THE GENERAL FRAMEWORK AND THE RECENT GERMAN DEBATE ON SPACE

In 2003 Karl Schlögel published a book entitled “In Space, We Read Time” that received much attention, at least in Germany.^[1] In the form of an essay he invited readers to re-examine space as a cultural-geographical and physical characteristic in history. At the same time, Schlögel developed no coherent theory suggesting how to interpret space historically. Instead, he identified the position of an observer as one who somewhat mechanically combines the personal experience of space with historical knowledge that was obtained outside any specific spatial circumstances. In fact, it remained unclear in the book whether space is viewed by the author as a given continuum or as a socially and culturally constructed reality. In this respect Martina Löw was more self-conscious in her comprehensive draft of a “sociology of space” in 2001. She pointed to the lack of theoretical reflection about space as a fundamental category of culture (along with time). Löw advanced an understanding of space as a dynamic process characterized by social and cultural dimensions, which changes in time and has a direct impact on the social landscape. The productiveness of the sociological approach of Martina Löw can be seen, for instance, in explaining why social and cultural conditions emerged in Siberia during the epoch of Peter I that were in some important aspects very different from those in European Russia.^[2]
Schlögel was in many respects the most prominent leader of the “spatial turn” in German historiography, especially in those quarters of it dealing with Eastern Europe and Russia. As Jürgen Osterhammel demonstrated over a decade ago in a review of recent developments in the French and Anglo-American academic communities, by the turn of the millennium there emerged a powerful international trend of studying history of space,^[3] and Schlögel and other German scholars simply joined this movement.
To be sure, there was good reason for a reluctant attitude to the study of space as a phenomenon in its own right, comparable to time and other key factors of human existence. Geopolitical theories, for example that of Karl Haushofer and the stress on the centrality of space in the interdisciplinary “Ostforschung” in the Third Reich, significantly influenced the ideology of National Socialism in Germany and its catastrophic expansion during the Second World War.^[4] This legacy cast its shadow over German scholarship throughout the post-WWII period and, therefore, it seems that the entire research agenda of historical studies in Germany was reconstructed or constructed anew avoiding the notion of space. In the fifties, history-writing was affected by modernized positivism, some called it historicism, stressing the free will of the individual as a fundamental precondition. Starting with the seventies, the “Historische Sozialwissenschaften” researched economic and social structures also without explicitly mentioning the spatial dimension.^[5] This avoidance of “space” was problematized after the “cultural turn” with its focus on cultural practices and the reconstruction of “Historische Lebenswelten.”^[6] By the nineties it became clear in Germany that space has a significance that cannot be reduced to studies of either macrostructures or microstructures. Thus we see the return of an interest in space everywhere in the humanities and social sciences in Germany, matching the uninterrupted tradition of spatial analysis in the United States, Britain, and France.^[7] Sociology and geography are rediscovering space along the lines suggested by Martina Löws in her well-known “Raumsoziologie,” or by Markus Schroer in his more recent study.^[8] In the field of Russian studies we find works discussing the significance of space such as those of Karls Schlögel or Frithjof Benjamin Schenk.^[9] Most of the studies of space in Russian history focus on urban space. Inspired by late imperial regional studies (kraevedine),^[10] most notably represented by Nikolai Antsiferov,^[11] it was communis opinio that the urban setting influences populations through its particular planning or historical background. In recent studies space appears not as a factor acting by itself, but rather one that is socially and culturally constructed. Researchers focused on the reciprocal influences of space and population, especially in great metropoles such as Vienna, Berlin, New York, Moscow, St. Petersburg and so on.^[12]
Recent years have witnessed an increasing interest in the process of mentally mapping space. The Russian Empire in the eighteenth century had been viewed within the changing historical and geopolitical context of European enlightenment, which included the emergence of nationalist sentiments. The mental mapping of Russia was in a way a contest between the project of Europeanization as advanced by Russian autocrats since Peter the Great and the concepts developed by European philosophes. As a result of this process, described by Hans Lemberg^[13] and Larry Wolff,^[14] Russia emerged as an Eastern power rather than a power of the North, as it had been conceptualized in the seventeenth century.^[15]
This relocation of the Russian Empire in imaginary space was of certain consequence for the space I am going to deal with in this article. By becoming an Asian or Oriental power in the eyes of western enlighteners, Russia was treated at best as a tabula rasa for westernization, as Leibniz suggested in his correspondence with Peter I.^[16] This also affected the debate about the boundaries between Europe and Asia and the character of Russia as a whole.^[17] Last, but not least, this relocation had consequences for describing and mapping “Siberia” as either an extension or an integral part of Russia. In this text I will deal with strategies of mastering the imperial space as exemplified by Siberia. “Siberia” stands here for a territory acquired by the Muscovite state in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that was defined differently in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union in different epochs from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. I seek to understand this mastering of space as undertaken by representatives of the elite in the center, by inhabitants of Siberia themselves, and by foreigners as a cultural and social construction heavily depending on specific “Lebenswelten.”^[18] My focus is not so much a study of the sources but an exploration of approaches and methods of research by scholars interested in symbolic mastering of the Siberian space.

THE MAPPING OF SIBERIAN SPACE THROUGH CONQUEST AND ANNEXATION
Since the 1580s and the time of Yermak, whose image in history and literature is also a part of the mapping of Siberia and the empire as a whole, Russian expansion into Siberia and the Far East occurred at a fast pace along the rivers flowing into the Arctic Ocean, as well as eastward toward the Pacific,^[19] leading to the establishment of an administration for the newly acquired colony.^[20]
On the mental map of Western European contemporaries Russia during this period was a northern power. In Russian texts of the time the term “sever” (North) was also used continuously, while other geographical terms varied.^[21] The expansion to Siberia, initiated by the Stroganov family^[22] which sought rich fur and mineral resources beyond the Urals, was perceived as expansion northward. This terrain and its inhabitants seemed familiar to Russians,^[23] just as the Mongols had become a well-known “counterpart” to medieval Muscovy over the preceding centuries.^[24] The forest-rich landscapes with their numerically small and usually animistic populations were reminiscent of the hinterland of the Republic of Novgorod.^[25]
The Ural mountains did not emerge as the fixed boundary between Europe and Asia before the writings of the eminent Russian geographer and historian Vasilii Tatishchev and his Swedish counterpart of German background, Philip von Strahlenberg. This demarcation made Siberia a region separate from the Russia that was an aspiring European power. Siberia was an embodiment of otherness.^[26] In fact, there had been earlier instances of referring to the Urals as a divide between Russia and Siberia, as for example in the autobiography of the Archpriest Avvakum, who described Siberia as a land of richness and opportunity.^[27] Even earlier, in one of the first Siberian Chronicles dated from the 1630s and written in Tobolsk, there was a geographical description of “Siberian country” in its richness and uniqueness with mention of the Urals that separated Russia from Siberia like a huge wall.^[28]
The mental mapping of the seventeenth century corresponded to practices of cartography of pre-modern Muscovy. Valerie Kivelson has demonstrated how region-centered maps fostered and framed the rise of regional identity in her analysis of the maps of Siberia, the North and Asiatic lands.^[29] Thus it was long before the great expeditions of the eighteenth century that Russians set about on the task of mapping their territories, contrary to the argument of Willard Sunderland. This is not to challenge his thesis that in the Russian expansion northward Tsar Alexis was more interested in subjugating the local population, especially the experienced hunters, than in mapping the new territories.^[30] Sunderland is also right when he, as others already had before him,^[31] argues that it was the epoch of Enlightenment that brought new ways of thinking, measuring, and mapping to Russia that resulted in a scientific approach to the spatial representation of Siberia and the empire as a whole.^[32] However, the real novelty was not the mapping of territories itself, but the “esprit geometrique” that came into the discourse of territoriality, as Sunderland calls it,^[33] especially during the reign of Catherine II.^[34] Besides the empirical interests of scholars who undertook the great expeditions of the eighteenth century, of no lesser importance for the new perception of imperial space were the provincial reforms of Peter and Catherine, the projects of the “Land Register” for the empire,^[35] and the network of schools introduced by Catherine in 1786 to stimulate the distribution of knowledge in an imperial manner, so as to reflect the principles of “gute Policey,” given the multi-religious and multi-ethnic composition of the Empire.^[36]
The flexibility of geographical concepts of Europe, Asia and Siberia in the eighteenth century is well illustrated by a famous letter of Catherine II written to Voltaire in the summer of 1767. She wrote about the challenges to enlightened rule that were presented by the geography of Russia and the diversity of the subjects of the empire:

“At last, I am here in Asia; I badly wanted to see it with my own eyes. In this city there are twenty different peoples who are nothing like each other. And nevertheless one must sew them a suit that will fit them all. General principles can be established easily, but what about the details? And they are quite the details! I would almost say that one has to create, unite and preserve an entire world. Of course, I won’t master this task as I have already too much work to do.”^[37]

Catherine II was writing from a place geographically located in Europe, according to Tatishchev and his fellow European geographers, but culturally situated at the crossroads of Russian, Tatar, and Finno-Ugric peoples, and of Christian, animistic, and Islamic faiths. Since the time of the Muscovite territorial expansion^[38] that laid the foundation for subsequent imperial claims,^[39] the cross-cultural overlap continued to contribute to the heterogeneity of the Russian Empire. Ideologically, the representation of supreme authority (“scenarios of power”, as Richard Wortman has put it) was no longer defined by the opposition “Khan or Basileus”,^[40] but by the statement made by Catherine the Great in her Great Instruction to the Legislative Commission in 1767: “Russia is a European Power.”^[41] When it became no longer necessary to legitimize the imperial claims of Russia and its rulers by their belonging to Europe,^[42] the question remained what the role of Siberia was to be in the course of mapping imperial space in a changed ideological and political context. In the narratives of the seventeenth century Siberia was not the “other” of Muscovy, but a place of enhanced spiritual purity; as part of the North it represented a space characterized by rough climate and particular flora and fauna, rather than a political geography.^[43]
Late medieval and early modern Russian authors did not attempt to define the terms that they used: “Tataria,” “Siberia,” and also occasionally “Europe” or “Asia.”^[44] The meaning of these notions shifted, therefore it would be misleading to attribute, as some scholars do,^[45] the mere mentioning of these terms in the texts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to any developed concepts of spatial distribution of sovereignty.
The prominent figures of the European Enlightenment used the juxtaposition of Europe and Asia to highlight their enlightened utopian project of modernization as Europeanization. In their correspondence they referred to mankind and especially to the Russian Empire as a tabula rasa, a potential testing ground for experiments. On the contrary, Catherine claimed that Russia was already European, or at least it was on track to becoming a civilized empire, with a civilizing mission in its periphery including Siberia.^[46]
This opinion was contested in several ways by the philosophes. What Denis Diderot did not dare to say to Catherine II in person^[47] the French astronomer Jean Chappe d’Auteroche expressed in 1768 in his work “Voyage en Sibérie.” To him, “Siberia” was a metaphor for despotic, autocratic “Asia,” and he denied any possibility of Russia joining European civilization. This country and its culture, he wrote, are Asian, its government is tyrannous, and the population is enslaved.^[48] Catherine responded to these allegations with “Antidote” (1770), in which she not only placed the Russian form of government within the ranks of the absolute monarchies of Western Europe, but also praised Russian culture as superior because Russia was already European and had a mission of bringing Europe to its Asian extension in Siberia. “Antidote” betrayed a sense of the injured national pride of its author that was shared from another perspective by such highly educated members of the elite as Prince M. M. Shcherbatov^[49] and Denis Fonvizin. Hans Rogger spoke of the compensatory nature of nationalism displayed by individual representatives of the Russian elite in the late eighteenth century.^[50] Most members of the Europeanized elite did not give much thought to the conflict of Europeanization with national identity. This would become the focus of important debates only in the nineteenth century. But they laid the groundwork for the mastering of Siberian space administratively and scientifically in a way that accommodated new imperial claims and new attitudes to entire peoples and individual subjects that inhabited this space.

THE MAPPING OF SIBERIAN SPACE THROUGH INTEGRATION AND IDENTITY BUILDING

Obviously, the problem of the cultural construction of space and its delimitation was not resolved with the beginning of scientific exploration of Siberia and the development of geography as a discipline. Almost one century after the famous letter of Catherine written in Kazan, an official reported in 1851 from Orenburg: “…Europe meets with Asia, the steamship meets the camel, [where] the dancing hall of the assembly of the nobility, designed by [Konstantin] Thon, is twenty verst of the nomadic tents.”^[51] This problem of inter-cultural encounters was not so urgent in Siberia because of the much lesser density of its population which was also less polarized in ethno-confessional terms. At least in the view of the Russians, there was enough room for everyone who wanted to settle in Siberia.
Recently, Siberia has become the focus of several studies, with a special attention paid to the period of the nineteenth century. For example, Mark Bassin^[52] and Claudia Weiß^[53] examined the mental mapping that emerged after the expeditions of the Emperor’s Geographic Society to Siberia and the Far East in the middle of the century. Anatolii Remnev has studied the process of Siberia’s symbolic “exploration” by means of imperial geography and by the development of administrative control throughout the nineteenth century.^[54] Eva Maria Stolberg^[55] has looked at the consequences of building railways and the processes of industrialization and population migration at the turn of the twentieth century for Siberia and the imperial Russian landscape as a whole. Space was an important dimension of all these studies as it was also the main characteristic of Siberia noticed by travelers even after the construction of the Trans-Siberian railway.^[56] Travelers also mentioned the wildness of the landscape, specific climatic conditions, rare settlements, different agricultural conditions and the difficulties of exploitation of rich natural resources. The homogeneous perception of Siberia as the land of natural abundance and immense size would gradually disintegrate into a vision of numerous distinctive regions and identities as the traveler spent more time in the region, or as the scholar (be it an anthropologist, historian, or geographer) gathered more data. Aleksandr Radishshev, who was exiled by Catherine II to Siberia, knew this already when he wrote:

“For a long time I have disliked anyone saying: this is customary in Siberia, or this and that they have in Siberia. Now I find all these general phrases about a country that stretches for eight thousand versts completely ridiculous. How can you speak in general terms about a land of such great physical diversity whose current conditions in some locations are as different, as dissimilar were the changes that have brought about the present state. Here the political situation and morality of the inhabitants correlate with the state of nature; savagery coexists with enlightenment and brutality with softheartedness thus blurring the boundary between vices and mistakes and between malice and wit in the immeasurable space of its territory and in the coldness of minus thirty degrees.”^[57]

The ideas expressed by Radishchev in his 1791 memo to Prince Mikhail Vorontsov would become widely held in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.^[58] The Siberian regionalism of the nineteenth century and the rising self-consciousness of the Siberians were a result of this dynamic process of appropriation and transformation of Siberian space. The notorious “shaping of the Stalinist landscape” in the course of the Cultural Revolution in the late twenties and thirties of the twentieth century was achieved through forced collectivization and industrialization. Siberia presents a paradigmatic case of this process in the context of East European history, an example of interrelation between space and humans.^[59]
“Siberia” played an important role in the self-perception of Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union as an empire because of its unbound resources and seemingly immeasurable space. The vastness of Siberia was in sharp contrast with other regions of the Empire, and it was open to different projections of meaning as a “tabula rasa,” even more so than during the time of Leibniz and Peter the Great. Strategically, Siberia could be seen as an Asiatic appendix of Russia, offering refuge to those who escaped from the heartland (for example, peasants and fugitives), or as a European extension into Asia up to the Pacific coast, representing the land of futurist visions.
In the 1850s and 1860s the Russian expansion eastward found its natural limit with the conquest of the Amur river basin.^[60] Any subsequent movement would mean the incursion into China. The appropriation of Manchuria ultimately led to the disastrous “little victorious war” against Japan.^[61] With Siberia finally stabilizing its meaning geographically, it still remained the object of different expectations and projections, both before and after the revolution of 1917.
The reports of journeys to Siberia by European, American and Russian authors during the late imperial – early Soviet period were full of stereotypes that often had political connotations.^[62] How did those stereotypes of the authors, their values and relevant social contexts, predetermine their perceptions of Siberian space? Did the different travel reports reveal any common patterns of perception? The double identification of Siberia as a developing country and at the same time the testing grounds for experimental social engineering dated back at least to the time of Speranskii.^[63] This European “external” perspective should be compared with the self-perception of the local elite, who saw themselves as a colonial outpost. Alternatively, the so-called regionalists self-consciously conceptualized regional identities on the grounds of their own visions and projections, within the spatial context of the empire.^[64] The otherwise crucial chronological divide of 1917 did not hold the same importance for the changing perceptions of space in Siberia.^[65] We find some conflation of boundless space with futuristic perceptions of time in the attempt to understand the essence of Siberia in the 1920s. A “Privatdozent” of the University of Hamburg, Arved Schultz, wrote in his widely read 1923 regional survey of Siberia: “Siberia – once the country of convicts, exiles and ice-cold weather, now, particularly after Nansen’s encouraging descriptions,” is the country of the future, “a second America, the natural Northern Asia, which includes all the landscapes between the Urals and the Pacific Ocean, the Urals and the Arctic Ocean and the inner-Asiatic mountains – so different and nevertheless so uniform in their enormous size and rough climate.”^[66]
Even the most sober definition of space in a strictly geographic sense often could not avoid projections into Siberia’s future: Schultz mentions the widely read account of the 1913 journey of Fridtjof Nansen, which combined Nansen’s first-hand observations with predictions of the future.^[67] Since the great expeditions of the Russian Academy of Sciences in the eighteenth century, every account of Siberia speculated on the future potential of this still unexplored area.^[68] This trope can be found in all the publications of the regionalists beginning with P. A. Slovtsov’s^[69] description of Siberia that inaugurated the development of the Siberian regionalist discourse. In this respect, the regionalists’ perception of Siberia as Russia’s “golden soil” or “a colony” did not differ from the imperial perspective advanced by and through the activities of the Geographic Society. It is the persistence of local visions of Siberia that explains how the largest “prison of the world” could be described at the same time as a “country of the future.”^[70]
The evolution of the Siberian myth, which is still quite popular in German society as shown by Tom Jürgens,^[71] is an understudied topic. This myth is already present in the works of Vasilii Tatishchev and George Friedrich Mueller. But how did it differ from the myth of the Russian North? They are at least partially overlapping. Swedish prisoners of the Northern War in Siberia spoke of their captivity “in the North.” Of course, one should be aware of the rich connotations of calling Siberia a “myth.” I use the term “myth” as suggested by Brigitte Schultze, who differentiates between classical myths and their variations throughout history and identity constructions arranged by or around a historical event.^[72] By utilizing the second definition, we can see how the “Siberian myth” amalgamates historical events with spatial imagery. To quote Jan Assmann, “One can say that in cultural memory actual history is transformed into history remembered and thus into a myth... Through memory history becomes a myth. Thus history becomes not unreal, but an opposite reality in the sense of its normative and formative strength.”^[73]
In the context of this article it means that the history remembered includes, for example, Yermak and his expedition on Siberian rivers, the exiled Decembrists and their wives, or the conquest of space by the Trans-Siberian Railway, all of which found their way into a myth of the Siberian space. Interestingly, we find declarations about Siberia constituting a foundation for the imperial might of Russia already in the first half of the nineteenth century. In the 1840s the statistician and geographer K. I. Arsen’ev argued that Siberia, just like Finland, the Tsardom of Poland, and the Caucasus, were territories that constituted separate entities while being essential to the empire.^[74] Arsen’ev represented a cohort of enlightened bureaucrats, as W. Bruce Lincoln called them,^[75] who through their administrative work and activities within the Russian Geographic Society fostered a vision of Siberia joining Russia in a single imperial entity.^[76] A rare dissident opinion was expressed in 1805 by F. F. Vigel who wrote that Siberia was sitting like a bear on the shoulders of the Russian Empire, representing little more than a burden.^[77]
By the end of the nineteenth century the perfected geographical-cartographic appropriation of Siberia (in the words of Mark Bassin) was supplemented by a growing concern about the influence that Siberian space could have on Russian migrants. P. P. Semenov-Tian-Shanski, the historian M. K. Liubavskii and others asked whether processes of acculturation and assimilation had led to the emergence of a new Siberian race, which in cultural terms occupied a niche between “Europe” and “Asia”.^[78] The idea of a new Siberian race as a social reality and a distant goal originated in the writings of historian and ethnographer A. P. Shchapov.^[79] Nikolai Danilevskii saw in such a race the source of even greater imperial power for Russia in its competition with other empires and races.^[80] In these combinations of racial and spatial discourses Siberia was much more visible than Central Asia. The discourse of Russian regionalists, who, interestingly enough, configured regional identities along the administrative borders outlined by the government (Western Siberia, Eastern Siberia, the Far East, the Amur province), bore resemblance to projections of the future made by Europeans and Americans.^[81] The regionalist discourse persisted through the revolution and civil war. The formation of the Siberian Regional Duma intensified the debates on Siberian citizenship, the inclusion of native peoples, and Siberia’s relationships with Russia.^[82]
The socialist transformation and the Stalinist “revolution from above” had particularities in Siberia.^[83] To many “travelers to the Soviets” who also visited Siberia, the project of transforming the region was seen as a particular social experiment within the general Soviet project of modernization.^[84] In the words of Matthias Heeke,^[85] the Soviet Union was a tourist magnet, and we know of many enthusiastic accounts written by visitors to Moscow and other large-scale building sites of socialism. Tourists were much more prone to trust their first impression, unlike numerous immigrant-workers,^[86] who spent much more time in Magnitogorsk and Kuznetsk.^[87] The story of the American John Scott is well known. At the outbreak of the world economic crisis he was convinced that capitalism was doomed while the Soviet Union was a living utopia. So he decided to move to the USSR. However, it was not only the ideological and economic considerations that influenced his decision, but also the popular adaptation of the frontier theory of Frederick Jackson Turner. Scott believed that in Siberia the USSR would accomplish the mission that the tsars had failed to achieve: bringing civilization into the wilderness and pushing forward the frontier of progress. Thus, Siberia emerged in its familiar image as the land of the future and a space for self-realization.^[88] When Scott arrived at the “Magnetic Mountain,” he was impressed by the enthusiasm of the unskilled workers, many of whom just a year earlier had been hunters or fishermen without any special training. This genuine enthusiasm prompted Stephen Kotkin in his book, one of the first in the field of cultural history of Stalinism, to speak about the emergence of a particular type of civilization by the early 1930s.^[89] After a few years spent in Magnitogorsk, John Scott had become disillusioned with Soviet socialism. His initial enthusiasm faded away as improvements in living conditions on the construction site of socialism did not materialize. The workload was increasing and production efficiency remained low while terror intensified. With his Russian wife and their children he succeeded in returning to the USA, where he (quite predictably) engaged in anticommunist activity and later became one of the founders of Radio Free Europe. In one respect Scott’s expectations were not incorrect: Siberia lived up to its promise of being the country of tomorrow. For those observers who did not sympathize with communist ideology (especially émigrés like Jurij Semenov^[90]), the tremendous potential of Siberia was perceived as a menace.
An overall sympathetic account of a trip to Siberia was written by Otto Heller in 1930 under the title “Siberia as Another America.” Heller chose to take a route that, in his eyes (and the eyes of the Soviets), demonstrated the omnipotence of the socialist country in research and exploration. He traveled by ship on the Northern Route across the Arctic Ocean in a convoy led by icebreakers through the Kara Sea and the Yugor strait.^[91] The mission of the convoy was to establish a permanent sea route between Europe and Asia, capable of transporting raw materials and other products of Siberia. His description almost literally repeated the language of Soviet newspapers of the time, with phrases such as the “Soviet North.” Heller wrote:

“My itinerary was not one of hasty passengers of express trains. I went through the polar sea by tundra and taiga. I saw the wilderness and the victorious humans who are defeating it once and forever. I knew the plans and statistics and I could evaluate the reports in reality. I saw the heart of Siberia. I became acquainted with its workers and its farmers. I spoke also with the exiles. Yes, I wrote this book with a certain opinion: the opinion that the future of the planet belongs to the workers and farmers. In Siberia proof will be given that they are able to bring an almost unexplored, wild world from its eternal sleep to life.”^[92]

In the Siberian space of the future nature cannot be defeated by technical means alone. Technology helps only when it is in the hands of people who have the necessary heroism and faith to face the challenge of space.^[93] To Heller, the indigenous peoples are part of uncivilized nature, which has to be tamed. They have to learn “urban behavior” overnight and give up their backwardness for the sake of the Soviet experiment, which was (although this was not always admitted explicitly at the time) an urban utopia. To quote from Heller’s account:

“In June animals still feasted in the Port of Igarka because the town did not exist yet. In June workers began felling the forest with their bare hands. In July the first huts were built and seven hundred workers began wading through the mud. Boats brought wood and machines;overnight the landing stages and port office were knocked together. In August the GPU official marked the first visa into my passport: Border control Port Igarka, Siberia’s port, Siberia’s only port, Siberia’s gate to Europe and America. At the beginning of September a large fleet arrived where in June still the tents of the Tungus had stood: fourteen ocean ships, four steamships, riverboats, wooden barges, long boats, rafts... the bears fled into the taiga.”^[94]

The Soviets took up economic expansion, urbanization and large-scale migration to Siberia from the point at which things had been left prior to being interrupted by war and revolution. There was a similarity in expectations, projections, visions, and, of course, technology that was used to make these hopes come true. Again, as in the nineteenth century, Siberia embodied the future of the empire. It is amazing how the writings by European Russians, regionalists, European and American travelers resemble each other when they discuss the Siberian space and its meaning for the Russian Empire and Soviet Union.

CONCLUSION

In conclusion it can be noted that since the early Muscovite expansion, different authors writing about Siberia pursued different strategies in different times while presenting Siberian lands as an integral part of the empire. Among those who wrote about Siberia were local inhabitants and recent migrants,^[95] exiles^[96] and prisoners of war (including prisoners of the two world wars)^[97], foreign travelers and even those who had never visited Siberia personally but nevertheless contributed to the formation of the image of Siberia. Alexander Pushkin, Jules Verne^[98] and the German writer Karl May belonged to the latter category.^[99] While individual circumstances, intellectual contexts and expectations varied we still can detect several main strategies of narration, each of them sharing one or another basic perception of space:
1. Siberia as a colony.^[100] This trope reflected the strategies of colonizing Siberia and its indigenous peoples as employed by the Novgorod Republic, the Muscovite state and its adventurous Cossacks,^[101] and the St. Petersburg government. The colonization perspective was shared by exiles and local ethnic groups that experienced the pressure of Russian modernization during the imperial and Soviet periods.
2. Related to the former is the theory of Siberia as a frontier zone. Siberia was often compared to the American West both by local writers and outsiders.^[102] Exiled Decembrists, members of the Geographic Society, regionalists and some travelers wrote about Siberia as a frontier of “modernity” and “civilization” and directly or implicitly referred to America as a relevant reference point.^[103]
3. The frontier of civilization could acquire a strategic meaning as the border protecting against the “yellow peril” of China^[104]or a desert area that should be populated at any cost.^[105] The Trans-Siberian railway seemed to be a strategic instrument of achieving these goals. These ideas became particularly prominent at the turn of the twentieth century.
4. Finally, there is a vision of Siberia as an inseparable part of greater Russia that does not have any distinctive cultural differences or specificity of its own. In this approach, Siberia simply mirrors Russia’s most fundamental characteristics thus allowing one to understand Russian culture better.^[106] The exploration of Siberia is here interpreted as a fulfillment of the national civilizing mission. In the prose of Karamzin, the adventurer Yermak became a Russian hero personifying the process of national expansion and colonization,^[107] which would be later identified by Kliuchevskii as the main characteristic of Russian national history. This resulted in the narrative of imperial history being dominated by a Russian “national” perspective.^[108] Thus, Siberia became genuinely Russian soil.
In the course of the “second wave” of scientific explorations initiated by the Geographic Society in the middle of the nineteenth century, the Russianness of Siberia was still understood largely in terms of imperial society and military interests. Alexander Middendorff and Nikolai Murav’ev were among those who shared these views.^[109] The “third wave” of scientific exploration of Siberia took place in the 1920s, with Soviet ethnographers and regional historians studying the local peoples and arranging for their abrupt and often forceful modernization, as described by Otto Heller and numerous publications in the newspaper “Soviet North.” Many foreign observers approved of measures that promised a break with the legacy of Siberia as an infamous place of exile and hard labor imprisonment.^[110]
Thus, the space of Siberia has been treated historically in terms of binary concepts. In the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries views of Siberia were conceptualized through the cultural discourse of the “Europe – Asia” divide, later on replaced by similarly contrasting notions of “core – periphery,” and “backwardness – modernity.” The inability of clear-cut binary models to account for the complexity and unevenness of Siberian space was felt by many observers writing about Siberia. At the same time, many latter-day theoretical conceptualizations of space do not take into account the authentic experience of Siberian space that people writing about Siberia in the past attempted to express. Therefore, the conceptual “mastering” of Siberian space and of the history of its physical exploration and appropriation remains a challenging task for historians.