ABSTRACT
Regions, like countries, are historical creations and not geographic givens. Siberia, the Russian Far East, and Northeast Asia are no exceptions. Neither are the fifteen new states that since 1991 have succeeded the USSR. Many of the dynamics of region formation and center–local tension within Russia run parallel to the state-building processes in newly sovereign states and the Commonwealth of Independent States negotiations. To understand these constitutive processes of state and region formation, especially the key dynamic of decentralization, it is necessary to forgo an exclusive emphasis on Moscow and incorporate new perspectives emerging locally.
