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J. Kusber, Mastering the Imperial Space: The Case of Siberia

Jan Kusber

masterInG the ImPerIal sPaCe:

the Case oF sIberIa

theoretICal aPProaChes

and reCent dIreCtIons oF researCh*

the general framework and the recent german debate on space

In 2003 Karl Schlögel published a book entitled “In Space, We Read Time” that received much attention, at least in Germany.1 In the form of an essay he invited readers to re-examine space as a cultural-geographical and physical characteristic in history. At the same time, Schlögel developed no coherent theory suggesting how to interpret space historically. Instead, he identified the position of an observer as one who somewhat mechanically combines the personal experience of space with historical knowledge that was obtained outside any specific spatial circumstances. In fact, it remained unclear in the book whether space is viewed by the author as a given con-tinuum or as a socially and culturally constructed reality. In this respect

* The author acknowledges the useful criticism and suggestions of the anonymous re-viewers of Ab Imperio.1 Karl Schlögel. Im Raume lesen wir die Zeit. Über Zivilisationsgeschichte und Geopoli-tik. München, 2003. With reference to Eastern Europe see his and other contributions in Manfred Sapper, Volker Weichsel (Hg.). Raum als Wille und Vorstellung. Erkundungen über den Osten Europas. Berlin, 2005(= Osteuropa 3/2005).

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Martina Löw was more self-conscious in her comprehensive draft of a “so-ciology of space” in 2001. She pointed to the lack of theoretical reflection about space as a fundamental category of culture (along with time). Löw advanced an understanding of space as a dynamic process characterized by social and cultural dimensions, which changes in time and has a direct impact on the social landscape. The productiveness of the sociological approach of Martina Löw can be seen, for instance, in explaining why social and cultural conditions emerged in Siberia during the epoch of Peter I that were in some important aspects very different from those in European Russia.2

Schlögel was in many respects the most prominent leader of the “spatial turn” in German historiography, especially in those quarters of it dealing with Eastern Europe and Russia. As Jürgen Osterhammel demonstrated over a decade ago in a review of recent developments in the French and Anglo-American academic communities, by the turn of the millennium there emerged a powerful international trend of studying history of space,3 and Schlögel and other German scholars simply joined this movement.

To be sure, there was good reason for a reluctant attitude to the study of space as a phenomenon in its own right, comparable to time and other key factors of human existence. Geopolitical theories, for example that of Karl Haushofer and the stress on the centrality of space in the interdisciplinary “Ostforschung” in the Third Reich, significantly influenced the ideology of National Socialism in Germany and its catastrophic expansion during the Second World War.4 This legacy cast its shadow over German scholarship throughout the post-WWII period and, therefore, it seems that the entire research agenda of historical studies in Germany was reconstructed or

2 Martina Löw. Raumsoziologie. Frankfurt a. M., 2001.3 Jürgen Osterhammel. Die Wiederkehr des Raumes: Geopolitik, Geohistorie und histo-rische Geographie // Neue Politische Literatur. 1998. Bd. 43. S. 374-397.4 For different interpretations of Haushofer’s influence see: Bruno Hipler. Hitlers Lehrmeister. Karl Haushofer Vater der NS-Ideologie. St. Ottilien, 1996; Frank Ebeling. Geopolitik. Karl Haushofer und seine Raumwissenschaft. Berlin, 1994. On “Ost-forschung” see Michael Burleigh. Germany Turns Eastwards: A Study of Ostforschung in the Third Reich. Cambridge, 1988; Hans-Christian Petersen. “Ordnung schaffen” durch Bevölkerungsverschiebung: Peter-Heinz Seraphim oder der Zusammenhang zwischen “Bevölkerungsfragen” und Social Engineering // Historical Social Research/Historische Sozialforschung. 2006. Bd. 31. H. 4. Special Issue: Bevölkerungskonstruktionen in Geschichte, Sozialwissenschaften und Politiken des 20. Jahrhunderts. Transdisziplinäre und internationale Perspektiven. S. 282-308; Idem. Ostforschung und Gebietsansprüche. Die Legitimation territorialer Expansion im Werk Peter-Heinz Seraphims // Osteuropa. 2005. Bd. 55. H. 3. S. 125-136.

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J. Kusber, Mastering the Imperial Space: The Case of Siberiaconstructed anew avoiding the notion of space. In the fifties, history-writing was affected by modernized positivism, some called it historicism, stressing the free will of the individual as a fundamental precondition. Starting with the seventies, the “Historische Sozialwissenschaften” researched economic and social structures also without explicitly mentioning the spatial dimen-sion.5 This avoidance of “space” was problematized after the “cultural turn” with its focus on cultural practices and the reconstruction of “Historische Lebenswelten.”6 By the nineties it became clear in Germany that space has a significance that cannot be reduced to studies of either macrostructures or microstructures. Thus we see the return of an interest in space everywhere in the humanities and social sciences in Germany, matching the uninterrupted tradition of spatial analysis in the United States, Britain, and France.7 Soci-ology and geography are rediscovering space along the lines suggested by Martina Löws in her well-known “Raumsoziologie,” or by Markus Schroer in his more recent study.8 In the field of Russian studies we find works dis-cussing the significance of space such as those of Karls Schlögel or Frithjof Benjamin Schenk.9 Most of the studies of space in Russian history focus on urban space. Inspired by late imperial regional studies (kraevedine),10

5 Hans-Ulrich Wehler. Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte. 5 Bände, München, 1987–2008. A prominent example of this approach in the field of Russian history in Germany is Dietrich Geyer. Der russische Imperialismus, Studien über den Zusammenhang von innerer und äußerer Politik. Göttingen, 1977.6 Rudolf Vierhaus. Die Rekonstruktion historischer Lebenswelten. Probleme moderner Kulturgeschichtsschreibung // Hartmut Lehmann (Hg.). Wege zu einer neuen Kulturge-schichte. Göttingen, 1995. S. 7-25; Ute Daniel. Kompendium Kulturgeschichte. Theorien, Praxis, Schlüsselwörter, 5. Aufl. Frankfurt a. M., 2006.7 See, for example, the outstanding work of Fernand Braudel, who combined a spatial approach and the long duree perspective: Fernand Braudel. Das Mittelmeer und die mediterrane Welt in der Epoche Philipps II. 3 Bände 2. Aufl. Frankfurt a. M., 2001.8 Löw. Raumsoziologie. An introduction to older concepts of space see in Markus Schroer. Auf dem Weg zu einer Soziologie des Raums. Frankfurt a. M., 2006.9 Frithjof Benjamin Schenk. Das Paradigma des Raumes in der Osteuropäischen Ge-schichte // Martin Schulze Wessel (Hg.). Eine Standortbestimmung der osteuropäischen Geschichte. Zeitenblicke 6 (2007), Nr. 2 // http://www.zeitenblicke.de/2007/2/; Idem. Der “spatial turn” und die Osteuropäische Geschichte // http://www.europa.clio-online.de/Por-tals/_Europa/documents/spt/Schenk_Der_spatial_turn_2006.pdf; Idem. Imperiale Raum-erschließung. Beherrschung der russischen Weite // Osteuropa. 2005. H. 3. S. 33-45.10 For this specific approach to regional studies see: Carsten Goehrke. Russlands Regionen und der Regionalismus: Forschungsgeschichtliche Bilanz und Ausblick // Andreas Kap-peler (Hrsg.). Die Geschichte Russlands im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert aus der Perspektive seiner Regionen. Wiesbaden, 2004. S. 38-51; Emily D. Johnson. How St. Petersburg Learned to Study Itself: The Russian Idea of Kraevedenie. University Park, 2006.

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most notably represented by Nikolai Antsiferov,11 it was communis opinio that the urban setting influences populations through its particular planning or historical background. In recent studies space appears not as a factor acting by itself, but rather one that is socially and culturally constructed. Researchers focused on the reciprocal influences of space and population, especially in great metropoles such as Vienna, Berlin, New York, Moscow, St. Petersburg and so on.12

Recent years have witnessed an increasing interest in the process of mentally mapping space. The Russian Empire in the eighteenth century had been viewed within the changing historical and geopolitical context of European enlightenment, which included the emergence of nationalist sentiments. The mental mapping of Russia was in a way a contest between the project of Europeanization as advanced by Russian autocrats since Peter the Great and the concepts developed by European philosophes. As a result of this process, described by Hans Lemberg13 and Larry Wolff,14 Russia emerged as an Eastern power rather than a power of the North, as it had been conceptualized in the seventeenth century.15

11 For a recent translation into German see: Nikolai P. Anziferow. Die Seele Petersburgs. Mit einem Vorwort von Karl Schlögel. München, 2003.12 Karl Schlögel. Jenseits des Großen Oktober. Das Laboratorium der Moderne, Petersburg 1909-1921. Berlin, 1988; Karl Schlögel, Frithjof Benjamin Schenk, Markus Ackeret (Hgs.). Sankt Petersburg: Schauplätze einer Stadtgeschichte. Frankfurt am Main, 2007; Rudolf Jaworski, Peter Stachel (Hgs.). Die Besetzung des öffentlichen Raumes. Politische Plätze, Denkmäler und Straßennamen im europäischen Vergleich. Berlin, 2007; Monica Rüthers. Moskau bauen von Lenin bis Chruščev. Öffentliche Räume zwischen Utopie, Ter-ror und Alltag. Wien, 2006; Monica Rüthers, Carmen Scheide (Hgs.). Moskau. Menschen, Mythen, Orte, Köln, 2003; Thomas Bohn. Das “Phänomen Minsk”. Stadtplanung und Urbanisierung in Weißrussland nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg, Habilitationsschrift. Jena, 2004; Idem. Das “neue” Minsk – Aufbau einer sozialistischen Stadt nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg // Dietrich Beyrau und Rainer Lindner (Hgs.). Handbuch der Geschichte Weißrusslands. Göttingen, 2001. S. 319-333; Harald Bodenschatz, Christiane Post (Hgs.). Städtebau im Schatten Stalins. Die internationale Suche nach der sozialistischen Stadt in der Sowjetunion 1929-1935. Berlin, 2003; Gregor Thum. Die fremde Stadt. Breslau 1945. Berlin, 2003; Bert Hoppe. Auf den Trümmern von Königsberg. Kaliningrad 1946-1970. München, 2000.13 Hans Lemberg. Zur Entstehung des Osteuropabegriffs im 19. Jahrhundert. Vom “Norden” zum “Osten” Europas // Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas. 1985. Bd. 33. S. 48-91. 14 Larry Wolff. Inventing Eastern Europe. The Map of Civilization in the Mind of the Enlightenment. Stanford, 1994.15 For premodern travelogues see Marshall T. Poe. Foreign Descriptions of Muscovy: An Ana-lytic Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources. Columbus, 1995; Idem. A People Born to Slavery: Russia in Early Modern European Ethnography, 1476-1748. Ithaca, NY, 2000.

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J. Kusber, Mastering the Imperial Space: The Case of SiberiaThis relocation of the Russian Empire in imaginary space was of certain

consequence for the space I am going to deal with in this article. By becom-ing an Asian or Oriental power in the eyes of western enlighteners, Russia was treated at best as a tabula rasa for westernization, as Leibniz suggested in his correspondence with Peter I.16 This also affected the debate about the boundaries between Europe and Asia and the character of Russia as a whole.17 Last, but not least, this relocation had consequences for describing and mapping “Siberia” as either an extension or an integral part of Russia. In this text I will deal with strategies of mastering the imperial space as exemplified by Siberia. “Siberia” stands here for a territory acquired by the Muscovite state in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that was defined differently in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union in different epochs from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. I seek to understand this mastering of space as undertaken by representatives of the elite in the center, by inhabitants of Siberia themselves, and by foreigners as a cultural and social construction heavily depending on specific “Lebenswelten.”18 My focus is not so much a study of the sources but an exploration of approaches and methods of research by scholars interested in symbolic mastering of the Siberian space.

the mapping of siberian space through conquest and annexation

Since the 1580s and the time of Yermak, whose image in history and litera-ture is also a part of the mapping of Siberia and the empire as a whole, Rus-sian expansion into Siberia and the Far East occurred at a fast pace along the rivers flowing into the Arctic Ocean, as well as eastward toward the Pacific,19

16 Printed in: Woldemar Guerrier. Leibniz in seinen Beziehungen zu Rußland und Peter dem Großen. St. Petersburg, 1873.17 Marc Bassin. Russia between Europe and Asia: The Ideological Construction of Geo-graphical Space // Slavic Review. 1991. Vol. 50. No. 1. P. 2ff.18 Rudolf Vierhaus. Die Rekonstruktion historischer Lebenswelten. Probleme moderner Kulturgeschichtsschreibung // Hartmut Lehmann (Hg.). Wege zu einer neuen Kulturge-schichte. Göttingen, 1995. S. 7-25; Ute Daniel. Kompendium Kulturgeschichte. Theorien, Praxis, Schlüsselwörter. Frankfurt a. M., 2001. S. 220 f.19 The process of Russia’s territorial expansion is a popular topic, see for example: Pe-ter Nitsche. Der Bau einer Großmacht: Russische Kolonisation in Ostasien // Michael Salewski (Hrsg.). Staatenbildung in Übersee. Stuttgart, 1992. S. 149-165; W. Bruce Lincoln. Die Eroberung Sibiriens. München, 1996. S. 52-96. With special emphasis on the local peoples: James Forsyth. A History of the Peoples of Siberia. Russia’s North Eastern Colony, 1581-1990. 4th Ed. Cambridge, 2000.

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leading to the establishment of an administration for the newly acquired colony.20

On the mental map of Western European contemporaries Russia during this period was a northern power. In Russian texts of the time the term “sever” (North) was also used continuously, while other geographical terms varied.21 The expansion to Siberia, initiated by the Stroganov family22 which sought rich fur and mineral resources beyond the Urals, was perceived as expansion northward. This terrain and its inhabitants seemed familiar to Russians,23 just as the Mongols had become a well-known “counterpart” to medieval Muscovy over the preceding centuries.24 The forest-rich landscapes with their numerically small and usually animistic populations were reminiscent of the hinterland of the Republic of Novgorod.25

The Ural mountains did not emerge as the fixed boundary between Europe and Asia before the writings of the eminent Russian geographer and historian Vasilii Tatishchev and his Swedish counterpart of German background, Philip von Strahlenberg. This demarcation made Siberia a re-gion separate from the Russia that was an aspiring European power. Siberia was an embodiment of otherness.26 In fact, there had been earlier instances of referring to the Urals as a divide between Russia and Siberia, as for example in the autobiography of the Archpriest Avvakum, who described

20 George Lantzeff. Siberia in the Seventeenth Century: A Study of the Colonial Admin-istration. New York, 1972.21 Vladimir N. Bulatov. Russkij sever. T. 2-3 (XVI-XVII vv.). Archangel’sk, 1998-1999.22 See on the Stroganovs: Ruslan G. Skrynnikow. Iwan der Schreckliche und seine Zeit. München, 1992. S. 298-339.23 For the relevant sources published in English see Basil Dmythryshyn (Ed.). Russia’s Conquest of Siberia, 1558-1700. Vol. I: A Documentary Report. Portland, 1995.24 Jan Kusber. Ende und Auswirkungen der Mongolenherrschaft in Rußland // Stephan Conermann und Jan Kusber (Hrsg.). Die Mongolen in Asien und Europa. Frankfurt a. M., 1997. S. 207-229; Charles J. Halperin. “Know thy Enemy”. Medieval Russian Fa-miliarity with the Mongols of the Golden Horde // Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas. 1982. Bd. 30. S. 161-175; Donald Ostrowski. Muscovy and the Mongols. Cross-Cultural Influences on the Steppe frontier 1304-1589. Cambridge, 2000.25 On this: Janet Martin. Travels in the Land of Darkness. The Fur Trade and its Sig-nificance for Medieval Russia. Cambridge, 1986; Eadem. Russian Expansion in the Far North. X to mid-XVI Century // Michael Rywkin (Ed.). Russian Colonial Expansion to 1917. London, 1988. Pp. 23-44.26 V. N. Tatishchev. Izbrannye raboty po geografii Rossii. Moscow, 1950. Pp. 108-117; Philip von Strahlenberg. Das Nord- und Östliche Theil von Europa und Asia, in so weit solches das gantze Russische Reich mit Sibirien und der grossen Tatarey in sich begrif-fet. Stockholm, 1730.

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J. Kusber, Mastering the Imperial Space: The Case of SiberiaSiberia as a land of richness and opportunity.27 Even earlier, in one of the first Siberian Chronicles dated from the 1630s and written in Tobolsk, there was a geographical description of “Siberian country” in its richness and uniqueness with mention of the Urals that separated Russia from Siberia like a huge wall.28

The mental mapping of the seventeenth century corresponded to prac-tices of cartography of pre-modern Muscovy. Valerie Kivelson has demon-strated how region-centered maps fostered and framed the rise of regional identity in her analysis of the maps of Siberia, the North and Asiatic lands.29 Thus it was long before the great expeditions of the eighteenth century that Russians set about on the task of mapping their territories, contrary to the argument of Willard Sunderland. This is not to challenge his thesis that in the Russian expansion northward Tsar Alexis was more interested in sub-jugating the local population, especially the experienced hunters, than in mapping the new territories.30 Sunderland is also right when he, as others already had before him,31 argues that it was the epoch of Enlightenment that brought new ways of thinking, measuring, and mapping to Russia that resulted in a scientific approach to the spatial representation of Siberia and the empire as a whole.32 However, the real novelty was not the mapping of territories itself, but the “esprit geometrique” that came into the discourse of territoriality, as Sunderland calls it,33 especially during the reign of

27 Alan Wood. Avvakuum’s Siberian Exile, 1653-1664 // Alan Wood and R. A. French (Eds.). The Development of Siberia. People and Resources. New York, 1989. 28 Polnoe sobranie russkikh letopisei. Moscow, 1986 (Sibirskie letopisi, ch. 1: Gruppa “Esipovskoi letopisi”).29 Valerie Kivelson. Cartographies of Tsardom. The Land and its Meanings in Seven-teenth Century Russia. Ithaca, 2006; see also the much older but instructive article by Leo Bagrow. Semyon Remezov: A Siberian Cartographer // Imagio Mundi. 1954. Vol. 11. Pp. 111-125.30 Willard Sunderland. Imperial Space: Territorial Space and Practice in the Eighteenth Century // Jane Burbank, Mark von Hagen, Anatolyi Remnev (Eds.). Russian Empire: Space, People, Power, 1700-1930. Bloomington, 2007. P. 33. 31 For example: Mark Bassin. Russia between Europe and Assia: The Ideological Construc-tion of Geographical Space // Slavic Review. 1991. Vol. 50. No. 1. Pp. 1-17; Jan Kusber. Zwischen Europa und Asien: Russische Eliten des 19. Jahrhunderts auf der Suche nach einer eigenen Identität // Stephan Conermann (Hg.). Geschicht(en), Mythen, Identitäten. Hamburg, 1999 [Asien und Afrika. Band 2]. S. 91-117.32 Georg Wilhelm Steller, Stepan S. Krašeninnikov, Johann Eberhard Fischer. Reisetage-bücher 1735 bis 1743 / Bearbeitet von Wieland Hintzsche u. a. Halle, 2000.33 Sunderland. Imperial Space. P. 45.

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Catherine II.34 Besides the empirical interests of scholars who undertook the great expeditions of the eighteenth century, of no lesser importance for the new perception of imperial space were the provincial reforms of Peter and Catherine, the projects of the “Land Register” for the empire,35 and the network of schools introduced by Catherine in 1786 to stimulate the distri-bution of knowledge in an imperial manner, so as to reflect the principles of “gute Policey,” given the multi-religious and multi-ethnic composition of the Empire.36

The flexibility of geographical concepts of Europe, Asia and Siberia in the eighteenth century is well illustrated by a famous letter of Catherine II written to Voltaire in the summer of 1767. She wrote about the challenges to enlightened rule that were presented by the geography of Russia and the diversity of the subjects of the empire:

At last, I am here in Asia; I badly wanted to see it with my own eyes. In this city there are twenty different peoples who are nothing like each other. And nevertheless one must sew them a suit that will fit them all. General principles can be established easily, but what about the details? And they are quite the details! I would almost say that one has to create, unite and preserve an entire world. Of course, I won’t master this task as I have already too much work to do.37

Catherine II was writing from a place geographically located in Europe, according to Tatishchev and his fellow European geographers, but culturally situated at the crossroads of Russian, Tatar, and Finno-Ugric peoples, and of Christian, animistic, and Islamic faiths. Since the time of the Muscovite ter-34 Klaus Gestwa. Der Blick auf Land und Leute. Eine historische Topographie russischer Landschaften in Zeitalter von Absolutismus, Aufklärung und Romantik // Historische Zeitschrift. 2004. Bd. 279. S. 66-74; Christopher Ely. This Meager Nature: Landscape and National Identity in Imperial Russia. DeKalb, 2002. Pp. 8-10; and Andreas Schönle. Garden of the Empire: Catherine’s Appropriation of the Crimea // Slavic Review. 2001. Bd. 60. Pp. 1-23.35 Martin Aust. Die Landvermessung im Moskauer Reich zur Zeit der Regentschaft Sof’ja Alekseevnas (1682-1689) // Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas. 2000. Bd. 48. H. 1. S. 90-108; Idem. Vermessen und Abbilden des russländischen Raumes nach der kulturellen Revolution Peters des Großen // Lars Behrisch (Hg.). Vermessen, Zählen, Berechnen. Die politische Ordnung des Raumes im 18. Jahrhundert. Frankfurt am Main, 2006. S. 27-44.36 M. O. Akisin. Rossiiskii absoliutizm i upravlenie Sibiri XVIII veka. Struktura i sostav gosudarstvennogo apparata. Moscow, 2003.37 Katharina an Voltaire aus Kazan, 29.5/9.6 1767 // H. Schuman (Hg.). Katharina die Grosse – Voltaire, Monsieur – Madame. Der Briefwechsel zwischen der Zarin und dem Philosophen. Zürich, 1991. S. 54 f.

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J. Kusber, Mastering the Imperial Space: The Case of Siberiaritorial expansion38 that laid the foundation for subsequent imperial claims,39 the cross-cultural overlap continued to contribute to the heterogeneity of the Russian Empire. Ideologically, the representation of supreme author-ity (“scenarios of power”, as Richard Wortman has put it) was no longer defined by the opposition “Khan or Basileus”,40 but by the statement made by Catherine the Great in her Great Instruction to the Legislative Commis-sion in 1767: “Russia is a European Power.”41 When it became no longer necessary to legitimize the imperial claims of Russia and its rulers by their belonging to Europe,42 the question remained what the role of Siberia was to be in the course of mapping imperial space in a changed ideological and political context. In the narratives of the seventeenth century Siberia was not the “other” of Muscovy, but a place of enhanced spiritual purity; as part of the North it represented a space characterized by rough climate and particular flora and fauna, rather than a political geography.43

Late medieval and early modern Russian authors did not attempt to define the terms that they used: “Tataria,” “Siberia,” and also occasionally “Europe” or “Asia.”44 The meaning of these notions shifted, therefore it

38 Jan Kusber. Um das Erbe der Goldenen Horde: Das Khanat von Kazan’ zwischen Krimtata ren und dem Moskauer Staat // Eckhard Hübner (Hg.). Zwischen Christi ani sie-rung und Euro päisie rung. Studien zur Geschichte Osteuropas in Mittelalter und frü her Neu zeit, Festschrift für Peter Nitsche zum 65. Geburts tag. Stutt gart, 1998. S. 305-312. 39 Günther Stökl. Imperium und imperiale Ideologie. Erfahrungen am Beispiel des vorpretinischen Rußland // Günther Stökl. Der russische Staat im Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit. Ausgewählte Aufsätze. Wiesbaden, 1981. S. 168-180. He is arguing against the views expressed in: Jaroslaw Pelenski. Russia and Kazan. Conquest and Imperial Ideology (1438-1560). The Hague, Paris, 1974; Henry R. Huttenbach. The Origins of Russian Imperialism // Taras Hunczak (Ed.). Russian Imperialism from Ivan the Great to the Revolution. New Brunswick, NJ, 1974. Pp. 18-44.40 Michael Cher niavsky. Khan or Basileus: An Aspect of Russian Mediaeval History // Michael Cher niavsky. The Structure of Russi an History. Interpreta tive Essays. New York, 1970. Pp. 65-79.41 See: Katharinä der Zweiten Kaiserin und Gesetzgebe rin von Rußland Instruction für die zu Verfertigung des Entwurfs zu einem neuen Gesetzbu che verordnete Commission. Riga und Mitau, 1769 (Reprint: Frankfurt a. M., 1970). S. 4.42 Ekkehard Klug. “Europa” und “europäisch” im russischen Denken vom 16. bis zum frühen 19. Jahrhundert // Saeculum. 1987. Bd. 38. S. 194-198.43 Susie Frank. Sibirien: Peripherie und Anderes der russischen Kultur // Wiener Slavis-tischer Almanach. Sonderband 44. 1997. S. 359-365.44 See the paratactic mentioning of Asia, Livonia und Europe in the Nikonian Chronicle (Patriarshaia ili Nikonovskaia letopis). See also Letopis po voskrenskomu spisku // Polnoe sobranie russkikh letopisei. St. Petersburg, 1856. Vol. 7. P. 239 f.; Ermolinskaia letopis // Polnoe sobranie russkikh letopisei. St. Petersburg, 1910. Vol. 23. P. 168.

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would be misleading to attribute, as some scholars do,45 the mere mentioning of these terms in the texts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to any developed concepts of spatial distribution of sovereignty.

The prominent figures of the European Enlightenment used the juxtapo-sition of Europe and Asia to highlight their enlightened utopian project of modernization as Europeanization. In their correspondence they referred to mankind and especially to the Russian Empire as a tabula rasa, a potential testing ground for experiments. On the contrary, Catherine claimed that Rus-sia was already European, or at least it was on track to becoming a civilized empire, with a civilizing mission in its periphery including Siberia.46

This opinion was contested in several ways by the philosophes. What Denis Diderot did not dare to say to Catherine II in person47 the French as-tronomer Jean Chappe d’Auteroche expressed in 1768 in his work “Voyage en Sibérie.” To him, “Siberia” was a metaphor for despotic, autocratic “Asia,” and he denied any possibility of Russia joining European civilization. This country and its culture, he wrote, are Asian, its government is tyrannous, and the population is enslaved.48 Catherine responded to these allegations with “Antidote” (1770), in which she not only placed the Russian form of government within the ranks of the absolute monarchies of Western Europe, but also praised Russian culture as superior because Russia was already European and had a mission of bringing Europe to its Asian extension in Siberia. “Antidote” betrayed a sense of the injured national pride of its author that was shared from another perspective by such highly educated members of the elite as Prince M. M. Shcherbatov49 and Denis Fonvizin. Hans Rogger spoke of the compensatory nature of nationalism displayed by individual representatives of the Russian elite in the late eighteenth century.50 45 Ekkehard Klug. “Europa” und “europäisch” im russischen Denken vom 16. bis zum frühen 19. Jahrhundert // Saeculum. 1987. Bd. 38. S. 194-198.46 On the enlightened reforms in Siberia in the early nineteenth century see Marc Raeff. Michael Speransky, Statesman of Imperial Russia. The Hague, 1957. 47 Manfred Hildermeier. Das Privileg der Rückständigkeit. Anmer kungen zum Wandel einer Interpreta tionsfigur der neueren russi schen Geschichte // Historische Zeitschrift. 1987. Bd. 244. S. 568 f.48 Hélène Carrère d’Encausse. L’Impératrice et l’Abbé: un duel littéraire inédit entre Catherine II et l’Abbé Chappe d’Auteroche. Paris, 2003. Maike Sach. V fokuse astronoma: Sibir’ glazami Shap d’Oterosha. Sibir’: vzgliad izvne i iznutri. Dukhovnoe izmerenie prostranstva. Irkutsk, 2004. Pp. 75-84.49 M. Schtscherbatov. Über die Sittenverderbnis in Rußland / Hg. v. K. Stählin. Berlin, 1925.50 Hans Rogger. National Consciousness in Eighteenth Century Russia. 2nd ed. Cambridge, 1969. P. 263 ff.; I. de Madaria ga. Rus sia in the Age of Catherine the Great. New Haven,

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J. Kusber, Mastering the Imperial Space: The Case of SiberiaMost members of the Europeanized elite did not give much thought to the conflict of Europeanization with national identity. This would become the focus of important debates only in the nineteenth century. But they laid the groundwork for the mastering of Siberian space administratively and scientifically in a way that accommodated new imperial claims and new attitudes to entire peoples and individual subjects that inhabited this space.

the mapping of siberian space through integration and identity building

Obviously, the problem of the cultural construction of space and its delimitation was not resolved with the beginning of scientific exploration of Siberia and the development of geography as a discipline. Almost one century after the famous letter of Catherine written in Kazan, an official reported in 1851 from Orenburg: “…Europe meets with Asia, the steamship meets the camel, [where] the dancing hall of the assembly of the nobility, designed by [Konstantin] Thon, is twenty verst of the nomadic tents.”51 This problem of inter-cultural encounters was not so urgent in Siberia because of the much lesser density of its population which was also less polarized in ethno-confessional terms. At least in the view of the Russians, there was enough room for everyone who wanted to settle in Siberia.

Recently, Siberia has become the focus of several studies, with a special attention paid to the period of the nineteenth century. For example, Mark Bassin52 and Claudia Weiß53 examined the mental mapping that emerged after the expeditions of the Emperor’s Geographic Society to Siberia and the Far East in the middle of the century. Anatolii Remnev has studied the process of Siberia’s symbolic “exploration” by means of imperial geography and by the development of administrative control throughout the nineteenth

1981. P. 337 f.; Ekkehard Klug. Das asiatische Rußland. Über die Entstehung eines europäischen Vorurteils // Historische Zeitschrift. 1987. Bd. 245. S. 265-289.51 Cited in Charles Steinwedel. How Bashkiria Became a Part of European Russia, 1762-1881 // Burbank et. al. Russian Empire. P. 94.52 Mark Bassin. Nationalist Imagination and Geographical Expansion in the Russian Far East, 1840-1865. Cambridge, 1999; Idem. Imperialer Raum – Nationaler Raum. Sibirien auf der kognitiven Landkarte Rußlands im 19. Jahrhundert // Geschichte und Gesellschaft. Zeitschrift für Historische Sozialwissenschaft. 2002. Bd. 28. H. 3. S. 378-403.53 Claudia Weiss. Wie Sibirien “unser” wurde. Die russische Geographische Gesellschaft und ihre Einfluss auf die Bilder und Vorstellungen von Sibirien im 19. Jahrhundert. Göttingen, 2007.

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century.54 Eva Maria Stolberg55 has looked at the consequences of building railways and the processes of industrialization and population migration at the turn of the twentieth century for Siberia and the imperial Russian land-scape as a whole. Space was an important dimension of all these studies as it was also the main characteristic of Siberia noticed by travelers even after the construction of the Trans-Siberian railway.56 Travelers also mentioned the wildness of the landscape, specific climatic conditions, rare settlements, different agricultural conditions and the difficulties of exploitation of rich natural resources. The homogeneous perception of Siberia as the land of natural abundance and immense size would gradually disintegrate into a vision of numerous distinctive regions and identities as the traveler spent more time in the region, or as the scholar (be it an anthropologist, historian, or geographer) gathered more data. Aleksandr Radishshev, who was exiled by Catherine II to Siberia, knew this already when he wrote:

For a long time I have disliked anyone saying: this is customary in Siberia, or this and that they have in Siberia. Now I find all these general phrases about a country that stretches for eight thousand versts completely ridiculous. How can you speak in general terms about a land of such great physical diversity whose current conditions in some locations are as different, as dissimilar were the changes that have brought about the present state. Here the political situation and morality of the inhabitants correlate with the state of nature; savagery coexists with enlightenment and brutality with softheartedness thus blurring the boundary between vices and mistakes and between malice and wit in the immeasurable space of its territory and in the coldness of minus thirty degrees.57

54 A. V. Remnev. Rossiia Dal’nego Vostoka: imperskaia geografiia vlasti XIX – nachala XX vekov. Omsk, 2004; Idem. Siberia and the Russian Far East in the Imperial Geography of Power // Burbank et. al. Russian Empire. Pp. 425-454; Idem. Samoderzhavie i Sibir: administrativnaia politika v pervoi polovine XIX v. Omsk, 1995.55 Eva-Maria Stolberg. Die sibirische Frontier und die Bedeutung Russlands in der Weltgeschichte: Eine Replik auf Martin Aust und Hans-Heinrich Nolte // Zeitschrift für Weltgeschichte. 2003. H. 1. 2003. S. 91-111; Eadem. The Siberian Frontier between “White Mission” and “Yellow Peril,” 1890s-1920s // Nationalities Papers. 2004. Vol. 32. No. 1. Pp. 165-182.56 For example: Rudolf Zabel. Durch die Mandschurei und Sibirien. Leipzig, 1902; Eugen Zabel. Transsibirien. Mit der Bahn durch Russland und China 1903. Darmstadt, 2003; John Forster Fraser. The Real Siberia. London, 1902; Karl Tanera. Zur Kriegszeit auf der Sibirischen Bahn und durch Russland. Berlin, 190557 Alexander Radishchev to A. R. Vorontsov // A. N. Radishchev. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii. Moscow and Leningrad, 1952. Vol. 3. P.356.

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J. Kusber, Mastering the Imperial Space: The Case of SiberiaThe ideas expressed by Radishchev in his 1791 memo to Prince Mikhail

Vorontsov would become widely held in the nineteenth and twentieth cen-turies.58 The Siberian regionalism of the nineteenth century and the rising self-consciousness of the Siberians were a result of this dynamic process of appropriation and transformation of Siberian space. The notorious “shap-ing of the Stalinist landscape” in the course of the Cultural Revolution in the late twenties and thirties of the twentieth century was achieved through forced collectivization and industrialization. Siberia presents a paradigmatic case of this process in the context of East European history, an example of interrelation between space and humans.59

“Siberia” played an important role in the self-perception of Tsarist Rus-sia and the Soviet Union as an empire because of its unbound resources and seemingly immeasurable space. The vastness of Siberia was in sharp contrast with other regions of the Empire, and it was open to different projections of meaning as a “tabula rasa,” even more so than during the time of Leibniz and Peter the Great. Strategically, Siberia could be seen as an Asiatic appendix of Russia, offering refuge to those who escaped from the heartland (for example, peasants and fugitives), or as a Euro-pean extension into Asia up to the Pacific coast, representing the land of futurist visions.

In the 1850s and 1860s the Russian expansion eastward found its natural limit with the conquest of the Amur river basin.60 Any subsequent move-ment would mean the incursion into China. The appropriation of Manchuria ultimately led to the disastrous “little victorious war” against Japan.61 With Siberia finally stabilizing its meaning geographically, it still remained the object of different expectations and projections, both before and after the revolution of 1917.

58 Cf.: Yuri Slezkine & Galya Diment (Eds.). Between Heaven and Hell. The Myth of Siberia in Russian Culture. New York, 1993.59 See the chapters in: Eva Maria Stolberg. The Siberian Saga. A History of Russia’s Wild East. Frankfurt a.M. 2005.60 G. I. Nevel’skoi. Podvigi Russkikh morskikh ofitserov na krainem vostoke Rossii, 1849-1855. Pri-amurskii i pri-ussuriiskii krai. St. Petersburg, 1897.61 David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye. Toward the Rising Sun: Russian Ideologies of Empire and the Path to War with Japan. DeKalb, IL, 2001; Jan Kusber. Der russisch-japanische Krieg 1904-1905 in Publizistik und Historiographie. Anmerkungen zur Literatur über den “kleinen siegreichen Krieg” // Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas. 1994. Bd. 42. S. 217-234; Idem. Siegeserwartungen und Schuldzuweisungen. Die Au-tokratie und das Militär im Russisch-Japanischen Krieg 1904/05 // Josef Kreiner (Hg.). Der Russisch-Japanische Krieg (1904/05). Bonn, 2005. S. 99-116.

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The reports of journeys to Siberia by European, American and Russian authors during the late imperial – early Soviet period were full of stereotypes that often had political connotations.62 How did those stereotypes of the authors, their values and relevant social contexts, predetermine their percep-tions of Siberian space? Did the different travel reports reveal any common patterns of perception? The double identification of Siberia as a developing country and at the same time the testing grounds for experimental social engineering dated back at least to the time of Speranskii.63 This European “external” perspective should be compared with the self-perception of the local elite, who saw themselves as a colonial outpost. Alternatively, the so-called regionalists self-consciously conceptualized regional identities on the grounds of their own visions and projections, within the spatial context of the empire.64 The otherwise crucial chronological divide of 1917 did not hold the same importance for the changing perceptions of space in Siberia.65 We find some conflation of boundless space with futuristic perceptions of time in the attempt to understand the essence of Siberia in the 1920s. A “Privatdozent” of the University of Hamburg, Arved Schultz, wrote in his widely read 1923 regional survey of Siberia: “Siberia – once the country of convicts, exiles and ice-cold weather, now, particularly after Nansen’s en-couraging descriptions,” is the country of the future, “a second America, the natural Northern Asia, which includes all the landscapes between the Urals and the Pacific Ocean, the Urals and the Arctic Ocean and the inner-Asiatic

62 See, for example: Georg Adolf Ermans. Reise um die Erde durch Nordasien und die beiden Oceane in den Jahren 1828, 1829, 1829. Historische Abteilung, 3 Bde. Berlin, 1833-1848, wissenschaftliche Abteilung, 2 Bde. Berlin, 1835-1841; see also Petr Filippovič Jakubovič. Im Lande der Verworfenen. Tagebuchblätter eines sibirischen Sträflings. Übers. v. Michael Feofanoff. Leipzig, 1884-1893; N. I. Iakushin. Dosto-evskii v Sibiri: Ocherk zhizni i tvorchestva. Kemerovo, 1960; Barbara Jedrychowska. Wszystkim obcy i cudzy. Feliks Zienkowicz i jego listy z Syberii 1864-1881. Wrocław, 2005; George Frost Kennan. Sibirien. 3 Bde. Berlin, 1890-1892; Kate Marsden. Zu den Aussätzigen in Sibirien. Übers. v. Marie Gräfin zu Erbach-Schönberg. Leipzig, 1894. 63 See Marc Raeff. Siberia and the Reforms of 1822. Seattle, 1956.64 N. M. Iadrintsev. Sibir’ kak koloniia v geograficheskom, etnograficheskom i is-toricheskom otnoshenii. Novosibirsk, 2003 and the shortened contemporary translation: Nikolaj M. Jadrincev. Sibirien. Geographische, ethnographische und historische Studien. Jena, 1886. See also an older and much more pessimistic work: Russkaia obshchina v tiurme i ssylke. Izslededovaniia i nabliudeniia nad zhizniu tiuremnykh. St. Petersburg, 1872.65 One can see this in the popular works of the journalist and novelist, Vladimir Korolenko (for example, see his “Sibirskie skaski” written in 1901).

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J. Kusber, Mastering the Imperial Space: The Case of Siberiamountains – so different and nevertheless so uniform in their enormous size and rough climate.”66

Even the most sober definition of space in a strictly geographic sense often could not avoid projections into Siberia’s future: Schultz mentions the widely read account of the 1913 journey of Fridtjof Nansen, which combined Nansen’s first-hand observations with predictions of the future.67 Since the great expeditions of the Russian Academy of Sciences in the eighteenth century, every account of Siberia speculated on the future potential of this still unexplored area.68 This trope can be found in all the publications of the regionalists beginning with P. A. Slovtsov’s69 description of Siberia that inaugurated the development of the Siberian regionalist discourse. In this respect, the regionalists’ perception of Siberia as Russia’s “golden soil” or “a colony” did not differ from the imperial perspective advanced by and through the activities of the Geographic Society. It is the persistence of local visions of Siberia that explains how the largest “prison of the world” could be described at the same time as a “country of the future.”70

The evolution of the Siberian myth, which is still quite popular in Ger-man society as shown by Tom Jürgens,71 is an understudied topic. This myth is already present in the works of Vasilii Tatishchev and George Friedrich Mueller. But how did it differ from the myth of the Russian North? They are at least partially overlapping. Swedish prisoners of the Northern War in Siberia spoke of their captivity “in the North.” Of course, one should be aware of the rich connotations of calling Siberia a “myth.” I use the term “myth” as suggested by Brigitte Schultze, who differentiates between classi-cal myths and their variations throughout history and identity constructions 66 Arved Schultz. Sibirien. Breslau, 1923. S. 1. See also Peter W. Dankwortt. Sibirien, und seine wirtschaftliche Zukunft. Ein Rückblick und Ausblick auf Handel und Industrie Sibiriens. Leipzig, 1921.67 Fridtjof Nansen. Through Siberia: The Land of the Future. London, 1914.68 Stepan Petrovič Krašennikov. Explorations of Kamchatka: North Pacific Scimitar. Report of a Journey Made to Explore Eastern Siberia in 1735-1741, by order of the Russian Impe-rial Government. Portland, 1972; Walther Kirchner (Hg.). Eine Reise durch Sibirien im achtzehnten Jahrhundert: Die Fahrt des Schweizer Doktors Jakob Fries. München, 1955; Gert Robel. Der Wandel des deutschen Sibirienbildes im 18. Jahrhundert // Canadian-American Slavic Studies. 1980. Vol. 14. S. 407-426.69 P. A. Slovtsov. Istoricheskoe obozrenie Sibirii. Novosibirsk, 1995.70 For regionalist conceptions at the time of the Revolution and Civil War see: Stephan Stuch. Regionalismus in Sibirien im frühen 20. Jahrhundert // Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas. 2003. Bd. 51. H. 4. S. 549-564.71 Tom Jürgens. Unser täglich Sibirien gib uns heute. Imaginäre Geographie als deutsche Popkultur // Osteuropa. 2007. H. 5. S. 201-214.

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arranged by or around a historical event.72 By utilizing the second defini-tion, we can see how the “Siberian myth” amalgamates historical events with spatial imagery. To quote Jan Assmann, “One can say that in cultural memory actual history is transformed into history remembered and thus into a myth... Through memory history becomes a myth. Thus history becomes not unreal, but an opposite reality in the sense of its normative and forma-tive strength.”73

In the context of this article it means that the history remembered in-cludes, for example, Yermak and his expedition on Siberian rivers, the exiled Decembrists and their wives, or the conquest of space by the Trans-Siberian Railway, all of which found their way into a myth of the Siberian space. Interestingly, we find declarations about Siberia constituting a foundation for the imperial might of Russia already in the first half of the nineteenth century. In the 1840s the statistician and geographer K. I. Arsen’ev argued that Siberia, just like Finland, the Tsardom of Poland, and the Caucasus, were territories that constituted separate entities while being essential to the empire.74 Arsen’ev represented a cohort of enlightened bureaucrats, as W. Bruce Lincoln called them,75 who through their administrative work and activities within the Russian Geographic Society fostered a vision of Siberia joining Russia in a single imperial entity.76 A rare dissident opinion was expressed in 1805 by F. F. Vigel who wrote that Siberia was sitting like a bear on the shoulders of the Russian Empire, representing little more than a burden.77

By the end of the nineteenth century the perfected geographical-cartographic appropriation of Siberia (in the words of Mark Bassin) was supplemented by a growing concern about the influence that Siberian space

72 Brigitte Schultze. Mythen, Topoi, Kulturthemen und andere sinntragende Ordnungen in neueren Identitätsdebatten am Beispiel der russischen, polnischen und tschechischen Literatur // Horst Turk, Brigitte Schultze, Roberto Simanowski (Hrsg.). Kulturelle Grenzziehungen im Spiegel der Literaturen: Nationalismus, Regionalismus, Fundamen-talismus. Göttingen, 1998. S. 220-238.73 Jan Assmann. Das kulturelle Gedächtnis. Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen. 2. Aufl. Frankfurt a. M., 1997. S. 52.74 K. I. Arsen’ev. Statisticheskie ocherki Rossii. St. Petersburg, 1848. P. 25 f.75 W. Bruce Lincoln. In the Vanguard of Reform: Russia’s Enlightened Bureaucrats. DeKalb, 1982. A more critical appraisal of their work see in: Susanne Schattenberg. Die korrupte Provinz. Russische Beamte im 19. Jahrhundert. Frankfurt a. M., 2008. S. 74-76, 220-222.76 This can be seen in Petr Kropotkin. Memoir of a Revolutionist. Part Three: Siberia. Boston, New York, 1999. Pp. 154-223.77 I. L. Dameshek et. Al. Sibir’ v sostave Rossiiskoi Imperii. Moscow, 2007. P. 17.

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J. Kusber, Mastering the Imperial Space: The Case of Siberiacould have on Russian migrants. P. P. Semenov-Tian-Shanski, the historian M. K. Liubavskii and others asked whether processes of acculturation and assimilation had led to the emergence of a new Siberian race, which in cultural terms occupied a niche between “Europe” and “Asia”.78 The idea of a new Siberian race as a social reality and a distant goal originated in the writings of historian and ethnographer A. P. Shchapov.79 Nikolai Danilevskii saw in such a race the source of even greater imperial power for Russia in its competition with other empires and races.80 In these combinations of racial and spatial discourses Siberia was much more visible than Central Asia. The discourse of Russian regionalists, who, interestingly enough, configured regional identities along the administrative borders outlined by the government (Western Siberia, Eastern Siberia, the Far East, the Amur province), bore resemblance to projections of the future made by Europeans and Americans.81 The regionalist discourse persisted through the revolution and civil war. The formation of the Siberian Regional Duma intensified the debates on Siberian citizenship, the inclusion of native peoples, and Siberia’s relationships with Russia.82

The socialist transformation and the Stalinist “revolution from above” had particularities in Siberia.83 To many “travelers to the Soviets” who also visited Siberia, the project of transforming the region was seen as a particular social experiment within the general Soviet project of modernization.84 In

78 S. G. Svatikov. Rossiia i Sibir’ (K isotorii sibirskogo oblastnichestva v XIX v.). Prague, 1930. See also: Yuri Slezkine. Arctic Mirrors. Russia and the Small Peoples of the North. Ithaca, 1994.79 A. P. Shchapov. Sochineniia v 3 tomakh. Farnborough, 1971. See also Willard Sunder-land. Russians into Iakuts? “Going Native” and Problems of Russian National Identity in the Siberian North // Slavic Review. 1996. Vol. 55. No. 4. Pp. 806-825.80 N. Ia. Danilewski. Russland und Europa. Eine Untersuchung über die kulturellen und politischen Beziehungen der slawischen zur germanisch-romanischen Welt. Stuttgart, 1965.81 Cf. N. N. Rodinga. Drugaia Rossiia. Obraz Sibiri v russkoi zhurnal’noi presse vtoroi poloviny XIX-nachala XX v. Novosibirsk, 2006.82 See Russell E. Snow. The Bolsheviks in Siberia, 1917-1918. London, 1977; N.G.O. Pereira. Lenin and the Siberian Peasant Insurrections // Yuri Slezkine and Galya Diment (Eds.). Between Heaven and Hell. The Myth of Siberia in Russian Culture. New York, 1993. Pp. 133-155; Idem. The Partisan Movement in Western Siberia, 1918-1920 // Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas. 1990. Bd. 38. Pp. 87-97. 83 Sergei A. Papkov (Ed.). Ural i Sibir’ v stalinskoi politike. Novosibirsk, 2002; L. V. Alekseeva. Nachalo kollektivizatsii na severe Zapadnoi Sibiri // Voprosy istorii. 2004. No. 2. Pp. 143-147.84 Egon Erwin Kisch. Zaren, Popen, Bolschewiken, China Geheim. Berlin, 1992.

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the words of Matthias Heeke,85 the Soviet Union was a tourist magnet, and we know of many enthusiastic accounts written by visitors to Moscow and other large-scale building sites of socialism. Tourists were much more prone to trust their first impression, unlike numerous immigrant-workers,86 who spent much more time in Magnitogorsk and Kuznetsk.87 The story of the American John Scott is well known. At the outbreak of the world economic crisis he was convinced that capitalism was doomed while the Soviet Union was a living utopia. So he decided to move to the USSR. However, it was not only the ideological and economic considerations that influenced his decision, but also the popular adaptation of the frontier theory of Frederick Jackson Turner. Scott believed that in Siberia the USSR would accomplish the mission that the tsars had failed to achieve: bringing civilization into the wilderness and pushing forward the frontier of progress. Thus, Siberia emerged in its familiar image as the land of the future and a space for self-realization.88 When Scott arrived at the “Magnetic Mountain,” he was impressed by the enthusiasm of the unskilled workers, many of whom just a year earlier had been hunters or fishermen without any special training. This genuine enthusiasm prompted Stephen Kotkin in his book, one of the first in the field of cultural history of Stalinism, to speak about the emergence of a particular type of civilization by the early 1930s.89 After a few years spent in Magnitogorsk, John Scott had become disillusioned with Soviet socialism. His initial enthusiasm faded away as improvements in living conditions on the construction site of socialism did not materialize. The workload was increasing and production efficiency remained low while terror intensified. With his Russian wife and their children he succeeded in returning to the

85 Matthias Heeke. Reisen zu den Sowjets: der ausländische Tourismus in Rußland, 1921-1941; mit einem bio-bibliographischen Anhang zu 96 deutschen Reiseautoren. Münster, 2003.86 “Kuzbass”. An Opportunity for Engineers and Workers. New York, 1922; Theo van Bernum. Fern in Sibirien. Ein Duisburger Hüttenarbeiter erzählt. Berlin, 1949.87 See Klaus Gestwa. Sowjetische Zukunfts- und Erinnerungslandschaften: Die “Sta-linschen Großbauten des Kommunismus” und die Schaffung eines neuen Zeit- und Raumbewußtseins // Stefan Kaufmann (Hg.). Ordnungen der Landschaft. Natur und Raum technisch und symbolisch entwerfen. Würzburg, 2002. S. 117-132; Idem. Technik als Kultur der Zukunft. Der Kult um die “Stalinschen Großbauten des Kommunismus” // Geschichte und Gesellschaft. 2004. Bd. 30. S. 37-73; Idem. Raum – Macht – Geschichte. Making Sense of Soviet Space // Osteuropa. 2005. Bd. 55. H. 3. Pp. 46-69.88 John Scott. Behind the Urals. An American Worker in Russia’s City of Steel. Bloom-ington, 1989.89 Stephen Kotkin. Magnetic Mountain. Stalinism as a Civilization. 2nd ed. Berkeley, 1997.

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J. Kusber, Mastering the Imperial Space: The Case of SiberiaUSA, where he (quite predictably) engaged in anticommunist activity and later became one of the founders of Radio Free Europe. In one respect Scott’s expectations were not incorrect: Siberia lived up to its promise of being the country of tomorrow. For those observers who did not sympathize with com-munist ideology (especially émigrés like Jurij Semenov90), the tremendous potential of Siberia was perceived as a menace.

An overall sympathetic account of a trip to Siberia was written by Otto Heller in 1930 under the title “Siberia as Another America.” Heller chose to take a route that, in his eyes (and the eyes of the Soviets), demonstrated the omnipotence of the socialist country in research and exploration. He traveled by ship on the Northern Route across the Arctic Ocean in a convoy led by icebreakers through the Kara Sea and the Yugor strait.91 The mission of the convoy was to establish a permanent sea route between Europe and Asia, capable of transporting raw materials and other products of Siberia. His description almost literally repeated the language of Soviet newspapers of the time, with phrases such as the “Soviet North.” Heller wrote:

My itinerary was not one of hasty passengers of express trains. I went through the polar sea by tundra and taiga. I saw the wilderness and the victorious humans who are defeating it once and forever. I knew the plans and statistics and I could evaluate the reports in reality. I saw the heart of Siberia. I became acquainted with its workers and its farmers. I spoke also with the exiles. Yes, I wrote this book with a certain opinion: the opinion that the future of the planet belongs to the workers and farmers. In Siberia proof will be given that they are able to bring an almost unexplored, wild world from its eternal sleep to life.92

In the Siberian space of the future nature cannot be defeated by technical means alone. Technology helps only when it is in the hands of people who

90 Jurij N. Semenov. Sibirien: Eroberung und Erschließung der wirtschaftlichen Schatz-kammer des Ostens. Berlin, 1954. See also: Boris Baievsky. Siberia. Its Ressources and Possibilities. Washington, 1926; Georg Cleinow. Neu-Sibirien. Sib-Krai. Eine Studie zum Aufmarsch der Sowjetmacht in Asien. Berlin, 1928; Rodger Swearingdon (Ed.). Siberia and the Soviet Far East: Strategic Dimensions in Multinational Perspective. Stanford, 1987. 91 On attempts to navigate through the Kara Sea in the nineteenth century see Dittmar Dahlmann. Handelsschiffahrt auf der Polarroute. Die Suche nach einer dauerhaften Schiffsverbindung zwischen den sibirischen Flussmündungen und den europäischen Häfen von der Mitte bis zum Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts // Bremer geographische Blät-ter. 2001. No. 1. S. 96-106.92 Otto Heller. Sibirien – ein anderes Amerika. Berlin, 1930. S. 76.

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have the necessary heroism and faith to face the challenge of space.93 To Heller, the indigenous peoples are part of uncivilized nature, which has to be tamed. They have to learn “urban behavior” overnight and give up their backwardness for the sake of the Soviet experiment, which was (although this was not always admitted explicitly at the time) an urban utopia. To quote from Heller’s account:

In June animals still feasted in the Port of Igarka because the town did not exist yet. In June workers began felling the forest with their bare hands. In July the first huts were built and seven hundred workers began wading through the mud. Boats brought wood and machines;overnight the landing stages and port office were knocked together. In August the GPU official marked the first visa into my passport: Border control Port Igarka, Siberia’s port, Siberia’s only port, Siberia’s gate to Europe and America. At the beginning of September a large fleet arrived where in June still the tents of the Tungus had stood: fourteen ocean ships, four steamships, riverboats, wooden barges, long boats, rafts... the bears fled into the taiga.94

The Soviets took up economic expansion, urbanization and large-scale migration to Siberia from the point at which things had been left prior to being interrupted by war and revolution. There was a similarity in expectations, projections, visions, and, of course, technology that was used to make these hopes come true. Again, as in the nineteenth century, Siberia embodied the future of the empire. It is amazing how the writings by European Russians, regionalists, European and American travelers resemble each other when they discuss the Siberian space and its meaning for the Russian Empire and Soviet Union.

conclusionIn conclusion it can be noted that since the early Muscovite expansion,

different authors writing about Siberia pursued different strategies in differ-ent times while presenting Siberian lands as an integral part of the empire. Among those who wrote about Siberia were local inhabitants and recent migrants,95 exiles96 and prisoners of war (including prisoners of the two world 93 For the background see Yuri Slezkine. From Savages to Citizens: The Cultural Revolu-tion in the Soviet North, 1928-1938 // Slavic Review. 1992. Vol. 51. No. 1. Pp. 52-76.94 Ibid.95 Kathleen Barnes. Soviets Promoting Migration to Siberia // Far Eastern Survey. 1939. Vol. 8. No. 25. Pp. 248-249.96 Andrew A. Gentes. Siberian Exile and the 1863 Polish Insurrectionists According to Rus-sian Sources // Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas. 2003. Bd. 51. H. 2. S. 197-217.

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J. Kusber, Mastering the Imperial Space: The Case of Siberiawars)97, foreign travelers and even those who had never visited Siberia per-sonally but nevertheless contributed to the formation of the image of Siberia. Alexander Pushkin, Jules Verne98 and the German writer Karl May belonged to the latter category.99 While individual circumstances, intellectual contexts and expectations varied we still can detect several main strategies of narra-tion, each of them sharing one or another basic perception of space:

1. Siberia as a colony.100 This trope reflected the strategies of colonizing Siberia and its indigenous peoples as employed by the Novgorod Republic, the Muscovite state and its adventurous Cossacks,101 and the St. Petersburg government. The colonization perspective was shared by exiles and local ethnic groups that experienced the pressure of Russian modernization during the imperial and Soviet periods.

2. Related to the former is the theory of Siberia as a frontier zone. Siberia was often compared to the American West both by local writers and outsid-ers.102 Exiled Decembrists, members of the Geographic Society, regionalists and some travelers wrote about Siberia as a frontier of “modernity” and “civilization” and directly or implicitly referred to America as a relevant reference point.103

3. The frontier of civilization could acquire a strategic meaning as the border protecting against the “yellow peril” of China104 or a desert area that

97 August von Kotzebue. Das merkwürdigste Jahr meines Lebens. Als Verbannter in Sibirien. Zürich, 1989; Heimito von Doderer. Der Grenzwald. 2. Aufl. München, 1995; Elsa Brandström. Unter Kriegsgefangenen in Rußland und Sibirien 1914-1920. Übers. Margarete Klante. Leipzig, 1927.98 Jules Verne. Michel Strogoff. Paris, 1875.99 Karl May. Zobeljäger und Kosak. Dresden, 1934.100 My understanding of colony here differs from the one advanced in Jörg Baberowski. Auf der Suche nach Eindeutigkeit: Kolonialismus und zivilisatorische Mission im Za-renreich und der Sowjetunion // Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas. 1999. Bd. 47. S. 482-504.101 Besides the work by Lantzeff, see recent studies: Christoph Witzenrath. Cossacks and the Russian Empire, 1598-1725: Manipulation, Rebellion and Expansion into Siberia. London, 2007; Idem. Die sibirischen Kosaken im institutionellen Wandel der Handels-Frontier // Andreas Kappeler (Hg.). Die Geschichte Rußlands im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert aus der Perspektive seiner Regionen. Wiesbaden, 2004. S. 395-415.102 This topic is well discussed in: A. D. Ageev. Sibir’ i amerkanskii zapad. Dvizhenie frontirov. Irkutsk, 2002.103 For the economic aspect of the problem see: Jack B. Pfeiffer. The Siberian Syndrome. Fact or Fiction // Pacific Historical Review. 1968. Vol. 37. No. 1. Pp. 83-95. 104 S.C.M. Paine. Imperial Rivals. China, Russia and Their Disputed Frontier. Armonk, 1998; Alexander Lukin. The Bear Watches the Dragon. Russia’s Perceptions of China and the Evolution of Russian-Chinese Relations since the Eighteenth Century. Armonk, 2003.

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should be populated at any cost.105 The Trans-Siberian railway seemed to be a strategic instrument of achieving these goals. These ideas became particularly prominent at the turn of the twentieth century.

4. Finally, there is a vision of Siberia as an inseparable part of greater Russia that does not have any distinctive cultural differences or specificity of its own. In this approach, Siberia simply mirrors Russia’s most funda-mental characteristics thus allowing one to understand Russian culture bet-ter.106 The exploration of Siberia is here interpreted as a fulfillment of the national civilizing mission. In the prose of Karamzin, the adventurer Yermak became a Russian hero personifying the process of national expansion and colonization,107 which would be later identified by Kliuchevskii as the main characteristic of Russian national history. This resulted in the narrative of imperial history being dominated by a Russian “national” perspective.108 Thus, Siberia became genuinely Russian soil.

In the course of the “second wave” of scientific explorations initiated by the Geographic Society in the middle of the nineteenth century, the Rus-sianness of Siberia was still understood largely in terms of imperial society and military interests. Alexander Middendorff and Nikolai Murav’ev were among those who shared these views.109 The “third wave” of scientific ex-ploration of Siberia took place in the 1920s, with Soviet ethnographers and regional historians studying the local peoples and arranging for their abrupt

105 Die Kolonisation Sibiriens. Eine Denkschrift von P. A. Stolypin und A.W. Kriwoschein. Berlin, 1912; Donald W. Treadgold. The Great Siberian Migration: Government and Peasant in Resettlement from Emancipation to the First World War. Princeton, 1957.106 This discourse have been examined from different vantage points by Claudia Weiss and Susi Frank. See Claudia Weiss. “Nash”, Appropriating Siberia for the Russian Empire // Sibirica. Interdisciplinary Journal of Siberian Studies. 2006. Vol. 5. No. 1. Pp. 141-155; Eadem. Representing the Empire: The Meaning of Siberia for Russian Imperial Identity // Nationalities Papers. 2007. Vol. 35. No. 3. Pp. 439-455; Susie Frank. Sibirien: Peripherie und anderes der russischen Kultur // “Mein Russland”: Literarische Konzeptualisierungen und kulturelle Projektionen. Beiträge der gleichnamigen Tagung vom 4. - 6. März 1996 in München. Wien, 1997. S. 357-381; Eadem. Reisen nach Sibirien: Zwischen Heterotopie und Topographie // KEA. 1999. H. 12. S. 113-136. 107 David Saunders. Historians and Concepts of Nationality in Early Nineteenth-Century Russia // Slavonic and East European Review. 1982. Vol. 60. No. 1. Pp. 44-62; Achim Beer. Nikolaj Karamzin und Nikolaj Polevoj. Ein Vergleich ihrer Überblickswerke zur russischen Geschichte / MA thesis, unpublished. Kiel, 2001.108 V. O. Kliuchevskii. Russkaia istoriia. Polnyi kurs lektsii. Vol. 1. Moscow,1993. Pp. 19-23. 109 See the recent biographical sketch by P. N. Zyrianov. Nikolai Nikolaevich Murav’ev-Amurskii // Voprosy Istorii. 2008. No. 1. Pp. 22-46.

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J. Kusber, Mastering the Imperial Space: The Case of Siberiaand often forceful modernization, as described by Otto Heller and numer-ous publications in the newspaper “Soviet North.” Many foreign observers approved of measures that promised a break with the legacy of Siberia as an infamous place of exile and hard labor imprisonment.110

Thus, the space of Siberia has been treated historically in terms of binary concepts. In the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries views of Siberia were conceptualized through the cultural discourse of the “Europe – Asia” divide, later on replaced by similarly contrasting notions of “core – periph-ery,” and “backwardness – modernity.” The inability of clear-cut binary models to account for the complexity and unevenness of Siberian space was felt by many observers writing about Siberia. At the same time, many latter-day theoretical conceptualizations of space do not take into account the authentic experience of Siberian space that people writing about Siberia in the past attempted to express. Therefore, the conceptual “mastering” of Siberian space and of the history of its physical exploration and appropria-tion remains a challenging task for historians.

summary

Автор начинает с обращения к новейшей рефлексии проблематики пространства в немецкой социальной и исторической мысли и излагает причины относительно позднего поворота немецких исследователей к набирающей популярность проблематике изучения воображаемой географии и пространственного мышления. Далее в статье рассматри-ваются варианты восприятия территории, присоединенной Московией в течение XVI–XVII вв., различными агентами в Российской империи и СССР. Среди агентов пространственного конструирования Сибири Кусбер выделяет представителей элит имперского центра, собствен-но сибирского населения, а также иностранных путешественников. Сибирские нарративы, анализируемые в статье, автор группирует по задаваемой ими модели интеграции сибирского пространства в империю: Сибирь как колония; Сибирь как зона фронтира; Сибирь как цивилизационная граница в модерном понимании; Сибирь как интегральная часть великой России.

110 See Sibirskaia ssylka (XIX-XX vv.): Sbornik nauchnykh statei. Irkutsk, 2003.