Abstract
<jats:p>This article examines the transformation of the image of the Far East in the military-administrative discourse of the Russian Empire after the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905. Analyzing the journalistic texts of G.N. Trubetskoy and L.M. Bolkhovitinov published in the collection Velikaya Rossiya (Great Russia, 1910), the author identifies three coexisting political languages used to describe the region: geopolitical, natural-colonial, and protective-legal. Before the war, the geopolitical language dominated, subordinating internal development to the goals of external expansion. However, even in pre-war texts, a conflict emerges between this language and the natural-colonial one. The defeat in the war led to a discursive shift: geopolitical logic persists but is re-subordinated to the tasks of internal development, infrastructural consolidation, and the reinforcement of legal borders. Trubetskoy reinterprets the imperial mission through spiritual responsibility, while Bolkhovitinov does so through administrative calculation and economic expediency. In the political thought of the early 20th century, the concept of the «Far East» becomes definitively entrenched as the «outskirts» of the imperial organism.</jats:p>