SIBERIA

Siberia is Russia's subcontinent of northern Asia. Its 13.5 million square kilometers (5.2 million square miles) comprise one-eleventh of the global landmass, and its forests make up one-fifth of the world's total. Although two-thirds of Siberian soil is locked in permafrost, the Black Earth Zone of the southwestern Siberian steppe is well suited for agriculture.

Siberia was Russia's late-nineteenth-century frontier. Intellectuals of the period idealized it as a land of freedom and individualism comparable to the American West, an interpretation echoed by American scholars of the late twentieth century. But in contrast to the U.S. frontier, Siberia's was conditioned by the overgovernment and undergovernment that typified tsarist Russia as a whole. Russia's East was both far wilder and far tamer than the Wild West. The regional folk saying "God is high above and the tsar is far away" expressed one aspect of the Siberian experience, but in response the central government made efforts to ensure that its presence was felt.

conquest and settlement

The Russian conquest of Siberia began in 1582 and continued for the next century. It was propelled by the demand for furs, the largest revenue source of the Muscovite tsardom, which closely regulated trade in the valuable commodity. The last sizable portions of territory, forming the Russian Far East, were annexed from China in the late 1850s in a new era of imperialism.

Siberia's original inhabitants were two hundred thousand hunter-gatherers and pastoral nomads. They spoke Finno-Ugric, Samoyedic, Turkic, Manchu-Tungus, Mongolian, Eskimo, or Paleosiberian languages and adhered to Islam, Buddhism, or—in the main—shamanism. Russian conquest succeeded for the same reasons Europeans prevailed over indigenous societies elsewhere: disease, guns, and exploitation. Reforms written by Governor-General Mikhail Speransky and enacted in 1822 curtailed the worst abuses by replacing forcible collection of tribute with taxation, but this proved equally burdensome. He also granted the various ethnicities internal autonomy, religious toleration, and statutory protection of their territories—although the latter could be circumvented by the central government, which retained ownership of the land.

In 1800 a mere 560,000 Russians inhabited Siberia, and by 1860 natural increase brought that to 2.3 million (alongside 648,000 natives). The Russians were the descendants of fugitive serfs, Old Believers fleeing religious persecution, merchants seeking opportunity, or the Cossacks, priests, and peasants who had been ordered there by the state to man and supply fortresses. Most Siberian towns evolved from these garrisons.

The slowness of settlement was a result of serfdom, which limited peasant mobility, and the early imperial government's view of Siberia less as a frontier extension of Russia proper than as a colony subject to exploitation for its resource wealth: originally furs, then the gold, silver, copper, coal, and iron discovered in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Siberia was also a dumping ground for criminals, vagrants, and dissidents. By the mid-nineteenth century, seventeen to nineteen thousand exiles were being shipped there annually, and convicts made up at least 10 percent of the population before the peasant influx of the 1890s, when it dropped to 5 percent. Some exiles were aristocratic political prisoners such as the participants in the 1825 Decembrist revolt and their families, who brought the first breath of European culture to Siberian towns, just as later generations of exiled radicals contributed to intellectual life. But most were criminals, and because exile was unsupervised and escape from penal convoys common, Siberian communities were plagued by violent outlaw gangs.

the trans-siberian railroad and tsarist attempts to assert control

Siberia was remote from the concerns of St. Petersburg until the reigns of Alexander III (r. 1881–1894) and Nicholas II (r. 1894–1917), who sensed risks to Russian dominion in northern Asia. Great Britain was Russia's colonial rival, and its navy posed a threat to the weakly defended Siberian coastline. Agitated by notions of the "Yellow Peril," policymakers feared the Chinese would flood into underpopulated Siberia. The autocracy doubted the loyalty of indigenous peoples, including the large numbers of Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese already resident in the Russian Far East, and suspected Siberia's regionalist intelligentsia, which envied the republican institutions of the American West. And, from 1861 to 1894, nine hundred thousand peasants, now emancipated but seeking to escape land hunger, illegally migrated to Siberia; the tsarist regime could not abide the spontaneity or afford the loss of tax revenues.

To assert control over this vast territory the tsarist state built the Trans-Siberian Railroad (1892–1905, with extensions 1907–1916), took charge of the peasant resettlement movement, and stimulated regional economic development. The 4,800-kilometer-long (3,000-mile-long) railroad, construction of which was orchestrated by Sergei Witte, minister of finance from 1892 to 1903, ran through the most habitable zones of southern Siberia. Under the leadership of the imperial minister, Anatoly Kulomzin, government surveyors divided 21 million acres of land along the route into 40-acre plots in communal villages and distributed them to peasant migrants who were also given travel aid and loans for supplies. The state built schools, churches, and silos, and provided medical and veterinary care. Infrastructure and scientific projects were also undertaken, from irrigation works and construction of river ports to geological exploration and subsidization of local industry.

In this epoch of transcontinental railroad construction, the autocracy strove to prevent the Siberian frontier from becoming like the American West. The government outlawed real estate speculation; capped the size of landholdings; retained ownership of forests and railroads; restricted individual, noncommunal peasant farming; and refused calls for elective forms of local government. In one significant respect the two nations were similar: the Russian state confiscated millions of acres of land used by the Kazakhs and other indigenous peoples who stood in the way of white settlement.

The results were mixed. Five million peasants migrated to Siberia, nearly doubling the population by 1914. Despite tensions between old and new settlers, the rural economy boomed, and peasants enjoyed a living standard higher than the Russian norm. Cities along the railroad line also grew rapidly, and the foundations were laid for Siberian industrialization. On the other hand, the projection of Russian military power via the Trans-Siberian threatened Japanese interests and helped precipitate the disastrous Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905). The newly arrived railroad workers, miners, and factory laborers, often employed in miserable conditions, were susceptible to the political agitation carried out by exiled radicals. In the Revolution of 1905 and at the Lena goldfields in 1912, their working-class discontents exploded in strikes and rebellions that called into question the strength of the tsarist regime's hold over Siberia.

See alsoRussia; Russo-Japanese War; Vladivostok.

bibliography

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Forsyth, James. A History of the Peoples of Siberia: Russia's North Asian Colony, 1581–1990. Cambridge, U.K., 1992.

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Marks, Steven G. Road to Power: The Trans-Siberian Railroad and the Colonization of Asian Russia, 1850–1917. Ithaca, N.Y., 1991.

——. "Conquering the Great East: Kulomzin, Peasant Resettlement, and the Creation of Modern Siberia." In Rediscovering Russia in Asia, edited by Stephen Kotkin and David Wolff, 23–39. Armonk, N.Y., 1995.

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Steven G. Marks