Content №1 от 2007
Siberia as a Russian colony
The author proves the fact that any Russian governments (in tsarist Russia or in the USSR or in postsoviet Russia) never treated Siberia (the Far East as well) as a Russian territory. In fact, the governments implicitly regarded these regions as the mere assets that they could have sold if the regions lost their value and significance, as it once happened to Russian America. So, the paper describes the Siberia history of XVI-XX centuries as a colonization process and a way to gain the “colonial” commodities such as furs, silver, gold, coal, grain, diamonds, nickel, oil and gas. Only two events, such as the creation of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the building of the defense-and-war-oriented industries (a military-industrial complex) in Siberia, could be regarded as the exception from a general picture of colonization. The paper may be referred to as a historical and geographical review on the economic topic.
