114 Siberia The EconomistDecember 21st 2019
2 tual partners in the resurgence of Siberian regionalism is their
self-confidence. They do not debate whether Russia belongs in Eu-
rope or in Asia or whether it could ever become a “normal” coun-
try—the sort of questions fretted over in trendy Moscow cafés. As
far as they are concerned, theirs is a normal country: one called Si-
beria which is populated by “spontaneous Eurasians”, people who
listen to their own common sense rather than the agenda pushed
by the Kremlin or Moscow liberals.
When, after the invasion of 2014, Russia’s state propaganda
whipped up patriotic hysteria under the slogan “Crimea is ours”,
the monstrators responded with “Hell is ours”. When the Kremlin
demanded the federalisation of Ukraine, the artists called a march
for the federalisation of Siberia and “the creation of the Siberian
republic within the Russian Federation”. Its slogan was “Stop feed-
ing Moscow”. The Russian authorities banned the march and
blocked the internet page that advertised it. Predictably, this gen-
erated a far greater resonance from the media than the march itself
would probably have done: conceptual politics born from concep-
tual art, and all the more powerful for it.
“All Siberian cities have different problems, but they have a
common grievance against Moscow,” explains Mikhail Rozhansky,
a historian and sociologist in Irkutsk. Yet while on paper Siberia is
no different from any other Russian region, in reality it has re-
tained some autonomy. And the harder the Kremlin tries to unify
the country, the stronger the sense of separateness becomes. It is
perhaps simply a function of size. In a land this large, people rely
on themselves and each other; they do not have high expectations
of any politician and reject authority as a matter of principle. This
gives them the country’s strongest streak of Russia’s most distinc-
tive contribution to political discourse: anarchy.
In 1898 Prince Peter Kropotkin, the father of anarcho-commu-
nism, wrote that in Siberia he “understood that the administrative
machine [of the state] can do no good for people...In Siberia I lost
any faith in state discipline and was ready to become an anarchist”.
In the last days of the Soviet Union Grazhdanskaya Oborona(CivilDefence), an iconic punk band from the Siberian city of
Omsk, inspired their fans by singing: “Kill the state
within yourself” and “Our truth, our faith, our deed is
anarchy”.
Protest is currently easier in Siberia than in the rest
of Russia, and politics freer, too. For the most part this
liberty is exercised only locally. But in 2019 Alexander
Gabyshev took it on himself to expand it in a very Sibe-
rian way. Though some indigenous Siberians con-
verted to Christianity after the Russians arrived, and
some practice Buddhism, some still follow Shaman-
ism. Mr Gabyshev styles himself a shaman warrior. In
the spring he set off from his native Yakutia dragging a
cart, a dozen followers in his wake. His destination was
Moscow, “the heart of evil”; his goal was to exorcise the
dark forces embodied by Mr Putin by lighting a fire in
Red Square and performing a ritual with a tambourine.
As he went along, his following grew, both on the
road and online. “From now on Putin is not a law to
you. Live freely. That is the law,” he preached—part
Kropotkin, part Aleister Crowley, an occultist. Then
one night a swatteam descended on his camp and
packed the shaman back on a plane to Yakutia. There
he was briefly incarcerated in a psychiatric ward before
being ordered not to leave Yakutia again. Amnesty In-
ternational declared him a prisoner of conscience.
Mr Gabyshev compares himself to a caterpillar
which “knows that what will come out of this cocoon
will be faster, stronger and wiser.” The idea of a shaman
liberating Russia has a surrealism all of its own.A valour undreamed of
But he is not the only one to believe that a cleansing can
come from the east to the west. In 2013 Vladislav In-
ozemtsev, a liberal economist, and Valery Zubov, a for-
mer governor of the Krasnoyarsk region,
wrote a response to “The Siberian Curse”
called “The Siberian Blessing”. They argue
that, “in a vast and over-centralised coun-
try such as Russia, [modernisation] cannot
come from the centre, because the centre is
the main beneficiary of the rent-seeking
system.” Siberia—“the awakening colony
that frees itself”—is not an eastern prov-
ince of Russia. Rather Moscow is a city west
of Siberia in dire need of reform and anar-
chy, cheerful skies and irony, and perhaps a
touch of shamanism, too.
As Sergei Kovalevksy, the curator of the
museum in Krasnoyarsk, puts it, “In Siberia
anything is possible.”
A similar thought occurred to Chekhov
when he stopped in Krasnoyarsk. “On the
Volga a man started with valour and ended
with a moan, which is called a song. On the
Yenisei, life started with a moan and will
end with valour of a kind we can’t even
dream of. This is what I thought standing
on the bank of the wide Yenisei: what a full,
clever and brave life will light these banks
with time!”
Most of the Krasnoyarsk that Chekhov
would have seen in the 1890s is long gone.
But something of that thought remains,
projected every night onto a building that
was once Lenin’s Museum.
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