Mark Bassin, Imperial Visions: Nationalist Imagination and Geographical Expansion in the Russian Far East, 1840–1865. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999, xv, 329 pp. + maps.

Extract

For the Russians, Siberia has always been “Other” and, as a result, it has often been imagined as something other than what it is. As Mark Bassin argues in this richly detailed book, this habit of the Russian imaginaire was on full display during the mid-1800s when hopeful Russian observers and statesmen envisioned the Russian Empire's latest territorial acquisition—the Amur river in far eastern Siberia—as a new Mississippi and the region around it as a potential second America. Ultimately, of course, these geographical analogies proved well off the mark. The region of the Amur never went on to experience the prosperity of the United States and the Amur river never even remotely rivaled the importance of the Mississippi as an artery of trade and settlement. And what is so interesting about all this is that the Russians themselves began to have their doubts about the Amur within just a few years of annexing it. Bassin's work, in fact, concentrates on explaining this strange shift. It is a study of why the Russian vision of the Amur that began so hot ended up turning so cold so quickly and what the vision itself seems to reveal about the content of Russian national identity.