ABSTRACT

While migration to new lands and frontiers is a dominant theme in Russian history, the existence of settler colonialism1 in Russia is fiercely contested. This chapter will argue that, in the nineteenth century, Imperial Russia developed ideologies and practices of settler colonialism which bore a clear family resemblance to those of other European states and peoples. It will concentrate primarily on migration, resettlement and colonization in Russia before the revolutions of 1917 and the establishment of the USSR. While the movement of Russians into Siberia and the other republics of the USSR continued throughout the Soviet period, this took place within a high modernist nation-building framework quite unlike wider European colonial practice, which distinguishes it from the settler colonialism of the Tsarist period.2