Ruling the East: Russian urban administration and the Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese in Vladivostok, 1884--1922

The present study is intended to contribute to the existing historical literature on Russian empire and "Russia's Orient" by examining the city of Vladivostok in Russian Primor'e as part of the frontier zone where the Orthodox Russian world encountered the Confucian-Buddhist world of East Asia. During the late imperial era, this city---founded in 1860 on territory annexed from China in the aftermath of the Second Opium War---was home to the largest Chinatown in the Russian empire, and also had substantial communities of Koreans and Japanese. Based on research in previously closed Far Eastern archives, the dissertation looks at how the Russian urban administration interacted with these three East Asian communities in Vladivostok (whose name literally means "Rule the East" in Russian), with a specific emphasis on the ways it dealt with East Asian immigration, ethnic neighborhoods, and crime in this Pacific Rim city. The final chapter examines the way these Russian-East Asian dynamics were altered during the turbulent years of first the Russo-Japanese War and then the Japanese military intervention of 1918--22.; Three major themes run throughout the work. First of all, the Russian empire formed an integral part of the transnational region of Northeast Asia, and therefore Russia deserves consideration not just from a European perspective but also from an Asia-Pacific perspective. Secondly, the Russian empire not only absorbed existing populations as its territory expanded, but in some cases it served as a magnet for substantial voluntary immigration from China, Korea, and Japan, attracting migrant workers who came to Russia in search of economic advancement and, in some cases, greater political freedom. The dissertation places East Asian immigration to Russia in comparative context with the large-scale trans-Pacific immigration of Chinese and Japanese to California, British Columbia, and Australia that was taking place at the very same time. Thirdly, the Russian empire was characterized by a high degree of local autonomy on its far-flung peripheries, and this study of Vladivostok illustrates how the local administration was generally too understaffed, too corrupt, and too ignorant of foreign languages and customs to rule the East Asians in the city effectively.