摘要：The article, based on the materials of N.M. Yadrintseva and N.M. Potanin reveals the content of the epistolary discourse of Asiatic Russia as a colony. The basis of the research procedures are the methodological principles of the new cultural and intellectual history, and the reliability of the conclusions is due to the involvement in the work of an array of letters of 1872–1874, written by the leaders of the Siberian regionalism in the traumatic circumstances of political exile. The team of authors found that the actors of the discourse represented elements of the political program for the colonization of the Asian spaces of Russia, in which there were no declarations of a separatist nature. It is determined that the ideas of the regionalists about the nature of the incorporation of asian territories into the general imperial space differed markedly from the understanding of this situation by the authorities, parties and movements of the national-conservative spectrum of the socio-political thought of the Russian Empire. It has been argued that the appeals in the epistolary discourse to Western European colonization theories provided an opportunity for the leaders of the Siberian regionalism to position Asian Russia not as a continuation of the territory of the empire, but as a colony that needed support and paternalistic guardianship from the metropolis until the their cultural, social, economic alignment, which will ensure the subsequent political emancipation of the region.
