[written by an incompetent author]
While working on this story, I found it absolutely necessary to represent some basic facts about Siberia — that magnificent land where I was born and happily spent 29 years, 6 hours and 15 seconds before leaving at the end of the 1990s. Since then, I have settled in a new place and started, little by little, to explore the world. I discovered myriads of amazing things, among which was the fact that to this day many people across the globe still see Siberia as terra incognita — cold and hostile, dotted with prisoner camps. Well, although you can find such places, particularly above the Arctic Circle, the main part of Siberia looks like a pretty healthy place, inhabited by bipedal human beings and domesticated animals, where you will see airports, laundries, vegan restaurants, chiropractic offices, Pastafarian churches, and many other bits of the modern world.
Unlike in California, bears didn’t roam the streets in Siberian towns — they felt much more comfortable and secure in their natural habitat. At least, it was so while I lived there.
For the sake of brevity, I’ll skip some nostalgic moments, like the Big Bang, early humans discovering fire, all the fuss over mammoth hunting, the cure for Neolithic obesity, decline of the Bronze Age matriarchy, the gory Iron Age, slavery-to-feudal puberty of humankind, et cetera, and jump straight to the 13th century. However, before such a huge leap in time, it wouldn’t be out of place to explain what Siberia is like from the geographical point of view.
Siberia is a territory spanning about five million square miles, which lies between the Ural Mountains and the coast of the Pacific Ocean, bordered by China, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan in the South and by the Arctic Ocean in the North. You would need more than six hours to fly from one of its ends to the other. It’s larger than the whole of Canada at low tide and — we are coming to it — until 13th century belonged to the largest unfragmented empire human history had ever known (sorry Brits) — the Mongol empire. Who didn’t then? Then, their empire fell to pieces, as all empires usually do, and the subsequent two hundred years of discord and turmoil led the region to nowhere.
However, in 1581, the very same year when Sir Francis Drake got his knighthood for proving, once again, that the Earth is not flat, Russian pioneers launched the large-scale colonization of Siberia.
Such operations never proceeded like a middle-class stag party, for the newcomers always had to deal with folks who had settled there hundreds of years before. However, in the Siberian land, the old-timers and the intruders spent much less ammo shooting at each other than people did in the other parts of the world over the years. It was a well-planned state policy started by the Russian czar Ivan the Terrible (whose title, in fact, must be translated as “the Awesome”) rather than the first draft of the “Wilde East.” The pioneers advanced east quite stubbornly, using a “long stick and short carrot” policy until they reached the Pacific coast. With all the ensuing hustle and bustle, it took about three hundred years. The land was rich, in whatever direction you looked or went, and looked like a nice acquisition for the emerging Russian Empire.
Hyperborea — that’s what the ancient Greeks called the Siberian land — looked mysterious, unexplored, boundless, and diverse, where the Shamanic legends mingled with treasure hunters’ tales about caves full of gold hidden by Mongolian khans, where any random step could bring you a fortune… or misfortune. Thousands of men — pioneers, adventurers, soldiers, criminals of all kinds — by their own will or by court order, set forward from their homes for a new place and better luck.
The mystery pretty much faded when, at the end of the 19th century, Russian engineers started building the Trans-Siberian railroad. The importance of that event for the Siberian region cannot be overestimated. The project brought the power of steam and steel to the farthest corners of that vast land, giving new opportunities for the development of seemingly inexhaustible natural resources. However, the people who had been condemned to penal servitude and sent to Siberia didn’t enjoy the monotony of a long railroad trip. They walked thousands of miles on foot, in frost, snow, and rain, week after week, as part of their punishment. Thousands of new factories and trading outposts were established. Brand-new roads and modern buildings were built; even a unique architecture style — “Siberian baroque” — appeared, which incorporated Russian orthodox church features along with Buddhist temple elements.
At the very beginning of the 20th century, it was a rich, prospective region with fast-growing industry and trade that could have played a key role in pushing the Russian economy to the world’s leading position. Again, it was a long-sighted policy of the short-breathed czarist regime, but at the very same time, some new guys with an irrepressible love for the color red checked into St Petersburg’s inns.
The Bolshevist Coup, the Great October Revolution or Armageddon — whatever you like to call it — took place in 1917 and turned out to be an unexpected humble pie that global capitalism had to swallow, almost without chewing. Thousands of books have been written about that event which changed world history forever. As they say, something doesn’t come from nothing. It was rough times when nice capitalist governments would send little soldiers to shoot naughty workers who dared to protest against the long working hours and discrimination. Women were banned from voting in those times, and child labor was a normal thing. That state of affairs had to be changed, and this process started somehow in Russia.
However, the triumphant march of the egalitarian dictatorship across the large Russian country wasn’t that fast in the Siberian land since there were not enough chained proletarians to support it. But, the red guys didn’t mind it and brought some backers from other places. Many people in Siberia were wealthy and had guns in their possession, and it took long years of fighting for the Bolsheviks to gain a foothold in the region. Until 1925, the whole of Russia, including Siberia, was torn apart by civil war, with a death toll of about 12-15 million people. For comparison, in the First World War, Russia lost “only” one million. The civil war split families, spread famine and diseases, devastated the economy and caused about two million people — mostly the intelligentsia and aristocracy — to leave the country. Have you heard of Sikorsky, Nabokov, Rachmaninoff? They were all part of that crowd.
Then a brand-new state, the Soviet Union, was established, which supposedly would be run by workers and peasants. I’m not going to dig deeper into whether or not it went right. I personally witnessed only what had been left behind of that ambitious project, and how it died.
They were not all bad, those guys with red stars stuck on their foreheads. For example, they proclaimed absolute gender equality and introduced a “free sex for everyone” policy that at times went far beyond the Sexual Revolution of the West in the 60s. I know that perhaps this topic interests you much more than my story, but unfortunately I don’t have enough time to go into further details.
In the 1930s, the Soviet Union led by Josef Stalin emerged as a world power, replacing the deceased Russian Empire. The Bolshevist state went through a lot of dramatic changes (including the ban on free sex, just if you are still curious), which had to let it catch up with the most powerful countries in the world… and then beat them all on the battlefield. For that purpose, two colossal programs — Collectivisation and Industrialisation — were launched.
During Collectivisation, all small private farms were forcefully dissolved by the state, and big, centralized, collective farms were established. About 6 to 13 million peasants died during this “painful but necessary change.” Just think about these numbers.
For Industrialisation, however, the Soviet state went another way. The industry needed technologies — delicate things, which were entirely absent in the Bolshevist land. Beating and shooting workers (as they did with peasants) wouldn’t have solved that problem, so, the red guys invited foreign specialists, mainly Americans and Germans, paid them bags of money and — voila! — thousands of new factories and plants mushroomed just in a few years. Then, the foreign brains were given more money, washed and dried thoroughly, and sent home. The Iron Curtain was drawn, and the borders were closed for nearly half a century.
The late 1930s were marked by massively repressive measures and a top-down restructuring of society, executing some high-profile officers as well as thousands of ordinary people. Not always small and not always victorious military campaigns were launched, like the Spanish affair and the Soviet-Finnish war, for the Red state to cut their military teeth on so that they could go on to crack a much bigger nut — Europe.
In Siberia, however, all those changes happened on a pretty small scale. It was still a plentiful, yet remote and patriarchal, region with a small and dispersed population that supplied the Soviet economy with furs, timber, gold, and ore.
The most significant boost to the region occurred during the Great Patriotic War with Nazi Germany from 1941 to 1945, which was the most dramatic and gory part of the WWII. About a million people and hundreds of industrial sites were evacuated from the European part of Russia to Siberia during those years. The munitions factories were built in the middle of nowhere, and the population of some sleepy Siberian towns grew significantly. Many engineers, scientists as well as whole research laboratories and institutes had to be relocated to this safe area. Having got its own heavy industry, the region stopped being just a source of raw materials and began supplying the front with tanks, airplanes, ammunition, and firearms.
During the war, the most remote regions of Siberia became, unexpectedly, a connective link between the Soviet Union and the Western world. In that period, the US supplied to the SU military equipment, medicines, and food valued at about $160 billion when adjusted for current inflation. Within that program, the Red Army, whose air forces had almost been annihilated at the very beginning of the war, received 16,000 combat airplanes, about 8,000 of which were deployed via the so-called “Al-Sib route” connecting Alaska and Siberia. Tens of thousands tons of cargo and thousands of passengers (in those times!) were transported via that route by planes just in three years! Then, the Allies won, Churchill said a few words in Fulton, and the two worlds split once again.
The boom that had started during the Great Patriotic war continued across Siberia through the post-war years. The proximity of raw materials to cheap sources of energy obtainable from coal and water-powered plants attracted the commissars of heavy industry. Huge plants the size of cities were built among the relict forests, close to the mines, and far from prying eyes — don’t forget that the Cold War was in full swing.
For many people, however, this expansion was a good chance to build their own career. Thousands of young engineers, teachers, and workers moved from the cities in the European part of the Soviet Union to Siberia after getting their qualifications. This movement was warmly supported by the State — Stolypin’s idea of populating Siberia was making a comeback after almost 50 years. The scale and ambitiousness of the new projects grew by leaps and bounds. The longest railway tunnel in Eurasia, the largest hydroelectric station in the world, the biggest aluminum plant in the whole galaxy — awards, honors, and privileges were pouring down from the generous hands of the Soviet bureaucrats upon the shoulders of the “builders of the victorious socialism.” Even more grandiose projects were in the pipeline, like the redirecting of the big Siberian rivers into Central Asia, building a railway line above the Arctic Circle, digging a tunnel to Sakhalin Island, and many other bombastic things.
However, by the end of the 1960s, the economy of the Soviet state started to slow down. The grandeur of the epic projects was facing critical lack of food and money. The agrarian robots that were about to replace farmers (at least, it had to happen according to the Soviet analog of Popular Mechanics) were instead substituted by schoolchildren and university students who, for a couple of months each year, took part in digging up potatoes and carrots instead of sitting in classrooms. Food and everyday products started vanishing from shelves. This change was probably less noticeable in the big central cities, like Moscow or St Petersburg, but in the peripheral Siberian towns, people had to spend hours in lines in order to buy very basic things.
At the beginning of the 1980s, when top Soviet leaders were dying almost every year, the threat of thermonuclear war was growing with every moment, and even the most conservative members of the Communist party started thinking about some sort of change. That’s how Gorbie popped up on the scene. The Soviet country started a slow drift towards the Western world, which suddenly turned out to be a sweet mixture of Disneyland and Walmart, set in the Garden of Eden. Then, the Soviet Union broke up — this time, officially.
The Iron Curtain was raised, and a massive influx of economic consultants, investors, and adventurers poured into the country, including into our welcoming Siberian land. Economic outflow, however, remained the same — oil, gas, raw materials, and some barrels for old friends.
The doors of the world markets were wide open for the new economy, and the ordinary people genuinely expected to become prosperous or at the very least, not become beggars. In reality, however, they spiraled into poverty. Hyperinflation devoured all our savings. “Don’t worry,” the bureaucrats with shifty eyes on TV would say. “They’re temporary difficulties. Just carry on.” So we did, year after year. This new way of life looked much like Genghis Khan’s version of capitalism and seemed to have no interest in education, science, or medicine.
Premium sports cars started to rattle along the roads that hadn’t been repaired for generations. Second-hand shops brought in a new type of fashion. Many of the new rich behaved like a plumber who had won millions in the lottery and tried to spend all his money before his liver and testicles fail. And when they did need a qualified doctor or a good school for their children, they would simply go abroad. I never envied anybody’s money, but I did think hard about that pragmatic approach. Finally, my family packed their bags and left the country. Because we were doctors, scientists, and mentors — all in one — but nobody needed us there. I simply felt that in another place, I could be of much more use for the people; I really wanted to.
Since then, about twenty years have passed, and, to be honest, I can’t recall a single instance of nostalgia. I hope things there are better now. At the same time, somewhere in the back of my mind, I still think that the finest hour for Siberia is yet to come. I don’t mean the global warming when Siberians would be able to grow pineapples instead of pines and sail freely to Canada across the melted ice of the Arctic Ocean. I mean that tremendous potential the majestic land harbors — not only in the heart of the earth but in the minds of the people who live there. Time will tell. I just hope that I will last long enough to see this change.
© 1995–2025 Alexander Daretsky. All rights reserved.