Siberia hovers indistinctly in the western imagination as a remote, frozen, unforgiving expanse. Its sheer vastness makes Siberia a subcontinent, stretching from the Urals to the Pacific, from the northern perimeters of Central Asia, Mongolia, China, and North Korea to the Arctic littoral and Bering Strait. Siberia's diversity poses formidable obstacles to anyone undertaking a comprehensive history. Climates, terrains, ethnicities, and cultures abound, undermining the resolve of even conscientious historians to eschew reductionist expedients. Siberia's past is generally (the works of Iurii Semenov, Benson Bobrick, W. Bruce Lincoln, Mark Bassin, and Janet Hartley come to mind) viewed through a metropolitan Russian prism. Standard scripts tell a familiar tale of discovery, conquest, exploitation, settlement, incarceration, development, and ecological blight. Deploring man's inhumanity to man from a distance requires less effort—and entails fewer risks—than immersion in one or more locales to apprehend and capture the sights, sounds, smells, and rhythms of Siberian realities.
Lebenswelten Sibiriens offers a fresh approach, intellectually rooted in Robert Kerner's opus magnum on Siberian rivers (The Urge to the Sea: The Course of Russian History; the Role of Rivers, Portages, Ostrogs, Monasteries, and Furs, 1942) but unencumbered by Kerner's idée fixe: the “urge to the sea.” It tackles one great river, the Yenisei, which flows over 2,000 miles from south to north from the Sayan Mountains in the Tuva Republic to the Kara Sea appanage of the Arctic Ocean. The Yenisei divides western from eastern Siberia and with its tributaries forms the heart of Krasnoyarsk Krai. Readers are metaphorically immersed in the Yenisei and the lands that its drains and floods. They learn about how sprig thaws and tides determine not only water levels but the outcome of an ongoing struggle for existence by flora and fauna. Daily life of peasants, fishermen, merchants, and missionaries along the river is vividly and authentically portrayed. Ambitious schemes by tsarist and Soviet regimes to explore, settle, and exploit the Yenisei Basin are subject to critical scrutiny.
Carsten Goehrke, Professor of east European history at the University of Zürich from 1971 until 2002, is eminently qualified to undertake such an ambitious project. Fluent in all the relevant languages, he has invested the time and effort to acquaint himself not only with Russian and western sources, but with the Yenisei Basin at first hand. Author of a three-volume study of daily life in Russia, he impresses this reader as having a discerning eye for gritty, at times comic, realities. He detects, and deftly conveys the gap between aspiration and achievement, between the ways things are and the way they should be. The Volga, it turns out, was not the only Russian river adorned by Potemkin Villages.
Encyclopedic in scale, scope, and style, Lebenswelten Sibiriens does not reveal its riches to the roving eye. But it rewards the attentive reader and reminds us of Johann Gottfried von Herder's words: “History is geography in motion.” The text of Lebenswelten Sibiriens is beautifully illustrated with lithographs, engravings, and over a hundred illustrations, many taken by the author. Particularly instructive are those of the same scene taken in different epochs, such a 1913 and a 1993 panoramic view of Krasnoiarsk. A generous selection of historic and contemporary maps helps readers to examine a particular settlement or scene in different historical contexts.
Lebenswelten Sibiriens accommodates a formidable scholarly apparatus: 150 pages of appendices offering a selection of tsarist and Soviet documents, accounts of travelers, statistical tables (including one of GULAG), a biographical roster, a regional gazetteer, glossary, notes, and a detailed, comprehensive, and up-to-date bibliography. Both as an analytic narrative and as a work of reference, Lebenswelter Siberiens makes an important contribution to the historiography of Siberia. It belongs in every research library and merits translation to reach a wider readership.
