The History of Siberia

Igor V. Naumov, David Collins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780415368193
• eBook ISBN: 9781134207022
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Studi asiatico-americani

Siberia has had an interesting history, quite distinct from that of Russia. Absolutely vast, containing many non-Russian nationalities, and increasingly important at present because of its huge energy reserves, Siberia was at one time part of the Mongol Empire, was settled relatively late by the Russians, and was for a long period a wild frontier zone, similar to the American West. Providing a comprehensive history of Siberia from the very earliest times to the present, thisbookcovers every period of Siberia's history in an accessible way.

Part I

The country known as
‘Siberia’

1 General information

‘Siberia’ is a name of Tartar origin. The term has been known since the thirteenth century, when the Mongols conquered the area and named it. On coming to the region the Russians adopted the same name, calling it the Sibirskaia zemlitsa (land) or ‘Siberia’ for short. The name is being used in this book to refer to the whole northern part of the Asian continent, covering a vast territory of about 13 million square kilometres, approximately 40 per cent of the territory of Asia.

Siberia has natural¹ borders: in the west the Ural Mountains (the Urals), in the north the Arctic Ocean, in the east the Pacific Ocean and in the south the Kazakh and Mongolian steppes. Geographically the country consists of three large regions: western Siberia covering the territory from the Urals to the Yenisei River; eastern Siberia stretching from the Yenisei to the mountains of the Pacific watershed; and the Far East including the Pacific Ocean littoral and the adjoining territory. The natural and geographical conditions of Siberia have greatly influenced the history, culture and way of life of the Siberian population.

In terms of its physical relief, Siberia is subdivided into four geomorph ological areas: the west Siberian Lowland, the mid-Siberian Plateau, the mountains of south Siberia and the mountains of the Far East. This geomorph ological structure has influenced the climate and the quality of topsoil.

Siberia lies within moderate and cold continental climatic zones. It is isolated from the warm influence of the Atlantic Ocean by Europe and the Urals and from the warmer air of central Asia by the mountains of south Siberia and the Far East. It is open only to the north, allowing the intrusion of cold air from the Arctic. Therefore the winter in Siberia is cold. However, though short, the summer is hot. The annual precipitation is not large, the average being 200–300 millimetres. The southern mountainous area and the Pacific Ocean coast are the exception where this index exceeds 1,000 millimetres. The winter is especially low in precipitation, which accounts for the widespread permafrost in Siberia.

The soils are predominantly acidic podsols, not very good for agriculture. Only in south-western Siberia, in the forest-steppe zone, are there fertile black earth (chernozem) belts. There are also some small ‘islands’ of black-earth further east, in southern Siberia.

Siberia is a land of rivers. Its main system consists of four great rivers: the Ob, the Yenisei, the Lena and the Amur with a large number of greater and lesser tributaries. Besides these, there are other very big rivers: the Indigirka, the Kolyma, the Olenek, the Khatanga and the Yana. Lakes are also plentiful, the largest of which is Baikal. The large number of water resources compensates for the severity of the climate and the poverty of the soil, and creates the necessary conditions for human habitation. In fact, Siberia is a very rich land. Over 90 per cent of Russia’s known natural resources are located here.

The flora and fauna of Siberia can be divided between five landscape zones²: the tundra, the forest-tundra, the taiga (huge coniferous forests covering over half of Siberian territory), the mountain taiga and the wooded-steppe. Historically these landscape zones have determined the main activities of Siberia’s inhabitants.

The population of Siberia is over 30 million. Its overwhelming majority consists of the descendants of those who came from European Russia and other regions of the former Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. They represent various ethnic types, cultures and religions. The indigenous population numbers less than one million people. Ethnically, it belongs to the Mongoloid race, but is linguistically divided into six language groups:

• Turkic (the most numerous) – the Tartars, Yakuts, Tuvinians, Khakass, Altaians, Shor, Dolgan and Tofalar (Karagass³);
• Mongolian – the Buriats;
• Tungus-Manchu – the Evenk (Tungus), Even (Lamut), Nanai (Gold), Ulchi, Udegei, Orok, Oroch and Negidal;
• Samodii – the Nenets, Nganasan (Tavgii), Enets and Selkups (Ostiak Samoieds);
• Yugrian – the Khanti (Ostiaks) and Mansi (Voguls); and
• Palaeoasiatic⁴ – the Chukchi, Koriak, Ket, Aleuts, Yukaghir, Siberian Eskimos (Inuit), Nivkhi (Giliak) and Itelmen (Kamchadals).

The native Siberian populations differ from each other in cultural and economic terms.

2 The study of Siberia’s history

Unlike other regions of the Eurasian continent Siberia began to be studied a relatively short time ago. The reason for this was the difficulty of access to the area, particularly its central and northern parts. Therefore, historians writing in ancient times pictured the territory of Siberia as a vast, uninhabited and cold desert where so-called ‘hyperborians’, unreal fantasy creatures, dwelt.

Nevertheless, some information about Siberia and its inhabitants did reach the ‘civilized world’. In particular, it can be found in Geography, written at the beginning of the first century CE by Strabo, an ancient Greek historian. In the seventh century the Gothic historian Jordanes wrote in his work about the origin and deeds of the Goths (see The Gothic History of Jordanes, Cambridge, 1966) that in the east, beyond the Ural Mountains, there was the land of the Yugra people who dwelt in the forests and whose chief occupation was hunting; the land of Ugra was rich in furs. In particular, Jordanes noted the abundance of the ‘silver sable’ whose fur was highly esteemed in Europe.

The famous Chinese historian Ssu-ma Ch’ien gave more information about Siberia than other ancient historians. In his famous work Shi Tsi (see The Grand Scribe’s Records, ed. W. Nienhauser, Bloomington, 1994), written in the late second or early first century BCE, he left a detailed description of the ‘Empire of the Huns’, their history and population, which also touched on some parts of southern Siberia.

In the Middle Ages, the world-famous European explorers Plano Carpini (Friar Pian del Carpine), Wilhelm von Rubruk, Marco Polo, and the famous Arabian historians Asad Gardizi, Rashid ad-Din, Ibn Batuta, and others wrote about the peoples of Siberia. Though none of them had visited Siberia, they made a detailed description of its nature and inhabitants from the evidence of those who had been there. Thus, Gardizi, for example, wrote in the eleventh century about the Yenisei Kirghiz and a mysterious Siberian people, the ‘Furi’. All of these descriptions were inaccurate. They contained a good deal of invention, but, nevertheless, they still communicated the first information (even if it was vague) about Siberia. Much more detail about the history of the south Siberian peoples is contained in medieval Chinese chronicles; it is from Chinese sources that experts learn about the history of ancient Siberian states and peoples.

The ancient Russians (Rus) also knew about Siberia. It was first mentioned in the eleventh century in the still extant Novgorod Chronicles. There is some information about Siberia (the Land of Yugra) and its people in the Lavrentiev Chronicle (the second half of the fourteenth century) and in the Ipatev Chronicle (early fifteenth century). These chronicles are one of the main sources for the study of ancient Russia. They describe the marches of the Novgorod people into the ‘Land of Yugra and Samoiad’, and the ‘Yugra and Samoiad’ peoples too. Siberia became an object of systematic studies only after its unification with Russia.

As early as the seventeenth century, when Siberia had not yet been completely conquered, the Siberian Chronicles emerged. They were remarkable examples of historiography. In these accounts the explorers involved in the conquest of Siberia (zemleprokhodtsy) sought to tell about their heroic deeds, and about the lands and peoples they had discovered and conquered.

In 1621, by order of the first Siberian bishop, Kiprian, survivors from Yermak’s expedition were gathered in Tobolsk, and Tales of Siberian Marches (Napisanie, kako priidosha v Sibir’) were compiled which have not survived. They were used as a basis for subsequent chronicles. The chronicle About the Seizure of the Kingdom of Siberia was written in 1630. Kiprian’s former secretary, Savva Yesipov, compiled his chronicle About Siberia and the Seizure of Siberia in Tobolsk in 1636 (it is now called the Yesipov Chronicle or the Kiprian Chronicle). In the middle of the seventeenth century the tale About the Conquest of the Siberian Land (the Stroganov Chronicle) was written on the basis of earlier chronicles and some documents belonging to the Stroganov family. In 1680 The History of Siberia was published. It was written by Yuri Krizhanich (Krizˇ, a church figure, exiled to Siberia. At the very end of the seventeenth century the cartographer and historian Semion Remezov compiled a History of Siberia on the basis of earlier chronicles, as well as his famous Book of Drawings of Siberia, the country’s first geographical atlas.

The Siberian chronicles were not historical works in the full sense of the term. The authors wrote down every bit of information they happened to hear or learn about Siberia, the Siberian peoples and historic events. Nonetheless, they are of great value as contemporary sources of information about the history of Siberia of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. All later researchers of this epoch, including present-day scholars, have needed to use them.

Scholarly study of Siberia began in the eighteenth century after Peter the Great’s reforms. In the middle of the eighteenth century, the academician G.F. Müller wrote a most valuable two-volume work, The History of Siberia, in which he gathered and generalized all information about Siberia known by that time. Müller’s work became an outstanding event in Russian and international historical science. It is precisely this work that is the starting point of scientific historiography of Siberia.

The study of Siberian history was vigorously pursued between the second half of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. During that period quite a few general historical works on Siberia came out. Perhaps the most significant and interesting of them were published at the end of the nineteenth century. These consist of a two-volume work by P.A. Slovtsov, An Historical Survey of Siberia (1886 and 1888), and a five-volume work, An Historical Essay on Siberia, by V.K. Andrievich (1889), as well as A Chronological List of the Most Important Data on the History of Siberia (1884) by I.V. Shcheglov. In addition to works of a general nature, a large number of major and minor works were published devoted to specific issues in Siberian history.

Gerhard Friedrich Müller (1705–83) was born in Germany and studied at Leipzig University. In 1725 he was invited to Russia to work in the Academy of Sciences. He was in charge of academic publications, and in 1731 became a professor of the Academy. In 1733–43 he was the chief of the team despatched by the Academy to participate in the Great Northern Expedition. He travelled throughout Siberia from the Urals to Nerchinsk and Yakutsk, examining the archives of many Siberian towns. He discovered, gathered and brought to St Petersburg a vast amount of valuable historical material, known today as ‘Müller’s 38 Dossiers’. In 1745–6 he worked on the General Map of the Russian Empire which was drawn up using the results of the Great Northern Expedition. In 1748–9 he published his fundamental work A Description of the Kingdom of Siberia. In 1748 he became a Russian citizen. In the Academy he concentrated on studying history and became one of the authors of the ‘Norman Theory of the Origin of the Russian State’. He initiated the establishment of a Department of History in the Academy and was the author of many historical works including the two-volume History of Siberia. He died in St Petersburg.

On the whole, by 1917 researchers had investigated the history of the annexation of Siberia to Russia and its exploration by Russians relatively well. The pre-Russian period in the Siberian history had been investigated far more sketchily: scholars had only just started searching for and gathering relevant historical sources and material.

The study of Siberian history was continued in the Soviet era. After 1917 a vast number of books and articles came out, devoted to various aspects of it, and they contained a large quantity of previously unknown facts. Soviet historians were particularly successful in researching the ancient history of Siberia, from the Stone Age to the arrival of the Russians. This great work was headed by academician A.P. Okladnikov, who, on the basis of new archaeological finds and the thorough investigation of ancient sources, succeeded in restoring the history of many Siberian peoples, both those surviving till the present-day and some who had died out a long time ago.

The high level achieved in the study of Siberian history was reflected in a fundamental five-volume work The History of Siberia prepared by the Siberian branch of the Academy of Sciences (1968–9). In addition, a large number of new, interesting and weighty historical works on Siberian themes were published after its publication.

Alexei Pavlovich Okladnikov (1908–81) was born in the village Anga, Irkutsk Province. He graduated from Irkutsk Teacher Training College and later completed a postgraduate course in Leningrad State University. From the end of the 1920s to the early 1930s he was engaged in Young Communist League (Komsomol) work in Irkutsk. Between 1938 and 1961 he worked in the Leningrad branch of the Archeological Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences undertaking archaeological investigations in Siberia. From 1961 to 1966 he was Head of the Humanities Department ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Part I: The Country Known As ‘Siberia’
• Part II: Siberia In Antiquity
• Part III: Siberia In the First Millennium and In the First Half of the Second Millennium CE
• Part IV: The Annexation of Siberia to Russia
• Part V: Siberia In the Eighteenth and the First Half of the Nineteenth Centuries
• Part VI: Siberia In the Second Half of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
• Part VII: The Revolution and Civil War In Siberia (1917–22)
• Part VIII: Siberia In the 1920s–90s and Beyond
• Glossary of Russian Terms
• Notes
• Editor’s Suggestions for Further Reading