EDUCATION

Dr. phil., Institute for Historical Studies, Humboldt University, Berlin. Dissertation: Mapping the Altai in the Russian Geographical Imagination, 1650-1900.

 

PUBLICATIONS

PEER-REVIEWED JOURNAL ARTICLES

“The Muscovite Silver Crusade: Power, Space, and Imagination in Early Modern Eurasia,” AbImperio. Studies of New Imperial Histories and Nationalism, 4 (2019), 49-72.

“Scenes of Starvation and Survival Cannibalism: Colonial Food Security in 17th-Century Siberia,” accepted by Food and History

BOOK CHAPTERS

“The View of the Golden Mountains: the Altai and the Resilience of Historical Imaginations,“ Matthew Romaniello, Jeff Hardy, and Jane Hacking (eds.) Russia in Asia: Interactions, Imaginations, and Realities (New York: Routledge, 2020), 29-50. (Routledge Series of Modern History).

“’All Roads North’: Indigenous Poverty Mobilities, “Renomadization” and Settler Colonialism In Modern Siberia,” Bernhard Kleeberg, Anna Möllers und Dirk Schuck (eds.), Nomad Properties: Political Anthropologies of Nomadism from the 18th Century until Today, Campus Verlag (in press).

BOOK REVIEWS

GREGORY AFINOGENOV, Spies and Scholars: Chinese Secrets and Imperial Russia’s Quest for World Power. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020. 384 pp. $46.00 USD. ISBN: 978-0-674-24185-5. The Canadian-American Slavic Studies, 56. 3 (2022), 383-386.

“The Sea of Siberian Slavery: Captivity, Human Commodification and Empire in 17th-Century Siberia”

 This study basically tells two tales wrapped into one account. It seeks to rewrite the history of colonial encounter with a clearer eye to the role indigenous people played in the colonization of Siberia. Russian imperial rule organized the tribute system (yasaq) in a ‘contact zone’ of Siberia based on an “economy of confiscation”: kidnapping and confinement of native leaders as the only means of ensuring that the fur tribute should be paid in full. The hostage became a key figure in the network through which the fur extraction operated. Certain forms of bondage existed in virtually every native society prior to the conquest, yet colonizers introduced a conceptually new kind of slavery in Siberia. Servitors (Cossacks) routinely organized raids in order to capture indigenous women and children. Moscow prohibited the holding and selling the natives, but, unsurprisingly, the ban remained on paper. Captivity and enslavement of indigenous people posed two technologies key to the rapid spread of the early modern Russian empire across the vast immense of Northeast Eurasia. By fundamentally destabilizing local societies in the historical perspective, both technologies were central to Russia’s success in the political, economic, and social colonization of the region.