‘I’m Ready to Declare Myself a Siberian in the Census,’ Tomsk Scholar Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 22 – Sergey Chernyshov, a Tomsk StatPaul Goblee University historian who got in trouble recently for calling Aleksandr Nevsky ‘a collaborationist,’ says that despite the absence among people living east of the Urals of the usual commonalities which define a nation, he is “prepared to declare that [he] is by nationality a Siberian.”

            “There is no Siberian culture,” the historian says. “There is a Tatar culture and a Bashkir culture. This is obvious. The Khanty and Chukchis also have a culture. But there is no unified Siberian culture, Siberian language or Siberian traditions. Therefore, there is no basis to say that in Siberia lives some big ethnographic community” (sibreal.org/a/ermak-kak-zavoevyvali-sibir-/31528515.html).

            This lack is “not good or bad,” Chernyshov continues. “It is simply a fact. But despite that, I find it pleasing to believe that we are somewhat different” than Russians west of the Urals” and am “ready to declare in the census that I am a Siberian by nationality,” a sign of the way in which regional identities can acquire an ethnic dimension.

            Before 1917, he tells Andrey Shvarts of the SibReal portal, Russians annually marked the Day of Siberia on the anniversary at the end of October of the beginning of the unification of Siberia to the Russian state. That Day became the occasion for the regular discussion of Siberia’s problems and possibilities (sibreal.org/a/ermak-kak-zavoevyvali-sibir-/31528515.html).

            That holiday became more politically fraught after the 1865 trial of the Siberian regionalists, Chernyshov says, siting the study of that movement produced by his university two decades ago. (For a link to the complete text of that detailed 2002 work, see  vital.lib.tsu.ru/vital/access/manager/Repository/vtls:000178155.)

            According to Chernyshov, the tsarist authorities generally did not have a problem with the propensity of Siberians to speak of their territory as a colony. That was a neutral term at the time. But after Siberians declared independence in 2018, any such reference which now implied decolonization is suppressed, and the Day of Siberia has not been celebrated.     

            The Tomsk scholar insists that today “there is no separatism in Siberia and that there never was any serious separatism there. Suggestions that Siberians are separatists is a complete fabrication. All uprisings in Siberia were against Soviet power or some reforms. There was never a serious rising calling for the separation of Siberia from Russia.”

            That doesn’t mean there aren’t tensions, Chernyshov says, or that they haven’t grown with time. “In tsarist Russia, there was the top leadership and a colony, but in Soviet times, all [parts of the country and its peoples] were a colony.”