To Siberia

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Unlike peasants in European Russia, Siberians had no problems with land availability; the low population density gave them the ability to intensively cultivate a plot for several years in a row, then to leave it fallow for a long time and cultivate other plots. Siberian peasants had an abundance of food, while Central Russian peasantry had to moderate their families' appetites.

Leonid Blummer noted that the culture of alcohol consumption differed significantly; Siberian peasants drank frequently but moderately: The Siberia Governorate was established in as part of the administrative reforms of Peter I. In , the governorate was divided into three provinces, Vyatka, Solikamsk and Tobolsk. These viceregencies were downgraded to the status of governorate in Tobolsk Governorate , Irkutsk Governorate , Vyatka Governorate.

Tomsk Governorate was split off Tobolsk governorate in Yakutsk Oblast was split off Irkutsk Governorate in In , the subdivision of Siberia was reformed again. It was divided into two governorates general, West Siberia and East Siberia. Siberia was deemed a good place to exile for political reasons, as it was far from any foreign country. Petersburg citizen would not wish to escape in vast Siberian countryside as the peasants and criminals did. Even the larger cities such as Irkutsk, Omsk, and Krasnoyarsk, lacked that intensive social life and luxurious high life of the capital.

About eighty people involved in the Decembrist revolt were sentenced to obligatory work in Siberia and perpetual settlement here. Eleven wives followed them and settled near the labour camps. In their memoirs, they noted the benevolence and the prosperity of rural Siberians and severe treatment by the soldiers and officers. Polina Annenkova, Notes of a Decembrist's Wife [25]. A number of Decembrists died of diseases, some suffered psychological shock and even went out of their mind. After completing the term of obligatory work, they were sentenced to settle in specific small towns and villages.

There, some started doing business, which was well permitted. Only several years later, in the s, they were allowed to move to big cities or to settle anywhere in Siberia. Living in the cities of Omsk, Krasnoyarsk, and Irkutsk, the Decembrists contributed extensively to the social life and culture.

In Irkutsk, their houses are now the museums. In many places, memorial plaques with their names have been installed. Yet, there were exceptions: Vladimir Raevskiy was arrested for participation in Decembrists' circles in , and in was exiled to Olonki village near Irkutsk. There he married and had nine children, traded with bread, and founded a school for children and adults to teach arithmetics and grammar. Being pardoned by Alexander II, he visited his native town, but returned to Olonki.

Despite the wishes of the central authorities, the exiled revolutioners unlikely felt outcast in Siberia. Quite the contrary, Siberians having lived all the time on their own, "didn't feel tenderness" to the authorities. In many cases, the exiled were cordially received and got paid positions. Fyodor Dostoevsky was exiled to katorga near Omsk and to military service in Semipalatinsk. In the service he also had to make trips for Barnaul and Kuznetsk , where he married.

Anton Chekhov was not exiled, but in made a trip on his own to Sakhalin through Siberia and visited a katorga there. In his trip, he visited Tomsk, speaking disapprovingly about it, then Krasnoyarsk, which he called "the most beautiful Siberian city". He noted that despite being more a place of criminal rather than political exile, the moral atmosphere was much better: Blummer suggested to prepare a gun, but his attendant replied: We are not in Italy, you know.

Chekhov observed that besides of the evident prosperity, there was an urgent demand for cultural development. Many Poles were also exiled to Siberia see Sybiraks. In they incited rebellion in Siberia. The development of the Siberia was hampered by poor transportation links within the region as well as between Siberia and the rest of the country. Aside from the Sibirsky trakt , good roads suitable for wheeled transport were few and far apart. For about five months of the year, rivers were the main means of transportation; during the cold half of the year, cargo and passengers travelled by horse-drawn sleds over the winter roads, many of which were the same rivers, now ice-covered.

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The first steamboat on the Ob , Nikita Myasnikov's "Osnova", was launched in ; but the early starts were difficult, and it was not until that steamboat shipping started developing in the Ob system in the serious way. Steamboats started operating on the Yenisei in , on the Lena and Amur in the s. While the comparably flat Western Siberia was at least fairly well served by the gigantic Ob- Irtysh - Tobol - Chulym river system, the mighty rivers of Eastern Siberia -- Yenisei , Upper Angara River Angara River below Bratsk was not easily navigable because of the rapids , Lena —were mostly navigable only in the north-south direction.

An attempt to somewhat remedy the situation by building the Ob-Yenisei Canal were not particularly successful.

Only a railroad could be a real solution to the region's transportation problems. The first projects of railroads in Siberia emerged since the creation of the Moscow — St. One of the first was Irkutsk — Chita project, intended to connect the former to the Amur River and, consequently, to the Pacific Ocean. Prior to the central government seldom responded to such projects, due to the weakness of Siberian enterprises, fear of Siberian territories' integration with the Pacific region rather than with Russia, and thus falling under the influence of the United States and Great Britain.

The heavy and clumsy bureaucracy and the fear of financial risks also contributed to the inaction: Namely the fear of losing Siberia convinced Alexander II in to make a decision to build the railway. Construction started in Trans-Siberian Railroad gave a great boost to Siberian agriculture, allowing for increased exports to Central Russia and European countries. It pushed not only the territories closest to the railway, but also those connected with meridional rivers, such as the Ob Altai and the Yenisei Minusinsk and Abakan regions. Siberian agriculture exported a lot of cheap grain to the West.

The agriculture in Central Russia was still under pressure of serfdom, formally abandoned in This measure changed the form of cereal product export: From to Siberia on average exported The rural areas of Central Russia were overcrowded, while the East was still lightly populated despite having fertile lands.

On May 10, , by the decree of the Tsar, agriculturalists were granted the right to transfer, without any restrictions, to the Asian territories of Russia, and to obtain cheap or free land. A large advertising campaign was conducted: Special propaganda trains were sent throughout the countryside, and transport trains were provided for the migrants. The State gave loans to the settlers for farm construction. Not all the settlers decided to stay; The cause of the explosion is controversial, and still much disputed to this day.

Different studies have yielded varying estimates of the object's size, with general agreement that it was a few tens of metres across. Although the Tunguska event is believed to be the largest impact event on land in Earth 's recent history, [31] impacts of similar size in remote ocean areas would have gone unnoticed before the advent of global satellite monitoring in the s and s. Because the event occurred in a remote area, there was little damage to human life or property, and it was in fact some years until it was properly investigated. The first recorded expedition arrived at the scene more than a decade after the event.

In , the Russian mineralogist Leonid Kulik , visiting the Podkamennaya Tunguska River basin as part of a survey for the Soviet Academy of Sciences , deduced from local accounts that the explosion had been caused by a giant meteorite impact. He persuaded the Soviet government to fund an expedition to the Tunguska region, based on the prospect of meteoric iron that could be salvaged to aid Soviet industry.

Per Petterson’s “To Siberia” - Words Without Borders

Kulik's party reached the site in To their surprise, no crater was to be found. A few near ground zero were still strangely standing upright, their branches and bark stripped off. Those farther away had been knocked down in a direction away from the center. By the time of the revolution Siberia was an agricultural region of Russia, with weak entrepreneur and industrial classes.

The intelligentsia had vague political ideas. The lack of strong social differences and scarcity of urban population and intellectuals led to the uniting of formally different political parties under ideas of regionalism. The anti-Bolshevik forces failed to offer a united resistance. While Kolchak fought against the Bolsheviks intending to eliminate them in the capital of the Empire, the local Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks tried to sign a peace treaty with the Bolsheviks, on terms of independence.

Foreign allies, though being able to make a decisive effort, preferred to stay neutral, although Kolchak himself rejected the offer of help from Japan. After a series of defeats in Central Russia, Kolchak's forces retreated to Siberia. Amid resistance of Socialist-Revolutionaries and waning support from the allies, the Whites had to evacuate from Omsk to Irkutsk, and finally Kolchak resigned under pressure of the Socialist-Revolutionaries, who soon submitted to the Bolsheviks.

By the s the agriculture in Siberia was in decline. With the large number of immigrants, land was used very intensively, which led to exhaustion of the land and frequent bad harvests. Furthermore, prodrazvyorstka and then the natural food tax contributed to growing discontent.

In — there was a number of anti-communistic riots in rural areas, with up to 40, people involved. According to a survey of in Irkutsk Oblast , the peasants openly said they'd participate in anti-Soviet rebel and hoped for the foreign help. The youth, that had socialized in the age of war, was highly militarized, and the Soviet government pushed the further military propaganda by Komsomol.

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There are many documented evidences of "red banditism", especially in the countryside, such as desecration of churches and Christian graves, and even murders of priests and believers. The Party faintly counteracted this. In the s, the Party started the collectivization , which automatically put the " kulak " label on the well-off families living in Siberia for a long time. Naturally, raskulachivanie applied to everyone who protested.

From the Central Russia many families were exiled in low-populated, forest or swampy areas of Siberia, but those who lived here, had either to escape anywhere, or to be exiled in the Northern regions such as Evenk and Khanty—Mansi Autonomous Okrugs and the northern parts of Tomsk Oblast.

Collectivization destroyed the traditional and most effective stratum of the peasants in Siberia and the natural ways of development, and its consequences are still persisting. In the cities, during the New Economic Policy and later, the new authorities, driven by the romantic socialistic ideas made attempts to build new socialistic cities, according to the fashionable constructivism movement, but after all have left only numbers of square houses.

For example, the Novosibirsk theatre was initially designed in pure constructivistic style. It was an ambitious project of exiled architects. In the mids with introduction of new classicism , it was significantly redesigned. After the Trans-Siberian was built, Omsk soon became the largest Siberian city, but in s Soviets favoured Novosibirsk. In the s the first heavy industrialization took place in the Kuznetsk Basin coal mining and ferrous metallurgy and at Norilsk nickel and other rare-earth metals.

The Northern Sea Route saw industrial application. The same time, with growing number of prisoners, Gulag established a large network of labour camps in Siberia. In , many enterprises and people were evacuated into Siberian cities by the railroads. In urgent need of ammunition and military equipment, they started working right after being unloaded near the stations. The workshops' buildings were built simultaneously with work.

Most of the evacuated enterprises remained at their new sites after the war. They increased industrial production in Siberia to a great extent, and became constitutive for many cities, like Rubtsovsk. On August 28, the Supreme Soviet stated an order "About the Resettlement of the Germans of Volga region ", by which many of them were deported into different rural areas of Kazakhstan and Siberia. By the end of war, thousands of captive soldiers and officers of German and Japanese armies were sentenced to several years of work in labour camps in all the regions of Siberia. These camps were directed by a different administration than Gulag.

Although Soviet camps hadn't the purpose to lead prisoners to death, the death rate was significant, especially in winters. The range of works differed from vegetable farming to construction of the Baikal Amur Mainline. In the second half of the 20th century, the exploration of mineral and hydroenergetic resources continued.

Many of these projects were planned, but were delayed due to wars and the ever-changing opinions of Soviet politicians. The most famous project is Baikal Amur Mainline. It was planned simultaneously with Trans-Siberian, but the construction began just before World War II, was put on hold during the war and restarted after. After Joseph Stalin 's death, it was again suspended for years to be continued under Leonid Brezhnev. The cascade of hydroelectric powerplants was built in the s—s on the Angara River , a project similar to Tennessee Valley Authority in the United States.

The powerplants allowed the creation and support of large production facilities, such as the aluminium plant in Bratsk , Ust-Ilimsk , rare-earth mining in Angara basin, and those associated with the timber industry. The price of electricity in Angara basin is the lowest in Russia. But the Angara cascade is not fully finished yet: The downside of this development is the ecological damage due to the low standards of production and excessive sizes of dams the bigger projects were favoured by the industrial authorities and received more funding , the increased humidity sharpened the already hard climate.

Another powerplant project on Katun River in Altai mountains in the s, which was widely protested publicly, was cancelled. The collapse of state-funded military orders began an economic crisis. The Siberian Branch of Russian Academy of Sciences unites a lot of research institutes in the biggest cities, the biggest being the Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics in Akademgorodok a scientific town near Novosibirsk.

Other scientific towns or just districts composed by research institutes, also named "Akademgorodok", are in the cities of Tomsk , Krasnoyarsk and Irkutsk. These sites are the centers of the newly developed IT industry, especially in that of Novosibirsk, nicknamed " Silicon Taiga ", and in Tomsk. A number of Siberian-based companies extended their businesses of various consumer products to meta-regional and an All-Russian level. Various Siberian artists and industries, have created communities that are not centralized in Moscow anymore, like the Idea [41] annual low-budged ads festival , Golden Capital [42] annual prize in architecture.

Until the completion of the Chita - Khabarovsk highway, the Transbaikalia was a dead end for automobile transport. While this recently constructed through road will at first benefit mostly the transit travel to and from the Pacific provinces, it will also boost settlement and industrial expansion in the scarsely populated regions of Zabaykalsky Krai and Amur Oblast.

Expansion of transportation networks will continue to define the directions of Siberian regional development. The next project to be carried out is the completion of the railroad branch to Yakutsk. Another large project, proposed already in the 19th century as a northern option for the Transsiberian railroad, is the Northern-Siberian Railroad between Nizhnevartovsk , Belyi Yar , Lesosibirsk and Ust-Ilimsk. While the natives are aware of the situation, in Western Russia myths about thousands and millions of Chinese living in the Transbaikalia and the Far East are widespread.

The largest research center in Russia, which systematically studies the history of Siberia is Institute of History of Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences [1]. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Mongol conquest of Central Asia. Russian conquest of Siberia. Russian explorers and Siberian river routes. Atwood-Encyclopedia of Mongolia and the Mongol Empire, p. A History of Chinese Civilization. The Full Collection of the Rissian Annals. Exploration and Conquest on the Russian Open Frontier, to Nowhere is this feat more apparent than in the source of the title, the narrator's fantasy of travel to Siberia:.

The world of To Siberia is defined by these contrasts of temperature and temperament. As Jesper blazes his way through the conflict between Communism and Fascism on his way to Morocco—an ironically apt end-point for Jesper's journey, given the country's status as a refuge for expatriate radicals, and the collapse of its own socialist movement in the s—his sister moves quietly through a less glamorous working-class existence.

Her parents don't think it appropriate for a girl to attend high school under the Nazis, so an aborted education and a series of working-class jobs in various Scandinavian cities form the backdrop against which Petterson's narrator seeks to realize the solitary liberation of her fantasy. The narrator's coldness can feel very alien, perhaps unbelievably so.

She reacts to the grossest injustices—her removal from school, for instance, and her firing from a job as a telephone operator due to an absurd misunderstanding—with an unruffled stoicism that expresses the emotional toll of these events only through her silence. In addition to her reaction to failure, she seems to flee from potential refuge with an almost inexplicable callousness. When characters begin to dismiss the narrator's dreams of traveling to Siberia because they associate the region with the spreading rumors of Stalin's prison camps, we begin to wonder if, despite the austere beauty of her vision, the narrator's dream might also represent her own incarceration within the cold walls that her troubled past has built around her psyche.

If Petterson's narrator seems distant from us, perhaps it is because we want her to be otherwise—we don't like to imagine ourselves as coolly accepting injustice and hardship. If this voice is unfamiliar to Americans' image of ourselves, however, it is surely not unfamiliar to our experience. In the orgy of self-congratulatory films and books released around the fiftieth anniversary of World War II, it is the heat we like to remember: To Siberia is a brilliant portrait and an unsettling reminder that, in the struggle that defeated Fascism, there was also a price paid by untold millions of individuals whose sacrifice was less visible—solitary, cold—but just as significant.

To Siberia

Alex Young is a poet and teacher from Oklahoma currently living in Tangier, Morocco. His recent poetry can be found in publications such as The Brooklyn Rail and Cannibal ; he also reviews poetry and fiction for newwest. She fears that the decorative stone lions guarding a gate on the outskirts of her small town will jump off their pillars and chase her: They tore themselves free of the stone blocks and grew larger, and I jumped off the trap heedless of the speed, grazed my knees on the gravel and ran out into the nearest field. There were roe deer and stags in the forest beyond the field, and I thought about that as I ran.

Nowhere is this feat more apparent than in the source of the title, the narrator's fantasy of travel to Siberia: What I liked was the train ride. It took an hour and that was enough for me to be able to lean backward against the seat with closed eyes, feel the joints in the rail come up and thump through my body and sometimes peer out of the windows and see windswept heathland and imagine I was on the Trans-Siberian railway[…] Jesper was heading for Morocco.

That would be too hot for me.

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