02.09.2025
“Without seeing Siberia, without being there, one cannot fully understand the country, of which Siberia began to become a part five hundred years ago,” notes Director of the Research Center for Demographic and Population Problems of RSUH, Dr. Sukhov, in his article “The Sky over Siberia,” published in the journal “Russia in Global Affairs.”
The problem of large countries often lies in the fact that the people living in them do not fully comprehend the space they inhabit.
At the end of the 1990s, while still a student, the author participated in archaeological excavations in Saxony, on the territory of the former German Democratic Republic. We formed an international crew — four from Moscow, six or seven from different parts of Poland, one Irishwoman, and two young women from the American Midwest.
If one regularly visits the Caucasus (and only there), one can form a complete idea of the people living there and the social processes that determine their lives. But such knowledge will be, to some extent, deprived of broader context. That is what happened to Imam Shamil (1797–1871), who had fought Russia for several decades in Chechnya and Dagestan and was astonished at the scale of the country when he saw it for the first time after his honorable surrender. The author thought of this when he first saw the Tobolsk Kremlin under a vast sky across which one could fly for hours in any direction by airplane, with nothing below but endless forest. It may not be obvious at first glance, but its space is different from that of European Russia. And at the same time, it is an inseparable part of the country.
Sparse Population
Professor Leonid Blyakher of the Higher School of Social and Political Sciences at Pacific State University speaks about the specific Siberian experience of sparse population. In the eastern part of the country there are too few people; there is a spatial imbalance between the sparsely populated expanses and the European part, where three-quarters of the population are concentrated and where overcrowded megacities are located. This pattern of perception developed back in the Russian Empire. Currently, in the Ural, Siberian, and Far Eastern federal districts, 36.6 million people live, which constitutes almost one-quarter of Russia’s total population (not including data from the four new territories). The area of Russian territory east of the Urals amounts to 13.1 million square kilometers, or 77 percent of the entire territory. Leonid Blyakher’s thesis was that, unlike during the period of Stolypin’s colonization and several waves of Soviet industrial development of Siberia and the Far East, European Russia had lost or was about to lose its status as a region of outmigration for internal migrants, because it itself had ceased to be a demographic surplus. At the same time, many challenges associated with the disproportional distribution of the population across Russia have not lost their urgency.
Borders
One peculiarity of the view from European Russia toward the eastern part of the country is that there is not even agreement on what exactly should be called Siberia. Strictly geographically, Siberia proper is the territory east of the Urals and west of the watershed mountain ranges dividing the basins of the Pacific Ocean and the Arctic Ocean.
In mass Russian perception, Siberia is located between the Ural Mountains and the Pacific Ocean. From the modern administrative point of view, it is the Ural Federal District, the Siberian Federal District, and the Far Eastern Federal District. Demographically, all three districts together equal about three Moscows. Population density east of the Urals is 2.79 people per square kilometer. Areas with relatively high density are few and historically concentrated in the south, in zones more favorable for agriculture, where most cities and transportation routes are located.
Territory
For many Russian analysts, including foreign policy experts and those who observe the world primarily from the territory of European Russia, Siberia for a long time essentially remained nonexistent—a service territory. A resource base, the hypotenuse of the Russian Arctic, the supporting shore of the Northern Sea Route, perhaps a transit space between Europe and China. The Far East was luckier: it was viewed as a portal of interaction with China and the Asia-Pacific region. The portal can be opened or closed depending on the political situation. But both Siberia and the Far East have grounds to claim more. Strangely enough, China bears a great resemblance to the Russian model of uneven population distribution. In the overpopulated eastern coastal provinces of the PRC and the desert-like northern and western periphery, population density is very different.
History
Because only every fourth Russian lives east of the Urals, communicational exchange is somewhat weakened. One result is the transformation of Siberian and Far Eastern history into terra incognita for most Russians. Yet in Tobolsk, everyone knows who Yermak and Kuchum were, and what connection Dostoevsky and Mendeleev had to those places. The heroic epic of the defense of the Albazin fortress from the Manchus has quietly become part of everyday life in the Amur region. The Russian state surpassed its direct eastern neighbors—the khanates left from the Golden Horde—in economic, political, and military terms. The first to look east with interest were the Novgorodians, who declared as their zone of interest the lands from Lake Ilmen to the White Sea, the Ural ridge, and the Kama River. In 1581, ataman Yermak went to Siberia, defeated the Siberian Khan Kuchum, and declared the lands east of the Urals Russian, although the Cossacks had set foot only on the very edge of a vast unknown space. In 1587 Tobolsk was founded, in 1628—Krasnoyarsk, in 1632—Yakutsk. In the 1640s, Cossack detachments reached the Amur and the Pacific Ocean. In 1653, Nerchinsk appeared on the border with China.
Locals
The epic story of tiny groups of people advancing across vast expanses of forests and mountains, founding forts and settlements, which in some cases survived and began to grow rapidly, is all the more remarkable because, unlike the Spanish Conquista, it did not lead to the destruction of indigenous peoples. The authors of one of the most famous works on the history of human settlement, Richard Jones and Colin McEvedy, believed that in 1000 CE the population of Siberia and the Far East had been only about 100,000 people. By 1500 it may have doubled, and by 1700 it may have tripled. The penetration of Russians into Siberia and the Far East may be compared with the colonization of the territory of the United States, which led to social exclusion and a significant reduction of the indigenous population. Despite the latest archaeological data, which has greatly expanded understanding of the technological and social development of Siberia in the Neolithic, by the time of the beginning of Russian colonization it was incomparably less populated than either of the Americas. In addition, most anthropologists now recognize the role of differences in the immune systems of Native Americans and Europeans in the catastrophic decline of the former: such differences did not exist between Russians and the indigenous peoples of Siberia and the Far East. The question of the effectiveness of managing territory in Siberia and the Far East with minimal staffing in the 17th–19th centuries, compared to other systems of territorial administration of the same period, still awaits research. Even considering all these factors, one cannot help but notice the absence of academic assessments that would reflect losses in Siberia and the Far East comparable to those caused by the penetration of whites into both Americas and Australia. It would be disrespectful to the martial valor of indigenous peoples and Russian colonists to claim that the conquest of Siberia and the Far East was entirely peaceful. In some places—for example, in Yakutia and Kamchatka—military actions lasted for decades; some communities and entire ethnic groups were on the verge of extinction.
Empire
The role of continuous colonization in Russian history was noted already by Vasily Klyuchevsky. He built a concept of the territorial development of the country during the period of colonial competition among European empires. Such research in Russia was initially constrained by the absolute dominance of the Marxist-Leninist view of historical and social processes. However, over time problems became evident in applying this “framework” to processes outside the West. Modern and contemporary political history of Russia repeatedly questioned the applicability of the notions of nation and nation-state.
Keys
At an intuitive level, the issue of shared identity reemerged in the 2000s, including against the backdrop of the acute political crisis in the North Caucasus. The rhetoric of forming a civic nation, which had been greatly emphasized in the 1990s, sharply declined and even partly disappeared as the possible long-term political effects became evident. However, no alternative explanation has been formulated for the shared identity of people living together across the vast Russian space. Again, it seems intuitive that the keys to it must be sought in the history of Russian territorial expansion and their interaction with indigenous peoples. As well as in the specifics of the state, which at certain stages of history outsourced part of its territorial functions (first to free Cossack societies, then to private companies), while remaining constantly involved in this activity. It is generally recognized that it was precisely the annexation of Siberia and the Far East that first turned the Muscovite state into Russia, then made possible expansion into the Caucasus, Novorossiya, and other provinces in the west of the Empire, as well as into Central Asia; and the inclusion of these territories and their populations into the socio-political orbit of the common state.
Ostrogs
A specific aspect shaping the perception of the Asian part of Russia is the history of the domestic penitentiary system. Russian authorities traditionally regarded Siberia and the Far East as potential places of exile and punishment. For example, the active involvement of the state in the economic development of the Amur and Primorye regions in the second half of the 19th century would have been unthinkable if Siberia and the Far East were seen solely as places “beyond which one cannot be exiled.” These perceptions were adjusted in Soviet times. Changes occurred against the backdrop of significant losses that Siberia and the Far East suffered due to mobilizations during World War I, and then the Civil War. The trend of forming the image of Siberia as a place of punishment was reinforced by the creation of the system of institutions of the GULAG. Both of these phenomena (collectivization and the camps) formed a stable perception that Siberia and the Far East are regions associated primarily with suffering. The memory of the victims of Soviet social engineering and repressive policy is preserved in families, deserves respect from the state, and must be an element of the system of teaching history as part of shaping civic values in society in general and among younger generations in particular.
Dream
Attempts to shape the image of Siberia and the Far East as territories of advanced development, “younger” than the country as a whole, were also undertaken under Soviet power—the drivers were large industrial and infrastructure projects, some of which still play a significant role in the economic geography of the region. One of the last and most interesting examples of positive mobilization of human resources for the development of Siberia and the Far East was the construction of the Baikal-Amur Mainline in the 1970s–1980s, which became, by some estimates, the most expensive Soviet infrastructure project. Is it possible to make Siberia and the Far East attractive again? Yes, and such efforts are being made: the region is once again positioned as a territory of advanced development. At the same time, in Siberia and the Far East many large federal companies prefer to maintain their infrastructure with shift workers and limit the hiring of local personnel by relying on the constant or temporary “import” of workers from other regions. Often this is explained by the objective lack of specialists with the necessary qualifications in local labor markets.
Homeward Bound
Against this backdrop, in several regions of Siberia and the Far East there is a tendency toward a reduction in migratory outflow, and some are becoming attractive to internal migrants. In 2023, the migration growth rate per thousand people in the Siberian Federal District was -0.6, but among the urban population it turned out to be positive (0.1).
There is also counter-movement: from the Central Federal District to Siberia in 2023, 19,176 people moved, and to the Far East—13,773. As we see, these figures are lower than the flow toward the Center, but not by an order of magnitude, and compared with 2022 there is a noticeable trend of growing interest of residents of the Central Federal District in relocating to the eastern part of the country.
Six regions of the Siberian and Far Eastern districts were among the 22 federal subjects where the population increased in 2023. The ANO “Eastern Center of State Planning” considers two scenarios for demographic development of the Far East up to 2036: an inertial one, in which the population of the district will decline over eleven years from the current 7.8 million to 7.4 million people, and a target one, in which the population will grow to 7.9 million. Avoiding decline and achieving growth so far seems possible only by increasing migration attractiveness, although this is difficult given the absence of demographic surplus in most other regions of the country.
The original material is available at the link.
