Many scientists and politicians from various countries consider the Asia-Pacific region to be a possible economic and political center of the world in the 21st century. This assumption is generally based on several arguments: 1) the rapid socio-economic development of the region's member countries; 2) the presence of powerful economic powers in the region , such as the United States and Japan; 3) the growing economic and political "weight" of a country such as China; 4) the rapid increase in the Asia-Pacific region's share in world trade; 5) economic and political involvement in the region of countries such as Australia and New Zealand. We deliberately do not mention Russia here yet, because its institutional advancement in this region (participation in international organizations) is still poorly supported economically and culturally, and its political influence is very limited.

Without going into detailed disputes about the economic boundaries of the Asia-Pacific Region and Russia's Northeast Asia, we will make some meaningful comments about the concepts and geographical images of these interconnected regions [Zamyatin, 1999(2); 2000(1); 2001(1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7)].

Undoubtedly, the cognitive center of the Asia-Pacific region, that is, the center that ensures maximum perception and acceptance of this region as a serious reality, is shifted towards Asia, and Southeast Asia, the so-called South Sea countries, which is due both historically and culturally. Ancient civilizations of the region developed on the territory of Southern China, Indochina, and modern Indonesia [Istoriya..., 1989; Fitzgerald, 1998]. For several millennia, the Pacific Ocean has served as a barrier rather than a link in establishing trade and cultural contacts between the countries of the region. Therefore, when we talk about the importance of the Pacific Ocean as a component of the geographical image of the Asia-Pacific region, we are forced to speak more about the coastal seas of East and South-East Asia, which are still the waters of the most intensive economic and cultural contacts.

Thus, the core of the Asia-Pacific region in our understanding is Southeast Asia and, partly, East Asia with adjacent coastal seas. The cognitive and imaginative half-periphery of the Asia-Pacific region, oddly enough, is represented by such economically developed countries as the United States, Australia, and New Zealand - both because of their distance from the busiest sea routes, and (even more importantly) because of the cultural and civilizational alienation of most of the countries in the region. Its cognitive and imaginative periphery is Russia, whose vector of cultural and political development during the XVII-XX centuries was directed mainly towards North-East Asia and, a little later, Central Asia

This work was supported by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (grant N 03 - 06 - 80168).

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Asia. During these historical epochs, Russia lacked the economic or cultural weight to make a significant presence in East and South - East Asia, although Central Asia, thanks to the research of the great Russian travelers of the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries, was quite well mentally and culturally developed.

The political influence of Russia in the Asia-Pacific region was during the entire specified time -XVII-XX centuries. - very limited due to insufficient economic, cultural and military resources directed to the development of Eastern Siberia and the Far East. It is characteristic that, although Russia reached the Pacific Ocean as early as the 17th century, the very concept and geographical image of the Far East were formed in Russian political documents and scientific literature relatively late, only in the second half of the 19th century; before that, both Chukotka and Kamchatka were considered parts of Eastern Siberia (Alekseev, 1982). The entry of the Amur and Primorye regions into the Russian Empire, as well as the military and strategic importance of these regions, became important factors in the rapid formation of the geographical image of the Far East in the representations of Russian sources by the end of the XIX century [see, for example, Kropotkin, 1992; Bassin, 1999].

It is worth noting that Northeast Asia, which has a much smaller cultural and civilizational history than the Asia-Pacific region as a whole, has not been perceived as an independent cross-border geographical image for a long time. This was the image of Terra Incognita, the periphery of Great Tartary (Tartary), which was practically unexplored, the image of the end and end of the world in the biblical sense - and due to such circumstances, the image is dependent, derived from the geographical images of Europe, European civilization and Russia (Zimin, 2000). Then, during the XVIII-XIX centuries, to the extent that Russia carried out the primary development and settlement of the territories of North-East Asia (Safronov, 1978), this region began to be perceived exclusively as the far periphery of a great semi-Asian power, mainly in political and ethnographic contexts, as a symbol of great ethnographic and natural diversity, as an integral part of the imperial "naturalist" collection of wild peoples, landscapes, and landmarks [see also: Bassin, 1991].

The construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway in the late 19th and early 20th centuries radically changed the cognitive and geographical situation. For the first time, it became possible to create, construct, and "invent" a single geographical image of Russia that does not break up into completely different "halves" of European and Asian Russia. At the same time, the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway was also important for the mental development of Europe, directly bringing its image closer to the image of the Far East and Asia as a whole. The geographical image of Russia thus, as it turned out, moved to the west, becoming more European. It is in this context that we should first understand the initial problems of forming geographical images of the Asia-Pacific Region and North-East Asia "on the part of Russia".

There is no doubt that the geographical image of Russian Northeast Asia for a long time (XVIII-XIX centuries) could not be isolated, structured, due to both the weak geographical knowledge of this region and the absolute amorphous nature of the figurative geographical context itself. Within the framework of the dynamics of the image of Russia, it was the far outskirts of Siberia, wild deserts in the European cognitive tradition, which somehow dominated the structures of representations of the educated social strata of Russian society. Japan, which gradually moved north during the 17th and 19th centuries, apparently created its own geographical image of Northeast Asia, which was also not, however, original.-

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It seems to have largely copied the Chinese worldview with a clear distinction between the cultural center and the barbarian periphery (Kin, 1972; Isaeva, 2000; Kryukov..., 1987).

The figurative-geographical (mental-geographical) field of North-East Asia appears, in the original sense, obviously, only by the end of the XIX - beginning of the XX century, when the gradual formation of the Russian (still largely European) image of the Far East [Zamyatin, 1999(1)] gives an impetus and accelerates the processes of autonomous structuring of the geographical space of the Far East. images of Northeast Asia. Rapidly modernized in the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Japan, apparently, also made a significant contribution to the development of this local cognitive-geographical situation, gradually changing the" Chinese "image of the" northern territories " in terms of its genesis to a more Europeanized image (including in the cartographic tradition), which suggests the quite natural existence of some other ideas about the region, within the framework of others mental formations [see, for example: New Edition..., 2001].

First, the dynamic geopolitical situation that developed in the Far East by the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuriesbecame a powerful factor in the formation of a unified image of the Asia - Pacific region-we note that initially in its more "northern" interpretation, associated with the flourishing of the colonial period in East Asia. Manchuria, Korea, the coast of China, and even Outer Mongolia - not to mention Japan itself and the Russian Primorye region-became essential components of the original core of the unified geographical image of this region as it began to take shape at the dawn of the twentieth century. A significant role in shaping this image of the Asia-Pacific region, of course, was played by the active political actions of the United States, which, in one way or another, entered the colonial arena by the end of the XIX century, including in East Asia and the North Pacific. As a result, the core of the unified geographical image of the region in its "northern" interpretation, which was gradually forming at the beginning of the XX century, was formed as a result of cognitive (mental) interaction, mainly in the political and economic spheres, of such powers as Japan, Russia and the United States. At the same time, one should not deny, of course, the significant role of the colonial policy of Great Britain, France and Germany in shaping the original image of the Asia-Pacific region.

Secondly, it is quite obvious that the geographical images of the Asia-Pacific region and North-East Asia, at the stage of their initial formation in the late XIX - early XX centuries, had essentially different cognitive and geographical genesis. If the geographical image of the Asia-Pacific Region was initially formed as relatively heterogeneous, heterogeneous, with inclusions of various colonial discourses that dominated the foreign policy of Japan, the United States, Russia, Great Britain and other colonial powers [see: Europe and..., 1985; De Serteau, 1986; Pagden, 1993; Occidentalism..., 1995; Said, 1995; Cheshkov, 1999; Coker, 2000; McInnes, 2002; Adams, 1988], the geographical image of Northeast Asia was formed primarily as a homogeneous one in terms of content, including ordered and structured ideas about the region as a kind of wild, barbaric outskirts of the Christian ecumenical world in the Biblical sense.

As a result, the geographical image of Northeast Asia for a relatively long time could not be considered as, perhaps, an integral part of the image of the Asia-Pacific region-it was, rather, an image of continental, Inner Asia, as if not seeing the ocean (oceans); an image closed to itself in terms of content and geography. In other words, the ethnographic and natural "flavor" of the image of this region, which is manifested in attempts to describe it in traditional scientific and artistic (in the European sense) descriptions, was for a long time (up to the middle of the XX century) a "litmus test" of the lack of formation of distinct and structured images of the region.-

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lonial or postcolonial discourses. The political territorial distinctions between Russia (USSR), Japan, and the United States that were carried out in this region during the 19th and 20th centuries did not and could not clarify this issue, since they were largely the product of larger-scale political decisions focused in a figurative sense on the Eurocentric model of the world. It was precisely in this cognitive-geographical situation that the political question of the state ownership of the Kuril Islands and Sakhalin was resolved in the first half of the XX century - we mean, of course, the geopolitical context of the First and Second World Wars [Allison..., 1997; Bogaturov, 1997; Russian Kurils..., 2002].

Considering the problem of forming geographical images of the Asia-Pacific region and North-East Asia, it is impossible to avoid interpreting these regions as cross-border [for more information, see: Zamyatin, 2000(2); 2001(6); 2002]. Moreover, this interpretation allows for a deeper investigation of the identified problems. In our understanding, a trans - border region is a fairly significant (large) territory that has a certain cultural and historical unity (a common cultural and political history, a certain common cultural landscape, a community of produced or reconstructed geographical images), and at the same time concentrating, concentrating the maximum possible number of transition zones in the development of significant territories. and large-scale phenomena (cultural, political, socio-economic).

Along with this, a cross-border region is one of the most capacious geographical images, and such a significant imaginative capacity is achieved both by the actual concentration of various phenomena in a certain territory, and by using border crossings to form the most effective structure of the image itself. It is also essential to understand the generally optional fixation, demarcation of a cross-border region as a geographical image in traditional geographical coordinates, on a modern physical or political map. For example, the geographical image of the Far East, understood as a cross-border region-represented and / or interpreted in any political or cultural traditions-may cover geographically different parts of Russia, China, Japan, Korea, Mongolia, the United States, and possibly other countries. At the same time, however, a more important aspect in the formation of the image structure is the use of cultural, civilizational, and political transitions that are somehow recorded in this image (between traditional and modern cultures, between the spaces of Christianity and Buddhism, between industrial and post-industrial economies, etc.). there is a kind of cognitive shift, or mental "drift" of the image in the mental-geographical field.

If we model a single image-geographical field that simultaneously contains geographical images of Northeast Asia and the Asia-Pacific region, then we should provide for a certain cognitive shift of the image of Northeast Asia towards the image of the Asia-Pacific region. How is such a mental phenomenon possible? Such a "drift" is possible in a situation of simultaneous purposeful transformation of both images. In this case, the geographical image of Northeast Asia should be positioned as a broader, more capacious one that includes, for example, from the point of view of traditional geography, the entire northern part of the Pacific Ocean, the coast of Alaska, the Pacific coast of Canada, the Russian coast of the Arctic Ocean, and from the point of view of the content concentration of various types of,

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in particular, the problems of ethno-cultural interaction of indigenous peoples (Chukchi, Aleuts, Ainu, etc.) with the state-forming alien peoples.

At the same time, the geographical image of the Asia-Pacific region should undoubtedly be positioned as more "southern" - from the point of view of the traditional geographical map, shifting towards Southeast Asia, and later, possibly, towards Latin America (to the east and southeast). At the same time, when structuring the image of the Asia-Pacific region in detail, it is necessary to use images of numerous cultural and civilizational transition zones (including Christianity - Islam, world religions-traditional cults and beliefs, landscape values of coastal and continental regions). The cognitive content of the proposed image transformations is the maximum dilution, distance of the nuclei of the images under consideration, with an obvious expansion of the images themselves. The modeled image-geographical expansion should eventually lead to a more intensive interaction of both images, while one image (Northeast Asia) does not necessarily have to be included in the other (Asia-Pacific) - rather, they can form a certain congive-geographical continuum, intersecting in various content aspects (cultural, political, economic).

Strictly speaking, forecasting the development of geographical images of North-East Asia and the Asia-Pacific region is a process (operation) of structuring them as if in reverse perspective (using the term and concept of O. Pavel Florensky [Florensky, 1993; 2000]. Such a process is essentially an "icon" in which the supposed, possible elements, structural components of these images are superimposed, superimposed mentally on the ideas that dominate in the present, and these ideas, in turn, are nothing more than a purposefully reflected image that has absorbed the events of past historical epochs, localized and recorded as the historical extent of these particular regions. As a result, the depth of the emerging mental-geographical space, "overturned" into the future, is the result of its meaningful expansion into the past. Based on this, in relation to the geographical images of North-East Asia and the Asia-Pacific region in the XXI century. we can say the following beforehand: these images seem to unravel the "canvas", the canvas of the Eurocentric figurative-geographical picture of the world, but at the same time the process of modeling them is, in fact, the second, in a broad cognitive sense, Eurocentric attempt to create a kind of image of a "New Europe" in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

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