Siberia beyond the Gulag Archipelago

Larger than Europe and the United States combined, Siberia is an enormous swathe of Russia, spanning seven time zones and occuping 77 per cent of the country’s land mass. Ryszard Kapuscinski describes the gulags which were placed there as being amongst the greatest nightmares of the 20th century — and that image of suffering has tarnished the region irrevocably.

In her masterful study of Siberia’s people, Janet M. Hartley, professor of international history at the London School of Economics and Political Science, argues that this has not only been a place of torture and starvation. While it has certainly endured miserable times, and is likely to suffer many more, it should be considered a frontier land, comparable in some ways to America.

The Cossack who won a resounding early victory there was Ermak — a warrior depicted today as a Russian Christopher Columbus and nationalist folk hero. According to Hartley, Ermak was really a ne’er-do-well, employed as a mercenary by the Stroganovs to defeat Kuchum Khan of Sibir. Their family business interests in the Urals had frequently been interrupted by Kuchum, who had also angered Ivan IV by refusing to provide him with furs

So, with the tsar’s blessing, in 1582 Ermak blazed a bloody trail through one of the Mongol empire’s last outposts. The Russian conquistadors who had gained control of Siberia by the end of the 17th century continued to murder and enslave the natives. While Hartley cites some examples of co-operation between locals and colonisers — particularly in her remarkable study of life in a Siberian military garrison — the settlers for the most part considered the indigenous people lowlier even than serfs.

But the exile of such distinguished dissidents as the Decembrists, who led the failed 1825 rebellion again Nicholas I, brought many liberals to Siberia.