Eastern Siberia, however, was not to have an institute of higher learning until Irkutsk University was founded in 1918.
Meanwhile, public libraries and museums had begun to open in most of the major towns, and some independent private collections were also outstanding. Perhaps the most famous was that of the Krasnoyarsk gold mine and distillery magnate Gennady Yudin, which contained about 80,000 volumes, and was subsequently obtained by the Library of Congress of the United States, where it formed the nucleus of the Slavic Collection.
If Siberian education was slight, health care was woefully inadequate. Smallpox vaccination had been introduced into Siberia in 1771, but Siberia’s first medical society was not formed until 1858 in Irkutsk. And it was not until the mid-1880s that major towns like Omsk and Krasnoyarsk had medical societies of their own. In 1830, there was only one doctor for every forty thousand inhabitants, and operations and autopsies could be as primitive as anything a Paleolithic native might perform. After the learned Decembrist Mikhail Lunin died at Akatui in December 1845, the examining physician, lacking proper instruments, opened his head with an ax.
Even some important settlements like Selenginsk had only a regimental surgeon, who interpreted the scope of his responsibilities so narrowly that he refused to treat anyone outside the garrison. Russians as well as natives often had to rely on shamans and other “witch doctors” (when home remedies did not suffice), but this wasn’t always detrimental to their health. The lama doctors of the Buryats in particular had the august traditions of Tibetan medicine behind them (which favorably compared with much of what a Russian doctor might know). They procured most of their medicines in powdered form from China, performed acupuncture, and knew how to read a pulse. The use of amulets, ritual spells, surrogate sacrifices (using effigies of the sick), and so on were sometimes resorted to, but reluctant Europeans in need could not always afford to scoff at their expertise. One English missionary whose copyist suffered from an intermittent fever took him to a Buryat physician who effectively prescribed a body rub with a medicinal ointment, followed by a four-day cycle of drugs that alternately knocked the patient out and purged him. At the end of the treatment, he felt as good as new.
Steadily, the Russian population of Siberia increased – from a third of a million in 1700, to over 1 million by 1812, to 3 million by 1854. Between 1815 and 1854, the size of the Siberian merchant class tripled, and the monetary value of the goods being carried across Siberia by waterway and road virtually quadrupled. Although a total of 27,800 miles of Siberia’s rivers were navigable, and paddlewheel steamers began to make their appearance in the 1840s, the value of river transport in general was limited by the fact that all but the Amur flowed northward into ice-bound Arctic seas.
Siberia’s economic life was fundamentally constrained by the distances between its mines and fields and the European markets where products could be exchanged for manufactured goods. The Urals (like the Allegheny Mountains in the United States until the beginning of the nineteenth century) remained a great divide. Had the mighty rivers of Siberia run east-west and not “poured their superfluous waters into an Arctic Sea,”543 the transportation problems might not have been so great, but “the whole country was kept waiting,” writes one historian (drawing an analogy to the United States), first for the advent of steam, and then the iron horse.
When we remember that, with all the facilities offered for transportation on the Great Lakes, Chicago was but a village in 1830, and that twenty years later it was considered doubtful whether Minnesota could be profitably settled, and twenty years later still it was a problem whether the Dakotas and the valley of the Red River of the North could offer permanent inducements to agricultural industry, we need not wonder that Western and Central Siberia were left practically unsettled until the dawn of the new era at the beginning of the twentieth century.544
Siberia’s internal commerce on the whole was “natural” (or in kind), and local, carried on mostly along the north-south river routes. The government’s various canal-building schemes over the years had come to nothing, and although the Ob was a fairly well developed artery of trade, the Yenisey and Lena, which emptied into the Arctic at higher latitudes, could only be utilized in their middle course. Thus, the commerce was concentrated at Krasnoyarsk, Yeniseysk, Minusinsk, and Irkutsk. (Moreover, Adolf Nordenskiöld’s famous expedition of 1878, which would bring the Vega through the Northeast Passage to Bering Strait, was attended by so many difficulties as to demonstrate how frankly impractical for regular communication the Northeast Passage was.) As things stood, without a more rapid means of crossing Siberia from west to east, the cost of importing heavy machinery to eastern regions would remain prohibitive, and the mines (outside of those owned by the tsar himself, which could draw on convict labor) were doomed to be worked by antiquated and wasteful methods.
The Roman Empire in the time of Hadrian had 53,000 miles of roads, many of them paved; Siberia (larger than Hadrian’s dominions) in the late nineteenth century had only dusty roads and trails. A network of postal and other routes connected many villages and towns, but even in the taiga west of Irkutsk in the 1890s there was still on the average only one inhabitant per square mile. Moreover, it took the mail three and a half months by pony express to get from the Urals to Okhotsk, and half a year from Moscow to Kamchatka. Although roads had been cut and maintained with relative ease across the level plains of Western Siberia, Eastern Siberia was rugged and mountainous, and in the middle of it lay enormous Lake Baikal, which stretched north-south for more than 400 miles. Although the Great Siberian Post Road, or Veliky Trakt, ran around the southern end of the lake, the detour was so long that goods bound to or from Kyakhta as part of the China trade sometimes rotted on the wharves.
Three routes from Tyumen led eastward: the northern or river route, by way of the Irtysh and the Ob, to Tomsk; the middle or winter route, which followed the Great Siberian Post Road through Omsk; and the southern steppe, via Omsk, Semipalatinsk, and Barnaul. At Omsk the routes from Orenburg, Semipalatinsk, and Central Asia converged, the main road continuing east to Irkutsk, where one fork went northeast to Yakutsk, another around the southern end of Lake Baikal to Verkhneudinsk. There it divided again, leading on to Kyakhta or Sretensk. Verst posts erected every two-thirds of a mile from the Urals to Vladivostok kept reminding the traveler, in a sometimes annoying fashion, how far he was from St. Petersburg – 2,543 versts at Tyumen, 4,053 at Tomsk, 5,611 at Irkutsk, and finally, at Vladivostok, 9,877 versts (6,250 miles).
In the preternatural vastness of Siberia, space became time – or time was absorbed into it – and measured from place to place. One emblematic story was told, for example, of six Kamchadal virgins who set out under imperial escort for the capital, 7,000 miles away. Before they reached Irkutsk, each had given birth to a child fathered by their military chaperon, and by the time they arrived at St. Petersburg, where they were to be presented at court, each was nursing a second babe-in-arms. Aside from what this story may imply about the chastity of Kamchadal maidens (or the reliability of Russian escorts), it was as much as to say that St. Petersburg was a lifetime away.