Sibirica

This article aims at filling the historiographical gap of the part played by women in the early Siberian exile system. The state exploited both their bodies and labour, forcing them to be sexual pacifiers and producers of babies as well as 'frontier domesticators' in general. First sent in the late sixteenth century, their numbers increased after the Ulozhenie of 1649, which largely replaced the death sentence with exile. Further important stages in development were marked by Peter the Great as part of his construction of a service state and by Catherine the Great using Siberia for the purposes of expanding the population and removing schismatics. By the end of the eighteenth century, just over 50 per cent of more than half a million Russians living in Siberia's rural areas were women, both exiles and 'volunteers'. The article concludes that the treatment of such women impeded later Russian efforts to create a healthy society.

Sakhalin's multinational offshore oil and gas projects signify hope for the region's economic regeneration. They also pose an environmental threat to the livelihoods of local natural resource-users, including Sakhalin's few remaining reindeer herders. For the herders over the past century, industrial development, particularly in relation to the domestic onshore oil and gas industry, has been associated with environmental degradation and loss of pastures, family cohesion, language and culture. The herders contrast the physical and mental freedom they enjoy living on the land to the constraint of village life. Their survival strategies are based on a certain freedom from authority and the formal law. Their desire for freedom is also manifested in a reluctance to engage with outsiders who could have a significant influence on their future. This paper explores the survival strategies of reindeer herding households and enterprises and the ways that they engage with outsiders such as state officials, NGOs and oil companies. The offshore oil and gas projects could result in further loss of important pastures and pollution of water sources, while project benefits may not reach some of Sakhalin's communities that are more isolated. However, the projects have catalysed global interest in the fate of Sakhalin's native peoples, oil company consultations have enabled herders to voice their concerns about the projects, and oil company-sponsored programmes may provide opportunities for the revival of herding and the reinforcement of native identity. This article considers some of the tensions between economic independence and security, between the democratic right to participate in planning processes and the desire to be free from state regulation, authority and outside intervention.

The uncompleted railway across Northern Siberia was one of the most shameful projects of the post-war era, involving many deaths and huge discomforts. Hailed by Stalin himself as a major part of his 'Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature', the scheme was dropped at his death in 1953. By that time, less than 600 kilometres were in working operation, even though up to 300,000 persons had been involved and about a third of them had perished, while more than 40 billion rubles of capital investment had been wasted. Ghostly labour camps, rusting rolling stock and rails, hundreds of bridges remain in what has been called 'an open air museum of human technology', preserved by nature's refrigerator - the tundra. The article describes the reasons for the railway project and the 'Great Plan', the organization involved, and the conditions in which the enslaved workforce struggled for survival and died.

The spring of 2003 saw a number of key announcements relating to the Sakhalin oil and gas projects. After considerable speculation, the Sakhalin Energy Investment Company announced that it was to go ahead with a $10 billion investment to construct Russia's first liquefied natural gas plant to export gas to Northeast Asia. This article examines the wider context of Russia's potential as an oil and gas supplier to Northeast Asia. It considers the prospects for the numerous gas pipeline projects that are being proposed. It then focuses in detail on the prospects for oil and gas development offshore of Sakhalin. The background to the current projects is presented and the composition and current status of the major projects reviewed. The article then examines the processes that are helping to shape the projects and places Sakhalin with the wider debate of the impact of globalisation upon Russia's economic transformation. The paper concludes by assessing the prospects for the future.

This article examines the movement for the achievement of national and regional autonomy for the indigenous peoples of Siberia. Concentrating on East Siberia, the author discusses the various conflicts between advocates of autonomy - political, territorial and cultural - in the region, and the various warring factions during the Revolution, Civil War and the early 1920s. She demonstrates how the native peoples did not necessarily understand the political ambitions of the leaders and politicians. She also demonstrates how difficult it was for the general principle of national self-determination to be achieved with so many conflicting interests during a period of nation-wide upheaval and civil war. Underlying this were also the perennial contradictions between the political aims of the centre and the local interests of the outlying regions and peoples. In conclusion, the author suggests that many of the problems of Siberian autonomous movements in the early twentieth century re-appeared at its end.

A study of the regional variation of suicide and homicide rates in the 1990s in Siberia showed that suicide rates were associated with clusters of variables measuring economic poverty and ethnic composition, while homicide rates were associated only with a cluster of variables measuring ethnic composition.

The international, inter-disciplinary conference on ‘Siberia, Land and Peoples: Destruction or Survival?’ took place at the University of Leeds, UK, 6–8 September 2002. Its organiser was Dr David Collins, a specialist in the history of 18th- and 19th-century Siberia and head of the Department of Russian and Slavonic Studies at Leeds.

David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, Toward the Rising Sun. Russian Ideologies of Empire and the Path to War with Japan (Dekalb, Ill.: Northern University Press, 2001) 329pp. £31.95 (hb); $42.00 (hb) ISBN 0-87580-276-1 (hb)

Anna Reid, The Shaman’s Coat: A Native History of Siberia (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2002) 226pp. £20.00 (hb). ISBN 0-2976-4377-0 (hb)

Kira Van Deusen, Raven and the Rock: Storytelling in Chukotka (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999) 216pp. £20? (hb) ISBN 0-295-97841-4 (hb) Matthew J. Payne, Stalin’s Railroad: Turksib and the Building of Socialism Victor L. Mote

Matthew J. Payne, Stalin’s Railroad: Turksib and the Building of Socialism (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001) 384pp. £23.00, ISBN 0-8229-4166-X

Jennifer Considine and William Kerr, The Russian Oil Economy (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Press, 2002) 360pp. £69.95 (hb), ISBN 1-84064-758-2 (hb)

This is a continuation of the lists published in Sibirica vol. 2 nos.1 and 2. It includes items from earlier years (1991–1995) discovered since the publication of my previous lists.