Chechesh Kudachinova a guest researcher at the Institute of East European Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. She obtained the degree of Dr. phil. at Humboldt University for the thesis Mapping the Altai in the Russian Geographical Imagination. Her chapter “The View of the Golden Mountains: the Altai and the Resilience of Historical Imaginations“ appeared in the volume Russia in Asia: Interactions, Imaginations, and Realitiesin Routledge Series of Modern History 2020. Her most recent peer-reviewed article “Scenes of Starvation and Survival Cannibalism: Colonial Food Security and Violence in Seventeenth-Century Siberia” will appear in Food and History journal in 2025.

’No More A Nowhere’: Mapping The Zone of Knowledge and Encounters At the Last Inner Asian Frontier

This paper explores a trans-imperial phenomenon that occured at the northwestern sector of the Russo-Qing borderline from the mid-18^th to the mid-19^th century. The collapse of the West Mongol Zunghars under the Qing invasion reorganized political and human space of Inner Asia (Perdue 2005). The ex-Zunghar vassals, the Turkic-speaking nomads of the Altay Mountains known as the Telenggits became the “double tributaries” of two rising Eurasian empires (Samaev 1991). Both powers established a viable revenue collection system for the Telenggits. A sparsely populated borderland posed a dormant periphery that saw neither caravan trade nor open hostilities. The official borderline across the buffer zone was established in the 1860s.

The paper builds on the insights drawn from border studies (LeDonne 2006; Rieber 2014; Urbansky 2020; McMahon 2021), transnational history (Lattimore 1962; Osterhammel 2018; Afinogenov 2020) and the history of knowledge (Burke 2016; Mulsow 2019). It develops a particular interpretative line concerning the idea of uncertainty and the historical interactions of borders and boundaries.

It adopts the Russo-centric perspective to demonstrate that what took Russia and Qing China apart was the attitude to the knowledge making about the frontier. Unlike its eastern rival, Russia’s policies vigorously sought to understand the spaces they aimed to govern. Robust efforts of the two key groups, frontier officials and German naturalists in the imperial service, empowered Russia to fill the knowledge gap and ultimately claim the contested province by firmly incorporating its inhabitants in 1865.