SUMMARY:

The article tells the story of the pursuit of the mythic “silver mountain” by Muscovite colonizers of Siberia in the seventeenth century as part of the general production of colonial space. It has commonly been thought that Russia’s conquest of Siberia was driven by the desire to extract fur pelts from the native population. Yet there was a time when Siberia was imagined primarily as a land rich in silver, so in its instructions to local administrators and explorers, the Muscovite government prioritized the search for silver deposits. These expectations were driven by the government’s desperate need of silver for coinage and informed by the North European cameralist theories and practices of the time as well as local Siberian legends. Ambitious expeditions covered great distances searching for the elusive silver mountain across Northeast Eurasia, soon reaching the Qing territory and the Pacific Ocean. The search yielded no immediate practical results but the dramatic broadening of the horizons of mental mapping and consolidation of the hitherto compartmentalized and incongruent pockets of local knowledge into a common sphere of colonial knowledge and space had implications of much greater significance. The dream of a silver mountain that one expected to find in various places, helped multiple local actors to construct, claim, and contest the common space of Siberia, politically and culturally tied to Russia. Along the way, Russia became involved in the global circulation of precious metals, spatial imagination, and sociopolitical ideas.