Soviets Almost But Not Quite Wiped Out the Original Siberians, Yakovlev Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, December 5 – The Soviet system wiped out almost all of the Slavic people who moved to Siberia before the revolution because the Siberians were the ambitious, freedom-loving capitalists who resisted the Bolsheviks and who were killed or at least marginalized by Moscow because they represented a threat to the communist system, Yakov Yakovlev says.

            At the end of the 19^th century, the Siberians considered themselves a separate people and counterposed themselves to the Russians west of the Urals, the regional specialist says. Scholars even discussed whether they were part of the Russian people or “a completely separate ethnos with its own culture and language” (sibreal.org/a/30983308.html).

            During the Russian Civil War, most of the Siberians supported the anti-Bolshevik movement or organized revolts against the Reds when Soviet power was established. Moscow never forgot that and targeted them for extinction, taking away their property and even their lives.  Few of these Siberians survived.

            That act of mass murder was followed by further repressions in the 1930s and later and by two new migration “waves” – those sent east by Stalin as GULAG prisoners or special settlers and most recently by those who came to exploit the region’s natural resources. But despite that, a few, a very few descendants of the original Siberians have managed to survive.

            In an article for the Sibreal portal, Yakovlev traces the remnants of the once proud Beshkiltsev family, one of the many clans who formed the core of the Siberian identity a century ago. All have lost many of their members as a result of Soviet depradations; but nonetheless, some members have survived and kept the older identity alive.

            He focuses on one of the Beshkiltsev’s, Varvara Tarasovna Beshkiltseva, now a retired teacher aged 88 who lives in the Beloyarsk district of the Khanty-Mansiisk Autonomous District. She tells how difficult it has been for her to glean information about her family’s remarkable past but also stresses how important that past remains for her and for others.

            For most of her life under Soviet power, the old Siberian families like her own were attacked as ideological enemies of the Soviet state.  But now, she says, ever more people in the region appreciate them as the forerunners of the Siberians of today; and so what her family and others like that created is no longer being condemned but celebrated.

            There is even the possibility, she suggests, that the Siberians of the 19^th century, after the horrors of the 20^th, will become the models for Siberians in the 21^st.