№ 3 - 2004
Blyakher L.Ye.
Want of Nationalism, or National Self-Consciousness in Russia’s Far East

The subject investigated in the article, is local national complex in one of outlying regions of the former empire, namely in the Russian Far East. In an outline review of history of the Far Eastern territories, the author demonstrates that periods of their flourishing and depression were always related with the level of intensity of organized migratory flows. As a result, a kind of “flowing” culture formed there, based on a balance of positive (inflow) and negative (outflow) migration and characterized by weakness of its “regional kernel”, i.e. system of norms specifically proper to the region. Therefore, when, following the crash of the centralized system of migration flows the “in- and outflow phenomenon” disappeared, those “held up” in the Far Eastern lands found themselves lacking in any common reasons to exist together. Such a situation, according to the author’s conclusion, was doomed to inevitably give rise to the need for nationalism. In anti-Chinese sentiments he sees reaction to the incompletion of the process of their self-identification and an attempt to solve this problem by means of an “image of enemy”.