GreyAtlas’s Reviews > Siberia: A History of the People > Status Update

Some authors depict Siberians, as freer
and less corrupt than European counterparts. There has been an attempt to create a
‘Siberian’ language – essentially a reconstruction of north Russian dialects
used by free settlers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

When the Trans- Siberian railway was built, it cost one billion gold roubles.
It also cost a huge amount of money to build the Norilsk nickel plant and
the Baikal- Amur railway. Developing the region further would require new
investment. The problem is we’ve forgotten how to attract investment over
the last decade and now we have to learn how to do it again

The economic collapse in the post- Soviet 1990s had a dramatic impact on
Siberia. Centres of industry – coal, steel, armaments – suffered as trade
contracted and factories closed. Unemployment soared as internal trade fell
apart, prices rose faster than wages, the rouble collapsed and savings became
worthless

The Virgin Lands policy (which mainly applied in north Kazakhstan but
also included land in western Siberia) introduced by Nikita Khrushchev in
the 1950s was, however, supposed to transform the cultivation of the fields,
and the lives of new settlers, in the way that new industries were transforming
the cities

urban population of Siberia grew more quickly than the rural
population. tsarist period, the boundaries separating towns and
villages were difficult to define but village/urban life became
differentiated in Soviet period, started
with Trans- Siberian railway but increased rapidly as a result of mass urbanisation.
Not only did its urban/rural balance shift, so too did the population’s ethnic
and gender composition

Built over the permafrost, it was famously
described by President Leonid Brezhnev as ‘the construction project of the
century’. The industrial belts along the line of the Trans- Siberian and the new
BAM railways became heavily populated and urbanised. In all, some 500,000
people settled in the ‘BAM zone’ in the far east.

only cause was a loathing of the Bolsheviks, but this could not
be translated into a realistic alternative to their rule. Within Siberia, there
were too many conflicting interests for Kolchak to put together a programme
that could appeal to all, or really any, of the social and ethnic groups. Put
another way, he simply could not inspire enough people to die for him and his
government to overthrow the Bolsheviks.

The Omsk government introduced its own
rouble, known variously as the Omsk, the Kolchak, the Siberian and the
‘yellow’ rouble, but did not attempt to adhere to the gold standard. This
new rouble promptly collapsed in value and inflation soared. The currency
situation was further destabilised by the deliberate flooding of the town
by the Bolsheviks with Bolshevik and tsarist roubles.

One reason we know as much as we do about the civic and cultural life of
Siberian towns is that many of them now had local newspapers and cultural
journals which recorded their activities. The Siberian Spectator, for example,
noted how much was spent in Tomsk on constructing new bridges and
restoring public buildings,48 and how much was spent in Krasnoiarsk on
welfare institutions.

The root cause of the transformation of Siberia was the construction of
the Trans- Siberian railway. The Great Reforms of the 1860s and 1870s in the
reign of Alexander II had an impact on villages and towns in the region, as we
will see, but it was the opening up of Siberia to mass migration and commerce,
and the improved ability to move troops as well as civilians and goods,