Authors

Discussion

“Russia’s Turn to the East” as a policy discourse comes from the confirmation of Russia’s desire to “Turn to the East” at the 2012 APEC Forum. But “Russia’s Turn to the East” has been imagined and acted upon for nearly 500 years, and Russian literature has documented this process. The Siberian text in Russian literature is an Asian text with Russian national character, and therefore one of the sources of Russian Eurasianism. This text, which mainly includes the Eastern Expedition Text, the Exile Text, and the Ecological Text, is an effective carrier of the Russian national spatial imagination and the problem of spatial governance. The Eastern Expedition Text writes about the process of Russia’s pioneering efforts in Siberia to the east, to the Pacific Ocean. The Exile Text reflects the ambivalence within Russian thought. And the Ecological Text’s connotations reflect the problems and reflections that Russia faces in terms of national development and spatial governance. Together, these three texts reflect the process of nationalisation of the geographical space of Siberia in Russia, which is also the process of imagining and acting on the historical “Russian Turn to the East”. A study of Siberian texts in Russian literature shows that the imagination and action of the “Russian Turn to the East” was fuelled by cultural, political, and economic motives, and manifested itself in the Russian state’s need for territorial expansion, governance, and economic development, with the deeper goal of serving the construction of the power of the Russian state or empire.