Aleksei Epishev

This research aims to recover a forgotten history of Chinese laborers in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. The Russian imperial state has used Chinese workers in military-related projects and railway constructions since the 1880s. During the First World War, more than 100,000 of them were recruited across the empire to work in mines, factories, and fields. There, they became subjected to a special regime of surveillance and control. This project will give voice to Chinese laborers as protagonists who had been almost completely silenced in both Russian and Chinese historical traditions while placing the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union on the historical map of global Chinese labor migration.