Uncertain Boundaries: Border Issues in Early Modern Russia

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

As the early modern Russian state expanded both in Asia and Europe, it was confronted with the tasks of defining, demarcating, and defending borders. Rarely simple, these processes required Russian actors to wrestle with the often-thorny issues of sovereignty and identity across a diverse spectrum of geographies and peoples. This panel brings together three papers examining these and other issues concerning borderlands and peripheries through political, cultural, and social lenses. Their topics span the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries and across the breadth of the Russian state, from the Kola Peninsula to the southwestern borderlands, to Siberia.

Sub Unit

• Early Slavic Studies

Chair

• Andrey V. Gornostaev, U of Toronto (Canada)

Papers

• Conceptualizing Russian Sovereignty of the Kola Peninsula in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries - Earl Joshua Hodil, Pomona College

• Borders in Remezov’s Atlas of Siberia - Erika L. Monahan, U of New Mexico

• It Only Took a Hundred Years: The Demarcation of the Russo-Polish Border after the First Partition of Poland, 1772-1781 - Andrey V. Gornostaev, U of Toronto (Canada)

Discussant

• Gregory Afinogenov, Georgetown U

Session Manager

• Tetiana Shyshkina, Justus Liebig U Giessen (Germany)