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1) The Conquest of Siberia

For a long time blocked by the unwelcome presence of the Tatars, the extension of the Russian Empire on the far side of the Ural Mountains was made possible only by the eventual defeat of the Tatar khan, Kuchum, at the hands of Yermak and his Cossack forces in 1582. The great Asiatic empire established by Jenghiz Khan began to go to pieces in the fifteenth century, and various more or less independent governments were established on the site of the ancient realm. Dissensions among these people caused some of them to spread northward, and in the beginning of the sixteenth century, before Yermak’s expedition, the Tartars had occupied much of the territory east of the Ural Mountains. They had found it easy to overcome the scattered inhabitants who had lived there previously, but they found more difficulty with the Russians with whom they came in contact in the Urals, so that in 1555 the Tartar Prince Ediger agreed to pay a yearly tribute of 1,000 sable skins to the Tsar, though otherwise still preserving a nominal independence. His successor, however, the Khan Kutchum, rebelled against this tribute shortly before Yermak’s arrival, and the Stroganoffs, a powerful family in the Ural Mountains, encouraged Yermak to make his invasion.

When Yermak crossed the Urals he found several well-established Tartar communities, and he first carried on operations successfully on the east slope of the mountains. He moved then eastward and easily captured Isker, the stronghold of Khan Kutchum, in the valley of the River Tobol, near where the town of Tobolsk now stands. He sent messengers to the Tsar describing his victories, and announcing that he held the conquered regions subject to his commands. The Tsar, Ivan IV, surnamed “the Terrible,” greatly pleased with the services of Yermak, raised him in royal favor, and sent him a hundred rubles, a silver cup and two cuirasses, as well as a fur robe which he had worn himself, a sign of special favor. The Tartar legend relates that a small black animal like a hound emerged from the Tobol River, while a large white shaggy wolf emerged from the Irtish. They met on a sandy island near the confluences of the two streams and fought, the smaller animal finally killing the larger one; then both disappeared in the Irtish. The native soothsayers interpreted this as meaning the overthrow of the Tartars by the Russians.

Yermak continued his work of invasion, but in 1584 was defeated by the Tartars, and was drowned in the River Irtish. After his death, however, the Russians promptly followed up the conquests that he had begun, and rapidly occupied the vast regions to the east. In 1587 the now flourishing city of Tobolsk was founded near the site of the old Tartar stronghold of Khan Kutchum. In 1604 the Russian advance had progressed so far to the east that the town of Tomsk, almost 1,000 miles from the Urals, now one of the most flourishing commercial centers of northern Asia, was founded; and in 1622 the town of Yakutsk, over twice that distance, was founded; while in 1647 the Cossack Dezhneff crossed Bering Straits, over 4,000 miles east of the Urals. In 1643 the explorer Poyarkoff discovered the Amur region in southeastern Siberia; and in 1649–52 the celebrated Khabaroff entered this same vast region and defeated the natives and the Chinese armies that defended it. It was, however, subsequently returned to the Chinese by the treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689, and was not again recovered by the Russians until 1858, when, by the skill and diplomacy of Count Muravioff, it was ceded to them by the treaty of Aigun without any fighting. Shortly after the middle of the seventeenth century the town of Irkutsk, west of Lake Baikal, and the town of Nerchinsk, east of Lake Baikal, were founded.

Vasily Surikov, The Conquest of Siberia by Yermak, 1895.

Oil on canvas, 285 × 599 cm. Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

Thus within less than a hundred years after the campaigns of Yermak the Russians had carried their explorations and conquests across Asia to the farthest points on the Pacific Coast; and all the northern part of the continent, from the Urals to the Pacific, and from the Turko-Mongolian possessions and the Chinese frontier on the south, to the Arctic Ocean on the north, was under Russian control.

The conquest of Siberia had been accomplished at remarkable speed, but at the expense of a great deal of blood.

As they continued in their warlike progress ever eastwards, the Cossacks demanded tribute from the populations they overran – tribute not in the form of money but of furs: the yassak. They also constructed forts to control these new subjects of the Russian Tsar and in which to stockpile the precious tribute. Some of the tribespeople, such as the Yakuts, surrendered without much resistance (the Russians were excellent at knowing whom to treat gently and offer gifts to), only to rise in revolt soon afterwards. It was more common, however, for the tribal groups – like the Khanty and the Mansis, the Khakass people, the Evenki and the Eveni people – to act with the utmost ferocity in staving off for as long as possible this hated colonization. The pacification of the north-east of Siberia, from the end of the 17^th century, thus took place amid horrifically bloody scenes of combat. The Yukaghirs, and then the Itelmen, sustained heavy losses; whole communities of them were wiped out. The Koryaks kept up their defiant opposition for nearly 25 years. And only after a full 60 years were the pertinacious Chukchis – a warrior nation – finally subdued, and even then only at the wrong end of the cannons brought in especially by the Russians, forced to adopt unusual methods.

The incorporation of Siberia into the Russian Empire was accompanied by an influx of colonists and the inauguration of a social system designed to exploit the indigenous populations. The consequences were manifold and immediate: the aboriginal peoples were forcibly suppressed, and made thoroughly aware of their insignificant numeric strength. As happened in the Americas, the colonists who came to Siberia brought with them all kinds of viral and bacterial diseases against which the aboriginal peoples had no immunity – smallpox, measles, and syphilis among them. Recurrent epidemics racked the defenceless communities. Smallpox alone accounted for the deaths of several thousand Yukaghirs.

The yassak system likewise, over time, was to have repercussions that were all but catastrophic for the peoples of Siberia. Together with the diseases it represented a principal reason for the declining numbers in the population of the ethnic groups during the Tsarist period. So oppressive was the levy of furs that local inhabitants were often forced to go to extreme lengths to get hold of ‘the golden pelt’. If the levy had not been fully supplied by the due date, the officers responsible for collecting it had various additional methods of extracting it. One of the more common was to kidnap someone and hold him or her to ransom until it was forthcoming, usually someone important in the community of whoever was defaulting on the tax – perhaps one of the best hunters, a headman, possibly one of the tribal elders. In this way quite often having insufficient time to see to keeping themselves properly fed, exhausted, obliged to do without their leaders or the people most required for the survival of their group, the local people all too frequently underwent periods of famine which, in the environmental conditions natural to the cold north and to Siberia in general, were particularly, insidiously, destructive.

Vasily Surikov, The Conquest of Siberia by Yermak, detail (indigenous archers), 1895. Oil on canvas, 285 × 599 cm. Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

Vasily Surikov, The Conquest of Siberia by Yermak, detail (front line), 1895. Oil on canvas, 285 × 599 cm.

Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

At the beginning of the 18^th century, brutality and massacres accompanied the forcible conversion to Christianity of the indigenous peoples. The Russians had realized that ‘gentle’ methods did not seem to be working. Simultaneously, the colonists continued to exploit the people shamelessly. It was nonetheless only a little later, in 1824, that an official Code of Practice was promulgated by the authorities that was meant to protect the peoples of Siberia from abuses of these kinds. Nothing much came of it.

In the space of two centuries, the conquest and the colonization of Siberia caused a general – in some cases, even permanent – decline in the fortunes of the aboriginal populations. By the end of the 19^th century some of the ethnic groups were in such a sorry state (by way of depletion in numbers, wretched health, poverty and low morale) that even then their disappearance altogether was regarded as being only a matter of time – and a short time at that.

On the 9^th of November 1901, the following telegram flashed along the wires from Sergei Witte, the Director of Railway Affairs, to his Imperial master, the Tsar:

“On May 19, 1891, your Majesty at Vladivostok turned with your own hand the first sod of the Great Siberian Railway. Today, on the anniversary of your accession to the throne, the East Asiatic Railway is completed. I venture to express to your Majesty, from the bottom of my heart, my loyal congratulations on this historic event.

With the laying of the rails for a distance of 2,500 kilometres, from the Transbaikal territory to Vladivostok and Port Arthur, our enterprise in Manchuria is practically, though not entirely, concluded.

Notwithstanding exceptionally difficult conditions, and the destruction of a large portion of the line last year, temporary traffic can, from day to day, be carried on along the whole system. I hope that within two years hence all the remaining work to be done will be completed, and that the railway will be opened for permanent regular traffic.”

In ten years, four thousand miles of railway had been laid down, averaging more than a mile a day: a record.

A huge country covering five million square miles of swamp and forest and rich corn land, and mountains, and deserts. A country of mighty rivers flowing from the central mountains of Asia to the Arctic Ocean, frozen solid half the year, but at certain seasons among the most magnificent waterways of the world. A country that was once inhabited by a great population, and then for ages the abode of a few wandering tribes; now receiving fresh life from tens of thousands of emigrants, who poured into it from Russia over the iron way. Suddenly, Siberia had leapt into notice as a new Land of Promise, to which were turned the eager and inquiring eyes of half the world.

2) An Enormous Undertaking

In the second half of the 19^th century, the Russians had acquired an important province in the Far East, washed by the waters of a great ocean, and traversed by a noble river. They determined that it should be joined to their European possessions by something more commodious and more safe than the ill-made, bandit-infested post-road that had previously wound its muddy or frozen length across the steppes and mountains. The government was also becoming more concerned about the fact that the populations of Russia, European and Asiatic, were very disproportionate. The nomadic tribes of Siberia, such as the Bashkires, Khirghiz, Evenks, Buryats, Votiaks, Kamchakdales, and Samoyedes were of small numbers in comparison to the millions of acres comprising Asiatic Russia, the official computation of the population being (including both Russians and aboriginals) one man to every five square miles. The first cause of the extremely slow progress in populating Siberia may be set down to its distance and inaccessibility from the congested districts of Russia. The only means of reaching its heart, up till the commencement of the Trans-Siberian Railway work, was by the lonely tarantass or the occasional steamers playing the tortuous waterways of the Irtish and Obi systems. The Siberian railway, however, promised to considerably alter this state of things.

Another stumbling-block to the rapid development of Siberia until this time been the great prejudice existing against it throughout European Russia, a prejudice which may be said to be far greater than that among foreigners. For many years Siberia had been the dumping-ground for criminals of the worst class. Although the want of communication may be set down as the first, the chief cause undoubtedly existed in Siberia having been made a penal colony.

It is said that the great famine of 1890–1891 which spread throughout Southern Russia, turned the eyes of the Russian government towards Siberia as a possible outlet for surplus population. Tsar Alexander II had always taken a kindly interest in his Asiatic possessions, and it was the dream of his life to see Siberia developed to its fullest extent. The wish was commendable, but the means were lacking.

It was in order to see with imperial eyes what Siberia was that Tsar Nicholas II (then Tsarevitch) took his memorable journey across the steppes and mountains from the Pacific coast. The first sod was cut and the first barrow-load wheeled at Vladivostok by Nicholas at the end of this grand tour of the East in 1891. His royal contribution was laid in that town as the foundation-piece of what would, in the course of a few years, rank as the monumental railway enterprise of the nineteenth century. Alexander, right up to his death, cherished his colonization scheme, and the heritage he left his son was energetically pushed forward. A start was made at the Cheliabinsk end in the following year. Following its commencement, construction steadily progressed in the face of physical and other difficulties at a pace which eclipsed the laying of the great trunk lines of the United States and Canada.

Vasily Surikov, Stenka Razin, detail, 1906.

Oil on canvas, 318 × 600 cm. Russian Museum, Moscow.

O. Kurliukov, Tabernacle, 1901–1906. Silver, gilding, cloisonné enamel, porcelain, 33 × 9 × 14 cm.

St. Michael Cathedral, Sitka, Alaska. Moscow.

Unknown artist, Icon: Kazan Mother of God, mid-19^th century. Wood, oil paint, 45 × 57 cm.

Irkutsk Regional Museum, Irkutsk.

Konstantin Savitsky, Repairing the Railroad, 1874.

Oil on canvas, 100 × 175 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

Illarion Pryanishnikov, Empties, 1872.

Oil on canvas, 48 × 71 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

In December 1895, the Trans-Siberian railway was completed to Omsk; in 1896 to Obi; in 1896 to Irkutsk, 3371 miles east of Moscow. Stretensk was reached in July 1900, and there the original scheme terminated. To avoid carrying the line along the Amur, an arrangement was come to with the Chinese Government in 1896, by which the engineers were given rights to drive the track across North Manchuria in an almost straight line to Vladivostok; and in 1898 the Russo-Chinese Bank (alias Russian Government) obtained a concession to make a branch due south from the Manchurian section to Port Arthur on the Gulf of Pechili. These sections were pushed forward with the greatest possible speed, owing to political events in the Far East, which demanded the presence of large bodies of troops to protect or extend Russian interests.

Many Russians once supposed that the construction of the Great Siberian Railway would ruin the traffic of the river systems; but it was found, on the contrary, that with the coming of the railway the river traffic was actually very greatly increased. This was due partly to the great stimulus given to business generally throughout Siberia, and also to the fact that these rivers, excepting the Amur, were dangerous to access by the cold sea route of the Arctic Ocean, and until the railway came, had no ready outlet for their traffic. Ocean steamers could readily enter the mouth of the Amur, but very few entered the great rivers which empty into the Arctic, on account of the difficulty and danger of navigating the Arctic Ocean north of the continent of Europe and Asia. Occasionally vessels from Russian ports and some from English and other ports in Europe made the trip; but the service was not regular and many of them were compelled to turn back, while not a few were lost. Hence the railway was of peculiar benefit to the traffic of these rivers by supplying a connection with the outside world which could not be gotten satisfactorily by sea.

Though the rivers and military postroads offered ready means of local travel before the railway was built, yet the distances in Siberia are so great that these methods, even under the most favorable circumstances, were slow and tedious; and, moreover, during a large part of the year the rivers are frozen and sleighs had to be used. The journey to different places took many months, and sometimes years, and was accompanied by great hardships and dangers, not only from the intense cold of the winter, but also from the intense heat of the short summer, and from wild beasts and famine. In early days the journey from Moscow to Irkutsk took about a year, while to Kamchatka it took six months more. Later on, however, the improvements on the military postroads and in the service on them made travel much more rapid, and a distance of 200 miles a day was not an unusual rate. Nevertheless, it became yearly more evident that more rapid communication was necessary for the proper development and protection of this vast region; and by about 1860 the project of railways in Siberia was much discussed. Many schemes to connect different river systems by short lines of railway, thus facilitating transcontinental traffic, were considered; but it was finally decided to build a continuous line from European Russia across Siberia to the Pacific. The discussion over the route of this line lasted for over twenty-five years, until finally, in 1891, the Tsar Alexander III chose the present one.

An elaborate monument at Vladivostok commemorates the arrival of the Tsarevitch at that place in 1891, and his inauguration of the Great Siberian Railway. The road was to be started from both ends and to be pushed as rapidly as possible. In the meantime the railway system of European Russia had already been continued east from Moscow to the Urals, and in 1892 the extension to Tchelyabinsk on the Asiatic side of the Urals was opened. This town was considered the starting point of the Great Siberian Railway, and from here the line was built eastward, passing through the region of Orenburg, along the southern border of the region of Tobolsk and the northern border of the Kirgiz Steppe; thence through the regions of Tomsk, Yenisey, and Irkutsk to Lake Baikal, reaching the town of Irkutsk in 1898. The passengers and freight were then transferred across the lake by boat, though the railway was later constructed around its south end. The road begins again on the other side of the lake, and has been completed eastward through Transbaikalia to Stretensk, on the Shilka River, to which point it was opened for travel in 1901. In the meantime, the East-Chinese Railway, built under Russian auspices through Manchuria, was completed. This line connected the line in Transbaikalia with the Ussuri Railway, thus establishing a through route from St. Petersburg and Moscow to the Pacific Coast port of Vladivostok. A branch line also connected the East-Chinese Railway with Port Arthur and the splendid Russian seaport of Dalny.

One of the principal objects of the railway was the transportation of emigrants to the fertile valleys of Central Siberia. The train-bound traveller passed train load after train load of outward-bound emigrants. At the principal stations of Chelabinsk, Kurgan, Omsk, Kainsk, and Atchinsk, emigrants by the hundreds disembarked, and could be seen encamped by the roadside awaiting their further transportation north, south, or east. The numbers were evidence that the attractions offered by the Government entirely outweighed prejudice and the discomfort of a long journey.

The agents of the Russian government were sent to the most thickly populated or distressed portion of European Russia, and there the desirability of emigrating to Siberia was impressed upon the more industrious of the peasantry, who could scarcely make ends meet in the overcrowded cities. The Russian Government offered inducements to the willing, and at the same time fixed a nominal fare to Siberia, in order to keep out the dangerous or dissolute. This fare was fixed at the rate of about one-twentieth of a penny per kilometer; and thus it was possible for a peasant to travel three thousand kilometers (two thousand miles) for the moderate sum of six roubles. From Southern Russia this would land the emigrant in the heart of Siberia.

Boris Yakovlev, Transport Returns to Normal, 1923.

Oil on canvas, 100 × 140 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

House of Carl Fabergé, Model of the Imperial Trans-Siberian Railway and a Fabergé Egg, 1901. Egg: onyx, silver, gold, quartz, enamel;

Train: gold, platinum, 13 cm. Armoury Museum, Moscow.

In 1896 alone nearly a quarter of a million peasants left Russia for Siberia. At that time, neither the railway nor the colonizing department could cope with the rush, and the Tsar was compelled to issue the edict commanding the officials of the various Siberian governments to drop all other State work and devote their efforts to the colonization movement. For a time things were in a completely chaotic state, and a large number of emigrants, finding no land ready for them, returned to Russia.

The Trans-Siberian Railway, as measured from Moscow, has a length to Vladivostok of 9,288 miles. The railway in its course crosses the upper waters of the Obi, Yenisey, Lena, and Amur at points where they begin to be easily navigable by vessels of considerable size. Up to the commencement of the Siberian railway, the only means of communication with interior Siberia were by horse. Such enormous distances had to be covered between towns that, in order to accommodate the large number of travellers, the Government erected, on the great high-road which pierced the heart of Siberia, stations at intervals of twenty-five to thirty miles. At these stations, horses could be hired at rates set down on a Government schedule, but beyond this and the shelter afforded, nothing was provided. It was thus necessary at the outset of the system for the traveller to provide everything requisite for the journey himself. In addition to his luggage, the wise Siberian traveller carried his bed, bed-clothing, food, and, in short, everything that he might require, rendering himself absolutely independent of hospitality on the way. On his arrival at a post-station, he wanted nothing but the samovar, or machine for boiling water, with which he made his tea. The charge for the samovar was minimal. No charge whatever was made for the use of the post-house, where the traveller in Siberia would break his journey for the night. If one, therefore, excluded the cost of horses, the traveller’s expenses were wonderfully low.

However, with the opening of the country by means of the railway, it stood to reason that a new class of travellers would spring up, and thus better accommodation had to be provided. More comfortable hotels and inns appeared, and towns materialised from nothing where the Trans-Siberian Railway’s stations were constructed, as the increased traffic brought money to the region. Already by the end of the nineteenth century, before the completion of the Trans-Siberian Railway’s unbroken route from Moscow to Vladivostok, adventurous travellers from America and western Europe were entering Russia in droves, eager to embark on the uniquely long voyage across the Siberian steppes, which was still a notoriously uncertain and perilous one. One such early traveller reported:

“Gratuitous information concerning the Trans-Siberian Railway was freely offered by our fellow-passengers, and we began to fear the worst. Tales about three hours’ stoppages at small stations; half a day here and a day there. No bridges over the Obi and Chulim rivers; so that the monotonous train journey should be relieved by a little sledging.”

(Robert L. Jefferson, Roughing it in Siberia)

Unfortunately, the railway’s influence was restricted to the southern part of Siberia and left thousands of square miles to both the north and the south completely untouched by its economic prosperity. The less positive contributions of disease and corruption, however, were brought from the crowded cities and spread amongst the native Siberian peoples with ease and rapidity, devastating entire races and permanently endangering the very existence of tribal culture in the Arctic.

Ivan Shishkin, Distant Forests, 1884.

Oil on canvas, 112.8 × 164 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

Isaac Levitan, The Vladimirka, 1892.

Oil on canvas, 79 × 123 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

Sergei Ivanov, On the Road, the Death of a Resettler, 1889.

Oil on canvas, 71 × 122 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

3) The Price of Progress

With the increasing influence and pressure imposed by the waves of emigrating Russians, the culture of the tribal people of Siberia suffered greatly. Throughout the 20^th century, confronted by industrialization and the insistence on assimilation, each generation of native Siberian youth found itself more at odds with parents and relatives, unable to find a place in what had once been home, knowing nothing about the ancestral way of life and incapable of living in the manner best suited to the taiga or the tundra. In the space of just a few years, the precious practical knowledge transmitted from generation to generation for centuries on end was deliberately obliterated.

But there was an even more vexatious consequence of the industrialization of Siberia and the influx into the northern and eastern regions of massive numbers of immigrants: environmental destruction. The list of ruinous effects is long – deforestation in the most easterly zone and on the Pacific coastline; pollution of rivers and lakes (the Ob, the Yenisey, the Vilyuy, Lake Baikal, and so on); acid rain (the High Altai, the area around Lake Baikal); air pollution (Norilsk, the Kuzbass Basin, Magadan, Vladivostok, Khabarovsk); and more. Such forms of pollution of course hit first and hardest the local populations who lived almost exclusively on natural produce in the affected areas. The spoiling of pasturage similarly led to an immediate reduction in the numbers of livestock and reindeer. Places where the hunting was known to be good suddenly became much smaller – and much emptier once the poachers arrived there. Fish became scarce, and those that were caught might often be dangerous to eat.

Since the 1970s, many of the different communities in Siberia have discovered among themselves writers, poets and artists, all intimately concerned with the catastrophic fate of their fellow aboriginals, and all refusing to admit even the possibility of their own ancestral culture’s extinction. They include people whose names are today well known, such as Vladimir Sanghi (of the Nivkhi), Yuri Rytkhe (Chukchi), Anna Nerkagi (Nenet), and the Kurilov brothers (Yukaghir).

The realities of life for the peoples of the north today are far from simple. A good third of the aboriginal populations have become entirely urbanized and are no longer distinguishable from other members of the public. The remainder live as best they can in their rural surroundings, perhaps half-engaged in traditional activities, perhaps half doing other things or simply unemployed.

For all the pain of assimilation, and for all the traditional ancestral practices with which the younger generation has failed to become familiar, the essential contribution bequeathed to the world by the ethnic cultures of Siberia seems, nonetheless, to have been maintained. That contribution is made up of a way of life founded directly on closeness to and dependence on nature, and on a holistic vision of the world and of humankind’s place in it, both recognizable even now in the persistence of animist rituals (or less often, shamanist rituals).

The next section of this book makes contact with such original ways of life, original ways of thinking – original, that is, in the sense both of being primeval and unlike anything else – so characteristic of the aboriginal peoples of Siberia.

The taiga (central Yakutia).

Khanty, Reindeer sled crossing a shallow lake, 1998.