112 Siberia The EconomistDecember 21st 2019
21river, he was hired by the Stroganov family in a bid to expand its fur
trade by taking on the Khanate of Sibir. In 1582, accompanied by
about 800 men, he crossed the Urals and established a foothold in
Siberia. He drowned three years later, but Russia’s expansion con-
tinued at a breakneck speed, pushing aside Mongolian Buryats,
Turkic Yakuts, Samoyedic Nenets and other indigenous, or at least
established, peoples. By 1648 the territory under their sway
stretched all the way to the port of Okhotsk on the Pacific coast.
Much less is known of Yermak than of, say, Raleigh or Sir Fran-
cis Drake. But a lack of detailed biography is no obstacle to becom-
ing a folk hero. In the romantic mythology of the 19th century he
came to embody the energy and enterprise of the free settlers who
had moved east into a land where serfdom was never imposed,
fighting, mixing and assimilating with those who the cossacks had
displaced as they did so. As Nikolay Yadrintsev, a 19th century his-
torian who did much to create the region’s founding myths, wrote:
“Siberia, in its origin, is a product of an independent, rather than
state-driven, movement and of the creative forces of the peo-
ple...that was later hijacked and regimented by the state.”
Regimented—and exploited. Its claim on the lands taken by
Yermak and his Cossacks transformed Muscovy, a second-tier
duchy, into the world’s largest continental empire. Over the fol-
lowing centuries the bounty of Siberia sustained the Russian, So-
viet and post-Soviet empires. A source of valuable furs and salt in
the 17th century, precious metals and gold in the 19th century, and
oil and gas in 20th century, the vastness of Siberia was to Russia
something akin to what the west was to America. It felt similar,
too. “My God, how far removed life here is from Russia,” Anton
Chekhov wrote as he travelled across Siberia. “I really felt I wasn’t
in Russia at all, but somewhere in Patagonia or Texas.”
A key difference, though, is that Russia has not moved beyond
the extraction of riches from these empty lands. Up to three-quar-
ters of what the country exports comes from Siberia. The rents ex-
tracted from these various trades still allow Russia to deal with
economic crises without modernising its economy or renouncing
autocracy and state monopoly, just as they did in centuries past.
In a book published in 2003, Clifford Gaddy and Fiona Hill
(more noted, recently, for her testimony to Congress during the
hearings on the impeachment of President Donald Trump) call
this “The Siberian Curse”. Siberia’s size, its extreme climate and its
misdevelopment by Russian rulers, they argue, hold all of Russia
back. “In essence,” they sum up, “to become competitive economi-
cally and to achieve sustainable growth, Russia needs to ‘shrink’. It
must contract not its territory, but its economic geography.”The trade across the Urals was not all
one way: in return for its resources, Siberia
was sent criminals, prostitutes, dissidents
and revolutionaries. In “The House of the
Dead”, a history of Siberian exile, Daniel
Beer notes that “the metaphors changed
over time, but the basic conviction re-
mained that Siberia was a receptacle for the
empire’s own disorder.”
This was meant to cleanse Russia, not
change Siberia. But some exiles could not
help but bring change—none more so than
the Decembrists. Young men who had been
greeted as liberators across Europe during
the Napoleonic wars, they had returned
home to Russia infused with the ideals of
liberty, nationhood and republicanism. On
December 26th 1825 they mounted an
armed revolt in St Petersburg. It failed. Five
were hanged; 121 were sent east.
Instead of oblivion, they found hope.
Nikolai Basargin, a 26-year-old Decem-
brist, wrote in his diaries, “The further we travelled
into Siberia, the more fetching it seemed in my eyes.
The common people seemed freer, more lively and
more educated than our Russian peasants, especially
the serfs.” The locals were, he thought, rather like
Americans. “There is no doubt,” Basargin wrote, “that
Siberia would stand its own in comparison to the
American States, this young republic whose rapid
growth in material and political significance is so
striking both in terms of its attitude to dignity and to
human rights”.A spring from December
The legacy of the Decembrists survived the fall of the
Russian empire and the Bolshevik revolution. In the
1970s one Decembrist family home in Irkutsk became
an atmospheric museum and a place of pilgrimage for
the Soviet intelligentsia. In an act of dignity and de-
fiance, a Siberian publishing house brought out a se-
ries of Decembrist memoirs. If you see that legacy in
Mr Muratov’s snowflakes and stripes, too, you might
not be wrong.
When, in 1861, serfdom was abolished in the rest of
Russia, millions of the newly free but landless flocked
there, assisted by the Russian state. The Trans-Siberian
railway, second only to St Petersburg itself as a tsarist
imposition of modernity on the landscape, spread
them between newly thriving cities and settlements in
between. The elegant classical architecture of 19th-
century Irkutsk and the delicate ornamentation of
wooden Art Nouveau houses in Tomsk still survive
among grey Soviet apartment blocks and eclectic post-
Soviet monstrosities, testament to the tastes, money
and energy that turned frontier forts into prosperous
and cultured cities.
Rich as it was in resources and talents, Siberia
lacked a wide range of freedoms. It saw itself as a colo-
ny and did not like that status, especially when the
word was preceded by the modifier “penal”. Siberian
intellectuals, students and journalists fostered a new
regionalism. They did not want independence. They
wanted Siberia to live up to its potential as the best part
of Russia—as what Russia might become. As Yadrint-
sev argued in “Siberia as a Colony”: “The views and ho-UlaanbaatarKrasnoyarskUlan UdeTayshetIrkutskTomskNovosibirskBarnaulNovokuznetskRUSSIA
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