1. Although Siberia was discovered in the late sixteenth century and the Pacific was reached in the eighteenth century, these were achieved by individual explorers. The Russian government did not express significant interest towards its Eastern territories and East Asia until the second half of the nineteenth century. Stephen Kotkin, ‘Introduction’, in Stephen Kotkin and David Wolff, (eds) Rediscovering Russia in Asia (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1995), p. 3.
2. See also R. Quested, The Expansion of Russia in East Asia 1857–60 (Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya, 1968);
3. G. Patrick March, Eastern Destiny (Westport: Praeger, 1996);
4. and John Stephan, The Russian Far East (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994).
5. The major founders of ‘Eurasianism’ were ethnographer Nikolai Trubetskoi and geographer Petr Savitskii. Mark Bassin, ‘Russia between Europe and Asia’, Slavic Review, vol. 50, no. 1, 1991, pp. 9–17; and Iver Neumann, Russia and the Idea of Europe, pp. 111–16.