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REDISCOVERING RUSSIA IN ASIA: Siberia and the Russian Far East. Edited by Stephen Kotkin and David Wolff. Armonk (New York): M. E. Sharpe. 1995, xviii, 356 pp. (Figures, maps, pictures, tables.) US$65.00 cloth, ISBN 1-56324546-9; US$24.95, paper ISBN 1-56324-547-7.
THE EPIC TALE of how Siberia and the Russian Far East were settled includes a cast of characters: conquerors, adventurers, raiders, merchants, scholars, political exiles and Cossacks who extended Russia's periphery into Asia and became a people possessing special qualities that differentiated them from other Russians. This process created two kinds of regionalism, subnational and transnational, as Russia's periphery overlapped with Chinese and Japanese peripheries, causing the two regionalisms to become fused in Northeast Asia. Traditional area studies and state-centric international relations theory are inadequate for understanding these linkages. However, there has been another tradition carried on by scholars with an affinity to the "Sibiriaki" (Siberians) that began at Harvard before World War I, was passed to Stanford, then Berkeley, and then to the University of Hawaii where it has the longest history, continuing for the last sixty years. The tradition is an institutionalized dialogue on Northeast Asia between East Asian and Russian specialists, a dialogue that excavates data on the region's common history. The tradition is also a sympathetic treatment of the periphery in its struggle with the center. This...