreign Policy Reawakening

St. Petersburg's Man in Siam

RésuméL’homme de Saint-Pétersbourg au Siam : A.E. Olarovskij et la Mission de la Russie en Asie, 1898-1905Pendant les années 1890, par suite de l’expansion des intérêts de la Russie impériale en Chine et de son commerce maritime en Extrême-Orient, des consuls russes furent nommés dans les ports les plus importants de l’Asie du Sud-Est. Leur mission première consistait à protéger les intérêts commerciaux et maritimes de la Russie tout en entretenant des relations diplomatiques avec les puissances coloniales en place. Selon les périodes, ils furent chargés de prospecter la région pour rechercher tant des zones de stockage du charbon pour approvisionner les navires que de nouveaux marchés et d’observer de près les dirigeants coloniaux. Mais en aucune façon ils ne devaient se mêler des affaires de ces derniers ! Il ne s’est produit qu’une seule exception à cette règle, quand A.E. Olarovskij fut nommé ministre résident au Siam par le gouvernement russe. L’histoire des activités de ce diplomate dans le rôle croissant de la Russie en Asie du Sud-Est constitue l’un des épisodes les plus intéressants de l’histoire des consuls de la région et nous fournit une nouvelle approche des rêves tsaristes pour la mission de la Russie en Asie au tournant du siècle, à savoir l’extension des ambitions impériales en Asie du Sud-Est et en Chine et l’établissement de relations avec l’Empire colonial français en Indochine.

Russia and the CIS in 2005: Promoting East Asian Oil Diplomacy, Containing Change in Central Asia

Oil played a big role in Russia's Asian diplomacy as the Khodorkovsky affair led to a rearrangement of Russian oil assets and pipeline plans, with consequences for China and Japan. China and Russia held their first military exercises, reflecting their concern over the impact of the “colored revolutions.”