Jones, Ryan Tucker. Empire of Extinction: Russians and the North Pacific's Strange Beasts of the Sea, 1741–1867 (review)

Abstract

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’. The fact that these have for many years included contributors to a Siberian Seminar and a journal entitled Sibirica deserved mention, perhaps. Certainly, in a fairly full bibliography for this kind of book, Practical Dictionary of Siberia and the North edited by V. D. Golubchikova and Z. I. Khvtisiashvili (Moscow, 2005) should have been included. History Department Paul Dukes University of Aberdeen Jones, Ryan Tucker. Empire of Extinction: Russians and the North Pacific’s Strange Beasts of the Sea, 1741–1867. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2014. xi + 296 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Figures. Appendices. Notes. Index. £35.99. Empire of Extinction is a cautionary tale that provides grim proof of the moral to the fable of the man who killed the goose that laid the golden egg. The epic story of Russia’s early conquest of Siberia, lured by the commercial SEER, 93, 3, JULY 2015 562 riches derived from the hunting and slaughter of the taiga’s fur-bearing mammals — most famously and lucratively the sable — has been well told, as, for example, in Raymond H. Fisher’s pioneering The Russian Fur Trade (Berkeley, CA, 1943) as well as other more recent works on Siberian history. As the terrestrial killing fields on the mainland became increasingly exhausted, Russian explorers, hunters, merchants and mariners in the mid eighteenth century turned their attention to the pursuit of the abundant aquatic animal life of the North Pacific Ocean, in particular the vast multi-islanded region stretching from the Kamchatka peninsula, through the Aleutian archipelago to the north American littoral. This is the remote, perilous, icy seascape which Ryan Tucker Jones dubs ‘the empire of extinction’, and the hunters’ prey the ‘strange beasts of the sea’, which give his book its title. The relentless, reckless hunt of the sea otter (Enhydra lutris) in particular also led to the establishment of Russia’s first overseas colony in present-day Alaska. Jones’s meticulously researched narrative not only describes the exploits of Russia’s Arctic adventurers and animal executioners, but also provides an analysis and object lesson in the close three-way relationship between the near extermination of the region’s marine species (in the case of Steller’s see-cow [Rhytina borealis] the total extinction), the pursuit of scientific knowledge (zoological, botanical, oceanographic, ethnological and cartographical) and the process of colonial imperialism. It is also somewhat ironic that a leading role in the Russian Empire’s expansion across the Pacific was played not so much by Russians as by foreign scholars and sailors. Vitus Bering (Danish), Daniel Messerschmidt, Georg Steller and...