Research interest in the Russian Far East is not a new phenomenon. However, the relatively sparsely populated region, with changing borderlines over time, today one third of the Russian territory representing only five percent of the country’s population and GDP, has always been seen as a periphery and as “far” from Europe. The conference that is reported here, was part of an effort undertaken by several Russian, German and American institutions, not least by the co-organizing German Historical Institute’s working group and network project “Russia’s North Pacific,” to change this image and to re-centre the Russia’s Far East, North Pacific and eastern Siberia by cross-border and transregional perspectives. Thus, it combined many of the most recent approaches to history – transregional and global history, environmental history, new imperial history and its biographical turn, postcolonial approaches with a tendency towards provincializing Europe, combinations of economic with cultural history, concepts of multi-polarity of identities, and the spatial turn. It has shown to what extent international historiography has moved away from methodological nationalism, traditional maps-and-chaps-approaches and eurocentrism. The timeline itself underlined very much the de-centering character of the topic itself – while the Corona-Virus hinders academics to travel and gather physically, it makes conference participants familiar to what it means to integrate a span of time zones from Berkeley through Bielefeld to Vladivostok into a collective conversation.

The keynote panel was opened by the Head of the Center for Asia-Pacific Studies of the Far Eastern Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences VIKTOR LARIN (Vladivostok), who asked for the basic forces that move the region. The central player historically, in his view, was and still is the central Russian government, while local identities and politics as well as players from neighbouring regions outside Russia have less influence. Nevertheless, Moscow lacks a clear strategy and sustainable interest for the Russian Far East, as Larin argued. The region is only paid attention to in the face of threats for territorial integrity, and is rather forgotten when these threats are alleviated.

BAO MAOHONG (Beijing) analysed the state of studies of the Russian Far East in China and interpreted them to be closely linked to the political conjunctures of Sino-Russian/Soviet relations. Ultimately however, Far Eastern Studies in China pluralised thematically deviating from former topics of interstate relations and Russian expansionism to thematic fields of development, environment, gender, cultural exchange, migration, and indigenous culture.

In accordance to this shift in Chinese research on the region, SERGEY GLEBOV (Amherst) sees the Russian Far East generally at the “forefront of many conceptual conversations historians are having today”. He identified three crucial developments and features that crystallised in the region at the time of its incorporation into the Russian empire: how the region was set into global geographic imaginaries, the relation between state and its subjects, and the emergence of race as a major category of difference. That the Far East’s incorporation into the Tsarist Empire concurred with the period of the Great reforms is the background of its particular role in modernisation processes. Due to this, as Glebov argued, central protagonists of Russian rule in the Far East imagined it as a space beyond the ancien régime.

DAVID WOLFF (Sapporo) posed the question how Russia’s several “turns towards the East” in history influenced its domestic Far East. Identifying various eastward turns after the Crimean War, around 1900, the first Soviet five-year plans, the oil boom in the 1970s, and in recent years, he argued that the impact for the Far East was minor, and depended highly on the complexities of relations with the West and Moscow’s political needs.

The second panel was aimed at positioning the Far East in the contexts of geopolitics, development designs, and regional practices. ANASTASIIA IGNATENKO (Vladivostok) presented her analysis of the place of the Korean Peninsula in the political institutions of the Russian Empire in the late 19th/early 20th century, concentrating on the mental mapping of the region and conflicting imaginaries of the “land” and “sea” boundaries. Having presented the analysis of the policy-making process in the Russian Far East, Ignatenko stressed the institutional background of the controversies that resulted in the political crisis and Russo-Japanese War of 1904/05.

ANNA SAVCHUK (Vladivostok) suggested gender imbalance as a key factor in the failure of the penal colonisation model in the Sakhalin Island. Designed as a useful tool of ensuring Russian presence in the scarcely populated and politically contested region, by the end of the 19th century penal colonisation became perceived as an ineffective and immoral practice. This happened largely as a result of spreading knowledge about the poor conditions of women in the Sakhalin, as well as due to the spread of ideas about alternative models of penal organisation.

ANATOLIJ SAVČENKO (Vladivostok) moved listeners’ attention to the last quarter of the 20th century. He offered a view on the development of the Russian Far East as a challenge typical for developing countries. In particular, he suggested to interpret the Soviet policy of industrial development in the Baikal-Amur railroad zone as the result of the rethinking of the Soviet Union’s role in the world economy and the transition to deeper economic cooperation with the capitalist countries of the Asia-Pacific region, primarily Japan. At the same time, the results of the new strategy were moderate and revealed not only the financial but also the technological dependency of the late Soviet Union on the capitalist countries.

Finally, SEBASTIAN HOPPE (Berlin) presented a longue durée perspective on special economic zones in the Russian Far East within Tsarist, Soviet, and post-Soviet pivots to Asia. He argued that several patterns observable in contemporary Far Eastern special economic zones development were also in place in previous historical formations. Particularly, a recurring and twofold trait of state-induced opening and geopolitically motivated securitisation of development is shared by the 21st century Special Economic Zone projects, free port regimes in the Primorye region from the 1860s to the 1900s, and early Soviet concession strategies in the Far East from 1918 to 1930.

In the third panel, RUSSELL VALENTINO (Bloomington) delivered a speech about imagined geographies and the specifics of place in the Russian Far East. He put different approaches of Far Easterners to define themselves (through highlighting the Russianness or through distancing themselves from the central authorities) in a comparative perspective. This helped him to show that it is not the physical distance that makes given descriptive patterns relevant but a perceived one. Moreover, the analysis of these patterns offers a perspective on the Russian Far East Place as a potential “non-place,” or a place defined through the distinction from other places. At the same time Valentino stressed the necessity of adopting different perspectives that would allow the elaboration of a more positive understanding of the Russian Far East.

IVAN GOLOVNEV (St. Petersburg) continued the discussion by offering rich material on the images of the Russian Far East in the visual documents of the 1920-1930s. Having made a review of several film documents that captured various cinematic images of the Russian Far East, he claimed that the role of cinematography consisted primarily in fixing and broadcasting the image of various colonisation capacities of the region, starting from natural resources to the socio-cultural "capital" of the region. Depiction of local ethnic communities served the idea of the need to "re-educate" the indigenous peoples, which serves as the example of the continuity between the late imperial and early Soviet traditions of describing local ethnic diversity.

The fourth panel expanded on the cornerstone issue of the local Far Eastern identities. ASYA KARASEVA (St. Petersburg) and MARIA MOMZIKOVA (Tartu) acquainted the listeners with the everyday life of the Far Easterners in the conditions of space-time inequality that appears in relations between the region and central Russia. Having demonstrated particular examples obtained during field studies in Vladivostok and Magadan, they convincingly showed that "space compression" (a result of the influence of synchronous communication technologies) in a centralised and geographically extended state, does not lead to rapprochement, but the formation of new distances. The authors find an explanation for this fascinating and non-obvious observation in the historical and socio-economic contexts in which transformations of space take place.

DOMINIC MARTIN (New Haven) presented an ethnographic essay about a group of “active youth” in the Far Eastern monotown of Bolshoi Kamen, Primorskii Kray, which has pioneered a new type of ecological tourism there. Having analysed their biographical background and recent socio-economic changes in the city, he argued that this group has reactivated an imagined possible future for the city that was never realised in practice, but which was envisaged by their parents during perestroika and the 1990s. This might be seen as an adaptation to the uncertain futures that have been opened up by the liberalisation and differential development of Bolshoi Kamen.

TATIANA ZHURAVSKAYA (Vladivostok) presented prominent results of a study of extralegal labor of Far Easterners in South Korea. The design of the study is of great interest for research on development projects, since the case of the Russian Far East is a situation in which a specific discourse about development meets the neoliberal ethics of the global market. In contrast to the well-established ideas about the role of development projects in the depoliticisation of poverty, Zhuravskaya proposed to consider the Far Eastern case as an example of how the issue of equitable distribution of resources is being re-politicised in the regional context of cross-border interactions. Experience of working in South Korea as low-skilled workers with higher wages than can be obtained in Russia neutralises the potential political effects from the implementation of development projects in the Far East and stimulates the rethinking of the self, the region, and of the protagonists’ own position.

The fifth panel tackled imperial biographies and how they played out in the Russian Far East. The presentations both looked at actors involved in the infrastructures of extraction in Eastern Siberia, the papers and discussion focused on the protagonists’ multiple identifications. IRENA VLADIMIRSKY (Gedera) and MARIA KROTOVA (St. Petersburg) retraced the life-story of a Jewish gold mining entrepreneur in Siberia, reconstructed through his uniquely rich personal archive. Siberia in their paper appeared as a sort of frontier region, where actors like Yakov Frizer maintained border crossing networks and upheld fragile, multiple identities between entrepreneurship, Siberian networks and patronage, mutual beneficial relations with the central state, and a Jewish community legally discriminated against.

DAQING YANG followed the trajectories of geologists in the Russian Far East through the massive political changes of Russian revolution and civil war. While some of the protagonists stayed in the Soviet Union others went into exile in bordering regions, mostly in Harbin and later Japanese-occupied Manchuria. As an outstanding example of how these scientists adapted to changing contexts and upheld hybrid identities, Yang advanced the biography of the director of the Far Eastern Branch of the Russian Committee on Geology, Eduard Ahnert, who, born in a German-speaking family in Tsarist Poland, after the Revolution became the “father of Manchurian geology” working for the Japanese empire.

The sixth panel was aimed at disentangling the relations between the environment, natural resources, and identity in the Far Eastern context. SPENCER ABBE (Eugene) examined the historical development of Kamchatka. According to him, while pre-imperial North Pacific civilisations were less vulnerable to natural hazards due to decentralised populations and social structure, high mobility, and diversified subsistence economies, the reorganisation of space, people, and infrastructure by European empires and their successor states in the North Pacific produced greater vulnerability to the natural hazards over time by concentrating people and infrastructure in hazardous areas.

ROBERT KINDLER (Berlin) delivered an insightful story about what has happened when the fur seal trade on the Commander Islands lost its economic significance in the early 20th century. Attempts to establish new and sustainable economic sectors on the Commander Islands (such as the case of mink farm creation in the 1960s) in practice created new economic and environmental problems. In an attempt to understand how Russian and Soviet officials tried to control this difficult situation, he found out that both political regimes had to resort to substantial subsidies.

RYAN TUCKER JONES (Eugene) unfolded the history of the Soviet whaling in Vladivostok. He shared several ideas about the role of the whaling industry in the construction of local identities. Having shown a number of examples of how Vladivostok’s wealth was related with the whaling business, the author underlined the long history of thinking about the ecological problems and even protesting against the expansion of the Soviet whaling industry. This tradition developed in the Russian Far East and had a changing effect on the local sentiments about the whaling industry.

The seventh panel about Sino-Russian encounters showed the extent to which racism and ethnicised forms of domination are transnational phenomena. STEPHANIE ZIEHAUS (Wien) analysed how indigenous modes of governance were incorporated into imperial domination. Looking at the Amur region turning from an open multi-ethnic borderland into an imperial hinterland in the 19th century, she highlighted parallels between the Qing and Russian Tsarist empire in this respect.

SÖREN URBANSKY (Berkeley) reported from his rich empirical material about the ethnicised prostitution branch in Vladivostok at the turn of the century and the fate of Chinese women working there. Putting the fate of these people into the context of what happened at other global port cities (San Francisco and Singapur) with Chinese communities similar by size, he showed that these communities were confronted with a similar racism.

LJUDMILA LISTROVAYA (Eugene) examined the discourse in Russia blaming China and the Chinese for Deforestation in Far East Russia. She identified long-standing modes of thinking and anti-Chinese narratives as the background of this discourse. These narratives were reinforced by governmental political tendencies such as, 60 years ago, in the context of the Sino-Soviet split and, nowadays, the Russian Federation’s struggle for defining its position in the global order.

The last panel dealt with the role of markets, transregional trading networks and national politics for regional settings and identities. The presentations and the panel discussion combined the large strands of cultural and economic history on the one hand and local and global perspectives on the other. FRANK GRÜNER (Bielefeld) examined late 19th/early 20th century Vladivostok as the Far East’s marketplace. He carved out interconnections between the city’s globalising port and free port status on the on hand and the urban society and local trade structures on the other.

TOBIAS HOLZLEHNER (Halle-Wittenberg) compared the spatial patterns of the two border regions Chukotka and Primor’e, with the former being a sparsely populated mountain region at Russia’s northern pacific coast and the latter comprising several urban metropolitan areas being located next to the coastal line and at the land-border with China. By looking at spatial and economic practices, he highlighted a tension between remoteness and global flows and showed how local populations manage to turn borderland situations into a resource.

PARK GYUN-HWI (Seoul) analysed local responses to Putin’s “pivot to East.” As giant investment projects came along with regulations hindering cross-border exchanges with neighbouring Japan and China local livelihood depended upon, the centre’s policy produced mixed reactions. Not least, negative attitudes towards Moscow’s development policies culminated in mass protests in Vladivostok against the ban on the import of Japanese used cars in 2013.

In the final discussion, Benjamin Beuerle identified two main recurring themes in the contributions: The first of these topics were the multiple and hybrid character of Far Eastern identities, which were connected to imperial state projects and the region’s character as a borderland. As second recurring theme Beuerle named development designs, mostly from the imperial centre(s), producing unintended results that could not be understood without examining local agency and structures. The discussion underlined the persistent importance of the imperial centre(s), mostly “Moscow”, as well as the influences of globalisation. Anatolij Savčenko pointed out a clear desideratum: the conference showed many research interests still to be concentrated on the imperial phase until the 1920s, while the latter part of the 20th century and the Cold War are still underrepresented. This leaves a vast space for future research. One might also add that the region’s specificities and variability in terms of space, from vastness to borderland character, from free ports to closed cities, enable the field to contribute substantially to discussions and theory-production on space and spatialisation as social practice. The research on Russia’s Far East should move from the margin to the centre of the debate of (global, universal or “normal”) history.

Conference overview:

Welcome by the organisers

Andreas Renner (Ludwig Maximilians University, Munich), Benjamin Beuerle (German Historical Institute Moscow) and Sandra Dahlke (German Historical Institute Moscow): Conceptual outline of the conference, project “Russia´s North Pacific”

Keynote panel
Chair: Nikolai Kradin (Institute of History, Archaeology and Ethnology of the Peoples of the Far-East; Far Eastern Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Vladivostok)

Victor Larin (Far Eastern Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Vladivostok): Pacific Russia in the Cross-hair of Interests and Policies: the Deviations of the 21st Century

Bao Maohong (Peking University): Russian Far East studies in China

Sergey Glebov (Smith College / Amherst College): Why the Russian Far East Should be Interesting for a Historian: Perspectives from New Imperial History

David Wolff (Slavic-Eurasian Research Center, Hokkaido University, Sapporo): A Swing of the Pendulum: East and West and the Russian Far East in Modern Russian History

Panel 2. The Far East between Geopolitics, Development Designs and Regional Practices
Chair: Ekaterina Boltunova (Higher School of Economics, Moscow)

Anastasiia Ignatenko (Institute of History, Archaeology and Ethnology of the Peoples of the Far-East; Far Eastern Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Vladivostok): The Korean Peninsula in the Political Institutions of the Russian Empire in the Late 19th–Early 20th Centuries: A View from the Center and the Region

Anna Savchuk (Far Eastern Federal University, Vladivostok): The Gender Aspect of the Forced Colonization of Sakhalin Island (1869–1906)

Anatolij Savčenko (Institute of History, Archaeology and Ethnology of the Peoples of the Far-East; Far Eastern Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Vladivostok): The Development Policy of the Russian Far East in the Last Quarter of the 20th Century as a Problem of Dependent Development

Sebastian Hoppe (Free University, Berlin / Friedrich Schiller University, Jena): Uplifting the Hinterland with Outside Help. A Historical Perspective on “Special Economic Zones” in the Russian Far East within Tsarist, Soviet and post-Soviet Pivots to Asia

Discussant: Sergei Pestsov (Institute of History, Archaeology and Ethnology of the Peoples of the Far-East; Far Eastern Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Vladivostok)

Panel 3. Films, Literature and Ethnography
Chair: Andreas Hilger (German Historical Institute Moscow)

Russell Valentino (Indiana University, Bloomington): Imagined Geographies and Specifics of Place in the Russian Far East

Ivan Golovnev (Kunstkamera, Saint Petersburg): Images of the Russian Far East in Film Documents of the 1920s–1930s

Discussant: Ekaterina Boltunova (Higher School of Economics, Moscow)

Panel 4. Local Far Eastern Identities
Chair: Sandra Dahlke

Asya Karaseva (European University Saint Petersburg) / Maria Momzikova (University of Tartu, Estonia): New Remoteness of the Russian Far East. Tactics of Everyday Life in Space-Time Inequality Conditions in Vladivostok and Magadan

Dominic Martin (Yale University): Experimenting with a Post-Fordist Future in a Far Eastern Monotown. Orthodox “Extreme Ecotourism”

Tatiana Zhuravskaya (Economic Research Institute of Far Eastern Branch of the RAS; Far Eastern Federal University, Vladivostok): Extralegal Labor of Far Easterners in South Korea: Freedom of Choice and Returning Home

Discussant: Joonseo Song (Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Seoul)

Panel 5. Actors and Biographies between Far East, Center and Abroad
Chair: Benjamin Beuerle

Irena Vladimirsky (Achva Academic College) / Maria Krotova (St. Petersburg State University of Economics): Far Eastern Biographies between Regionalism and Internationalism. Yakov Frizer (1869–1932): a Jew, a Gold Entrepreneur, a Philanthrope and a Russian Patriot

Daqing Yang (George Washington University, Washington DC): Russian Far Eastern Scientists in the Transnational Circulation of Knowledge. From Dal’geolkom to Manchuria and Beyond

Discussant: Tatiana Saburova (Indiana University, Bloomington)

Panel 6. Far Eastern Natural Resources, Identity and the Environment
Chair: Tatiana Saburova

Spencer Abbe (University of Oregon, Eugene): “The Tsunami Has No Borders:” Environmental Contingency, Empire, and the Production of Vulnerability in Kamchatka

Robert Kindler (Humboldt University, Berlin): After the Fur Seal. Economy, Environment and Sustainability on the Commander Islands, 1900–1991

Ryan Jones (University of Oregon, Eugene): Soviet Whaling in Vladivostok. Between Far Eastern Identity and Global Tensions

Discussant: Benjamin Beuerle

Panel 7. Sino-Russian Encounters
Chair: Ivan Zuenko (Institute of History, Archaeology, and Ethnology of the Peoples of the Far East; Far Eastern Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Vladivostok)

Stephanie Ziehaus (University of Vienna / Palacky University of Olomouc): Cultural Transfer and Empire Building in the Sino-Russian Borderland in the 19th Century

Sören Urbansky (German Historical Institute Washington): Sex and the City: Interracial Intimacy in Turn of the Century Vladivostok

Liudmila Listrovaya (University of Oregon, Eugene): “The Chinese logged everything”. Culture, Collective Cognition and Historical Trauma in Russian Deforestation Discourse

Discussant: Anna Kuteleva (Higher School of Economics, Moscow)

Panel 8. Markets, Trading Networks and (Trans)regional Identity
Chair: Anatolij Savčenko

Frank Grüner (Bielefeld University): Russia’s Far Eastern Marketplace. Transnational/-Regional Trade and Urban Dynamics in Vladivostok, 1880s to 1917

Tobias Holzlehner (Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg): Borderland Brokers. A Comparative Approach to Informal Trading Networks in the Russian Far East

Hyun-Gwi Park (Kyung Hee University, Seoul): After Putin’s Turn to East. The Russian Far East in Double Blind

Discussant: Andreas Hilger

Final discussion / outlook