Robert W. Montgomery is a Professor of History at Baldwin Wallace University (formerly Baldwin-Wallace College) in Cleveland, Ohio. He teaches undergraduate courses in Russian, East Asian, and World History, and his research centers on the history of the indigenous peoples of Siberia under Russian/Soviet rule. During the summer of 2021, he spent two weeks at the NYPL as one of the recipients of the Library's Short-Term Research Fellowship.

What research are you working on?

I am a historian of Russia, and my research treats the cultural and political history of the Native Asian peoples of Siberia, particularly the Buryats around south Siberia’s Lake Baikal. Traditionally Buddhist or Shamanist nomadic herders, they are culturally, ethnically, and linguistically close to the Mongols across the Russo-Mongolian border. My current topic is the Buryat journalist, economist, and historian Mikhail Bogdanov (1878-1919). Like others of the budding Buryat intelligentsia, Bogdanov promoted Buryat cultural survival, social improvement, economic modernization, and political rights and opposed the state's assimilationist policies. Yet he also interacted with another native Siberian group: the Khakas, a Turkic-speaking herding, farming, and hunting group of the Yenisei River area. Between 1909 and 1913, he worked as a land surveyor in Khakasia and I am interested in this period of Bogdanov’s life. 

When did you first get the idea for your research project? 

A few years ago, I noticed that rather little had been written about Bogdanov and the Khakas. That drew my curiosity, especially since the Buryats and Khakas had much in common at the turn of the century. Both were losing their land to outsiders thanks to government-sponsored colonization programs; both had few schools (none in the native language); both faced repressive and intrusive state policies of assimilation and religious conversion policies; and both were developing their own intelligentsia shaped equally by native tradition and Western learning. 

What brought you to the Library?

I had known of NYPL’s uniquely vast holdings in Russian studies since graduate school but never had been able to spend enough time in the city to use them. One day during last Winter Break, I was browsing longingly through the online catalog and the website in my spare time (it’s an unusual hobby!) and stumbled across an announcement for the Short-Term Research Fellowship. I immediately decided that this was my opportunity to finally come work in NYPL’s research collection. 

What research tools could you not live without?

The best way to answer this question would be to discuss three especially valuable genres of research materials I’ve found so far at NYPL and a few things I’ve discovered in them. First are Russian periodicals from the late nineteenth-early twentieth centuries, particularly the journals of the multiple Siberian branches of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society. There, I discovered Bogdanov’s 1915 observations on Khakas economic life; a study of Khakas Shamanism published in the same year by the Khakas scholar and activist Stepan Mainagashev (1886-1920) whom Bogdanov had met in Khakasia; and ethnographic studies of the Buryats and Khakas dating back to the 1850s! A second key resource is the vast body of book-length works on Siberia’s native peoples. For example, an overview of prerevolutionary Khakasia edited by Leonid Kyzlasov discussed Bogdanov’s land-surveying work and interactions with young Khakas intellectuals. So too did the long obituary of Bogdanov appended to Bogdanov’s posthumously published Ocherki istorii buriat-mongolʹskogo naroda [Outline of the History of the Buryat-Mongolian People]. This obituary was written by the Russian ethnographer Nikolai Koz’min (1873-1938), who himself had investigated the Khakas and had persuaded Bogdanov to go to Khakasia! A third indispensable tool is NYPL’s bibliographies on the Buryats and Khakas, e.g. Etnografiia buriatskogo naroda: bibliograficheskii ukazatelʹ literatury, 1768-2002 [Ethnography of the Buryat People: Bibliographical Guide to Literature, 1762-2002] (2006) and the extensive 2011 bio-bibliography of the Khakas historian Viktor Butanaev. (Incidentally, NYPL holds bibliographies and works for researchers of other Native Siberian peoples, for example, central and eastern Siberia’s Evenki and Sakhalin Island’s Nivkhi, Ainu, and Uilta/Orok.) 

What tabs do you currently have open on your computer?

First, the NYPL research catalog page is naturally open! I unearth so many new bibliographic leads in the Russian and East European collection’s materials that it’s worth immediately digging in the catalog in the hopes that those new potential sources are also at NYPL. Second, right next to the catalog’s tab is the link to the “Advance Request of Research Materials” form: if the materials cited in my sources are indeed available here, the form lets me quickly lay hands on them, either on the incoming shelf of the researchers’ room or in the reserve section of the Main Reading Room. The third and fourth tabs that I always keep open link to WorldCat and OhioLink (an Ohio academic library consortium): since I, unfortunately, have only a few weeks at NYPL, WorldCat, and OhioLink tell me if I can obtain an item after I leave if need be. The fifth and final tab is either Google or its Russian equivalent Yandex: on rare but happy occasions, a Russian library or research institution has placed online a PDF of an older book, article, or journal issue that I discovered here, and downloading it for later lets me move on to other NYPL materials! 

What's the most unexpected item you encountered in your research?

While examining the early 1910s publications of the Imperial Russian Geographic Society’s small branch in the Russian-Mongolian border town of Kiakhta on the very remote chance that Bogdanov might have published something in them (he didn’t, by the way), I kept running across interesting articles on Mongolian issues by an author who’d escaped my attention earlier. I was particularly curious since the author’s name showed that she was a woman: prerevolutionary Russia was after all a patriarchal society, so academe was inevitably a male-dominated field. The author turned out to be Avgusta Dmitrievna Kornakova (1863-1940), a prosperous Russian who lived on a farm with her family in northern Mongolia near the Russian border. Kornakova was fluent in Mongolian and highly knowledgeable about Mongolia’s culture, religion, daily life, and politics. Some of her articles, and notices about her academic papers, appeared in the publications of other Geographical Society branches, so she was clearly of more than local significance as a scholar. 

Have I left anything out that you'd like to tell other researchers?

The Short-Term Research Fellowship has been a very rewarding and intellectually intense experience that has helped my scholarship immensely. NYPL’s Russian and East European collection is just as extensive as I’d expected, and I have benefitted greatly from the assistance of the Slavic and East European curator Dr. Bogdan Horbal, the Main Reading Room’s reference staff, and many others. Not only have I found materials on my specific research topic, but I’ve also serendipitously discovered many other great sources on the Buryats and other Native Siberian peoples that will serve me well in future research projects.