Aleksandr Korobeinikov

This project examines how the history of Siberia has long been framed through centralized imperial and Soviet narratives portraying the region primarily as a frontier of conquest, exile, resource extraction, and Russian expansion. Such perspectives have marginalized Indigenous communities, regional actors, and local intellectual traditions while shaping enduring epistemological frameworks through which Siberia continues to be understood in both academic and public discourse. As a result, the region has often appeared as a passive and peripheral space defined through metropolitan priorities and imperial categories of knowledge.Rather than reducing Siberian history to either imperial or exclusively Indigenous-centered narratives, the project develops a more complex framework for understanding Siberia as a space of interaction, negotiation, conflict, adaptation, and competing visions. Drawing on new imperial history, settler colonial studies, and the history of knowledge, it examines how various actors shaped Siberia across the imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet periods. By foregrounding regional complexity and multiple historical perspectives, the project contributes to broader efforts to rethink the epistemological foundations of Russian and Eurasian history from regional and non-metropolitan perspectives.