Commentary: A History of the Peoples of Siberia: Russia's North Asian Colony 1581-1990
“Their starting-point is different, and their courses are not the same; yet each of them seems marked out by the will of Heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe.”
— Alexis de Tocqueville, speaking of Russians and Americans in Democracy in America
Though I am no fan of Alexis de Tocqueville, he spoke to the stark similarities shared between America and Russia and, James Forsyth’s A History of the Peoples of Siberia, reflects that mirror image with disturbing force and clarity.
A History of the Peoples of Siberia details the invasion of European Russians into Siberia, spanning 400 years, and the process by which the Russians colonized the indigenous tribes who live there. Each page of this dense text held a mirror up to my face. The story is shockingly similar to how white Europeans colonized North America and the genocide they waged (and that continues today) against the indigenous peoples.
Truth be told, when I first picked up Forsyth’s book, I worried that a white writer would be unwilling to write honestly about colonization. However, in search of research material for my novel, I didn’t have much choice, as there are few texts like A History of the Peoples of Siberia that are available in English and aren’t state propaganda. (A high-bar, I know.) So I ventured cautiously into Forsyth’s text, eyeing each sentence critically, waiting for the drop of racist stereotypes, reductionism, white-washing, apologist rationalization, or worse: a travelogue disguised in academics’ clothing, glamorizing the violent truth of colonization or mentioning it at the barest possible minimum. To my surprise and delight, Forsyth participated in none of this.
In his preface, he addresses my fears directly,
“I take the risk [of writing this book] in the hope that what I have written may be a useful contribution to the study of a vast area of human activity which has been largely neglected by historians willing to dismiss pre-conquest Siberia as an ‘empty land’ inhabited by only ‘thinly scattered natives’… Such are, for instance, the assertions that the occupation of Siberia by the Russians was, on the whole, a peaceful process, that incorporation into Russia was of more benefit to the native peoples because it brought them into contact with a ‘higher culture’, and that there was no resemblance between Russian rule and other colonial regimes under which native peoples were cruelly exploited.”
Already, without directly naming America, Forsyth points to the “resemblance” shared between Russian colonization and other such empires. To the best of my ability, I’ve documented below a skeleton design of how colonization works, specifically how Russian colonization into Siberia resembles European colonization of North America.
Christianity was used as a tool of empire-building and subjugating indigenous peoples, thus penalizing and restricting the indigenous religions already in practice, slowly separating the tribes from their own cultures, in favor of Russification. Spanish conquistadors began this process in South and Central America and the Puritans continued it when they landed on the eastern coast of North America. The main difference being denominational: Russian Orthodox Christianity vs Catholicism in South America and Puritanism then Protestantism in North America.
The Russian colonizers viewed Siberia as virgin land, empty, and at their discretion to use however they liked, no matter the implications for the environment or the cultural norms of the peoples. North America was seen similarly, although the indigenous communities were numerous and visible. Remember a thing called the Doctrine of Discovery? According to Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz in her book An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, “According to a series of late-fifteenth-century papal bulls, European nations acquired title to the lands they ‘discovered’ and the Indigenous inhabitants lost their natural right to that land after Europeans arrived and claimed it.” The Doctrine of Discovery is founded on the assumption of emptiness where there aren’t Europeans and tries to prove its own point through genocide. But indigenous resistance prevents the colonizer’s hope of extinction.
Natural resources found in Siberia (first sable furs, then timber, then gold, then other minerals like tin, coal, copper, and nickel) are exploited to a devastating degree for the sole benefit of the colonizers in their attempt to build personal wealth, either immediately or in the long-haul. Furthermore, the indigenous population is expected to perform the labor of extracting such resources for little or no payment, and, more often than not, at the expense of their own well-being, pushing them into poverty and dependency on the very state that put them in such a situation. Particularly in the early centuries of Russian colonization in Siberia, indigenous Siberian tribes were violently forced into vassal relationships with Moscow or with individual robber-baron types, where they were expected to pay the Russians in furs or other needed resources on a recurring basis. If they did not pay, their leaders, wives, and children were taken to be hostages or slaves. For those indigenous tribes that resisted, as many did, their villages were raided and destroyed. The fur trade boomed in North America during early European colonization because of exploitative tactics like these. Forsyth even compares the fur trade in Siberia with the Gold Rush in the U.S, pushing thousands of Russians into Siberia searching for the sable furs that would make them rich like European settlers pursued “Manifest Destiny” to get rich. Today, the U.S government, hand-in-hand with corporations, builds oil pipelines through sovereign territories, dismissing any rejection by said nations. According to Xiuhtezcatl Martinez’s book, We Rise, "Originally, the [Dakota Access] pipeline was set to go through the City of Bismarck, which was mainly a white population, but because people in the city complained, they re-routed the pipeline to go past the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation." Indigenous water protectors, particularly Sioux, led a resistance movement at Standing Rock that inspired millions around the world. The latest update on the Dakota Access pipeline states, “The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, along with other plaintiff Tribes, has renewed its request for an injunction shutting down the pipeline. The request was supported by declarations from Tribal staff, an economist, and a pipeline safety expert. The motion will not be fully briefed and ready for a decision until December [2020].”
Because of the vast expanse of land composing Siberia (and North America), infrastructures had to be built to allow for long-distance communication and transporting resources. Such infrastructure was either built off of infrastructure that the indigenous tribes had already constructed or required indigenous knowledge, resources, and labor. Again Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz writes, “Many have noted that had North America been a wilderness, undeveloped, without roads, and uncultivated, it might still be so, for the European colonists could not have survived. They appropriated what had already been created by indigenous civilizations. They stole already cultivated farmland and the corn, vegetables, tobacco, and other crops domesticated over centuries, took control of the deer parks that had been cleared and maintained by Indigenous communities, used existing roads and water routes in order to move armies to conquer, and relied on captured Indigenous people to identify the locations of water, oyster beds, and medicinal herbs.”
In order for the state’s government and aristocratic financiers to extract wealth from the land, poor laborers were encouraged to immigrate to Siberia in large numbers, slowly becoming the majority of the population over the indigenous inhabitants. In order to feed the Cossacks who were the immediate vehicles of colonization (think ranger settlers along the frontier in America), farms and farmers were needed to grow grain, especially. Landless poor from Europe came to the Americas in search of a better life, where they could perhaps own land and build wealth. And the colonizing powers needed those bodies to achieve their goals of conquering the land for themselves. But, much like the peasants sent to Siberia, those landless poor normally stayed that way, continually moving along the American frontier, pushing Indigenous nations off their lands, in a never-ending search of an impossible prosperity.
Russian officials relied on and exacerbated inter-tribal tensions and the lack of a centralized government to force indigenous Siberians’ hands. This was also a tactic used by the U.S federal government, especially in the first three centuries of colonizing North America.
While specifics can deviate depending on the land and the political climate of the era, this is the path of colonization. Americans and Russians share an exceptional affinity on this path. As I write this piece nearly 190 years after Tocqueville, I disagree with his assessment of the likeness between Russians and Americans. He says that our “starting-point is different, and [our] courses are not the same.” But our courses are the same. Though both of our governments try to convince us how different we are, we are actually the same. And this is no compliment.
For anyone interested in learning about the process of colonization, or who wants to learn specifically about the history of Siberia, I highly recommend Forsyth’s book. Even though this book took me nearly 3 months to read, it’s well worth it.
If our goal is to decolonize, then we must start by learning how colonization works; its patterns could be its downfall.
To discover more examples of the overlap between Russian and American settler colonialism, check out my commentary of In Search of Appalachia.
Last edited: January 26, 2021