Exceptional Subjects: Koreans, Settler Colonialism, and Imperial Subjecthood in the Russian Far East, 1860s–1917

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Sergey Glebov

Abstract This article traces debates and policies of the Russian imperial administrators toward the Korean population in the Far Eastern provinces of the Russian Empire. Koreans were initially treated as de facto members of the peasant estate, and in the 1890s many were granted the status of Russian subjects. Yet the rise of settler colonialism and a nationalizing empire from the 1880s, and especially after the Russian revolution of 1905, complicated the issue of Korean subjecthood and led to policies that excluded Koreans from the regulations normally applicable to peasants, such as the right to increased land allotments. At the same time, the neotraditionalist approach to the management of difference in the empire was still present in the 1910s, albeit never clearly articulated to compete with the nationalizing idiom.

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-52
Author(s):  
Tanja Penter ◽  
Ivan Sablin

In early 1918, the Bolshevik-dominated Third Congress of Soviets declared the formation of a new composite polity—the Soviet Russian Republic. The congress’s resolutions, however, simultaneously proclaimed a federation of national republics and a federation of soviets. The latter seemed to recognize regionalism and localism as organizing principles on par with nationalism and to legitimize the self-proclaimed Soviet republics across the former Russian Empire. The current article compared two such non-national Soviet republics, those in Odessa and the Russian Far East. The two republics had similar roots in the discourses and practices of the Russian Empire, such as economic and de facto administrative autonomy. They also took similar organizational forms, were run by coalitions, and opposed their own inclusion into larger national and regional formations in Ukraine and Siberia. At the same time, both of the Soviet governments functioned as ad hoc committees and adapted their institutional designs and practices to the concrete—and very different—social and international conditions in the two peripheries. The focus of the Odessa and Far Eastern authorities on specific problems and their embeddedness in the peculiar contexts reflected the very idea of federalism as governance based on decentralization and nuance but contradicted the party-based centralization and the exclusivity of the ethno-national federalism in the consolidated Soviet state.


Author(s):  
E.S. Burdin ◽  

After the start of Korean migration to Russia in 1864, the Russian authorities began to make attempts to formalize the legal status of the arrived migrants in order to protect them from persecution by the Korean government and its patron China. Areas of compact residence of Korean immigrants were separated into a separate administrative-territorial unit – Suifun District, where the post of “head of Koreans” was established. Separate elements of local self-government were introduced in the Korean settlements. After the establishment of official diplomatic relations with Korea in 1884, the problem of the legal status of Korean migrants in Russia became one of the important topics on the agenda of Russian-Korean negotiations. Due to its decision, Petersburg wanted to stop the uncontrolled transfer of the population from Korea to the Russian Far East and prevent the unauthorized seizure of state lands by Korean settlers. In 1888, the Russian authorities managed to partially resolve the issue of citizenship of the Korean settlers who settled in Russia. From now on, measures to formalize their legal status were carried out on the basis of the norms of the Russian-Korean convention on border relations of 1888, as well as an oral (gentleman's) agreement between K.I. Weber and Kim Yun Sik. An agreement was reached that the Koreans who settled in Russia before the establishment of Russian-Korean diplomatic relations were recognized as equal with Russian subjects. Migrants who settled in the region after the conclusion of this agreement were to liquidate their farms and return to their homeland. The issue of the status of Korean immigrants was finally settled only in 1900. Russian citizenship was granted to all migrants, including those who resettled after 1884. The author comes to the conclusion that the Far Eastern authorities initially perceived the Korean settlers who settled in the South Ussuriysk Territory as subjects of Russia, but could not provide them with all the benefits in accordance with Russian law, since such a step could cause protests from Korea and China.


1978 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 307-330 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lewis H. Siegelbaum

The description provided by John Foster Fraser, a British journalist wandering through Siberia and Manchuria in the autumn of 1901, is of Khabarovsk, a town of some fifteen thousand people. Such scenes were not peculiar to Khabarovsk at the turn of the century, but could be witnessed in other towns throughout the Russian Far East such as Chita, Blagoveshchensk, Nikol'sk-Ussuriiskii, and Vladivostok. Who were these ‘weak, withered-faced’ Chinese that one was likely to encounter? What were they doing within the boundaries of the Russian Empire? What were the attitudes of the Russian population towards the Chinese and what policies did the provincial and central authorities adopt with respect to them?


Slavic Review ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 77 (2) ◽  
pp. 333-357
Author(s):  
Ivan Sablin ◽  
Daniel Sukhan

Tracing the emergence of the Russian Far East as a new region of the Russian Empire, revolutionary Russia, and the Soviet Union through regionalist and imperialist discourses and policies, this article briefly discusses Russian expansion in the Pacific littoral, outlines the history of regionalism in North Asia during the revolutionary and early Soviet periods, and focuses on the activities of the Far Eastern Council of People's Commissars (Dal΄sovnarkom), the Far Eastern Republic (FER), and the Far Eastern Revolutionary Committee (Dal΄'revkom). Inspired by Siberian regionalism and other takes on post-imperial decentralization, the Bolshevik Aleksandr Mikhailovich Krasnoshchekov and other regional politicians became the makers of the new region from within. Meanwhile, the legacies of the empire's expansionism, the Bolshevik “new imperialism” in Asia, and the Japanese military presence in the region during the Russian Civil War accompanied the consolidation of the Russian Far East.


2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-62
Author(s):  
A. N. Starostin ◽  
R. N. Pavlinova

The article is devoted to a poorly studied problem of an ethnic shape of Muslims of the island of Sakhalin on materials of the First General Population Census of the Russian Empire in 1897. The island was the place of penal servitude where criminals from all the Russian Empire served their penalties. It resulted in a motley ethno-confessional structure of its population significantly differing from the other regions of the Russian Far East. The number of Muslims was rather considerable and exceeded the number of brothers in faith in the other Far East regions. Based on the census data analysis their gender, age and social structure is reconstructed.


2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 216-242
Author(s):  
V.A. Yakimova ◽  
A.A. Orekhova

Subject. The article addresses the tax liabilities of taxpayers registered in the subjects of the Far Eastern Federal District, which should be paid to the consolidated budget of the Russian Federation, as well as the factors of the said debt growth. Objectives. Our aim is to assess the level of tax debt of regions of the Russian Far East and identify the correlation between the factors and the amount of tax debt. Methods. The study rests on methods of analysis, generalization, grouping, systematization, and the correlation and regression analysis. Results. We analyzed the level of tax debt for the entire Far Eastern Federal District and by region, identified factors affecting the growth of tax debt therein. The paper assesses the structure of tax debt by type of taxes and activity of debtors. The unveiled factors may help control changes in the size of tax debt in the Russian Far East and develop effective measures to improve the debt collection. Conclusions. The study shows that there is an increase in the tax debt in the regions of the Russian Far East, in the VAT in particular. The factor analysis revealed that the volume of sales of wholesale enterprises, investment in fixed capital, the consumer price index have the largest impact on the amount of tax debt.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ol'ga Nikolaychuk

The monograph presents the search for solutions to the problems of the Far Eastern region. The proximity of China and the remoteness from the center of Russia make us look for effective measures to overcome the problems of settling the Far East in the context of sustainable economic development of modern Russia. The paper analyzes the problems of the Far East: in industry, agriculture, forestry, energy problems, environmental problems, and provides recommendations for their solution. Considerable attention is paid to migration problems. The experience of China is studied through the prism of bilateral cooperation with Russia. It is intended for students, masters, postgraduates, researchers dealing with issues of macroeconomic regulation and forecasting.


2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 902-916
Author(s):  
Yury D. Shmidt ◽  
Natalya V. Ivashina

The present paper analyses migration policy measures implemented in the Russian Far East, namely, State Programme to Assist the Voluntary Resettlement of Compatriots Living Abroad to the Russian Federation, the Far-Eastern Hectare Programme, establishment of Priority Development Areas (PDAs) and territories with a special regime of economic activity. The synthetic control method was applied to quantitatively assess how the adopted measures affect the migration outflow from regions of the Far Eastern Federal District. According to this method and relevant statistics, constituent entities of the Far Eastern Federal District were compared with control regions of the Siberian Federal District, where these policy tools have not been introduced. Comparable areas had similar socio-economic development trends and migration flows in the period preceding the implementation of the state programmes. To analyse the impact of migration policy changes in 2011–2018, the difference between outflow values of the Far Eastern and synthetic control regions was calculated. The results showed that the average estimated values are negative and significantly different from zero. This indicates a positive effect of new migration mitigation measures on reducing the outflow from the Russian Far East. Future research will separately assess the effectiveness of each migration policy tool implemented in the Far Eastern Federal District.


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