The Political Ecology of Vladimir Arsen’ev

The article describes the life and work of Vladimir Klavdievich Arsen’ev in the context of the development of settler colonial project in the Far East. The article argues that Arsen’ev, a military officer and a self-taught geographer and ethnographer, shared in a political ecology, which combined “defense” of native peoples and the nature of the Russian Far East with racialized views of Chinese and Korean immigrants. This political ecology, in particular, led Arsen’ev to take part in military operations designed to cleanse remote parts of the Ussuri region of the Chinese and to develop administrative proposals on the governance of native peoples, which foreshadowed Soviet projects.