Siberia does not exist: Russia's northeast is a colony and saying so is taboo

As a child, I had a favorite book. The largest book of all, of which there were probably a thousand in the house. It was called "Atlas of the USSR." Scale 1:2,500,000, 25 kilometers to one centimeter. To create a map of the Soviet Union at that scale, several kilograms of paper were needed.

The USSR on a wall map was impressively large, yet it seemed weightless. "Packed" in an atlas, however, it was truly heavy, and this sparked childlike excitement: How much of it—which means: how much of us— was there!

My father, a geologist and lover of the language of topography, owned maps of probably every country in the world; I was surrounded by cardboard brochures labeled "Egypt," "France," and "Chile." But how small, how flyweight they were compared to the enormous atlas! Trifles, odds and ends, empty promises.

You could open the large book to any page and feel teleported to unknown worlds: mountains, the taiga, the tundra, the abstract space of imaginary adventures. Abstract because you actually knew very little about these places, and that allowed you to easily appropriate them, to make them something semi-fictional, poised between reality and the fantastical books of Jules Verne.

Naturally, Siberia took up about two-thirds of the atlas. The sprawling Siberia on the maps was gigantic compared to the tiny, succinct Siberia chapter in the history textbook. It was the ratio of an elephant to a mouse.

This strange relationship suggested that Siberia was pure geography, a space without history, not master of its own destiny. And taking possession of it had been so easy, so inevitable, because it was no one's property—it simply stretched eastward beyond the Urals, waiting for the first to discover and exploit it.

Certainly, on maps of Siberia, one stumbled upon local names: Labytnangi, Khatanga, Bodaybo... But these places were completely insignificant entities, and the eye searched for another, higher layer of names that would replace or erase the local names. Names for mountains, islands, seas: the Laptev Sea, the Anshu Islands, the Chersky Mountains.

It never occurred to anyone that these places had been called something else in distant times. Someone called them by non-Russian names, and perhaps they still do.

It seemed as if Siberia had only appeared or come to life the moment the eyes of the Russian explorers fell upon it. Oh, how they were envied, those who once set out in ships or rode in caravans, who had so much empty space before them that they could baptize these new realities at every turn, immortalizing themselves and their friends by name. And, of course, the crowned heads at whose direction they had set out were not forgotten.

How late was I born myself—too late, everything had already been named, everything had already been discovered, but secretly I thought: Perhaps something had been overlooked, and there was more? Perhaps somewhere there was a river, a meadow, or an island, as yet nameless, waiting for me?

At that time, I devoured books by Ernest Thompson Seton, James Fenimore Cooper, and Thomas Mayne Reid, which told of the struggle of the indigenous peoples of the North American continent against the settlers from Europe, whom they considered invaders. These books were published in huge numbers in the USSR, probably because the stories served as an indirect critique of Western imperialism.

Like many other young readers, I immersed myself in the world of Native American tribes, their everyday lives and their warlike conflicts. Of course, in the summer we sometimes played Indians, constructed bows from hazelnut sticks, and collected bird feathers to make headdresses.

I rooted for the Native American warriors who bravely defended their pastures and forests—but it never occurred to me that my empathy could just as easily extend to the indigenous peoples of Siberia, the Khanty, Evenks, Yakuts, and dozens of others who had fought back against the Russian conquest with arms in hand. In Russian-speaking culture, this story, and even a limited reflection on it, had simply never occurred, even though the two processes—the conquest of the American West and the conquest of the Russian East—had historically run parallel.

In terms of images and patterns of perception, the dominant image in Russia was that of the "subjugation of Siberia," a heroic struggle against nature rather than the brutal subjugation of already settled groups of people. This interpretation has remained unshaken to this day. The Russians are seen as pioneers, as explorers, not as colonizers who came to seize foreign lands that already belonged to someone else.

The statehood of the local Siberian peoples was too weak to offer military resistance to Russia. No battle remains in historical memory.

But Russia advanced, established itself, and moved further and further – all the way across the sea to Alaska.

This narrative might have been at least partially challenged in the 20th century had it not been for the Bolshevik coup of 1917, which led to the abolition of many civil rights, including the right to land ownership. After their subjugation and political and economic conquest, the indigenous peoples of Siberia were no longer masters of their land in the simplest legal sense—they were no longer allowed to dispose of their reindeer pastures and forest areas.

The complete abolition of property rights enabled the Soviet state to mercilessly exploit the territories of indigenous peoples without encountering legal challenge. The Soviet regime, too, resorted to the same pathos of subjugating nature and exploiting natural resources. Its popular romantic heroes were "modern" pioneers, champions of socialist colonization: topographers and geologists, polar explorers and pilots, who joined forces to explore a seemingly deserted, enclosed space, discovering its riches and transforming them into "common property."

The locals were given the official role of helpers, assisting the representatives of the center and civilization in finding their way to natural treasures that were no one's property. They belonged solely to nature and had to be taken from it.

Pre-revolutionary Russia was more honest in this sense. On the 1908 "Map of the Gradual Expansion of the Borders of the Russian Empire since 1462," the term "conquest" is used in reference to Siberia: "Conquered during the reign of Tsar Fyodor Ivanovich . . .", "Conquered during the reign of Tsar Mikhail Fyodorovich Romanov . . ."

But "conquered" means that there was someone to fight against. So, blood was shed. In Soviet usage, the word "conquest" will disappear once and for all, replaced by the less specific phrase "subjugation." You can only subjugate nature, right?

The epitome of horror in the Nazi concentration camps were the gas chambers and crematoria. The epitome of horror in Stalin's camps was the bitter cold of Siberia. The gas chambers and crematoria had to be built first, based on a plan. The cold exists without people; it doesn't need to be organized. It kills in a completely impersonal way. Nothing can be blamed on it.

Siberia is the ideal place for state crimes. Hidden from the world's gaze, without any witnesses. The isolation, the emptiness, the harshness of nature are the best possible non-place. Seen from the European part of Russia, it lies "outside," beyond the borders of the inhabited world, in the wilderness.

It is no coincidence that the history of Siberia's colonization since the Tsarist era has been one of exile and expulsion. After Siberia, the insurgents and resisters from the western fringes of the empire were banished, transforming Siberia into a place of forced transformation, a shift of identities. The empire's adversaries themselves, or their descendants, inevitably became explorers and colonizers, pursuing scientific or administrative careers and leaving their names on maps, in zoological compendia, or mineral registers.

But the climax of Siberia's history as a place of punishment came, of course, with the Soviet era.

The Nazi extermination camps, although mostly located in the east and relatively far from the German heartland, were still located in densely populated areas. There were many witnesses all around.

The Soviet camps in Siberia, outposts of the dreaded Soviet "internal colonization," were located in sparsely populated areas inhabited by peoples who were not connected to European and, more broadly, world memory through established cultural channels. The number of testimonies about the Gulag from them is vanishingly small. The predominant perspective is and remains the view from behind the barbed wire, the view of the prisoner, the view of those deported here from central Russia. Of people who are complete strangers in Siberia.

What did the locals experience, what did they feel when the Soviet regime criminally invaded their lives, destroyed the order of their living space, rendered their centuries-old traditions obsolete, and began to plunder their resources? What does it mean that, in a short period of time, living dead were "dumped" onto their territory in numbers that far exceeded their own? How did the Gulag's necronomy, aimed at exploiting local natural resources and leaving behind mountains of corpses as "slag," change these regions and these peoples forever?

Unfortunately, this crucial question has not yet entered the liberal public discourse on the Gulag in Russia. Its core remains the forced transport of "Russian Europeans" to the edge of the world or beyond, into a realm of non-existence and death, from which hardly any returned as surviving witnesses. The intense interest in their terrible fate is understandable. What is astonishing, however, is how little research has examined local testimonies. For this reason, the literature on the Gulag as a whole persists within a colonial lens that ignores the perspective of indigenous peoples.

Naturally, every reader feels pity for a victim of the regime, deprived of their freedom and plunged into a hell of deprivation and humiliation. But at the same time, this prisoner becomes part of the colonization project. He is forced to "subjugate" Siberia along with other unfortunates. And the local realities are merely an obstacle for him, blocking his path to freedom.

At the same time, the resistance of indigenous peoples to Sovietization generally remains outside the canon of Russian (liberal) historical memory. The collectivization of reindeer herders, the persecution of shamans, and months of armed uprisings in the tundra do not fit into the narcissistic self-image of the Russian government. This would have required a special effort, an acknowledgment of special responsibility, and a special attention to the fate of indigenous peoples, something Russian society was incapable of—primarily because it remains imprisoned in an imperial mindset without realizing it.

The indigenous peoples of Siberia, who according to Russian statistics number approximately 1.5 million, are scattered across vast areas and differ greatly in their way of life. Settled and nomadism, agriculture, livestock farming, reindeer herding, hunting, and trade exist in varying proportions. This is partly a result of aggressive economic development by the center, since none of the areas inhabited by indigenous peoples is adequately protected as areas with a "traditional way of life."

As hostages of the Russian state system, some "tribal leaders" and intellectuals of the indigenous peoples support Russian imperialist aggression against Ukraine, such as the Khanty-Mansi writer Yeremei Aipin, author of the anti-colonial novel "Our Lady of the Bloody Snow" (2002), which tells of the uprising of the peoples of the Far North against Soviet rule. This paradoxical circumstance underscores the degree of dependence of the indigenous peoples, whose language and culture are threatened by Russification and whose male population of military age is being sacrificed in the war against Ukraine.

The gigantic deposits of oil and gas in the West Siberian lowlands were only discovered and developed after Stalin's death.

In the late USSR, jokes and stories were told about special "rejuvenation pills" supposedly produced by a secret medical institute to restore youth to the demented elderly members of the Politburo. It can be said that Siberia's oil and gas, thanks to exports and foreign currency earnings, became a similar "pill" for the Soviet Union's ailing economy.

It is impossible to know how long the USSR would have existed without this “doping” and what its end would have been like.

Russia took over the deposits, established a production system, and became a major oil and gas supplier to Europe. In the 1990s, under Yeltsin, it embraced the idea of "change through trade," the idea of bringing countries and systems closer together through pumps and pipelines. And Putin, as the subsequent president, got his boost – through a significant increase in the prices of these resources.

The Putin state, in which an unwritten social contract emerged fairly quickly after 2000—citizens surrender individual rights and democratic freedoms in exchange for economic prosperity—is the result of this economic cycle. Putin's personalistic dictatorship and kleptocracy are possible because oil and gas flow through its veins. Oil and gas revenues account for approximately 30 percent of all Russian budget revenues.

At the heart of Putin's dictatorship is the half-baked idea of a global revenge, a common uprising of historical losers against Western hegemony. However, it lacks the elements of fanaticism or total coercion characteristic of the Stalinist model of an aggressive dictatorship, in which the state can dispose of the lives of its citizens at will.

Putin doesn't have a post-revolutionary Soviet society at his fingertips, accustomed to total deprivation, violence, and ideological drill. He's dealing with an urbanized, cynical, and apathetic society, to which he must provide a certain level of prosperity. He achieves this with the help of Russian raw materials. Therefore, the source of the regime's power lies neither in Moscow nor the Kremlin, neither in slogans nor propaganda campaigns—it lies in Western Siberia, deep underground, where oil and gas lie.

One day, the reserves will run out. But not so soon. If true federalization were to occur in Russia in the distant future, the Siberian peoples would have to be able to assert their claim to the resources of their ancestral homeland. Decentralizing control over natural resources would guarantee Russia's transformation into a normal country. It would become a neighbor that poses no threat.

However, there is another factor that could affect Russia's colonial policy in the region in the long term: global warming.

In Russia, people are rather skeptical about the idea of climate change, climate protection, and the associated responsible consumption of fossil fuels. The attitude toward nature remains invasive and subjugating. Furthermore, the green agenda, especially a green energy policy, poses a direct or indirect threat to Russian exports. It calls into question the very system of energy dependence that Russia has turned into a political instrument vis-à-vis the world.

Approximately eleven million square kilometers of Russian territory, or about two-thirds of the total area, are covered by permafrost, which extends to varying depths into the ground.

And it has begun to thaw, as scientific observations show. On the one hand, global warming is leading to the "thawing" of Siberia, the Arctic, and the Northeast Passage, making these areas more accessible for exploitation. Therefore, climate change may have a positive side in the eyes of the Russian leadership. On the other hand, scientists predict that the decline of permafrost could lead to significant emissions of _CO2 and methane into the atmosphere. This, in turn, would accelerate the thawing process.

The colonial logic of Siberia's development—the roads, the bridges, the buildings—is all based on the assumption that the frost will last forever. But this duration is now in question. The shrinking permafrost is destroying everything. Civilization is sinking into the mire, and with it the oil and gas infrastructure.

This is a long-term challenge that goes far beyond Putin's revanchist wars, and one that Russia may fail to meet. It could also force it to rethink its aggressive stance toward nature and humanity.

With all this, Siberia's history, which is literally and figuratively "frozen," is likely to be set in motion. Climate change, which renders obsolete the structures of colonial exploitation of Siberia that developed during the Soviet era and were consolidated and expanded during the Putin era, could become the impetus for political transformation.

Sergei Lebedev , born in 1981, is one of the most important voices in contemporary Russian literature. He lives in Germany. He has just published "No! Voices from Russia Against the War" with Rowohlt. – Translated from the Russian by Andreas Weihe.