Sibirica

Russia transitioned from enforcing the world’s longest ban on importing tobacco in the seventeenth century to legalizing the product at the beginning of the eighteenth and ultimately becoming one of the world’s largest producers of tobacco by the nineteenth century. A part of this process neglected by historians is the way in which Russia distributed tobacco among the indigenous communities in Siberia, Kamchatka, and Russian America, creating new consumers where none had existed. This article discusses both the process by which Russia exported tobacco to its frontier and the manner in which tobacco consumption was localized among its diverse populations. Tobacco was not a single product experienced the same way throughout the empire but rather became a marker of difference, demonstrating the multiple communities and trade networks that influenced the nature of Russia’s colonial presence in Asia and the North Pacific.

The article investigates the projects for creating a self-governing system in Siberia between the revolution of 1905–1907 and the Russian Civil War of 1918–1920. Analysis of original newspaper articles and archival material shows that these projects shared an aspiration for the establishment of a democratic system of self-government. The Siberian intelligentsia (the oblastniks) believed that Siberian autonomy would promote the economic and cultural development of the region, while serving All-Russian interests. It was only during the deep social upheavals and crisis of power in 1917 when separatist tendencies became dominant among the Siberian political elite. Anti-Bolshevik forces in Russia considered the Siberian outskirts to be a “territory of salvation” for the future democratic non-Soviet Russian state.

Although histories of migration to Siberia describe the eighteenth century as a period of less movement than either the seventeenth or nineteenth centuries, the regulation of such mobility evolved considerably over the course of the century. This article looks at three foci of legislation: the act of getting to Siberia, the act of fixing oneself in an official status in Siberia, and the legislation of forced and targeted mobility. In all these areas, decrees show a change from viewing Siberia as a distinctly different space with its own rules and exceptions to a space more fully integrated with the larger system of governance in the empire and more fully understood as a part of Russia proper, not simply as a mercantile colony.

This article analyzes the semantic structure of domestic deer herd names in Alutor, a Kamchatkan language spoken by a semisettled group of Koryaks. The structure of the lexicon shows a variety of names of herds and parts of herds according to sex and age of a deer and the relative location of a deer in the herd, and of names of harnesses and parts of harnesses. Herd names and names of parts of reindeer harnesses represent composite lexemes consisting of simple nouns. All Alutor names in the present article are explained in their contexts, as well as in the hierarchical organization of the hypero-hyponymic groups in which synonym relations and relations of variation are being observed.

This report discusses the role of the Soviet government and the leadership of Iakutiia in increasing the intellectual potential of the region in the second half of the twentieth century through the development of specialist personnel. The authors draw attention to both positive and negative factors related to the process of growth of specialist personnel in the region. The article discusses some aspects related to the provision of training and education for native men and women, such as individual business sense and organizational skills, the system of attracting and training indigenous cadres, and the language of instruction.