Siberia as an illusion. Historian Sergey Cherneshov - about what unites Siberians

A rare Siberian does not have a story about how he trolls some foreigners or Muscovites with stories about thirty-degree frost in July and bears on the streets of the city. Or (as in the case of Novosibirsk) about bears roller in the subway. A set of such banalities, coupled with the history of five or ten French as a measure of the area of almost any Siberian region (not to mention the Krasnoyarsk Territory), form the basis for the collective myth of Siberia as a "special region." However, if you look at this myth more closely-will there be something in it other than conditional geographical boundaries and stories about bears in the subway?

Nemesque natives

First of all, you need to make one significant reservation. When we say something about the special path of Siberia or the understanding of Siberia as a "special region", we subconsciously mean the picture of the world of the Russian population of this region. This myth (or discourse, in the language of modern science) is not in the worldview of the Chukchi, Yakuts, Khakasses and other "small peoples", and if there is, then it is completely specific. Therefore, it is necessary to understand that the idea of understanding Siberia as something special is the idea of Russians in Siberia and almost no one. Now it is the majority of the population of the region, but this was not always the case.

Russians in Siberia are historical newcomers who have been living here for more or less all the last 400 years. And the previous couple of thousand years in Siberia there were no Russians, therefore, there could simply not be a discourse about the "special path". Why? Here it is necessary to identify one more important thought for further reasoning: for the idea of a “special path”, an antagonistic idea of a “original” or “exemplary” path, regarding which “specialty” reports, is necessary. Simply put, the idea of a “special path” always arises in the colonies, where the intellectual elite takes the life of the metropolis as a reference point - in our case, Moscow. For the Ugra peoples of the Tyumen region (current Khanty, Mansi and others), there is no "special path", there is their only way. But for Russians in Siberia there is such a way.

When Russian immigrants at the beginning of the 17th century find themselves in unfriendly Siberia, they are faced with the need to legitimize their own community. Simply put, they need to explain to themselves why and why they are here, how they differ from the native population, and most importantly - to explain this as noble as possible. If we think for a short while, we will understand that a set of ideas, how to do it simply and effective, what then, that now is not so big.

The first obvious idea - it is necessary to invent the myth of Russians as civilizers. We are here, because we are carrying Russian civilization, the will of the Russian state, we carry the light of knowledge and technology, but the archaic local population is opposed to us, which does not always understand its happiness. Therefore, the "conqueror of Siberia" Yermak in the earliest folk legends is not just the head of the army with dubious legitimacy, but the performer of the will of the Russian king. On the other hand, with the emergence of the local intellectual elite in Siberia, a request is formed to isolate and develop Siberian identity, including artificially - as in all other outskirts of the empire. Yes, then they say local intellectuals, we, of course, are Russians and bring the light of civilization, but we are special Russians, because - distances, frost, character and so on. The idea of "Russians" must be landed on local soil, otherwise it will not last long. And this is the second obvious move for anyone who decides to invent an identity in colonized territories.

The destiny of intellectuals

For a minute we will dwell on to make out one phrase that we called, but did not outline the boundaries. What is to "invent a myth" and who was doing this at all? After all, this is only in the fairy tales "Words and Music", in life, each idea has a specific author, with the name and surname. And yet - this is only in the school textbooks of a grandfather with beards (writers and thinkers) are portrayed as the leaders of the "people's masses" and the herald of the "deep people". And what is in reality? Is it possible to say that the idea of Siberia as a “special region” in the last couple of hundred years has mastered the minds of any significant number of people?

In short - no, the ideas of Siberia as a "special region" have always taken care of a very narrow bunch, from tens to hundreds of people by hundreds of thousands and millions of Siberians. This heap, although she imagined herself a compass for the rest of the people, she perfectly understood that for the most part, these constructions are extremely incomprehensible.

If in more detail, then the picture looks like this. First of all, from among the ideologists of the "special path" of Siberia, we exclude all visiting intellectuals. If you read the notes of the Protopop Avvakum, the poet Fonvizin, the Decembrist Muravyov and many, many others in Siberia, then we will see that they are completely uninteresting at least some reasoning about Siberia. They, having lived for several years in Siberian cities, do not even mention local vicissitudes in their letters and memories: they are more concerned about the affairs of Paris or St. Petersburg than Tobolsk, which was behind their door at that time.

Next, we exclude from the list of those who could profess the “special path” of Siberia, the whole generalized “people”. Actually, on his impassable deafness to any abstract generalizations of any kind (and even more so-about Siberia as some "special region"), all local local historians complain in all articles of the last two and a half centuries known to us. Back in the middle of the 18th century, almost 37% (!) Siberia residents were exiled and fugitive, and in Tobolsk one of the most educated people of that time, Metropolitan Pavel Konyushkevich did not believe in the earth around the Sun. One of their key researchers of Siberia in the mid -19th century Grigory Spassky, the author of numerous local history books and publisher of the Siberian Bulletin magazines and the Asian Bulletin, turned out to be so much in demand among local contemporaries that in 1859 the Siberian newspapers mistakenly published the necrologist about his death, confused with his death.

The next exclude from this list the majority of local local historians. Even during the heyday of Siberian local history, in the second half of the 19th century, local researchers were not so interested in a local story that, say, only the publication in the “Moscow Vedomosti” in 1889 of the reader’s angry note about the devastation of the “Kuchumov settlement”-the remnants of the last capital of the Siberian Khanate, at least somehow contributed to the organization of full-fledged archaeological substitutions. On this occasion, the then Tobolsk Governor Vladimir Troiznsky unsubscribes to Moscow as follows: "Due to the vastness of the province, it is not able to ensure the protection of antiquity monuments. In most cases, industrialists who are trying to find or valuable objects or bones of antediluvian animals are born in the mounds."

Finally, we will exclude the overwhelming majority of Soviet historians, local historians and enlighteners from the list of radio students for the “special path” of Siberia. One would think that interest in local identity is growing as the number of literate in the first decades of Soviet power grows, but this is completely not so. Take, for example, an exhaustive list of lectures that in 1925-1926 held in Krasnoyarsk the local department of the State Geographical Society and the Bureau of Local Lore: "Life and Creativity of Surikov", "Industrialization of the Prienisei Territory", "Union", "Evolution of a Living Being", "Protection of Nature", "Atlantis", "New Archeological Reding in Egypt "," News of anthropology "," New archaeological excavations in Greece and in Crete "," Meat allowance of Krasnoyarsk "," Power of the population of the Krasnoyarsk district "," Livestock of the Krasnoyarsk District "," The Law of the Hotality "," Transarctic Air Messages "," Conversations on World War II ".

There are lectures on excavations in Crete and in Egypt, but there is nothing about Siberian identity.

Finally, we will exclude the local trade and industrial elite from the list. The archive of the Krasnoyarsk City Council has one curious thing about how the local merchant Ivan Gadalov asks to reimburse 758 rubles 45 kopecks of expenses at the expense of the city, which he carried out to organize a celebration in Krasnoyarsk in 1882 of the 300th anniversary of Siberia accession to Russia. In total, the holiday cost 1100 rubles, of which only a little more than 300 rubles were collected by subscription. This, by the way, is about how important any "Siberian myths" were for local elites.

And who then remains in the list of candidates for the ideologists of the "special path" of Siberia? Actually, we know them all by names. This is, first of all, the “Siberian regionalists” Grigory Potanin and Nikolai Yadrintsev with his “ Siberia as a colony ”, the same local historians Znamensky and Spassky from the 19th century, and a dozen more names for all 400 years of the existence of Siberia within Russia. No matter how regrettable we are to realize this, units tried to comprehend the “special path” in Siberia in any systematically, despite the fact that 99.99% of the people around them were not even alien, but extremely uninteresting.

From state interests to romanticism

But what about the "deep people", what ideas he nominated during this time and continues to put forward now? Strictly speaking, we don’t know this, quantitative and qualitative studies of the ideas of modern Siberians about Siberia as a “special region” simply does not exist. Our is the first, but we just start it.

However, if you analyze the modern works of local local historians, the regional press, local history textbooks and other similar sources, then the picture will turn out as follows.

The myth of the "special" Siberians is present everywhere, in any regional texts from Perm to Irkutsk. The fact that this myth exists is the only thing that can be said about it clearly and definitely. Because then porridge from meanings begins: from the idea about the fact that the Siberians "speak cleanly, thoroughly and courteously" to discussion about some special "Siberian character", "passionate rise." Semlorov perfectly conveyed this Meshin in his poem "I-from the Urals" Poet-Yetytnik Vladimir Radkevich :

There was Moscow generous and wide.

With me with some incomprehensible affection

Some recalled Ermak,

Others are the Ural Tank building.

"Folk myth -making" is very different from each other depending on the region. Let's say in Perm from the pages of newspapers and local history publications we will be told about the "folk colonization" of Siberia and Yermake as a local hero, which is logical, because the trip of Yermak began from here. In the Tyumen region, where the first Russian cities arose in Siberia and where the first Russian regular army went, they write about "state ideas" in the conquest of Siberia and the civilizer role of Russians. In Krasnoyarsk, they talk about the Yenisei as an important line of the Russian Siberian colonization and the back of the Russia - along with the Volga. In Vladivostok they talk about the confrontation with China and sea victories. In general, each region has its own myths.

If it unites something all the regions together, then this is primitive romanticism. Without rising to the understanding of Siberia as a “special region”, local journalists, local historians and just active citizens are actively discussing a special “Siberian morality”, about fields and birches, northern romance, ancient mounds, cold and all that kind.

Actually, what we were repulsed in in our reasoning: if there is something that unites all Siberians in a local worldview, then this is cold, bears, a special “Siberian character” and various other shapeless and empty concepts. Nothing specific and nothing interesting, because about the same will be told in Rostov, in Kamchatka, in Karelia and Dagestan, in New Zealand and Brazil. This is a completely typical post -colonial discourse, in which only small details change, and the carriers of this discourse - a thin layer of local intellectual ethitis, whose activities, strictly speaking, no one notices.

Instead of the afterword: about the illusion of social

The preparation of people's ideas about reality is a thing for an observer is no less unpleasant than the preparation of frogs. It may seem that here we encroach on the most sacred - on our original myths and the ideas of the people about themselves. Unfortunately for the layman, the way it is: for the social sciences in the same way as for biology, there is nothing saint.

Historians and other humanities know that any social community, whether it is a state or a macroregion like Siberia, is an artificial thing. And the only real place where the boundaries of these communities are located is the heads of people. In this sense, "Russia" is a concept no less abstract than "Siberia". Any social abstraction has a team of specific authors who came up with this abstraction and forced to believe in it, even if this team has several hundred people and is distributed in time for a couple of hundred years.

The social abstraction "Siberia" is something, not filled with meanings, not because of its inferiority, but only because the team of authors has not formed to the end or its ideas are not yet relevant in the modern agenda. But from history we know for sure: macro -regions that took as a basis post -colonial self -identification (and Siberia is just such a macroregion), built on contrasting the center and periphery, sooner or later take it as a basis for a local myth.

When this happens, we will find out that Siberia turns out to have a thousand-year history, honors the memory of the ancestors, and in general-it was and will always be.

Sergey Cherneshov-candidate of historical sciences, founder and director of the development of new-college, project manager of the Russian Scientific Fund No. 22-78-00150 "Siberia in the socio-political dynamics of Russian statehood: retrospective and modern discourses of collective historical memory"

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