The Russian conquest of Siberia was a gradual process which began in the early 1580s and in many ways continued down to the twentieth century. There was no Russian state prior to the sixteenth century. Instead there were numerous small principalities and republics along the course of the Upper Volga River in Eastern Europe. One of these, the Duchy of Muscovy, conquered the others in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. It evolved into the Russian state which then began expanding eastwards over the Ural Mountains in the 1580s. Up until this time the vast region known as Siberia stretching across northern Asia had been loosely controlled by Asiatic tribes-people like the Turks and Huns who frequently migrated to warmer climates to the south and west. The Russian expansion into Siberia was rapid once it commenced. The first Russian expedition reached the far eastern side of the continent and looked out onto the Sea of Okhotsk and Pacific Ocean in 1639, less than sixty years after Russia had first expanded over the Ural Mountains more than 4,000 kilometers away. However, while Russia nominally controlled Siberia from this point forwards, effective control over this vast region took much longer to establish. Siberia remained very thinly populated by Russians until the nineteenth century when concerted efforts were made to colonize Asian Russia and the Trans-Siberian Railway was built to connect cities like Moscow all the way across Siberia to the Far East. Today approximately 25% of Russia’s population lives east of the Ural Mountains.[1]
Russian conquest of Siberia chronology of eventsRussian conquest of Siberia chronology of events
In the High Middle Age, Eastern Europe was divided up into numerous principalities and republics like the Duchy of Muscovy, the Principality of Tver and the Republic of Novgorod. The Duchy of Muscovy emerged to conquer the other Russian principalities under rulers like Ivan III. In 1547, Ivan IV, better known as Ivan the Terrible, was proclaimed as the first Muscovite ruler with the title of Tsar of Russia. During his long reign the nascent Russian state expanded swiftly to conquer the Golden Horde that controlled the Lower Volga River down to the Caspian Sea.[2] It was in the final years of his reign in the early 1580s that a Russian Cossack by the name of Yermak Timofeyevich led the first Russian expedition over the Ural Mountains into Asia. This is generally acknowledged as the commencement of the Russia Conquest of Siberia.[3]
The conquest itself took place over the next 200 years. Russian explorers like Ivan Moskvitin, Mikhail Stadukhin and Semyon Dezhnyov trekked vast distances across the cold region of northern Asia in a matter of a few decades in the early seventeenth century and explored the far northeast of the continent. In 1639 the first Russian expedition reached the Sea of Okhotsk connected to the Pacific Ocean. However, while mapmakers and politicians in Moscow might have been happy to claim that these eastern expeditions had extended Russian rule all the way to the Far East, in reality nothing more than nominal control over Siberia had been established at this early stage. There were still very few Russian settlements east of the Urals and a limited Russian population presence. Conversely, the native peoples of this vast and cold world continued to live broadly independent of any form of Russian rule.[4]
In the century that followed, some of these Siberian tribespeople offered little resistance to the encroaching Russian state authority, but others like the Buryat and Tingus had been influenced by the Mongolian conquests centuries earlier and had sufficient military capabilities to oppose Russian expansion throughout the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth. Over time, though, like the Native Americans and First Nation people in Canada and New England in their interactions with the French and English during the same time period, the Siberian natives were worn down and conquered as more and more Russians trekked east of the Urals to acquire land and to trade in furs and other commodities. The final stages of the Russian conquest of Siberia took place between 1742 and 1778 when the last major campaigns against groups like the Chukchi and Koryak were undertaken in the far north-eastern corner of Siberia in Kamchatka and the Chukchi Peninsula.[5]
Extent of migration during the Russian conquest of SiberiaExtent of migration during the Russian conquest of Siberia
Russian migration east of the Urals was an even more prolonged process. It occurred gradually with settlements being founded slowly moving eastwards in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For instance, the city of Tobolsk was established by the Cossacks in 1587 as the conquest of the Khanate of Sibir was completed. Over half a century later, Okhotsk was founded on the far side of Siberia as a Russian colony on the Pacific Ocean. Many other settlements like Omsk were established north of what is now Kazakhstan in 1714 as Russia sought to expand into Central Asia from Siberia. Krasnoyarsk already existed from the late 1620s as a major stop-off point roughly midway between the Urals and the Pacific Ocean. Over time these would grow into the most important cities in Asian Russia. This migration was fueled to a degree by the movement of the Old Believers to Siberia. These were Russians who continued to adhere to older forms of Russian Orthodox Christianity and faced persecution back in Europe after a series of church reforms in the 1650s.[6] Yet the process was much more delayed in alternative instances. For instance, the city of Novosibirsk on the Ob River was only built in the 1890s.[7]
Even the towns which were founded early on in the Russian Conquest of Siberia remained quite small through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was only in the nineteenth century that the Russian government proactively sought to colonize and populate Siberia with people from the European parts of Russia. This process was aided by the ending of serfdom in Russia in 1861. Part of the reason why Russia was so behind the rest of Europe in bringing this medieval form of agricultural bonded labor to an end was owing to fears that if it was prohibited Russia’s serfs would migrate eastwards in huge numbers to live on thinly populated lands in Siberia. In the end, the prohibition of serfdom across the Russian Empire did not lead to a mass exodus of this kind, but there was a growing migration into Siberia that was aided in the early twentieth century by the construction of the 9,289 kilometer-long Trans-Siberian Railway from Moscow to Vladivostok on the Pacific coast. Millions of Russian migrated eastwards to Siberia in the century between 1850 and 1950 as steamships, railways and other technological developments made the prospect of living here more tolerable.[8]
Demographic impact of the Russian conquest of SiberiaDemographic impact of the Russian conquest of Siberia
The demographic impact of the Russian conquest of Siberia over time has been very substantial. Approximately 35 million people live in Russia east of the Ural Mountains today. Admittedly a small proportion of these are ethnic people who have roots in Siberia going back long before the Russian conquest, but most are the descendants of Russian Europeans who either migrated here voluntarily or who were forcibly transplanted to Siberia during the Soviet dictatorship of Joseph Stalin between 1924 and 1953.[9] We get a sense of this from looking at the size of some of the cities that have developed out of Russia’s colonies in Siberia. Although it is dwarfed by Moscow and St Petersburg, the only two megacities in Russia, Novosibirsk is the third largest city in Russia today with one and a half million inhabitants. Krasnoyarsk has a population of over a million and is one of the fastest growing major cities in Russia. Omsk has over 1.1 million inhabitants. There are many other cities in Siberia with hundreds of thousands of inhabitants. They are all demographic by-products of the Russian conquest and settlement of Siberia that occurred over a period of approximately 350 years.[10] Tens of millions of Russians today and people further afield will have an ancestor who migrated east of the Urals to Siberia between the 1580s and the middle of the twentieth century.
See alsoSee also
Explore more about the Russian conquest of SiberiaExplore more about the Russian conquest of Siberia
- Russia, Births and Baptisms, 1755-1917 records collection on MyHeritage
- Russia, Marriages, 1793-1919 records collection on MyHeritage
- Russia Deaths and Burials, 1815-1917 records collection on MyHeritage
- Russia, Cemetery Records records collection on MyHeritage
- Russians Immigrating to the United States records collection on MyHeritage
- Being Russian: Traditions and Genealogy on the MyHeritage Blog
- Battle of Kursk: Tracing Family History Through WWII Records on the MyHeritage Blog
- House of Romanov: Russian Royal Lineage Uncovered on the MyHeritage Blog
References
- ↑ Anatole V. Baikalov, ‘The Conquest and Colonisation of Siberia’, in The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 10, No. 30 (April, 1932), pp. 557–571.
- ↑ https://www.thecollector.com/how-muscovy-become-russia/
- ↑ https://www.britannica.com/biography/Yermak-Timofeyevich
- ↑ https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/russian-colonial-wars
- ↑ David N. Collins, ‘Subjugation and settlement in seventeenth and eighteenth-century Siberia’, in Alan Wood (ed.), The History of Siberia: From Russian Conquest to Revolution (London, 2024), chapter 3.
- ↑ Caroline Humphrey, ‘Schism, Event, and Revolution: The Old Believers of Trans-Baikalia’, in Current Anthropology, Vol. 55, No. S10, The Anthropology of Christianity: Unity, Diversity, New Directions (December, 2014), pp. S216–S225.
- ↑ https://link.springer.com/rwe/10.1057/978-1-349-95839-9_1175
- ↑ Leonid Goryushkin and Alan Wood, ‘Migration, settlement, and the rural economy in Siberia, 1861–1914’, in Wood (ed.), The History of Siberia, chapter 8.
- ↑ https://cepa.org/article/russia-explained-siberian-indigenous-population-halves-amid-suicide-epidemic/
- ↑ https://datacommons.org/ranking/Count_Person/City/country/RUS?h=wikidataId%2FQ104538