Siberia

V

History

Although nomadic peoples first entered Siberia about 50,000 years ago, the region’s first settled communities date from about 10,000 bc. Evidence of these settlements is abundant in southern Siberia, which was drawn into the trade that flourished along the ancient Silk Road linking China with imperial Rome. When the nomadic Scythians surged out of their homeland on the edge of present-day Mongolia around 700 bc, the great grass road that stretched along Siberia's southern lands became the route by which they invaded Europe. Using the same road, the Sarmatians followed in the 3rd century bc, and the Huns overran the area in the 4th century ad. In the 13th century the Mongols swept in and took control of southwestern Siberia. In the 15th century the Mongol Empire dissolved into many smaller states. One of these states was the khanate of Sibir, whose capital was located near present-day Tobol’sk.

A

Russian Exploration and Conquest

In the 16th century the first Russian conquerors marched against Sibir. Financed by the powerful Stroganov family, the Russian Cossack adventurer Yermak led a force of Cossacks that defeated the armies of Sibir in 1582 and claimed all of Siberia in the name of Russian tsar Ivan IV Vasilyevich, also known as Ivan the Terrible. Yermak’s success soon led to other Russian incursions. By 1639 Russian settlers had reached the Pacific Ocean, and in 1648 Russian explorer Semyon Dezhnyov sailed through Bering Strait, rounding the easternmost tip of Asia.

Far to the south, other Russians explored the Amur valley on the southeastern edge of Siberia, which led to conflicts with China. By the terms of the Treaty of Nerchinsk, signed in 1689, Russia gave up all claims to the entire watershed area of the Amur River. In the 1850s Russia moved to regain the area through military campaigns led by Russian general Nikolay Muravev. In the Treaty of Aigun signed in 1858, China ceded all territory north of the Amur to Russia. This treaty and the Treaty of Beijing (1860) established the present-day border between the two countries.

Like the Mongols before them, the Russians collected tribute from Siberia’s indigenous peoples in the form of furs. Great quantities of fine Siberian pelts were exported, first to Europe and later to China, until furs from North America began to compete on a large scale at the beginning of the 19th century. At that time, the mining of iron, silver, copper, and gold, performed by Russians and Russian convict labor, began to replace fur-gathering as Siberia’s main economic activity.

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B

Influx of Russians

Siberia’s harsh climate, poor roads, and limited food supplies kept the Russian population in the region small until 1861, when the Russian imperial government freed the country’s serfs (peasants legally bound to the land they worked) and significant migration began. When construction of the Trans-Siberian Railroad began in the early 1890s, hundreds of thousands of Russian settlers arrived in the region, and farming began to develop in Siberia on a commercial scale. Before this time, Russians living in the region had been mainly soldiers, government officials, runaway serfs, peasants, and religious dissidents.

C

Place of Exile

In the 1660s the Russian government under Tsar Alexis I had begun the practice of punishing common criminals and political offenders by exiling them to Siberia. Among those exiled during the 17th and 18th centuries were the archpriest Avvakum, who had defied the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church; Aleksandr Menshikov, the favorite of Peter the Great, who succumbed to court intrigue after the emperor’s death; and progressive writer and critic of serfdom Aleksandr Radishchev. By the 1870s the number of exiles had grown to more than 10,000 per year. Joseph Stalin, Vladimir Lenin, and Leon Trotsky all served terms of exile in Siberia in the 1890s and 1900s for revolutionary Marxist activities.

D

Soviet Period

Following the Russian Revolution of 1917, which brought the Bolsheviks (later Communists) to power in Russia, civil war broke out between the Bolsheviks and their adversaries, most notably the counterrevolutionary White forces (see Russian Civil War). White armies led by Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak fought the Bolsheviks for control of Siberia and its natural resources. After Kolchak was defeated in 1920, Siberia came under Soviet rule.

Siberia’s development accelerated under the Soviets, especially after Joseph Stalin came to power in the 1920s. Stalin began using forced labor to mine the region’s minerals, particularly iron, coal, silver, gold, and diamonds; cut timber; and build cities and industrial complexes. Brutal forced labor became a major aspect of the ongoing practice of Siberian exile. The Soviet leader condemned millions of men and women to the Gulag—a vast system of work camps and prisons in Siberia—during the 1930s and 1940s. Usually convicted on trumped-up charges, those exiled included intellectuals, party or army officials, and ethnic minorities who Stalin believed could pose a threat to his power or obstruct state policies. Some of the USSR's greatest writers, scientists, and military leaders, including World War II hero Konstantin Rokossovsky, served prison terms in Siberia. Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and other survivors have described the horrors of Siberia's labor camps in vivid detail. After Stalin's death in 1953, the labor camp population dropped dramatically.

Beginning with the first economic Five-Year Plan (1928-1932), Soviet planners made strenuous efforts to develop Siberia. In the south and southwest, the huge industrial complexes of the Kuzbas and of Magnitogorsk both owed their beginnings to the early five-year plans. So did Noril’sk, which grew during this period from a tiny frontier town into a sprawling complex of plants processing uranium, copper, nickel, and platinum. The Soviet government encouraged Russians to move to Siberia voluntarily by offering high wages for work in the region, and Russians poured into the newly built industrial centers. Some Siberian cities grew by more than 600 percent between 1927 and 1940.

During World War II (1939-1945), Soviet planners shifted much of the USSR’s heavy industry from Ukraine (then a Soviet republic) and European Russia to Siberia, where it lay beyond the reach of Germany's longest-range bombers. In the 1960s and 1970s the Soviet government built gigantic petrochemical complexes at Tomsk and Tobolsk. In the 1980s and 1990s huge mining operations in the Siberian northeast—which formerly had depended on forced labor—began to be modernized and expanded with Western assistance.

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