History of Siberia

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prehistory

Since the earliest times Siberia has been inhabited by tribes of different origins or assignments. The Scythians - a group of Iranian tribes with a comparable culture such as the characteristic animal style or deer stones - originally came to southwest Siberia from the west and south as Kurgan peoples. Their presence in Tuva has been around since the 9th century BC. BC archaeological tangible, such as in the. Arschan - kurgans , the Siberian "Valley of Kings". Bronze vessels from the Western Zhou dynasty were found there, the following into the dead is recorded and, due to the structural arrangement, a dynasty formation is suspected.

Furthermore, their presence in the Minussinsk area on the Yenisei (there so-called Tagar culture until the 3rd century BC) is palpable. The Minusinsk region has recorded since the beginning of the 1st millennium BC. The Bronze Age metallurgy , the products of which can be found in almost all major museums in the world. Few settlement sites were found, but the number of graves suggests a relatively dense settlement on the Yenisei. In the late Tagar culture there, one also identifies graves of the upper class, which were sometimes buried collectively. The rulers' graves of this culture were found near Salbyk north of Abakan .

And finally there was the Pasyryk stage in the Altai , whose frost-preserved graves ( tattoos , Chinese mirrors, ceremonial wagons, horse jewelry, tapestries) are assigned to the late Scythian period (4th / 3rd century).

The time of the Turkic Kongol khanates

The Scythian period came to an end with the migration movements initiated by the Xiongnu from Mongolia and the time of the increasingly Turkic-speaking khanates in Siberia ( Kirghiz , Kimaks ) began, which in turn were conquered by the Mongol princes ( Genghis Khan , Orda-Horde , Khanate Sibir ). These nomadic or semi-nomadic peoples exercised little more than a supremacy in the south of Siberia, since their war tactics reached their limits in the impenetrable taiga and they mostly had to be content with tributes .

Nevertheless, this shift in the steppe peoples only depicts part of Siberian history; Finno-Ugric peoples , Samoyed peoples and Manchu-Tungus peoples complete the picture. The Hungarians , who moved from the Urals to the Black Sea and further into their current settlement area in the 9th century, are assigned to the Finno-Ugrians. The Jurchen , which in the 12./13. C. Northern China controlled and renamed later in Manchu, probably came from the Tungus from.

For the economic and cultural level of Siberia in the Middle Ages, the Kyrgyz people on the Yenisei may serve as an example: they mined iron and gold early on and processed it into jewelry and weapons, they had a runic script, and apart from cattle breeding they also practiced proper agriculture (wheat , Millet), even irrigation and road building are attributed to them. According to Raschid ed Din (Persian chronicler, wrote around 1303), they are said to have owned several cities (Abakan, Kemidjkat), which is not absurd in view of the ruins of cities in Tuva with Buddhist places of worship and burial grounds (12th / 13th centuries .). Even Byzantine coins were found, which could have come to the Yenisei via Volga Bulgaria .

After the Mongol storm that began in 1237, the Golden Horde ruled southern Western Siberia from 1238 , from 1425 the Siberian Khanate split off and existed until 1588.

Russian conquest and immigration

The first contacts of the Rus with Siberia date back to the heyday of the Novgorod Republic in the 11th century. From this time on, individual hunter clans had to pay tribute to the Russians and later to the Mongols. After the Golden Horde collapsed around 1500, Russian conquerors, traders and colonists could increasingly immigrate to Siberia. In the middle of the 16th century Russian Cossacks and merchants increasingly penetrated the huge, undeveloped area, founded the first Russian settlements and traded mainly in furs and precious metals .

The most important family of traders were the Stroganovs in Perm , who controlled the salt trade. In 1558 they received extensive land ownership and privileges from Tsar Ivan IV , such as permission to build fortresses and raise troops, as well as tax exemptions with which they promoted the colonization of Siberia. The Stroganovs collected taxes for the Tsar and established their own state with its own currency in Siberia. Their troops were mostly composed of Cossacks. Above all, they recruited social outsiders for their settlement colonies: prisoners, deserters, impoverished nobles. Under Boris Godunov , the Stroganovs received further privileges. The Cossack ataman Jermak conquered the Tatar Khanate of Sibir near present-day Tobolsk in 1582 , thus opening the way for the colonization of large parts of western Siberia. Around 1600 the last Khan fled to Kazakhstan, leaving Siberia for good to the Russians.

Newly founded cities such as Tyumen (1586), Tobolsk (1587), Tara (1594), Surgut (1594), Narym (1596), Turinsk (1600) or Tomsk (1604) housed farmers, craftsmen, priests and officials with Russian culture and Way of life. Up until 1650, Cossack troops led by Vasily Pojarkow , Jerofei Khabarov and others followed. a. along the Siberian rivers. In 1607 the Russians reached the Yenisei , in 1632 the Lena and in 1636 the Pacific . The expansion into the steppe area in the south was stopped by the Kazakhs and other steppe peoples. There were disputes with the Manchus over the Amur region , the only arable area in Siberia.

The organization of the settlers (peasants, Cossacks, etc.), called Mir , was relatively free and self-determined for that time. The chairmen were elected by the male taxpayers, distributed the community tasks, spoke the law, provided the taxes for the tax authorities and provided for a social burden sharing. The state stood above the settler organizations, often represented by corrupt and immoderate voivods , whose behavior was known in Moscow, but was practically never punished, so that the residents sometimes deposed them themselves. At the time of Tsar Peter I (r. 1696–1725), Matwei Gagarin was the governor of Siberia. He lived like a king and was hanged after ten years in St. Petersburg. Slave and fur robbery, fraud, arbitrariness, etc., were widespread. Towards the indigenous population, after the military conquest phase and the protection provided by the extensive fortress construction, a general relaxation quickly took place. The tribal structures were preserved and the tsar only enforced a duty to pay tribute in the form of fur taxes.

Nevertheless, the Russian conquest of Siberia dragged on until the beginning of the 18th century; the Buryats , Khanty and Koryaks fought against the tsar's tribute collectors for many decades. In the case of the Buryats, the tough resistance meant that they formed the backbone of the Trans-Baikal Cossack regiments in the 19th century , often entering into mixed marriages with the Russians and farming.

The Russian expeditions and traders soon came into contact with the Chinese . While China had traditionally sealed itself off from abroad, there was also great interest in the furs offered by Russian traders. In 1689 both empires signed the Treaty of Nercink . In this, Russia renounced the Amur area, but received trade privileges that were regarded as the personal privileges of the tsar. Only his traders were allowed to trade with the Chinese. The political disputes, which soon flared up again, disrupted trade, which resulted in increasing black market trade by traders not authorized by the Tsar. This practice was legalized at the end of the 18th century. Above all, furs were exchanged for Chinese textiles, and later for tea.

The settlement policy changed under Peter I : Russian and Ukrainian farmers were specifically settled along the rivers. The previously little forced missionary work of the natives was also systematically pursued from the Peters government onwards. Under Catherine the Great , Siberia was given a uniform administrative structure, which also limited the arbitrariness of the local rulers. The constant deportation of exiles ( katorga ), including prominent favorites like Menshikov and Münnich , did the rest of the settlement. At the beginning of the 19th century, around 2,000 people were exiled to Siberia each year; at the end of the century there were 19,000 people annually.

The failed December Revolution of 1825 (" Decembrist Uprising") led to the banishment of the rebels (around 600 intellectuals from the upper classes) to Siberia.

The first explicit research expeditions were also initiated by Peter the Great (r. 1696–1725) and supported by his successors. Bering led an expedition to Kamchatka . Other important discoverers were Gerhard Friedrich Müller and Johann Georg Gmelin . In 1829 Alexander von Humboldt also traveled through Siberia.

As early as the 18th century there were more Russian settlers than Siberyaks. Serbs , Bulgarians , Romanians and Germans were also motivated to colonize . The number of settlers increased again sharply after the peasants' liberation in 1861, as many former serfs in the cities could not earn anything as seasonal workers and looked for a new home around Tomsk and Tobolsk or on the Altai.

In the last two decades of the 19th century there was a flood of immigrants, which went hand in hand with the gradual opening of the Trans-Siberian Railway (symbolic first groundbreaking in 1891; autumn 1904 open for the first time, if not yet completed). 1897–1911, 3.5 million Russians immigrated to Siberia, in 1905 90 percent of the 9.4 million inhabitants of Siberia were Russians. Differences to the European part of Russia soon developed: the huts of the Siberian farmers were more spacious and in better condition, social interaction was easier, criminal past was no obstacle to social advancement.

As in the American Wild West , at the end of the 19th century, the upper class of Siberia flaunted their newly acquired wealth, oriented themselves towards Parisian fashion, and had electric light since the 1880s. But in contrast to the Russian West, the big cities like Irkutsk also had unpaved streets and no real sewers. The traveler John Frazer compared the lifestyle in Irkutsk with that in San Francisco at the time ("and after us the Flood").

Siberia produced a surplus of 3 million tons of grain around 1910, and butter was also exported (70 tons annually around 1910). In addition to butter, wheat, wood and coal, gold was particularly important. In 1908, Siberia generated three percent of the value of Russian industrial production with one percent of its labor force. In 1911, agricultural machinery and equipment were imported for $ 10 million, so that the Siberian farmers not only had more livestock than their European compatriots, but were also better mechanized (e.g. steam-powered threshing machines ). Further (e.g. technical) educational institutions in the big cities (in Tomsk there were even 30 in 1910) completed the picture.

In addition to the positive side, there was also a negative side: the working conditions. In 1910 the workers on the gold fields on the Lena were mostly living in caves and under tarpaulins. Wages were eaten up by high prices in company-owned shops and abuse was commonplace. A riot broke out on April 4, 1912, and government forces killed over 500 striking workers. The massacre in the gold fields of the mining company Lena Goldfields Ltd. started a wave of strikes in 1912 - a harbinger of the revolution.

Siberia after the revolution in 1917 and during the Soviet Union

In the summer of 1918, in the course of the October Revolution, a good 19 “governments” came into being in Siberia. B. those of GM Semjonow , Baron Ungern-Sternberg or Iwan Kalmykow , all of them cruel warlords. They were supported e.g. B. with Japanese money and weapons, but also British and Americans interfered. The most significant of these warlords was probably Kolchak , which on 18 November 1918 in Omsk the Supreme Regent made Siberia. But by October 1922 at the latest (incorporation of Vladivostok ), the Soviet Russians prevailed under Frunze and others.

The forced industrial development of Siberia began with the first five-year plan in 1929. Cities, power plants and industrial plants were built up in the area, which is rich in natural resources. At the beginning of the 1930s, it was decided to build a second railway line, the Baikal-Amur Mainline , in the south of Siberia in addition to the Trans-Siberian Railway (which now had to be electrified) . But one did not get beyond preliminary work, u. a. because of the German-Soviet War from June 1941, which was part of the Second World War. Construction began in 1974 and the line was officially put into operation in 1984.

Siberia was a place of exile for political opponents as early as the tsarist era, and in 1930 Stalin's orders began with the establishment of the gulags . Camps and so-called special settlements were set up. See, for example, the tragedy of Nasino , from mid 1933. At present, the height of the Great Terror 1937/ 38 were brought to the seven million people in the Siberian prison camp.

The Second World War had a major impact on the history of Siberia. In the course of the relocation of production capacities to the Urals and Western Siberia, hundreds of factories, tens of thousands of machine tools, rolling mills, printing presses, turbines and motors came across the Urals. New plants were built for this purpose, costs were irrelevant. Not only large parts of war production, but also soldiers, e.g. B. the divisions that stopped the German advance in the Battle of Moscow at the end of 1941 were withdrawn from the Far East . That was only possible after Richard Sorge's radio message from Japan to Moscow in August 1941 that the Japanese Privy Council had decided to finally end the fight against the Soviet Union from Manchukuo ( Manchuria ).

After the war, the Ural region, with a network of large and small towns and their railway connections, was the most powerful industrial area of ​​the SU, and Western Siberia was also on the threshold of modernity . Siberia to the east of the Yenisei was hardly developed. The population of Novosibirsk and Omsk was almost half a million, in Tomsk it was almost 200,000. Industrial production had tripled, so that many reconstruction products (electrical appliances, tractors, etc.) now came from Siberia. However, more than ten percent of the male population was still in gulags until Stalin's and Beria’s deaths , although there have been serious uprisings by former soldiers in the gulags since 1950.

The height of the Soviet era brought gigantic projects for Siberia. They brought advantages for the region, but indicated the limits of the plan-driven socialist economic system. This was demonstrated, for example, from 1953 by the Neuland campaign to overcome the food shortage. a. led to soil erosion in Kazakhstan and southern Siberia, and ultimately favored the fall of Khrushchev in 1964 . Another point was the generation of electricity by damming the large Siberian rivers and building appropriate power plants (e.g. Bratsker reservoir ). This led to the generation of large amounts of energy for the nearby production sites. However, the provision of housing, kindergartens, shops, schools, etc. was neglected, which led to an emigration of workers, as Brezhnev discovered in 1981. Another point was the increasing environmental pollution everywhere, arguably the most serious legacy of the Soviet era.

Nevertheless, the z. For example, through the Siberian oil and gas foreign exchange generated the financial backbone of the country and an effective foreign policy leverage of the Soviets.

Aspirations for sovereignty

In 1919, Siberia separated from Russia for a few months, because even then there were forces who disapproved of the direct administration from Moscow.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union there was again the idea of ​​a sovereign Siberia, the "North Asian United States" with a white and green flag. In some places they wanted their own police, constitution, budget, judicial system and financial and customs sovereignty.

In Krasnoyarsk , the administration even printed its own money in the summer of 1992. There, on March 27 and 28, 1992, a people's deputies congress from seven administrative areas met: Tyumen , Omsk , Tomsk , Novosibirsk , Kemerovo , Krasnoyarsk and Khakassia , with which all regions except Yakutia joined together to form the so-called MASS . In February 1993 the Russian Prime Minister and the MASS signed a mutual cooperation agreement. Later the MASS gradually gave up its political goals and limited itself to the economic interests of Siberia. Here, too, she did not have resounding success; the oil and gas companies still have their headquarters in Moscow; H. Most of their profits go there. Seat of MASS is Novosibirsk.

Siberia until today

Today, many residents of the newly founded cities of Siberia under communist rule live in extremely poor conditions after the economic incentives that lured them there in Soviet times have ceased to exist. Cities and settlements decay; many people migrate. In 1998 it was decided to "liquidate settlements with no prospects". The high level of environmental pollution in ecologically sensitive Siberia means that life expectancy and child mortality in several industrial cities are as high as those in the Third World.

The gap between Chita and Khabarovsk in the M 58 "Amur" has been officially closed since 2004 ; the asphalting of the last sections was finished in autumn 2010. Since then, it has been possible to drive from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific by car on a paved road without leaving Russian territory.

A railway connection - the Amur-Yakut Mainline - from the Baikal-Amur Mainline to Yakutsk has been under construction for decades . Their completion was delayed again and again - also for lack of money.

In 2020 there was a heat wave in Siberia 2020 . This is also the reason for the diesel oil disaster near Norilsk .

See also

people

subjects

literature

  • W. Bruce Lincoln: The Conquest of Siberia. Piper, Munich 1996, ISBN 3-492-03441-1 .
  • Eva-Maria Stolberg : Siberia: Russia's "Wild East". Myth and social reality in the 19th and 20th centuries (= contributions to European overseas history 95). Steiner, Stuttgart 2009, ISBN 978-3-515-09248-7 .
  • Eva-Maria Stolberg (Ed.): Sibirische Völker. Transcultural Relationships and Identities in North Asia. (= Periplus. Yearbook for Non-European History. 17). Lit, Münster 2007, ISBN 978-3-8258-0639-2 .
  • Ludmila Thomas : History of Siberia. From the beginning to the present. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1982.

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