Had Soviets Not Used Force to Move People There, ‘Siberia would have been Left without People Long Before Now,’ Political Geographer Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Jan. 22 – The accelerating decline in the population of Siberia in recent decades has prompted many officials to propose taking steps to reverse that, but Russian political geographer Dmitry Oreshkin says such ideas are at a minimum utopian and that Siberia would have been depopulated long ago had the Soviets not used force to move people there. 

            The population of that enormous region has declined for more than a century, with the fall off being only briefly reversed when the tsarist regime promoted resettlement there and then in Soviet times when the state imprisoned and exiled individuals and whole peoples in that direction, he continues (sibreal.org/a/territoriya-sama-po-sebe-nikomu-ne-nuzhna-chto-ne-tak-s-kremlevskoy-ideey-sibirizatsii-rossii-/33649804.html).

            According to Oreshkin, the present-day Russian state has neither the money nor the capacity to move massive numbers of people to the region; and without these “resources,” Siberia will continue to lose people, declines that immigrants from other countries aren’t compensating for now and are unlikely to compensate for in the future.

            Oreshkin notes that because of this and because of Moscow’s policies, the region’s population remains relatively unconnected with its component parts both because there are few roads or rail lines and because Siberians mostly have to travel from one city to another via Moscow rather than directly.

            And he comments that most Russians “do not understand that territory by itself is not a divine gift and it is nothing for which one must struggle or fight. Instead, it is something we must invest in and develop,” steps that Moscow shows little sign of doing at least in the case of Siberia.