Siberian Colonization and the Future of Asiatic Russia

Abstract

UNTIL THE LAST CENTURY Siberia was almost a void in terms of population as well as power.' The affairs of this vast expanse inhabited by relatively few people were managed by St. Petersburg or Moscow. The Russian government took account of the claims and strength of Peking and Tokyo, but the regional interests of Siberia itself received scant consideration. To St. Petersburg, northeastern Asia was a land of fur and exile, and the outside world accepted this estimate readily enough. Beginning around the 188o's, the old Siberia was invaded and overwhelmed by a mass incursion of new settlers. In imperial policy as well as in the realities of Siberian society, fur and exile shrank in importance. Unfortunately these facts and their implications did not become well known in the West. The rise of the Russian revolutionary movement occupied the center of foreign attention, and Siberia was known only as the destination of the political offenders whom St. Petersburg caught. Ignorant of Siberian potentialities, Western public opinion was shocked and further misled by such reports as George Kennan's Siberia and the Exile System, published in 1891. Efforts of other journalists like Harry de Windt to restore some perspective about the exile system and attempts of such writers as Jules Legras and Philips Price to tell the story of the great Siberian migration went unheeded,2 and the monumental impact of the new settlers never really penetrated the consciousness of the West. The mass movement to Siberia in the period up to World War I involved some seven million people, almost all of them peasants. They went to Siberia in search of freedom and free land. The most pervasive single factor prompting their departure was their feeling that the amount