The Conquest of a Continent: Siberia and the Russians - Softcover

Lincoln, Bruce

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0801489229 ISBN 13: 9780801489228

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 2007

Synopsis

"In The Conquest of a Continent, the historian W. Bruce Lincoln details Siberia's role in Russian history, one remarkably similar to that of the frontier in the development of the United States.... It is a big, panoramic book, in keeping with the immensity of its subject."―Chicago Tribune

"Lincoln is a compelling writer whose chapters are colorful snapshots of Siberia's past and present.... The Conquest of a Continent is a vivid narrative that will inform and entertain the broader reading public."―American Historical Review

"This story includes Genghis Khan, who sent the Mongols warring into Russia; Ivan the Terrible, who conquered Siberia for Russia; Peter the Great, who supported scientific expeditions and mining enterprises; and Mikhail Gorbachev, whose glasnost policy prompted a new sense of 'Siberian' nationalism. It is also the story of millions of souls who themselves were conquered by Siberia.... Vast riches and great misery, often intertwined, mark this region."―The Wall Street Journal

Stretching from the Urals to the Arctic Ocean to China, Siberia is so vast that the continental United States and Western Europe could be fitted into its borders, with land to spare. Yet, in only six decades, Russian trappers, cossacks, and adventurers crossed this huge territory, beginning in the 1580s a process of conquest that continues to this day. As rich in resources as it was large in size, Siberia brought the Russians a sixth of the world's gold and silver, a fifth of its platinum, a third of its iron, and a quarter of its timber. The conquest of Siberia allowed Russia to build the modern world's largest empire, and Siberia's vast natural wealth continues to play a vital part in determining Russia's place in international affairs.

Bleak yet romantic, Siberia's history comes to life in W. Bruce Lincoln's epic telling. The Conquest of a Continent, first published in 1993, stands as the most comprehensive and vivid account of the Russians in Siberia, from their first victories over the Mongol Khans to the environmental degradation of the twentieth century. Dynasties of incomparable wealth, such as the Stroganovs, figure into the story, as do explorers, natives, gold seekers, and the thousands of men and women sentenced to penal servitude or forced labor in Russia's great wilderness prisonhouse.

About this title

About the Author

The late W. Bruce Lincoln was author of twelve books on Russia, including The Romanovs: Autocrats of All the Russias; Red Victory: A History of the Russian Civil War; Between Heaven and Hell: The Story of a Thousand Years of Artistic Life in Russia; and, most recently, Sunlight at Midnight: St. Petersburg and the Rise of Modern Russia. He held the title of Distinguished Research Professor of Russian History at Northern Illinois University.

From Kirkus Reviews

A sweeping, stark, and cautionary popular history of Russia's ruthless, centuries-old exploitation of its vast Eurasian hinterland. Lincoln (Russian History/Northern Illinois University; Red Victory, 1990, etc.) applies a broad narrative brush to tell a grand, terrible, and almost unrelievedly brutal tale that covers nearly a thousand years of history. On the heels of the retreat of the rampaging Golden Horde of the Mongols in the late Middle Ages came Russia's drive toward the Pacific--a drive led by successive generations of explorers and merchants ravenous for the raw materials that would enrich both them and the cash-poor tsarist kingdom as it strove to break out of its inconsequential Muscovy heartland to join the ranks of the great powers. Just as, in the 18th century, Siberian ``black gold''--priceless sables and other furs--formed the mainstay of the Russian economy during the nation's first great imperial expansion, so did oil and natural gas from the vast Siberian fields later fuel the Soviet push toward industrialization. And, of course, the forgotten reaches of the Siberian wilderness have provided generations of Russian rulers with a continent-sized dungeon for dissidents and defeated rivals, first in their thousands under the tsars and later in their millions in Stalin's slave economy. Lincoln stresses the terrible price that the ruthless Russian exploitation of Siberia's riches continues to exact--a price both human (from the dispersal and suppression of Siberia's aboriginal inhabitants to the mass deportations and death camps of the Stalinist era) and environmental (the near-extinction of Siberia's once-teeming fur supply through overhunting being merely a prologue to vast ecological catastrophes inflicted by reckless Soviet industrialization). Throughout, Lincoln's harrowing subject matter and epic scale recall Robert Hughes's The Fatal Shore, though Lincoln lacks Hughes's ability to express his human sympathy through vivid individual characterization. Still, overall, a grimly compelling, richly rewarding trek. (Sixteen pages of b&w photographs, three maps-not seen) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0801489229
• ISBN 13: 9780801489228
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 528