Local sentiment, in any case, scarcely supports such a move. Nearly one-fifth of the Russian population now lives in Siberia, and it has been left for the nationalities to declare their republican autonomy within a Russian federation. In May of 1990, a Latvian-born Russian lieutenant, remonstrating with other pro-independence Latvians, reportedly asked: “Where will it all end? So the Baltics want to get out of the Soviet Union. Do you think this will make things better? Then the Chukchis will want their own territory. They have all the gold. They could live like Arab princes.”795 Most Chukchis would find that surprising. What native (and Russian) Siberians do want is more political say in the direction of their lives, and more control of the land in which they live. And now that all the empire’s artificially appended states have split away, Siberia remains. With Siberia, Russia will continue to be by far the largest, and potentially the richest, nation on earth.
SOURCE NOTES
1. Waliszewski, Ivan the Terrible, p. 349.
2. Kennan, Siberia and the Exile System, vol. 1, p.56.
3. Meakin, A Ribbon of Iron, p. 158.
4. Bruemmer, “Life upon the Permafrost,” p. 32.
5. Ibid.
6. Kennan, Tent Life in Siberia, p. 310.
7. Shalamov, Kolyma Tales, p. 62.
8. Quoted in St. George, Siberia. The New Frontier, p. 108.
9. Mirsky, To the Arctic!, p. 4.
10. Shinkarev, op. cit., p. 16.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid., p. 17.
13. Wright, Asiatic Russia, vol. 1, p. 253.
14. Ibid., p. 217.
15. Quoted in ibid., p. 5.
16. A F. Anisimov, “Cosmological Concepts of the Peoples of the North,” in Michael, ed., Studies in Siberian Shamanism, p. 159.
17. Kennan, Tent Life in Siberia, p. 124.
18. Morgan and Coote, eds., Early Voyages and Travels in Russia and Persia, vol. 1, p. cxxxi.
19. Sumner, Survey of Russian History, p. 458n.
20. Cognates survive, as in the ‘‘Yugrian Strait” between Yaygach Island and the mainland.
21. Istorichesky arkhiv, vol. 3, 1940, p. 93.
22. Literally, “the saltworks on the Yychegda River,” located near a salt lake.
23. Lantzeff and Pierce, Eastward to Empire, p. 89.
24. Ibid.
25. Yvedenskiy, Dom Stroganovykh, p. 88.
26. Longworth, The Cossacks, p. 53.
27. Ibid.
28. Lantzeff and Pierce, op. cit., p. 95.
29. Remezov Chronicle, chapter 23; see Armstrong, ed., Yermak’s Campaign in Siberia, p., 117.
30. Ibid., p. 99.
31. Ibid., p. 117.
32. Lantzeff and Pierce, op. cit., p. 101.
33. Ibid., p. 105.
34. Armstrong, op. cit., p. 211.
35. Bond, ed., Russia at the Close of the Sixteenth Century, p. 83.
36. Lantzeff and Pierce, op. cit., p. 127.
37. Kerner, The Urge to the Sea, p. 13.
38. Shinkarev, The Land Beyond the Mountains, p. 44.
39. Baddeley, Russia, Mongolia, China, p. lxxiii.
40. Armstrong, op. cit., p. 223.
41. Olearius, The Voyages and Travels, p. 13.
42. Ibid.
43. Bond, ed., Russia at the Close of the Sixteenth Century, p. 56.
44. Olearius, op. cit., p. 13.
45. Bond, ed., op. cit., p. 151.
46. Quoted in Kelly, ed., Moscow, pp. 260-61.
47. Quoted in Avrich, Russian Rebels 1600-1800, p. 12.
48. Povroskii, History of Russia, p. 140.
49. Hingley, The Tsars, p. 75.
50. Quoted in Levin and Potapov, eds., The Peoples of Siberia, p. 115.
51. Massa, Short Account of Muscovy at the Beginning of the XVII Century, p. 54.
52. Hingley, op. cit., p. 78.
53. Massa, op. cit., p. 91.
54. St. George, Siberia. The New Frontier, p. 264.
55. Ibid., p. 265.
56. Ibid., p. 254.
57. Ibid., p. 267.
58. Sumner, Survey of Russian History, p. 458n.
59. Georg Gmeiin, quoted in Huppert, Men of Siberia, p. 33.
60. Neatby, Discovery in Russian and Siberian Waters, p. 13.
61. St. George, op. cit., p. 263.
62. Fisher, The Voyages of Semen Dezhnev in 1648, p.162.
63. Ibid., p. 164.
64. Ibid., p. 58.
65. Ibid., p. 106.
66. Ibid., p. 247.
67. Ibid., p. 276.
68. Lantzeff, Siberia in the Seventeenth Century, p. 1.
69. Fisher, The Russian Fur Trade, 1550-1700, p. 34.
70. Ibid., p. 21.
71. Ibid., p. 51.
72. Dmytryshyn, Vaughan, and Crownhart-Vaughan, eds. and trans., Russia’s Conquest of Siberia, 1558-1700, p. iv.
73. Lantzeff, Siberia in the Seventeenth Century, p.125.
74. Fisher, op. cit., p. 61.
75. Golder, Russian Expansion on the Pacific, 1641-1850, p. 21.
76. Mancall, Russia and China, p. 18.
77. Kerner, The Urge to the Sea, p. 67.
78. Bassin, “Expansion and Colonization on the Eastern Frontier,” p. 11.
79. Fisher, op. cit., p. 138.
80. Ibid., p. 155.
81. Kennan, Tent Life in Siberia, p. 159.
82. MERSH, vol. 35, p. 99.
83. Quoted in Utley and Washburn, Indian War’s, p. 9.
84. Levin and Potapov, op. cit., p. 788.
85. Utley, The Indian Frontier, p. 13.
86. Lantzeff, Siberia in the Seventeenth Century, p. 78.
87. Lantzeff and Pierce, Eastward to Empire, p. 156.
88. Quoted in ibid., p. 158.
89. Tupper, To the Great Ocean, p. 28.
90. Bassin, “Expansion and Colonization on the Eastern Frontier,” p. 13.
91. Lantzeff and Pierce, op. cit., p. 163.
92. Golder, Russian Expansion on the Pacific, 1641-1850, p. 45.
93. Ravenstein, The Russians on the Amur, p.13.
94. Sebes, The Jesuits and the Sino-Russian Treaty of Nerchinsk, 1689. p. 134.
95. Lantzeff and Pierce, op. cit., p. 166.
96. Tupper, op. cit., p. 29.
97. Fisher, The Russian Fur Trade, 1550-1700, p. 209.
98. Sebes, op. cit. , p. 59.
99. Wood, “Avvakum’s Siberian Exile,” in Wood and French, eds., The Development of Siberia, p. 28.
100. Mancall, Russia and China, p. 314.
101. Lantzeff and Pierce, op. cit., p. 171.
102. Mancall, op. cit., p. 31.
103. Quoted in ibid., p. 127.
104. Quoted in Sebes, op. cit., p. 73.
105. Mancall, op. cir., p. 155.
106. Quoted in Semyonov, The Conquest of Siberia, p. 127.
107. Sebes, op. cit., p. 52.
108. Foust, Muscovite and Mandarin, p. 7.
109. See Fisher, Bering’s Voyages, p. 33.
110. Ogorodnikov, Ocherkhi istorii sibiri, 11, 1, p. 280.
111. Dmytryshyn, Vaughan, and Crownhart-Vaughan, eds. and trans., Russia’s Conquest of Siberia, p. 13.