way into the professions. merchants therefore developed and flourished along lines familiar in Western society just as they encountered similar prob- lems.What intrigues a number of authors in this book is the tight grip of old be- liefs and of Russian traditions among the Moscow mer-chantry. What disappoints them is the equally evident unwillingness or inability of their subjects to develop and disseminate a political program and a political party until the eve of the revo- lution in 1917. By then, it was too late for these merchants to apply their energy and intelligence to the terrible problems of tsarist . Both they and their country paid a high price for this neglect of politics.

Charles A. Ruud University of Western Ontario

Victor L. Mote. Siberia: Worlds Apart. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998. xvi, 239 pp. $29.00 Cdn. (paper). Distributed in Canada by HarperCollins, Ltd., Scarborough, Ontario.

For Russia's rulers, Siberia has long represented a "resource frontier" to be ex- ploited for the benefit of European Russia. Many Siberians, natives and alike, have objected to this conception of their region and have at times vigor- ously defended local Siberian interests against the demands of central policymak- ers. In Siberia: Worlds Apart, Victor Mote, professor of geography, Russian stud- ies, and political science, at the University of Houston's University Park campus and the author of numerous studies of Siberian economic development, investi- gates the turbulent history of the Siberian "periphery" and its relations with Rus- sia's Moscow/St. Petersburg-centered "core." The book's first three chapters provide an overview of Siberia's geography, climate, resources and the prehistory and early colonial history of its native and immigrant populations. (Mote rejects the customary, but largely arbitrary, desig- nation of the Russian Far East as an entity separate from "Siberia proper," treating it instead as part of "Greater Siberia".) The contrast between Siberia's tremendous wealth in fossil fuels, ores, forest products, and other natural resources on the one hand and its inaccessible terrain, inhospitable climate, and physical remoteness on the other has presented profound difficulties for Siberia's would-be developers: Siberia is "too cold in winter; too boggy in Western Siberia; too rugged in Eastern Siberia and the Russian Far East; too dry most of the time in the majority of the region; too far north, reducing the intensity of the sunlight and curtailing the length of the growing season; too 'bloody,' full of sanguisugent insects in July and August, at the peak of the harvest season; and ultimately, too far away from almost everything and everyone" (p. 9). Chapters 4 through 6 cover Siberia's nineteenth- and twentieth-century history through the Brezhnev/Andropov/Chernenko "." By the mid-nine- teenth century, Siberian Russian intellectuals such as N. M. ladrintsev and G. -N. Potanin, inspired by romantic literary depictions of Siberia and resentful of Czarist looting of Siberian resources and tyrannical and corrupt rule, began to coa- lesce into a group of "regionalists" (oblastniki) who extolled the Siberian virtues of independence, toughness and instinctive democracy and demanded greater Siberian autonomy or even secession. ladrintsev even argued that "Siberians were distinctive enough to merit consideration as a separate ethnicity ... of mixed Russian and native heritage and [composed of] liberty-loving 'individuals'" (p. 64) and advocated the creation of an independent, democratic, and federalist Siberian republic. Although individual regionalist intellectuals were jailed or forced to re- cant, their emphasis on specifically Siberian needs and interests continued to in- fluence Siberian political discourse. (The autocracy's attempts to Russify the Buri- ats, lakuts [Sakhas], and other native peoples similarly failed to obliterate native identities and agendas.) Stalin's subsequent policies of collectivization, industri- alization, Russification and political terror brought Siberia rapidly and violently into the Russian political mainstream. However, this did not preclude the forma- tion of Siberian interest groups and factions in the Communist Party in the post- Stalin years: Siberian Party leaders such as Egor Ligachev and Vladimir Dolgikh successfully lobbied for increased official investment in their region, securing the development of the West Siberian gas and oil industry and the construction of the BAM (Baikal-Amur-Mainline) railroad. The final two chapters investigate Siberian political, economic and social is- sues between Gorbachev's rise to power in 1985 and the post-Soviet .present. These chapters contain the most valuable new material and offer an indispensable guide through the shifting sands of post-Soviet politics east of the Urals. Mote again emphasizes the struggle between Siberian moves for greater regional auton- omy and Moscow's continued preference for strong central rule. He provides nu- merous examples of this conflict, e.g., the ongoing feud between the Sakha (Iakut) Republic's president Mikhail Nikolaev (whom Mote dubs "Sakha's Stephen A. Douglas" for his impassioned defense of regional interests) and Moscow authori- ties over control of the abundant Sakha diamond deposits, and the conflicts be- tween the Yeltsin government and Primorskii Krai governor Evgenii Nazdratenko over issues of tax collection and central government subsidies to his region. In particular, native Siberians are far from passive recipients of officialdom's poli- cies towards them: groups such as the Khanty and Mansi have become increas- ingly vocal both in their objections to Moscow's rapacious and environmentally devastating exploitation of their homelands and in their demands for a say in poli- cies affecting their future. Siberia: Worlds Apart provides a unified, comprehensive treatment of Siberia as a region: geography, economy, culture (particularly native culture), history and politics all are investigated in approximately equal depth. The book thus comple- ments several recent English-language treatments of Siberia, including W. Bruce Lincoln's narrative history Conquest of a Continent (New York: Random House, 1992); investigations of Siberia's indigenous populations and official policies to- wards them, such as James Forsyth's History of the Peoples of Siberia (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) and Yuri Slezkine's Arctic Mirrors (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994); John Stephan's magisterial The Russian Far East: A History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994); and