The 'Soft' Power of Colonization: The Role of Political Exiles' Wives in the Orientalization of Siberia in Late Imperial Russia

• In Event: Forging Frontiers: Identity, Representation, and Alienation in Imperial Russia's Borderlands

Abstract

Throughout the 19th century, the tsarist administration viewed Siberia both as a frontier and a colony: it served as a canvas for Russia's imperial ambitions of exoticization of its “backward” Asiatic territories and a simultaneous effort to assimilate and integrate them. In the late imperial period, penal colonialism turned exiles into an essential tool for imperial aspirations to populate and Russify the region. The current paper examines the role of political exiles and their wives in the Orientalization and exoticization of Eastern Siberia and its Indigenous population in fin-de-siècle Russia. Revisiting the common historiographical view of women as invisible bystanders of Russian colonial enterprise, this work examines the contribution of such wives of political exiles as zoologist Mavra P. Cherskaia (1857-1940), botanist Ekaterina N. Klements (1854-1914), and anthropologist Dina L. Brodskaia (1864-1943) in the accumulation of scientific knowledge about Siberia and the attempts to civilize and domesticate the “wild frontier.”

Author

• Anna Smelova, Georgetown U