Towards the end of the USSR historians began to ask questions that were previously either explicitly or implicitly forbidden. One of these questions – broadly stated – is how the imperial government administered its peripheral territories. This had been a touchy subject, given the Kremlin’s interest in promoting the myth of a common goal so as to bind the various republics more closely together. These republics’ reincarnation as independent states has focused attention on the piecemeal way the empire and its successor were put together and, both inside and outside Russia, historians’ interest has traveled increasingly towards the periphery or, as it sometimes called, the “near abroad.”
Sibir’ v sostave Rossiiskoi imperii forms part of Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie’s handsome “Historia Rossica” series and is, more specifically, one of this series’ volumes dealing with particular territories of Imperial Russia.^[1] L. M. Dameshek (of Irkutsk State University) and A. V. Remnev (of Omsk State University) are each an established expert in the history of Siberia’s and the Russian Far East’s administration during the imperial period.^[2] Their new book is intended for tertiary-level students, though its sophistication and coverage of topics only recently beginning to be addressed render it appropriate for graduate students and professional scholars.
Despite several important studies of Siberia’s imperial-era administration by Anglophone historians,^[3] there is at present nothing in Western historiography to compare with Sibir’ v sostave Rossiiskoi imperii. Therefore, this review will contextualize the book primarily within Russian historiography and, for reasons that will be made clear below, within pre-Soviet historiography especially.
It is nevertheless true that foreigners wrote some of the first accounts of Siberia under Russian rule.^[4] In 1730, the Swede Philip Johan von Strahlenberg returned home from Siberian exile to pen his much-heralded account of what was then a still little-known region;^[5] and the German Gerhard F. Müller, accompanying the 1733 Kamchatka Expedition, pored through manuscripts in local monasteries to eventually produce his History of Siberia.^[6] Later, during Catherine II’s reign, Dartmouth College dropout John Ledyard traveled through Siberia keeping a journal and writing letters that were first published in the early 1800s.^[7] The similarly peripatetic Englishman John Dundas Cochrane published his charming account of Siberia in 1823.^[8]
Perhaps the first Russian to document the history of Siberia was V. N. Ta-tishchev (1686-1750), commandant of the Urals’ metallurgical industries and firm defender of autocratic government, whose posthumously-published five-volume history^[9] of Russia is a valuable source on early imperial consciousness.^[10] A century later P. A. Slovtsov (1767-1843), a state official exiled to Irkutsk who became its director of public schools, published his history of Siberia.^[11]
These early studies offered much information on the region’s unique characteristics and peoples but, unfortunately for Siberians, made little impact on the center’s policies towards Siberia (though Swedish prisoners’ accounts did spur Peter’s interest in Siberian metallurgy). Cognitive dissonance between center and periphery was somewhat meliorated with M. M. Speranskii’s and the Siberian Committee’s 1822 Siberian Reforms.^[12] These presented the first regulations specifically for Siberia and taking into account the particular characteristics of its peoples and geography; but for most European Russians, from serfs on up to (and most significantly including) the monarch, Siberia remained an abstraction, perhaps because its very size, climatic extremes, native societies, and exile population eluded comprehension. This cognitive dissonance has many explanations, though lack of information is not one of them, despite the fact that no member of the royal family visited the region until tsarevich Alexander’s week-long venture into Western Siberia in 1837. Immediately following Ermak’s invasion in 1582 the Kremlin began receiving regular reports from the courtiers and military governors (voevody) dispatched there. Muscovy established an administrative apparatus which, though corrupt and consisting of only several thousand personnel, proved remarkably efficient, as shown in part by its ability to limit the kind of demotic settlement that characterized the American West. But Peter and his heirs scuttled this legacy, plunging the region into such an abyss of mismanagement that it was only beginning to crawl out of it by the 1850s.
Nicholas I’s death and the loosening of censorship allowed publication of more, increasingly critical, studies of Siberia. As of 1851, the number of exiles (overwhelmingly male) had grown to account for approximately thirteen percent of Siberia’s non-indigenous male population,^[13] and the interior ministry ranked Siberia as the second most murderous territory after the Caucasus. Scholars accordingly focused attention on its traditional role as a destination for violent criminals and other pariahs. In 1871, ethnographer-historian S. V. Maksimov’s three-volume Sibir’ i katorga first appeared, and was twice revised by 1900. In 1889, Russia’s first professor of law, I. Ia. Foinitskii, contextualized the history of Siberian exile within a discussion of penal reform. Foinitskii’s study was joined a decade later by a similar one commissioned by the Ministry of Justice.^[14] Taking under consideration the extensive damage exile was inflicting on Siberian society, each study inveighed against it, especially administrative exile (ssylka po administrativnomu poriadku), which in the hands of peasant communes accounted for over half of those deported each year.
The most searing indictment of exile came from the pen of N. M. Iadrintsev. As a university student in St. Petersburg during the 1860s, Iadrintsev was part of a small group the government accused of conspiring towards Siberia’s secession from Russia. Iadrintsev and fellow theoretician G. N. Potanin tried to convince authorities that their brand of “regionalism” (oblastnichestvo) was merely territorial patriotism and did not threaten the empire, but they were unsuccessful. Analysis of their writings suggests they may indeed have had a more radical agenda.^[15] Iadrintsev was returned to his birthplace of Omsk and incarcerated in the local prison for two years, before being exiled to Arkhangel Province until 1874, when he was allowed to return to the capital. Before doing so, he drew upon his experiences to write Russkaia obshchina v tiur’me i ssylke, a study largely focused on Siberia’s criminal exiles. Yet his most significant work, Sibir’ kak koloniia, first published in 1882^[16] and highlighting the region’s geography, flora, fauna, peoples, and history, made a case for both Siberia’s exceptionalism and its integrability into the empire as something other than a fond of raw materials and repository for society’s outcasts. Iadrintsev went to great (and sometimes gory) lengths to demonstrate exile’s deleterious effects on both those it punished and the indigenes and sibiriaki (Siberian-born Russians) they came in contact with. Nonetheless, in both this and his earlier book he also credits Siberia and its population of nomads, fugitives, and religious sectarians with preserving the individualistic and self-governing customs he associates with ancient Rus’ and that formed a contrast with European Russia, where by implication these customs had been either forgotten or destroyed. Despite his interesting combination of a Slavophilic aversion to the Petrine tradition with a radical populism inspired by Proudhon and the framers of the American Constitution, Iadrintsev has received little scholarly attention outside Russia,^[17] although his influence on Americans’ formative notions about Russia was profound given that George Kennan, the propagator of many of these notions, was greatly influenced by Iadrintsev’s work and their personal meetings together.^[18]
Iadrintsev’s influence can also be seen in a pair of fin-de-siècle histories of the Sakhalin penal colony.^[19] A. A. Panov and N. Novombergskii, each a government official, castigated the colony as being not only an outrage against humanity but as an administrative failure emblematic of a government willfully ignorant of objective circumstances – all very telling given Russia’s precipitate humiliation by Japan. For these and other writers, Sakhalin was a microcosm of the empire’s more general woes as it lurched towards collapse.

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Space has been given to this pre-Soviet historiography because Dameshek and Remnev’s book is more firmly grounded in it, rather than that of the Soviet period. In a 1976 book review, Stephen Watrous noted of several studies from that time that “the [tsarist] state is shown as administrative unifier, cultural pacesetter, defender of Russian territory, and upholder of ‘Russia’s historical mission’.”^[20] The near-absence of Soviet-era publications in Dameshek and Remnev’s bibliography suggests a similar view of the scholarship. This is not to say that many fine studies of tsarist Siberia were not produced before 1991, but they tended to focus narrowly on notable individuals or groups rather than to discuss larger questions of governance. From 1921 to 1935 the All-Union Society of Penal Laborers and Exile-settlers published Katorga i ssylka. This journal created a hagiography of Old Bolsheviks’ and other revolutionary saints’ good deeds and sufferings in exile, though to be fair it also included more general histories written by politicheskie (former political prisoners) who had become kraevedy of their assigned locales. The many subsequent studies of Decembrists, narodovol’tsy, and Social Democrats exiled to Siberia veered toward the encyclopedic rather than the analytical and, when the focus did switch to administration, it was similarly fact-obsessed. Less so is the five-volume Istoriia Sibiri s drevneishikh vremen do nashikh dnei (1968-1969), a collective effort led by Novosibirsk State University’s A. P. Okladnikov (whose own work fell mostly within archaeology). Still a standard reference, it nevertheless shied away from problematizing its topics, preferring instead (in those volumes on the tsarist period) to highlight examples revealing the government’s iniquity. From the 1970s to the early 1990s Okladnikov’s colleague, L. M. Goriushkin, oversaw publication of several collections mostly focused on exile and mining a similar vein, though, like all Soviet-era works, these remain valuable owing to their archival databases.^[21]
During the USSR’s waning days historians began revisiting Petersburg’s governance and administration of Siberia. In his 1980 account of exiled Decembrists, S. V. Kodan shifted attention to the role played by administrators.^[22] At decade’s end, Goriushkin spearheaded a collection of papers on Siberia’s economic development during the late imperial period; and in 1991, A. S. Nagaev published his fascinating study of the Omsk Affair.^[23] More recent accounts focusing on administration and governance include B. S. Shostakovich’s study of Polish exiles, Iu. N. Smirnov’s work on the Orenburg Expedition, N. P. Matkhanova’s analysis of Eastern Siberia’s political apparatus, G. V. Shebaldina’s account of the deportation and management of the Swedes captured at Poltava, and a volume on local self-government.^[24] A recent annotated edition of Iadrintsev’s Sibir’ kak koloniia, on which Goriushkin was working at the time of his death in 1999, further evinces the link between this latest scholarship and that from the nineteenth and early twentieth century.^[25]

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Sibir’ v sostave Rossiiskoi imperii therefore has predecessors both old and new, and is one of several recent textbooks on Siberian history.^[26] Two major themes are consistently revisited throughout its ten chapters. First is Siberia’s role in the “imperial narrative.” Readers familiar with Benedict Anderson or even Anne McClintock^[27] will have something to sink their teeth into here. Given that many Russians felt their empire had a “natural right” to Siberia, yet at the same time distinguished it from the “native Russian land” or the empire’s “fundamental core” (Pp. 5-17), Dameshek and Remnev’s proposal that Siberia was (and is) a “mental construct” will similarly strike a chord with readers of Ab Imperio, Kritika, Mark Bassin’s and Willard Sunderland’s works, or recent collections by Jane Burbank and others.^[28] Hence, the priority the imperial imagination gives to naming and boundary identification is introduced and problematized early on and illustrated by such examples as the difficulty administrators faced when trying to categorize Siberian tribes according to soslovie. Such categorization was important, for on the one hand it helped establish taxation rates for individuals and communities and, on the other, designated the extent to which these individuals received what Burbank has termed their “imperial rights.”^[29]
This quandary faced by officials serves to introduce the book’s second major theme: the center/periphery relationship, insofar as it involved the cognitive dissonance already mentioned as well as larger questions of administrative structure and bureaucratic functioning. Dameshek and Remnev hold that tsarism essentially failed in its responsibilities towards the region. Take the case of exile, which by the 1830s was jettisoning between seven and ten thousand people a year into the countryside as either exile-settlers (ssyl’no-poselentsy) or administrative exiles, not to mention the smaller number of convicts who, having completed their katorga sentences, were expected to join a rural commune or perhaps the meshchane. The government did little more than deliver these people to Siberia’s villages, leave them a small one-time stipend, and order them to somehow become self-sufficient farmers alongside a group of strangers. As the Siberian Committee learned, even if these wretches had the potential to accomplish this feat, sibiriaki usually shunned or denied them land and, as often as not, chased them from the village. The central government, able to depend upon serf owners to more or less govern the empire’s European countryside, failed to provide the personnel necessary to account for their absence in Siberia and, as a result, leaned upon the sibiriaki who, largely independent and answering to no one, readily thumbed their noses at it. Petersburg’s detachment was further evidenced by its failure to extend either Kiselev’s or the zemstvo reforms to include Siberia’s peasantry. By 1913, despite the development since the early 1700s of metallurgy, salt-panning, and (much later) logging and fishing industries, agricultural products still made up two-thirds of Siberia’s GDP. In other words, Siberians were the industrializing and modernizing center’s designate producers of raw goods and consumables.
The lack of a clear chain of command also hampered effective governance. Speranskii redesigned Siberia’s administrative apparatus with a view towards forestalling the kind of satrapies created by such earlier governors as N. I. Treskin, but did so at a time when the ministries established in 1802 were still vying for control with regional governors.^[30] Together with court politics and the tsar’s arbitrariness, this resulted in a bureaucratic nightmare that is well reflected in official documents of the time. For similar reasons Speranskii established governing councils (sovety) for each of Siberia’s two newly-created governors-general, in the hope that the latter would function as executors rather than potentates; but in the words of a gendarme officer the councils soon existed “only on paper,” while certain governors-general (most notably N. N. Murav’ev) maintained enormous power. What made this situation worse for the people they controlled is that few governors-general were Siberian-born and so, for them, Siberia was merely a tour of duty necessary for getting a better assignment closer to the capital. This helps explain the staggering turnover rate: “In the thirty years following the 1822 reforms twenty-nine men served as governors for the provinces of Tobol’sk, Tomsk, Eniseisk, and Irkutsk. Most often replaced was the governor of Tobol’sk, where during this period there were eleven governors, and where from 5 May 1832 to 5 May 1835 this office was vacant” (Pp. 98-99). Tobol’sk’s revolving door spun all the faster because five of these governors were fired for corruption. Similar turnover rates characterized the later period and interrupted administrative continuity. Another problem was the lack of rank-and-file administrators and police, whose jobs were made more difficult by the vast distances separating Siberia’s already small population centers. Responsible for 36,000 souls, not counting exile-settlers, and for processing more than 13,000 documents a year, Omsk District’s mid-century land court staff consisted of a secretary, two clerks, a registrar, and a part-time scribe. During the 1870s, a military governor, vice-governor, and forty-three lower officials administered and policed Transbaikal’e’s population of 451,000 (Pp. 100-101, 112).
The resultant power vacuum below the provincial (guberniia) level allowed what Iadrintsev called a “guerrilla war” to rage for years between sibiriaki and those vagabonds and fugitive exiles collectively known as brodiagi. Victims as well as perpetrators of violence, this homeless population of brodiagi offered tragic evidence of tsarism’s failure to properly govern this huge territory, to say nothing of the rest of the empire.^[31] Dameshek and Remnev nonetheless overlook this group and similarly neglect to mention that the nepriniatye – those who completed their sentences but were returned to exile because their former communes refused to accept them – made up a significant proportion of the growing exile population. They do note that exiles posed such unique problems for Siberia that, when special courts were established for aborigines during the 1860s, ones were established for them as well. But more attention could have been given to the long-running debate over whether or not to abolish exile, as well as the pivotal role played by an autocracy that did not want to fund a Western-style prison system. Whereas the Murav’ev Commission abolished several categories of exile in 1900 that reduced by 85 percent the number subject to deportation, this decision was reversed four years later under exigencies of revolutionary opposition. By 1917, Siberia once again had a large (yet this time more politicized) exile population. Former exiles’ eventual claims that Siberia was a “university of revolution”^[32] were somewhat overblown, but it remains a cruel irony that within his own punitive apparatus, Nicholas II gestated his family’s downfall.
Dameshek and Remnev devote one or two chapters each to Siberia’s colonization, administration, peasantry, indigenes, economy, and exile system, and conclude with a chapter discussing the oblastniki, primarily Iadrintsev and Potanin. This final chapter once again highlights an affinity for those progenitors of a much-needed discussion about Siberia’s place and role within Imperial Russia. Iadrintsev is lauded especially for his comments about colonialism’s detrimental effects on tribal society and the analogy he drew between Siberia and Britain’s exploited colonies. Colonialism brings all those who suffer its effects together into “one of the special forms of mutual friendship,” the authors approvingly quote Iadrintsev, but rather than draw a connection to the referent who would have been de rigueur prior to 1991, they note, “within this cheerful perspective… may be seen the obvious influence of Louis Blanc” (P. 321). There follows a discussion of Siberia from the 1905 revolution until October 1917. The authors link this period’s political actors to earlier oblastniki, but by now the movement had fragmented. In August 1905, a group calling itself the Union of Siberia (Sibirskii oblastnoi soiuz) met in Tomsk to proclaim Siberia an “inseparable part of Russia” deserving rights and treatment accorded the rest of the empire. One year later, Siberia’s deputies to the newly-formed Duma called for Siberia to have its own, regional duma. The ephemeral Far Eastern Republic is mentioned only briefly, presumably because it falls outside the imperial era, though a fuller discussion of what the authors seem to view as its genesis from oblastnichestvo would have been useful.
In their final paragraph, Dameshek and Remnev claim there are two “methods” by which Russia may be governed. The first grants “a large role” to regional governments; the second centralizes control in a vertically-integrated administration “deciding all questions and substituting for local administrations” (P. 333). Siberia’s tsarist past might suggest such a stark either/or choice, but this is one instance where the authors distort the picture. Federated nation-states from the USA to Australia to Spain testify to the possible gradations between these two options; moreover, however well-founded contemporary Siberians’ grievances against Moscow are, its relationship with the periphery is clearly evolving and holds several possibilities.^[33]
With its appendices of maps, demographic data, and lists of Siberian governors, Sibir’ v sostave Rossiiskoi imperii is a fine book, but one that would have been better served by a separate conclusion summarizing major points introduced throughout, rather than an awkward fast-forwarding to the present, which after so many judicious discussions appears idiosyncratically tendentious. This aside, Dameshek and Remnev have written an excellent introduction to the history of Siberia during the imperial period that will benefit students and scholars alike.