Sibirica

Vladimir Klavdeevich Arsen'ev is one of the best-known figures of the Russian Far East, and yet the scholarly literature—particularly in English—on his historical significance is surprisingly thin. Literary scholars, drawn by Arsen'ev's famous novel Dersu Uzala, and cinema scholars, intrigued by Akira Kurosawa's masterful film adaptation of that work, have most critically engaged with the Russian polymath's work (Arsen'ev was, after all, a military officer, an explorer, an author, an ethnographer, a bureaucrat, and more). Much more rarely have scholars assessed Arsen'ev's important role as an actor in and commentator on Russian colonization in the Far East. This special collection of articles in Sibirica makes a start at that assessment, identifying several areas where a study of Arsen'ev's life and writings can illuminate important aspects of the region's early twentieth-century history.

The article is devoted to the famous explorer and writer Vladimir Klavdievich Arsen'ev (1872–1930). He arrived in the Russian Far East in 1900, where he conducted numerous research expeditions and engaged in a comprehensive study of the Far East. Arsen'ev studied the lives of the region's indigenous peoples and published several books, Dersu Uzala being the most famous one. This article is based on Arsen'ev's personal archives, which are stored in Vladivostok. The article chronicles his life in the Soviet period. It also discusses the punishment of his wives and children.

The article describes the life and work of Vladimir Klavdievich Arsen'ev in the context of the development of settler colonial project in the Far East. The article argues that Arsen'ev, a military officer and a self-taught geographer and ethnographer, shared in a political ecology, which combined “defense” of native peoples and the nature of the Russian Far East with racialized views of Chinese and Korean immigrants. This political ecology, in particular, led Arsen'ev to take part in military operations designed to cleanse remote parts of the Ussuri region of the Chinese and to develop administrative proposals on the governance of native peoples, which foreshadowed Soviet projects.

The article explores Vladimir Arsen'ev's rationalization of the economic activities that he observed during expeditions in the Russian Far East, predominantly in the Ussuri region. It analyzes his categorization of the local population, which was derived from nonmatching taxonomies and included concepts such as nationality, religion, race, and subjecthood. Disentangling this categorization helps to outline the main contexts that influenced Arsen'ev, such as postwar political and military concerns, challenges of settler colonialism, and nationalizing empire. The article shows how Arsen'ev's intertwined life experiences as a military officer and geographer, colonization official, ethnographer, and resource-conscious naturalist outlined the limits of his imagination and provided the ground for his intellectual innovations.

This article examines the contributions the famous Far Eastern writer Vladimir Arsen'ev made to the development of the Russian/Soviet whaling industry in the 1920s. During that time Arsen'ev worked as a “specialist for marine mammal hunting” for Dal'rybokhota. He studied the whales of the Russian Far East and helped craft the Far Eastern Republic's policy toward its subjects who wanted to start whaling. As someone with a deep knowledge of imperial-era environmental destruction and conservation, Arsen'ev helped develop measures designed to protect the region's Indigenous people and fur-bearing animals while strengthening Russian sovereignty. He also advocated the wholesale slaughter of killer whales and ultimately failed to restrain destructive commercial whaling. However, in addition to adding a new chapter to Arsen'ev's biography, his ideas about whales and whaling help us better understand the Far East's environment history and especially the way imperial-era ideas around conservation survived into the Soviet period.

In 1900, Vladimir Arsen'ev arrived in a remote corner of the Russian Empire on the cusp of significant change. Forests in the Ussuri Kray (now Primorskiy Kray, or Primorye) were wild, wildlife was abundant, and the human population was low. Twenty-one years later, after witnessing a sustained influx of settlers and a reduction of wildlife, in his introduction to Across the Ussuri Kray [Po Ussuriiskomy kraiu], a travelogue about his experiences in the region, Arsen'ev mourned the passing of this unique time and place. This article outlines Arsen'ev's contributions to our understanding of Primorye's wildlife in the early twentieth century, describes what led to the reductions in wildlife he witnessed and offers a summary of how wildlife and wilderness look in the region today.

The Third International and Interdisciplinary Conference about the Tungus “Social Interactions, Languages, Landscapes in Siberia and China (Evenki, Evens, Orochons and Other Groups)” was organized by the Amur Region State University (Blagoveshchensk, Russia) and other coorganizers on June 14–16, 2019. The conference was devoted to the study of Tungus peoples from different standpoints and scientific/theoretical approaches. It demonstrated the vivid interest of researchers from many countries all over the world to the discussed topics. One of the main distinctions of this particular event was the resourceful and multifaceted intercommunication between scholars, indigenous people, and local authorities.

Aileen E. Friesen, Colonizing Russia's Promised Land: Orthodoxy and Community on the Siberian Steppe (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020), xiii + 224 pp., index, illustrations (black and white), map. $48.75 (cloth). ISBN: 978-1-4426-3719-1.

Alex Oehler and Anna Varfolomeeva, eds., Multispecies Households in the Saian Mountains: Ecology at the Russia-Mongolia Border (Lanham: Lexington Books; 1 edition, 2019), 296 pages. Hardcover, $95.00. ISBN: 9781793602534.