Eastern Siberia

“ Eastern Siberia would become quite un-Russian, and it must be remembered that it is the Russians alone who form, and will form in the future, the reliable element of the population. Such an inrush of Chinese into the Pri-Amur district would undoubtedly improve the standard of its agriculture and convert its deserts into flowering gardens; but, at the same time, surplus land in Siberia, every acre of which we ought to preserve for our own people, would be passing into the hands of non-Russian races. The population of Russia of the twentieth century will need it all. ”

“ Between the post-stations of Krasnorechínskaya and Bieloyárskaya, about twenty miles west of Áchinsk, we crossed the boundary line between the provinces of Tomsk and Yeniséisk, and entered the vast region known as Eastern Siberia. ”

“ South of Siberia lies another immense extent of territory, stretching across the continent, and comprising the great upland plain known as the steppes. On this broad expanse rain rarely falls, and its surface is half a desert, unfit for agriculture, but yielding pasturage to vast herds of cattle, horses, and sheep, the property of wandering tribes. Here is the great home of the nomad, and from these broad plains conquering hordes have poured again and again over the civilized world. From here came the Huns, who devastated Europe in Roman days; the Turks, who later overthrew the Eastern Empire ”

“ All the natives in north-eastern Siberia, except the Kamchadals, Chuances, and Yukagirs, who are partially Russianised, may be referred to one or another of three great classes. The first of these, which may be called the North American Indian class, comprises the wandering and settled Chukchis and Koraks, and covers that part of Siberia lying between the 160th meridian of east longitude and Bering Strait. It is the only class which has ever made a successful stand against Russian invasion, and embraces without doubt the bravest, most independent savages in all Siberia. ”

“ It furnishes almost the only firewood of the Wandering Koraks and Chukchis, and without it many parts of north-eastern Siberia would be absolutely uninhabitable by man. Scores of nights during our explorations in Siberia, we should have been compelled to camp without fire, water, or warm food, had not Nature provided everywhere an abundance of trailing-pine, and stored it away under the snow for the use of travellers. ”

“ When one considers that crossing Eastern Siberia thirty-two times on foot is about equivalent to walking twice the circumference of the globe at the equator, one can appreciate the indomitable resolution of these men, and the strength of the influence that draws them towards home and freedom. In the year 1884, 1360 such brodyágs were recaptured in Western Siberia and sent back to the mines of the Trans-Baikál, and hundreds more perished from cold and starvation in the forests. ”

“ The water communication between Eastern Siberia and Western Russia is necessarily very circuitous from the circumstance that the great rivers in Siberia run from south to north, and fall into the Frozen Ocean. For example, the distance by water from Omsk to Tumen is 3000 versts, and by land only 632. The Amoor and its tributaries form an exception, flowing eastward and falling into the Sea of Ochotsk. To begin at the extreme east; the grand water-route now used for goods is from the Pacific up the Amoor as far as the Shilka. ”

“ Then, if for the northern part of Eastern Siberia, land carriage from Tomsk to Krasnoyarsk; from the latter town down the Yenisei to the towns of Yeniseisk and Turukhansk, beyond which the country is inhabited only by wandering Tunguses and Ostiaks. There are other important water-routes in Siberia, such as that from Tumen by the Ob and Irtish to Semipalatinsk on the Kirghis steppe; and from Irkutsk down the Lena to Yakutsk, [316] but the lines of greatest traffic are those running east and west. ”

“ The Russian Government is very anxious to settle agriculturists in these Eastern Siberian regions, for the land is as yet barely cultivated at all. Farmers are very scarce, and the famous mines are also short of labourers. It seems that possibilities here are even greater than in Western Siberia, the only drawback being the enormous distance. ”

“ Mariinsk (13,000) , a mining centre on the railway and Achinsk (10,000) a little farther east. In eastern Siberia other important towns are: the great port of Vladivostok (95,000) ; the two Amur ports and agricultural centres, Blagovyeshchensk (76,000) and Khabarovsk (53,500) ; Chita (73,000) with growing agricultural and commercial interests; Krasnoyavsk (73,000) , the chief river and railway port of the Yenisei; Nikolsk-Ussuriski (34,700) , a rising industrial and railway centre 70 m. from Vladivostok; Nikolaevsk (12,500) , the port at the Amur mouth ”

“ The population of northern Siberia speaks in general Ural-Altaic languages, but it includes a few scattered tribes whose singular speech excludes them from this linguistic group, and who have therefore been placed by ethnologists in a distinct class called "paleasiatics" or "hyperboreans." This class is composed of the Ostyak and Kot on the Yenisei River, the Gilyak and Ainos at the mouth of the Amur and on the Kurile, Sakhalin and Yezo islands, the Kamchadal and Koryak of Kamchatka, and the Chukches and Yukaghir of extreme northeastern Siberia. ”

“ See also Vostóchnoe Obozrénie. Eastern Siberia, transportation of convicts to, I. 110-119; extent of, 265; hardships of exile to, 275; division of, into governor-generalships, II. 263; exile of Poles to, 280; prisons of, 537; étapes of, 544; government buildings in, 545. See also Siberia. Eckhardt, Dr. Julius, Russian author, II. 431, 436. Ekaterínburg, arrival at, I. 34; the town of, 35 39; wealth of, 35, 36; exposition in, 36; discovery of mines of, 76; prison at, 540, 541. Ékho, II. 485, 487, 489. Elephant, sacred white, II. 90-92. "Emigration to Siberia," II. 449. ”

“ If any lasting gain is totaled from the great Russian bedlam, emphasized in it prominently must be the opening of Siberia to the world. As boys and girls, and even as grown men and women, we thought of Siberia as an arctic waste of snow and ice, ravaged by man-hunting wolves, dotted with world-lost exile mines, peopled by a strange semi-barbaric race in fur and lambskin and dwelling in half-real dusk beneath the bondage of the knout. ”

“ Siberia is thought of as a terrible ice-desert, without life, without variety, without charm, as a frozen land under the curse of heaven and of miserable exiles. But it is entirely forgotten that Siberia includes a full third of Asia, and that a region which is almost twice as large as the whole of Europe, which extends from the Ural to the Pacific Ocean, from the Arctic sea to the latitude of Palermo, cannot possibly be excessively monotonous nor uniform in all its parts. But people usually picture only one district of Siberia, and even that in a false light. ”

“ We may, therefore, conclude that, from the ethnological point of view, as well as from the geographical, Siberia is merely a prolongation of Russian Europe, or of what is known as Greater Russia. It is true that a few heterogeneous elements exist of the same sort as those to be met with in Russia itself: Poles and Germans from the Baltic provinces, and the descendants of exiles, or even exiles themselves; and thus it comes to pass that in all the larger towns, at Tomsk, Krasnoyarsk and Irkutsk, Catholic and Lutheran churches abound. ”

“ That is the traveller's thought. He finds that they thicken and broaden, and deepen as they sweep in their majestic gloom across the Urals, and make up for thousands of miles the grand Siberian arboreal belt. In this taiga the Tsar possesses wealth beyond all computation; and the railway will put it actually at his disposal. The third zone, the most valuable of all, is that which mainly constitutes Southern Siberia. It is the region of the Steppes, that endless natural garden which again makes Siberia an incomparable land. ”

“ There was vigorous opposition by the tribes, but they were soon subdued. The only effective resistance they met was that of the Chinese, who obliged the Cossacks to quit the Amur, which river they claimed. In 1855 the advance here began again, and the whole course of the river was occupied, with much territory to its south. Siberia, thus conquered by arms, is being made secure for Russia by a trans-continental railroad and hosts of new settlers, and promises in the future to become a land of the greatest prosperity and wealth. ”

“ A country of such vast extent must necessarily include all varieties of topography and scenery, and all sorts of climate. Disregarding for the present local and partial exceptions, taking climate and topography together and beginning at the arctic ocean, Siberia may be roughly divided into three broad east-and-west zones, or belts of country. They are as follows: 1. The great northern túndra or the treeless region of moss steppes, extending along the whole arctic sea-coast from Nóvaya Zémlaya to Bering strait. ”

“ IN crossing the boundary line between the provinces of Perm and Tobólsk, we entered a part of the Russian empire whose magnitude and importance are almost everywhere underestimated. People generally seem to have the impression that Siberia is a sub-arctic colonial province about as large as Alaska; that it is everywhere cold, barren, and covered during the greater part of the year with snow ”

“ Nature seems often to play strange games in distributing men as she does over this globe. To these miserable dwellers on the most remote shores of the Frozen Sea, Siberia appears as a land of promise—the Eldorado of their dreams of happiness; and thither they emigrate in bands, and in whole families, to look for more lucrative labour and in search of a more clement sky.
I do not know how many days I may have spent in thus climbing the woody but snow-clad heights of the Oural chain. ”

“ Her avaricious eyes are fixed on the kingdom of Corea, and the whole of Manchuria may yet become Russian soil.
Siberia is by no means the inhospitable land of ice which the name suggests to our minds. That designation applies well to its northern half, but not to the Siberia of the south. Here are vast fertile plains, prolific in grain, which need only the coming railroad facilities to make this region the granary of the Russian empire. The great rivers and the numerous lakes of the country abound in valuable fish; large forests of useful timber are everywhere found ”

“ But still, for nearly seven months of the year, that Siberia is the old Siberia still, fast bound in the grip of an appalling frost, waging, in its storms, a never-ceasing battle against human enterprise and effort; and the haunt of those insatiable and savage creatures which seem to stand out from all other creatures in being devoid, when in packs, of all fear or dread of man.
The steppes above Turkestan, which I visited last, are milder in climate than those of Akmolinsk. ”

“ The Russian colonization of Siberia has been carried out without the aid of any other European nationality. There are only a few hundred other Europeans settled in the country, the greater number of whom are French people. I was much amused at the little station at Sokur, about nine leagues from the Obi, to find a buffet kept by a Frenchwoman, a peasant who had married a Bessarabian, and who had only been in Siberia a year, after having, however, spent several in Southern Russia. ”

“ Notwithstanding its terrible climate, Siberia is not entirely uninhabitable; indeed, even on the borders of the Arctic Ocean humanity is represented by a few aboriginal Polar tribes, who wander from place to place in sledges drawn by dogs, and usually followed by a numerous herd of reindeer. The white man, however, cannot endure the conditions prevailing in the extreme north, and it is therefore necessary with a view to colonizing that one must learn to distinguish between the different parts of Siberia. ”

“ Now Siberia, instead of being shut off from the rest of the world, will be traversed by one of the most frequented routes xviiin the universe, and its southern zone will become one of the richest possessions of the white race. ”

“ The purely Russian population, to whom the agricultural zone almost exclusively belongs, forms about nineteen-twentieths of the 3,356,000 inhabitants of Western Siberia, which itself contains three-fifths of the population of all Siberia. ”

“ For all that, I have never seen in Siberia any of those miserable hovels to be found in Russia, but undoubtedly the manners and customs of the Siberian peasants are even more primitive than those of the Russians. They possess less knowledge of hygiene and cleanliness, and are absolutely ignorant of everything calculated to render life in the least degree agreeable or rational. ”

“ All through the summer, at any rate, America and England will, by the Arctic passage and by these mighty rivers, communicate with the heart of Asia, the railway in the far interior completing the circle of commerce. Other results will follow. Siberia at present contains a population of four million—less by more than a million than London reckons within its borders. Millions of the Russian peasantry in Europe are in a condition of chronic semi-starvation. ”