Janet M. Hartley. Siberia

This book’s claim to difference is its focus on “how people lived” (xiv) and it clearly achieves this goal in a concise but holistic English-language account of Siberian history. It is not quite social history but rather a depiction of the pragmatic aspects of life. Janet M. Hartley covers housing, diets, and coping with long-distance travel in conjunction with key historical events from Yermak Timofoyevich’s expedition in the 1580s and Mikhail Speranski’s reforms of the 1820s to Soviet socialism. Equally important, the book does not aim to be comprehensive but to provide a sense of the diversity of ways of life in different locations (villages, towns, garrisons); among different population groups (Cossacks, exiles, explorers, missionaries, Soviet workers, and academics); and around projects such as railway construction, collectivization, and the making of the new Soviet citizen. Hartley covers most of the established narrative such as Siberian hardships and opportunities, including freedom from serfdom, and critically addresses popular and scholarly stereotypes: Siberian emptiness and wilderness, the domination of its history by terror and exile, and Siberia as a place for only resource extraction.

Archaeology · Art · Communism · Economic history · Ethnology · Frontier · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Population · Serfdom · Socialism · Sociology · Wilderness · Chinese history and philosophy · Demography · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies