What Is Asia to Us? Scholarship on the Tsarist "East" Since the 1990S‪.‬

It was 1997, and the editors of a new collection on the history of the Russian "Orient" were excited. For years they had been forced to make do with published sources or whatever materials their archival handlers would allow them to see in Moscow and Leningrad, but now the USSR had collapsed and it had suddenly become possible to venture out to the "erstwhile borderlands" and "experience what only being there can provide." The "famished," as they described themselves in their introduction, were finally sitting down to the "smorgasbord." Imperial Russia was being "revisioned." Scholars were being "reborn." (1) Oh, yes, those were the days. As a graduate student at the time, I remember feeling some of the headiness myself. The Party was over, the world was young. Of course, looking back now, one cannot help but feel a little naive. Important changes were indeed taking place in the field, but it is not clear how much of this was related to access to new archives or even to the seemingly magical "paradigm shift" of the end of the USSR. A new interest in tsarist Russia as a multinational empire had appeared somewhat earlier, along with funding to support it. (2) Yet, regardless of exactly when or how it happened, Daniel Brower and Edward Lazzerini were right that a new era was dawning. Even then, there was a sense that a boom had begun, which, for better or for worse, still continues today. As Stephen Kotkin put it not long ago, only half tongue in cheek, "Apply for a grant on 'borderlands,' and you get the grant even before you hit the send button." (3)