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Address:
190068 Saint Petersburg
123 Griboedov channel, Room 123
Phone:+7 (812)786-92-49
Postal address:
190068 Saint Petersburg
123 Griboedov channel
The Department of History was created in 2012. The overarching goal of the department is systematic development of the field of global, comparative, and transnational history as a potent tool of overcoming the limitations of national history canon, fostering interdisciplinary dialogue in the field of social sciences and humanities, and brining new public relevance to historical knowledge. The department mission includes the development of new type of historical undergraduate and graduate education in Russia and pioneering new research fields in Russian historiography in dialogue with the global historical profession.
De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2025.
In press
Nedopekina A.
Laboratorium: Russian Review of Social Research. 2024. Vol. 16. No. 1. P. 130-134.
In bk.: Revolutionary Biographies in the 19th and 20th Centuries: Imperial – Inter/national – Decolonial. Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2024. P. 17-34.
Khvalkov E., Levin F., Кузнецова А. Д.
Working Papers of Humanities. WP. Издательский дом НИУ ВШЭ, 2021
Address:
190068 Saint Petersburg
123 Griboedov channel, Room 123
Phone:+7 (812)786-92-49
Postal address:
190068 Saint Petersburg
123 Griboedov channel
Writing and representing the Russian Conquest of Central Asia
Alexander Morrison is Professor of History at Nazarbayev University in Astana, Kazakhstan. In 2007–2013 he was Lecturer in Imperial History at the University of Liverpool. In 2000–2007 he was Prize Fellow of All Souls College, University of Oxford, where he completed his PhD thesis “Russian Rule in Samarkand 1868–1910: A Comparison with British India.” This work was published under the same title by Oxford University Press in 2008. Alexander Morrison is currently writing a history of the Russian conquest of Central Asia.
Russian literature and empire has proved a burgeoning field over the last thirty years, emerging in parallel with an ‘imperial turn’ in historiography which has led to a welcome focus on Tsarist Russia as a multi-ethnic state. However, while historical writing on Russian encounters with non-Russian peoples has been fairly evenly spread between the Western Borderlands, the Caucasus, the Volga-Ural Region, Siberia and Central Asia, literary scholarship is inevitably dominated by Russia’s intense cultural relationship with the Caucasus, a region that captured the Russian romantic imagination like no other. As Susan Layton has noted, ‘The conquest produced a vast literary Caucasus’, and Katya Hokanson has argued for the crucial role of this encounter in forging a sense of Russian narodnost’ in the 19th century, but in Central Asia, the site of 19th century Russia’s other great encounter with the Muslim world and the exotic Asian ‘other’, there was apparently no corresponding impact on the public or even the elite literary consciousness. While Vasilii Vereshchagin's Central Asian canvases provided vivid visual representations of Russian expansion in the region, no author ever became as synonymous with Russian imperialism in Central Asia: there was no Central Asian Lermontov, and no Russian Kipling. However, despite the lack of a 'high' literary tradition, there was in fact a rich legacy of Russian writing on the conquest of Central Asia in the form of campaign memoirs, journal articles and military historiography, which together represent a diverse and now largely ignored written legacy. This paper will analyse both the process of composition and the purposes for which these works were used by the Russian military establishment, explore their particular tropes and ideological preoccupations, and also attempt to establish what, if any, impact they had on educated society in Russia.
Venue: Saint-Petersburg, Promyshlennaya st., 14 A, office 323
Contact Information: Maria Ukhvatova
E-mail: mukhvatova [AT] hse [DOT] ru