This article was downloaded by: [Queensland University of Technology]On: 21 October 2014, At: 15:45Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Nationalities Papers: The Journal ofNationalism and EthnicityPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cnap20

Stalinism and the demise of oldSiberiaSteven G. Mark aa Clemson University , U.S.A.Published online: 19 Oct 2007.

To cite this article: Steven G. Mark (1998) Stalinism and the demise of old Siberia,Nationalities Papers: The Journal of Nationalism and Ethnicity, 26:4, 777-784, DOI:10.1080/00905999808408599

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00905999808408599

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information(the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor& Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warrantieswhatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of theContent. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions andviews of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. Theaccuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independentlyverified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liablefor any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages,and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly inconnection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Anysubstantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden.Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Nationalities Papers, Vol. 26, No. 4, 1998

REVIEW ARTICLE

STALINISM AND THE DEMISE OF OLD SIBERIA

Steven G. Marks

James Hughes, Stalinism in a Russian Province: Collectivization and Dekulakization inSiberia. New York: St Martin's Press, 1996, xv, 271 pp. + tables, maps, documents.

Valentin Rasputin, Siberia, Siberia. Translated with introduction by Margaret Winchelland Gerald Mikkelson. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996, vi, 438 pp.+ photographs, bibliography of Western scholarship.

Vasily Shukshin, Stories from a Siberian Village. Translated by Laura Michael and JohnGivens. Foreword by Kathleen Parthé. Introduction by John Givens. DeKalb: NorthernIllinois Press, xlviii, 256 pp.

It is no wonder that Siberia has always been described in hyperbolic, mutually exclusiveterms, as either a prized possession or a wasteland. This vast, multi-ethnic territoryspanning northern Asia extends from the polar regions to the subtropics. It encompassesthe world's largest stretches of black earth and forest. Within it are located some ofRussia's biggest cities and least densely populated regions. Distant from the center, it hasbeen historically undergoverned and overgoverned, in places exploited like a colony forits mineral treasures, in others neglected like any remote Russian province. In the pastcentury, the tendency of Russian governments intent on binding it to the center andprofiting from it has been to impose their own development strategies without regard forlocal priorities. In the 1890s, the 1930s, the 1950s, and 1970s, Siberia was the laboratoryfor massive governmental projects, each of which transfigured the territory: the Trans-Siberian Railroad, Stalinist collectivization and industrialization, Khrushchev's VirginLands scheme, and Brezhnev's Baikal-Amur Mainline fiasco.

The three works under review focus on the wrenching change brought about totraditional, rural Siberia by Stalin and his successors. Almost absent from them is theurban-industrial zone that skirts the Trans-Siberian Railroad line and is home to the bulkof Siberia's population. But the merit of these books, despite some deficiencies, is thatthey explore less accessible places, the part of Siberia which, as Valentin Rasputinwrites, "is in no hurry to reveal itself (p. 61). In doing so, they accentuate the complexlegacy of the Soviet experiment in the regions of modern Russia.

James Hughes's Stalinism in a Russian Province is a study of the "Ural-Siberianmethod" between 1928 and 1930, or the early phase of dekulakization and collectiviza-tion. This is a dense bureaucratic history with some major thematic complications, but

0090-5992/98/040777-08 © 1998 Association for the Study of Nationalities

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Que

ensl

and

Uni

vers

ity o

f T

echn

olog

y] a

t 15:

45 2

1 O

ctob

er 2

014

REVIEW ARTICLE

it nonetheless reveals much about the events that destroyed the old peasant village andtransformed Russian rural society.

It is difficult to swallow Hughes's bold but unsubstantiated theme that Stalinism in thecountryside "was much a 'revolution from below' as it was a 'revolution from above"'(p. 3). The implications of that revisionist assertion would be significant if the textoffered evidence to back it up. But in fact, it shows the opposite, that the manipulationsof Stalin and his government were key to every stage of the process. Time and again,Hughes states clearly that the entire set of connected policies was conceived and drivenfrom the top.

As Hughes indicates, forced collectivization originated with the economic and politi-cal calculations of Stalin. He saw the grain surplus being produced by the peasants ofthe Western and Central Siberian Black Earth Zone and wanted to expropriate it for thestate in order to reduce the time and costs involved in industrializing: full CommunistParty control of the peasantry would guarantee delivery of food supplies to the cities andallow the government to shift its hard currency expenditures away from grain to betteruses. More than a problem with the budget, it was also a matter of power. Stalin'sperception of the weak presence of the state in Siberia (which, Hughes neglects tomention, he shared with most other Russian rulers in the nineteenth and twentiethcenturies) was compounded by his belief that the dominance of kulaks in farming andthe produce market threatened to bolster the strength of capitalists and undermine theCommunist Party's monopoly on power. For these reasons, although in ideological termsStalin portrayed dekulakization and collectivization as class struggle, he himself under-stood them in raw political terms: he referred to coercion of the peasants as a modernversion of Mongol tribute, the prerogative of the Soviet conquerors to impose their willon the conquered capitalist peasantry. Indeed, an interesting segment of the bookhighlights the precedents for these policies in previous Bolshevik, tsarist, and Muscovitepractice—suggesting continuity in the political instincts of Russian rulers and once againcontradicting Hughes's nebulous "revolution from below."

Turning our attention "below," it is obvious that few if any of the locals involved indekulakization and collectivization operated as they did without being prodded by theregime. By "revolution from below," Hughes seems largely to mean the excesses ofSiberian officials. These, however, did not happen spontaneously, but only after hintscame from party leaders in Moscow that local officials were to go hard on, or even toliquidate, the kulaks. In general, it was the Kremlin that egged regional officials on ratherthan vice versa. With brutal Bolshevik anti-peasant actions from the Civil War era stillfresh in their minds and a virtual lack of legal restraint—another circumstance deter-mined by Moscow—it was to be expected that, under pressure to overfulfill their planand left to read between the lines of government propaganda and newspapers, theSiberian apparatchiki would turn to violence. For sure, it was hard for the governmentto supervise what took place in distant, vast Siberia, but primarily, as Hughes demon-strates, it was the central government that established the institutional framework and theexpectations that allowed local abuses to go unchecked. The Stalinist state certainly didnot directly command everything that took place and left much to the discretion of localofficials, but these men knew who set the basic goals and methods of the operation andwhat the consequences would be if they did not follow suit. In presenting these facts,

778

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Que

ensl

and

Uni

vers

ity o

f T

echn

olog

y] a

t 15:

45 2

1 O

ctob

er 2

014

REVIEW ARTICLE

Hughes undermines his own attempt to challenge the totalitarian model; at the sametime, he gives a good indication of how it really operated.

Somewhat more successful, although not fully, is the depiction of class divisionsamong the peasantry, another major theme of the book. Intending to "demythologize"peasant involvement in dekulakization and collectivization (p. 5), Hughes challenges thework of Moshe Lewin, one of the pre-eminent scholars in the field, who contends thatpeasants of all strata closed ranks in joint opposition to the incursions of the communistoutsiders. Hughes, by contrast, portrays the government as more effective than usuallythought at dividing and conquering. Stalin's tactic was to foment class war in the villagesby pitting poor peasants (bedniaki) and middle peasants (serednidki) against theirwealthier neighbors by means of differential taxes and grain quotas, followed byinducements to ostracize and physically assault kulaks. As the pressure on kulaks seemedto originate within the villages, Stalin was able to create an air of democracy to distractfrom the party's repressive and coercive intentions and thereby operate against a largesegment of the peasant population without provoking a mass rural uprising. In Hughes'sassessment, tapping pre-existing collectivist and redistributive sentiments to goad thepoorer peasants into opposing the acquisitive kulaks was a highly sophisticated maneu-ver which the Stalinist Politburo adopted in preference to the blunter Leninist methodsof forced grain requisition.

But how sophisticated and successful was it? Once the middle and poor peasantsrealized that forced collectivization was intended not just for kulaks but for all of them,they fought the state through acts of theft or open resistance, often jettisoning theirsupposed class consciousness to unite with the kulaks. Hughes cites evidence that evenmany poor peasants opposed collectivization as a form of serfdom, charged the Sovietgovernment with stealing their labor and produce, and lamented the decline of theirliving standard relative to pre-1917 levels. When it became apparent that this oppositionwas widespread, the state abandoned its cautious deviousness and went in for wholesalecoercion, following in the footsteps of Lenin. As for which social category the victimsbelonged to, the text is confusing, in some places indicating that the victims werepredominantly kulaks, but in others that all segments were well represented. Thesituation was further complicated by a uniquely Siberian phenomenon: although Hughesadmits it is a guess, he enticingly suggests that the intra-village conflict here was asmuch a result of old-settler versus new-settler tensions as it was of class divisions. Allof these factors weaken Hughes's case against the standard notion of a state-peasantdichotomy. He does, though, effectively prove that the villages were riven with class andother hostilities which Stalin and his henchmen exacerbated and exploited.

As the overarching themes of the book are not always sustainable, its strength restson its wealth of detail. Hughes delves into the evolution of policy and the process bywhich the party both poisoned class relations within villages and infiltrated rural Sovietsto destroy them internally. His descriptions of the brutality of collectivization areunstinting: the arbitrariness; the beatings and executions; the systematic rape of peasantwomen; the carnivalesque humiliations of peasant justice; the pillage of victims'property by fellow peasants and officials; starvation and mass beggary among the exiles;arrest and servitude in the Gulag. Surprisingly, Hughes indicates that some categorieswere exempt from dekulakization, at least initially: kulaks with families in the army or

779

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Que

ensl

and

Uni

vers

ity o

f T

echn

olog

y] a

t 15:

45 2

1 O

ctob

er 2

014

REVIEW ARTICLE

factories for security reasons, also Siberian natives and foreign and non-Slavicpeasants—although the rules seem to have been ignored when ethnically mixedvillages underwent Stalinization. Peasant protests, too, receive ample treatment. Mostlyspontaneous and primitive, they were all easily suppressed. As is well known, farmore effective and destructive was the slaughter of cattle and refusal to sow grain, fromwhich Soviet agriculture never recovered. All told, villages were soon depopulated byapproximately 50%: many of the kulaks who were not repressed simply sold theirproperty and fled, some deep into the forest, but most to the industrializing cities, thedestination of a mass rural exodus after the relaxation of the first push towardcollectivization in 1930.

The reprieve did not last long. When the state next embarked on dekulakization andcollectivization in 1931-1932, it did not relent in its efforts to "capture" the countryside.Concentrating on the "trial run" of 1929-1930, Hughes's book illuminates the origins ofthe herculean project of dictatorial social engineering which entailed the exterminationof millions of peasants and the collectivization of tens of millions. As Hughes puts it,Stalin's "final solution" (Chapter Seven title) "accelerated the etatisation of the country-side" (p. 214) and the "destruction of autonomous peasant village culture and society"(p. 143) in Siberia and then all of the USSR. As never before, Stalin succeeded inextending the presence of the Russian state throughout its territory beyond the Urals; theaftermath is apparent in the works of Shukshin and Rasputin.

Vasily Shukshin's Stories from a Siberian Village were written in the 1960s and1970s. Set in his native Altai region, they indicate that a huge divide continues to existwithin Russia between the rural, undeveloped provinces and the industrialized metropoli-tan centers. Shukshin is a storyteller rather than a political or social analyst, but his workgives us a sense that both the immense geographical distances and the malign neglect ofthe communist regime were to blame for the perpetuation of this circumstance.

In her foreword to the stories, the Soviet-literature authority Kathleen Parthe com-ments that Shukshin gives scant ethnographic detail compared to the other dereven-shchiki, or "Village Prose" writers. It may be true that what is distinctively Siberian orAltaian is missing here. Shukshin is more given to dialogue than description and, as thetranslator, John Givens, remarks, it is impossible to render the peculiarities of Shukshin'srural Siberian dialect in English. Yet, Shukshin's stories yield vivid impressions of lifeon the collective farm. His sparse but evocative phrasing conveys the smells of hay,home-brewed beer, and Soviet cigarettes; the sounds of accordions and televisions; thesights of wattle fences, izby, bathhouses, horse-drawn carts on muddy roads, andbabushki carrying buckets on yokes; and, of course, on every other page, the multiplesensations aroused by drinking vodka. The crudeness, crabbiness, and cruelty of villagersare ever present in the stories as husbands and wives beat each other with fists or spoons,and constantly yell, curse, and spit abuse. Nights spent in jail for fighting and vandalismare common. And in typical Russian fashion, the brutality coexists with saintlykindliness and self-sacrifice. The hard daily grind and bleak impoverishment leave noroom for cultured distractions, as seen in "The Microscope," in which a peasant's hungerfor knowledge is beaten out of him by his wife after he spends what little money theyhave on that scientific instrument.

780

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Que

ensl

and

Uni

vers

ity o

f T

echn

olog

y] a

t 15:

45 2

1 O

ctob

er 2

014

REVIEW ARTICLE

Most of these tales present a slice of life and do not explore why these conditionsexist. Upon reading them one is struck by the remoteness of rural Siberia, where inplaces modern technology still seems unfamiliar. But in the semi-autobiographical"From the Childhood Years of Ivan Popov," Shukshin points to Stalinism as a primarysource of Siberia's ills. The young protagonist's father, like Shukshin's, was arrested asa kulak and never seen again. Expelled from their izba, the family loaded their fewbelongings in a cart and moved to the city, where they saw light bulbs for the first time.The boy's mother remarried and they returned to the village, but the new father waskilled in the war. Bereft of his labor, they eked out an existence on the edge ofstarvation. For Shukshin and his characters, the 1930s and 1940s were the watershedperiod in the life of the Altai village.

Shukshin's portrayal of conditions on the collective farm forms a backdrop to hisdialogue, which captures the idiosyncrasies of the peasant worldview. He is preoccupiedwith the tensions between city dwellers and villagers, a result of post-war peasantout-migration to the urban centers of Siberia and European Russia. This theme is notnew to Russian literature, yet the fact that it continues to endure is noteworthy, indicatingthe uneven and drawn-out process of Russian modernization. Shukshin's stories illustrateabove all the peasants' ambivalence toward outsiders and social climbers. In "Ignakha'sCome Home," a circus wrestler with a city-born wife finds that he can't go home again.Five years away have made him a different person, and neither he nor his family in thevillage can feel comfortable with each other. "Cutting Them Down to Size" is about alocal wit intent on displaying his own intellectual prowess by deflating what heautomatically assumes to be an urban visitor's arrogance. "Oddball" features a peasantwho senses his inferiority to his sister-in-law, a lowly snack-bar waitress, because sheis from the city. It is not that these peasants are fully isolated—they watch movies andTV, have served in the war, and have worked or studied or served jailtime in the cities.But for the most part the contact is fleeting and when it does occur serves only to remindthe rural residents how hard their lives are without the city's running water, piped heat,and other conveniences and distractions. Many are tempted to leave, then find itimpossible to adjust on their return; those who stay lash out at each other and the world.

It is these people who figure most commonly in a Shukshin story. Rather than theaverage working peasant, he prefers to write about eccentric individualists and off-beat,alienated misfits. Parthe compares them to Dostoevsky's man from underground, theproto-existentialist hero who, asserting his personality and free will, thumbs his nose atthe laws of nature and refuses to yield to his own miserable circumstances. Shukshin'sprotagonists do share some of these qualities, but just as often as they struggle againstfate they succumb to it in pessimism or resignation, as in "Stubborn" or "Meditations."Shukshin's peasant fatalism, however, is not a rehash of the old stereotype: the dyingman in "Passing Through" glimpses eternity as a Tolstoy character might, but he yearnsto live one more season before merging with it. Perhaps a more apt comparison wouldbe with Sholem Aleichem. Shukshin's wistful, comic stories, too, are filled withluftmenshn and schlemiels who dream of transcending their destitute Soviet collectivefarm hamlets as the Jews once dreamt of messianic salvation from the impoverishedshtetls of the Pale. Although from different eras, in both cases their livelihoods havebeen squeezed dry by the oppressive restrictions of a paranoid government.

781

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Que

ensl

and

Uni

vers

ity o

f T

echn

olog

y] a

t 15:

45 2

1 O

ctob

er 2

014

REVIEW ARTICLE

As Valentin Rasputin points out, Shukshin's characters reflect the way Siberia haschanged for the worse following the Stalinist "conquest" (p. 59). In alignment withShukshin and Hughes, Rasputin sees this rather than the Russian revolution as thebeginning of the end for the centuries-old Siberian way of life. Siberia, Siberia, firstpublished in Russian in 1991, is a lament for what has passed, and a plea to savewhatever remnants of old Siberia have managed to survive despite Stalin, industrializa-tion, and the rapaciousness of the Soviet natural resource ministries.

The essays in this volume follow in the nineteenth-century Russian tradition ofblending literary genres. Like the non-fiction of Dostoevsky and Chekhov, Rasputincombines travelogue, philosophy, and advocatory journalism in a long, digressivework that reads like a novel. But it is Turgenev's comment on Tolstoy that best suitsRasputin: he is Russia's "crank and genius." For his writing is equally exasperatingand exhilarating, scintillating and monotonous.

Although Chapter One is titled "Siberia without the Romance," Rasputin's view ofSiberia is heavily romanticized. He is an ecological alarmist, which may be justified inlight of the poisoned Russian environment. But his generalizations about the rest of theworld are dubious: he assumes that the earth's resources are running out, the settled areasof the world are dangerously polluted, and the very survival of the human race is atstake. Salvation, he claims, will come only from Siberia! It already serves as the "lungsof the planet" (p. 34), and Irkutsk "receives more sunlight than any other place in theworld" (p. 64). More than just a matter of having potential colonization space in anovercrowded world (he does not explain for whom or how it would be distributed),Siberia is a "moral [concept] that promises an unclear but much desired renewal" (p. 33).What does he mean by this? Siberia offers an escape from the evils of industrialism: "wehave long felt Siberia within ourselves as the reality of the future, as a reliable andimminent step in our forthcoming ascent" toward "something new and different, an agewhen human beings will abandon labors that are unnecessary and harmful to theirexistence and ... will finally start taking care of the land ... that they have been luckyenough to inherit" (pp. 66-67).

Rasputin's account of early Siberian history is just as fanciful in spots. In the Russiansubjugation of Siberia, "the Cossacks played an almost supernatural role" (p. 38).Compared to Yermak, the earliest Russian conqueror in Siberia, "Columbus [is]nothing!" (p. 38). Motivated by the ideal of liberty, Yermak and the other Cossacks werethe vanguard of a "spontaneous grassroots movement" (p. 44) consisting of the down-trodden Russian people pushing across Siberia in quest of freedom. In Rasputin's eyesthe makers of this new land were primarily peasant farmers rather than industrialists,traders, or soldiers, whose multiple roles he downgrades. As for the vanquished natives,he stresses their actual exploitation far less than he does either the ineffectual protectivelegislation granted them by the Russian government or the cultural give and takebetween them and Russian Siberians. Many of his interpretations may be off-balance, buthe does not whitewash Yermak's banditry and excesses, and his account of the earliestRussian movement across Siberia, besides being a gripping read, offers some excellentobservations on how it might have taken place.

Rasputin's romantic views of the Siberian people are of a piece with his conceptionof history. He makes the questionable statement about Siberia's largely urban population

782

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Que

ensl

and

Uni

vers

ity o

f T

echn

olog

y] a

t 15:

45 2

1 O

ctob

er 2

014

REVIEW ARTICLE

that "mighty rivers and unmeasured expanses have formed our free and restless souls"(p. 35); at least he does not repeat the hackneyed comparison between Siberia and theAmerican frontier. Echoing some of the less tenable beliefs of the Siberian regionalistNikolai Iadrintsev (1842-1894), he writes that the psychological and physical features ofthe Russians in Siberians are unique. It is undeniable that the isolation, harsh climate,and ferocious insects have endowed Siberians with qualities of endurance and hospi-tality, but the same can be said of European Russians. Without being able to offer muchof substance here, he falls back on exotic stereotypes: in Eastern Siberia, the Asianfeatures of the Russian women "give female beauty new contours and an expressivefreshness that sets it apart from the tired, washed-out look of European beauty" (p. 49).Following suit, he states that Siberia is distinctive because it merges Slavic spontaneitywith Asian self-absorption and naturalness, resulting in the primary Siberian personalitytrait of cunning mixed with kindness. Siberia may be Asian, but, according to Rasputin,it is culturally superior because it is the only place where many "ancient" and "innate"Russian values have survived (p. 58). He gets tangled up, though, attempting to separateinseparable Siberian from Russian attributes. He blames prostitution, drunkenness,violence, and other age-old Siberian vices on the importation of Russian morals, whichhe adds are worse today than in the time of Yermak.

Behind these views lies a patriotic passion for Siberia which gives rise to the book'schief concerns: the threat of industrial pollution to Siberia's environment, the deterio-ration of its historical structures, and the degradation of its distinct cultural ways.Although his accounts of the fight against pollution can be tedious and redundant,Rasputin's descriptions of nature with its rich diversity, oddities, extremes, and won-drous beauty are among the best parts of the book. His superb essays on the highlyvariegated regional cultural landscape make the reader feel that he is experiencing almostfirst-hand the isolated peasant homestead on the Katun River; historic Tobolsk, Irkutsk,and Kyakhta; and the Arctic settlements on the lower Indigirka River, where seven-teenth-century Russian dialect and food habits have survived until recently, "splendidlypreserved" in the permafrost, like "mammoth carcasses and trunks of birch trees near theocean" (p. 345). Unfortunately, much of this heritage is vanishing. A Buriat shaman whoknows neither his own language nor his ritual dances epitomizes the cultural losses ofthe aboriginal Siberians, which Rasputin also regrets. The formerly glorious towns arewretchedly poor, the local wooden architecture has been replaced by blocks of soulless,prefab high-rises, and the philanthropic and and moral example of the local merchantsis long since extinct—all casualties in one way or another of Stalinist industrializationand exploitive industrial policies. He is especially contemptuous of the corrupt, careeristbureaucrats and the wealthy magnates who run the extractive industries, for giving littleback to benefit the region—one timeless tradition that has not died.

But what is to be done? At first glance, his solutions seem pragmatic. His calls forpollution controls, the extension of nature preserves near Lake Baikal, encouragement ofhistoric architectural preservation, and heightened "civic and humanitarian conscious-ness" (p. 366) are reasonable. Many of his ideas, however, are unworkable if notcounterproductive. He writes that "Siberia needs to be developed. But it needs develop-ment, not the highway robbery concealed by this beneficial concept" (p. 373). Granted,Soviet-style industry was a disaster, but what does he mean by beneficial development?

783

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Que

ensl

and

Uni

vers

ity o

f T

echn

olog

y] a

t 15:

45 2

1 O

ctob

er 2

014

REVIEW ARTICLE

Although he holds up the example of Sweden as a rebuke to Siberians, he is hostile toindustry, big cities, and materialism—all basic ingredients of Swedish prosperity. Hisvision becomes more concrete when he expresses envy of Russians in the Arctic, whosepresent life is so harsh, as in the distant past, that they cannot be lured into idleness andvice. In his eyes, it is a bad sign for the future that they are beginning to usesnowmobiles instead of dogsleds. His musing on the outlook of the earliest Russians inSiberia reveals more about him than them: their "dreams [were] directed backward, notforward, toward the time when no government authority oppressed anyone and peoplecould celebrate life freely, without tripping over some restrictive law at every step, whenlands were not worn out or forests mown down, and when consensus and faith keptpeople more steadfast and honest than laws did" (p. 223). His vision also facesbackward, as he largely seeks negation of the present.

For this reason, Rasputin's translators, Margaret Winchell and Gerald Mikkelson, aremistaken when in the introduction they equate his ideas with pre-revolutionary Siberianregionalism. Despite some similarities involving skepticism toward heavy industry aswell as Siberia's relationship to Russia and the world, they are fundamentally different.The regionalists elaborated a clear set of political, legal, educational, and economicmeasures needed to benefit the Siberian populace. Theirs was a positive, realisticprogram for gradual change, in the direction of the rural American Midwest. PerhapsRasputin's frustrations are a measure of the greater difficulties facing today's Siberia.But his reactionary Siberian Utopianism is unsuited to the task of ameliorating theseconditions which arose from "the bitter experience of recent times" (p. 67).

784

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Que

ensl

and

Uni

vers

ity o

f T

echn

olog

y] a

t 15:

45 2

1 O

ctob

er 2

014