Hartley, Janet M. Siberia: A History of the People (review)

Abstract

SEER, 93, 3, JULY 2015 560 (p. 14). Nevertheless, with this sympathetic, but far from uncritical, portrait Hughes tells an absorbing story of a remarkable, enigmatic and controversial figure the like of which seems now to be part of a vanished age. University of Exeter Roger Cockrell Hartley, Janet M. Siberia: A History of the People. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT and London, 2014. xx + 289 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £25.00. People make places, and the book’s subtitle is especially appropriate for a vast region, some of it not far from wilderness, penetrated over the centuries by a whole range of immigrants. Janet M. Hartley is by no means the first to make a scholarly expedition into the subject, noting the work of predecessors such as W. Bruce Lincoln, Alan Wood, James Forsyth and Yuri Slezkine in particular. However, she does bring to her work the keenness of a convert, finding her first inspiration in the rich records of the garrison records of Gizhiga, a remote post on the Sea of Okhotsk in the Russian far northeast, which she investigated during research for a previous publication. This has led her to further visits to archives in Irkutsk, Khabarovsk, Krasnoiarsk, Omsk and Tomsk as well as Moscow. The result is an engaging study of peasants, townsfolk and other categories of inhabitants throughout the history of Siberia in an approach that is a mixture of the chronological and the thematic. Hartley avers that special problems of administration involving the complex relationship between centre and periphery would require another book. She nevertheless puts the peasantry in their appropriate setting, where the customs of the village competed with the demands of local government. As many as 130 differentelementsinpeasantdresswereidentifiedintheearlynineteenthcentury, the number diminishing with the arrival of the railroad and immigrants from European Russia later on. Today, the Russian population of Siberia constitutes 84 per cent of the whole, and old dialects are dead or dying, making the problem of constructing a Siberian language virtually impossible. However, even if many of the remaining 16 per cent have narrower horizons confined to their ancestral lands, there is a strong regional consciousness among the majority. This depends to a large extent on the towns that punctuate the vastnesses. Originally no more than trading posts or stockades, some of them such as Krasnoiarsk or Novosibirsk have become significant industrial centres. The book has more on the earlier than the more recent period, but nevertheless contains engaging vignettes of contemporary urban life drawn from the author’s own experiences, along with some evocative illustrations. REVIEWS 561 Apart from its size and weather, Siberia is best known for its exile system, described powerfully by some of those who experienced it such as Dostoevskii, while helping to form the outlook of V. I. Ulianov who allegedly drew his revolutionarypseudonymfromtheRiverLena.Eventoday,alibrarianinIrkutsk defines Siberians as ‘the children of the Decembrists’ (p. 130). Willy-nilly, they are also the children of the Leninist and Stalinist revolutions, however much some of them would like to deny a key part of their past. Hartley does not hold back from the horrors of the Civil War, if treating Reds and Whites in an evenhanded manner, and the miseries of the ‘Gulags’, although also acknowledging that genuine idealism helped to construct the Soviet Union. On the new, post-Soviet Russia, she also strives for balance, concluding with a long quotation from Valentin Rasputin. Siberia is exceptional, he declares, in retaining wilderness until recent times, but also experiencing ‘the immense unprecedented influence of our economic activity’ in its exploitation of natural resources. This coincidence tests the human race and attracts people ‘to feel in themselves the boundary between the temporal and the eternal, the inconstant and the true, the ruined and the preserved’ (p. 251). Thebookcouldnotbethelastwordonitschallengingsubject,norindeeddoes it claim to be so, falling into the ‘scientific-popular’ genre that characterizes the Yale imprint. But, building on the achievements of its predecessors, it certainly adds to them. Most of all, the enthusiasm which pervades the work will be infectious, spreading the understanding of an important part not only of Russia, but also of the world, and encouraging others to join the growing number of ‘Sibiroveds...