The Future of : Discussion Author(s): Miss Czaplicka and Leslie Urquhart Source: The Geographical Journal, Vol. 51, No. 3 (Mar., 1918), pp. 159-164 Published by: geographicalj Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1779376 Accessed: 22-06-2016 03:38 UTC

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This content downloaded from 128.143.23.241 on Wed, 22 Jun 2016 03:38:28 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms THE FUTURE OF SIBERIA: DISCUSSION 159 seems no reason why the north, whose food-producing capacities in many localities are undoubted, should be left unused because of the cold season. Great masses of labour are already migratory according to season in various parts of the world; and, given the possibility at some time in the future of doing most farm work by machinery, it does not require much stretch of imagination to foretell the likelihood of these northern lands being developed by capitalists having summer farms in the north and winter industries in Europe or Southern Asia. The wealth of the harvests on cheap land might stand the cost of the annual migration of the moderate amount of expert white or northern labour required. An experienced Siberian business friend said in 1914 that such methods would pay, but that such experiments could not be carried out under the Government system of that time. There is an immediate effect of this great war which may help to accelerate the development of Siberia. The world is short of food, and the still unbroken lands of Siberia are awaiting development. What better task for than, helped by the combined organizing powers of the United States and Western Europe, to make a great expedition against those lands awaiting the plough ? Behind the opposing combatant lines to-day are improvised road-towns, railway towns, canal towns and camps, great cranes, great guns, all sprung?where were no towns before?in the twinkling of an eye. Could some Russian Government, on the conclusion of peace, divert a small fraction of that organized energy into the placing of tractors and skilled mechanics and agriculturalists on to those vast unbroken lands ? It seems to me that the obstacles are such as a great world-wide emergency might break down.

Before the paper the President said: I need hardly introduce the lecturer, Colonel Harald Swayne, who is distinguished as a traveller and even better known as a sportsman. He will tell us something of what he has seen in a part of the world which must be of great interest to us just now?Siberia, and I will not detain you further with any remarks of mine.

(Colonel Swayne then read the paper printed above > and a discussion followed.) The President : That part of Siberia with which the lecturer has been dealing is only the fringe of Southern Siberia within reach of the railway. Hereafter I hope that from points on the railway there may be stretches of country reclaimed and brought under cultivation that will enormously increase the cultivable area of Siberia, which is already big enough to accommodate something like half the population of Russia. We have yet to learn what exactly are the conditions of climate and soil in Siberia, which may permit the cultivation of wheat in latitudes far more northern than any yet tried. In Canada it has been found quite possible to cultivate wheat much further north than anybody had expected ; it may be the same in Siberia. Russian methods of colonization no doubt differ from ours: they are slower, and I think in some ways they are surer. I am very glad to near that the Russian Government took some precaution in placing the right class of people on the land, because in other parts of the world they have not been successful.

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I can speak generally for South America, where Russian colonies, particularly in Patagonia, can be described only as an absolute failure. Another matter of interest to everybody just now is the position of the , who extend from the Amur River on the extreme north-east, through Central Asia to Orenburg and the Black Sea. My own reminiscences of service with Cossacks are confined to a short period of some six months when I worked with a Cossack escort in the uplands of Central Asia settling boundaries. They were Cossacks of the Black Sea, and I found them most excellent supporters, asking no questions as to provision made for them, but quite content to trust to Providence to find food and water wherever they were going. The Cossacks are the military caste in Russia, and on account of their military service they enjoy certain privileges, including the right of shooting as they please, and I found them exceedingly useful in providing the camp with game. They were well set-up fine men, exceedingly muscular, and had no difficulty, when pitted against a certain number of Sikhs in a tug-of-war, in pulling those Sikhs over the line. I Iearned then that international contests of that kind do not always lead to brotherly love! There were two points about them which impressed me: firstly, their almost ideal reverence for the Tsar. The Tsar was, I am convinced, to a great many of them a real divinity. When every day at the sound of the trumpet they all went down on their knees to pray I feel confident that two-thirds of them prayed to the Tsar. Secondly, I noticed their solid detestation of Germans. The whole Russian army was permeated with Germans ; the chief of the Commission was a German, and nearly all the leading scientific officers; but between the Germans and the best of the Russian officers, particularly the Cossack ofiicers, there was no friendship; they would not even feed together. If that was the case thirty years ago we may easily understand what the conditions were four or five years ago. I have referred to the Cossacks because we have with us a distinguished writer who knows more about the Cossack country than most of us: Miss Czaplicka, whom I will ask to address the meeting. Miss Czaplicka : Siberia has for several years occupied a great deal of my time, and I believe that there are problems to be met with in that land that do not face us in any other European colony. It is even a question whether Siberia, especially Western Siberia as far as the River Ob, is to be considered as a colony, or merely as an extension of Russia. By this I mean that while normally the motherland reaches a high degree of development and stability before any colonization is attempted, in this case the rise of Russian Western Siberia coincides in time with the growth of Muscovite or Great Russia. The popular idea that Siberia was subjugated to Russia by a handful of Volga Cossacks is losing ground under a closer study of the facts. If the people of Eastern and Northern Russia had not voluntarily colonized and populated Western Siberia both previously and subsequently to the time of its conquest by the Cossack , his presentation of the Tatar Siberian Khanate to Ivan the Terrible of Moscow in 1582-3 would have been an inci- dent scarcely worthy of mention in history. Among many proofs which can be brought forward in support of my view might be cited the fact that when we consider the origin of the Russian settlements of Western Siberia, we find that the overwhelming majority of them were founded by voluntary immigrants. For instance, out of 776 old settlements in the Yeniseisk Government, 674 answer to this description, while 102 developed from the Cossacks' palisaded fortresses or ostrogs. Thus the success of thp Russian advance in Siberia is due to peaceful penetration of the eastern and partly of the southern peasants

This content downloaded from 128.143.23.241 on Wed, 22 Jun 2016 03:38:28 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms THE FUTURE OF SIBERIA: DISCUSSION 161 and other Russian people. But at the same time it is true that it was the Cossacks who carried Russian government, or properly speaking, the Tsar's authority, into these eastern regions. It is possible that had it not been for the Volga Cossacks, these various Russian and Finnic immigrant elements would have started a new national unit, quite independent of their original home, perhaps something similar to the original Cossack national communities on the banks of the Dnieper and the Don, because the majority of these free colonists left their old country for the same reason, that is, to escape despotic rule. To these free colonists we must add involuntary colonization by political exiles from 1593 (three hundred people from Uglich after the murder of the Tsarevich Dimitri), and by criminal exiles from 1754. But this theory holds good only of the Russian acquisition of Siberia. As for the Far East country, the Amur Provinces, and Russian Central Asia, there is 110 more question of peaceful penetration or spontaneous colonization on the part of the people, but of conquest by diplomatic and strategic methods on the part of the Russian Government. In this conquest the greatest service was rendered by the Cossack regiments, and it is the only occasion in the history of the modern Cossacks, that is, the Cossacks reorganized into military divisions connected with the Russian army, on which they proved successful in flghting against an external enemy. Before I speak of the present problem of the Cossacks in Siberia, I would like to touch upon the question: " Who were the Cossacks who made their adventurous expeditions from the Volga all across Siberia, and what is their relation to the original national communities of the Dnieper and the Don ? " I do not need to say much in this Society about the meaning of the original Cossack communities, the two centres of which were the Don and the Dnieper. Roughly speaking, they were formed as a protest against the complicated State machinery and the economic conditions connected with it. Their racial com- position in regard to their neighbours was very much like the racial composition of Switzerland in regard to its neighbours. When the clash came between the Dnieper Cossacks and Poland and the and Russia, their national feeling developed still more, and in spite of the ultimate submission of all of them to Russia and the destruction of their old organization, this national feeling has persisted, and has now to be reckoned with in the Ukrainian and Don Cossack problem. Their enforced reorganization into regiments depen- dent more on the Ministry of the Interior than on the authorities of the Russian army, and strictly connected with the monarchic rdgime, was carried out during the reigns of Peter the Great and Catherine II. The history of the Siberian Cossacks is quite different from the history of the European Cossacks. It dates from the time of Yermak?roughly speaking, 1580. Whether Yermak and his five hundred Cossacks were to any great extent associated with the so-called Yaik Cossacks, later on renamed , we do not precisely know; in any case they could not have been the Volga Cossacks, as some writers assert, since the Volga Cossack Regiment only came into being in 1733 (from the transportation of a group of Don Cossacks). The Cossacks of Yermak seem to have formed an independent band, who were outlawed by the Moscow Government for their bad reputation, and were occasionally hired by the Moscow merchant family Strogonoff as escort for their tradmg expeditions across the Urals. When they presented tc the Tsar of M oscow the land they said they had discovered, they called them? selves Cossacks, and various Russian soldiers sent to support them also adopted this name. Thus started a kind of regiment strictly dependent on the Moscow M

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Government, and with an organization quite different from that of any Cossack body in Europe. Peter the Great, who is known to have been the enemy of the national communities of European Cossacks, gave special support to these Siberian regiments, and at the time of Alexander I. the Cossacks in Siberia were definitely grouped into two sections : the Town Cossacks, a kind of police force similar to the old Town Cossacks of Moscow in the sixteenth century, and the Border Cossacks (Lineynyie). Remnants of the Town Cossack organ? ization are still to be found in the Yakutsk, Irkutsk, and Yeniseisk districts, though we now find them also as owners of land. The Border Cossacks were especially protected by Nicholas I. We see that the Siberian Cossacks in? crease in number not only by natural growth, but by the amalgamation with them of other Russian soldiers as a result of every new strategical move. For instance, the Transbaikal Cossack Regiment was formed in 1829, the Amur Regiment in 1858, the Ussuri Regiment in the same year (though it assumed the name only in 1882), and the Semirechian Regiment in 1869. It is quite possible that some of the national traditions of the European Cossacks which are now to be found among the Siberian Cossacks were brought to them by the European Cossacks sent to Siberia in great numbers as political exiles. Thus we find, for instance, that at the time of the Tsar Michael Feodorovich, some Dnieper Cossacks were already being sent into exile ; many thousands met the same fate after the rising of Rasin in 1667, and still more Ukrainian Cossacks after the final subjection of the Ukraine to Moscow in 1787.. At the beginning of the war the Cossacks of Asiatic Russia did not number even two million, and were divided into seven units, the largest of which was the Orenburg, of about half a million ; then came the Transbaikal, the Siberian, the Amur, the Semirechian, and the Ussuri units. They possess about 100 acres of land per head, of which in 191 o only nine per cent. was under culti- vation, so that as colonists the Siberian and other Asiatic Cossacks hardly count. But the fact that their lands form strips along the frontiers of the other Asiatic Powers makes of them a useful strategical weapon. Yet if we consider that their racial composition is not as European as that of the other Russian regiments stationed in Siberia, it remains to be seen whether in case of neces- sity they could be used against their racial kin from across the frontier. Thus, for instance, in Transbaikalia, to be a Cossack means to belong to a social class, as one talks of being a burgber or a peasant. For a Russified Tungus or Buriat it is considered a rise in social rank, and the same can be said of the various Turkic Cossacks who to a great extent enter into the composition of the Orenburg and Ural regiments. Thus this most curious problem which faces the European Cossacks, especially the Don Cossacks?whether their free national tradition of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, or their strictly military organization in the spirit of absolute monarchy will predominate?has no existence for the Asiatic Cossack. For it was the latter tradition, if any, that they cultivated until the recent revolution. Yet even this tradition has no long standing among them, so that they are not a sufficiently important factor to be reckoned with either on one side or the other in any problem concerning Russia as a whole in normal times. During the present war however the various Cossack regiments have come more into contact with one another; and during the revolution they formed the union of all Cossack regiments (voiska) under the hegemony of the Don Cossacks. The Siberian Cossacks played a greater part in the internal affairs of Siberia than did the European Cossacks in those of any other part of Russia. Firstly, they form a social class through which the

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Russification of the natives, whose national feeling is not sufficiently strong to resist it, proceeds very rapidly. Secondly, lacking even the illusory national traditions of which the European Cossacks boast, they are very strong sup- porters of the imperial re*gime, which does not prevent them from being revolu- tionary if any government tries to limit their privileges. For instance, when in 1911 some lands of the Amur and Ussuri Cossacks were allotted to colonists, there was just as much dissatisfaction with the Tsar's government on the part of the Cossacks as was aroused last year by the Provisional Government's attempt to infringe upon their privileges. If Siberia comes out of this present chaos with some form of local self- government, as we can reasonably expect, she will still need some kind of army for frontier defence, and possibly for defensive purposes a semi-regular army of the Cossack type would serve very well. It is, however, to be expected that some other arrangement may be made with the Cossacks to compensate them for their military service than to give them enormous stretches of arable land which they neither can nor wish to cultivate, and which in other hands might be of much greater advantage to Siberia as a whole. Politically, the Cossacks will always form a stable element, but one not disposed to favour a settled and progressive mode of life, or a very democratic form of government. We can see, then, how the idea of free Cossack communities composed of rebels allied against the strict tribal and monarchic organization, which origin - ated among some Turkic tribes of Central Asia, probably the Kaizak-Kirghiz, has migrated to Eastern Europe, passed through several evolutionary stages and periods of suppression, and returned to Asia as an idea almost dia- metrically opposite to the original. Mr. Leslie UrQUHART: I have been engaged in mining and metallur- gical work in the Caucasus, the Urals, and particularly in Siberia, for the best part of my life. The mineral resources of Siberia are probably greater than in any other country of the world. Two of the mining and metallurgical companies with which I am associated have established a large industry in the production of lead, zinc, gold, silver, and "copper from the ores mined in a large concession in the Altai obtained from the late Tsar. These mining and smelting works were erected and equipped during the war, and I am glad to say that last year these Anglo-Russian companies were producing and supplying the Russian Government with these materials for the war?the only lead and zinc produced to-day in the Russian Empire. Gold and silver mining was started in the Nerchinsk district of Siberia in 1692, and in the Altai as far back as 1700. To my mind the first step towards the rapid development of Siberia will be in the direction of mining enterprise. The miner has generally been the pioneer of civilization; the countries which are fortunate in having large mineral resources are the more quickly developed for that reason, and Siberia is probably far and away the richest mining country in the world to- day. It is computed that in thirty to forty years' time the non-ferrous mines in the United States to-day will be exhausted, and it is more than probable that the shortage in the American production of copper, lead, zinc, gold, and silver will be made good by the increase in the production of these metals from Siberia. The reason why Siberia has not been exploited for its minerals earlier has been due to want of development of means of communication ; there are roughly only 7500 miles of railways in that country, whereas the area of Siberia is between 5I and 6 million square miles. The United States, with an area of less than half this, has 250,000 miles of railway. The richest mines and mineral deposits are very often many hundreds of miles away from

This content downloaded from 128.143.23.241 on Wed, 22 Jun 2016 03:38:28 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 164 NOTES ON THE the main trunk railway through Siberia, and it naturally makes it impossible without very large capital to develop these resources. But the policy of the Government before the revolution was to develop rail way s as rapidly as pos? sible ; even now construction is going on in many parts of that country; and there is every probability that after the war the attention of miners all over the world will be attracted to Siberia. The political outlook at the present moment can be regarded as only a passing phase. A country that has a population of 200,000,000, who have settled and formed an empire of 8,500,000 square miles, is not destined to perish or disintegrate. Can there be a better proof of capacity for civilization than that this people has evolved a language which for power, for subtlety, for complete command over the finest shades of meaning stands in a class by itself? It is only the innate goodness and the almost childishly trusting sim- plicity of the Russian masses which could have made them temporarily the prey of such a medley of adventurers, traitors, and sentimental anarchists as are in power at Petrograd to-day. But Petrograd is not Russia. The settle? ment of to-day's crisis will, to my mind, be brought about by Nature rather than by any political happenings. The people are suffering terribly from the want of food, accentuated by the breakdown of the raiiways ; but the suffer- ings which they are undergoing now, and will go through this winter, will probably bring back the masses to common sense and reason. The present Government is artificial, and has obtained power by controlling the technical equipment of the country?the raiiways, posts, and telegraphs?and by pan- dering to the lowest instincts of the workers. But these poor people are seeing reason through their sufferings, and I believe that before this winter is past Russia will be herself again. Her future is secure, and what a future it is des? tined to be ! Few men have the remotest idea of the immensity of her wealth and resources which await development, more especially in Siberia and the Altai. The President : I ask you to join in a very hearty vote of thanks to the lecturer for the most interesting account of his travels in Siberia, and I take this opportunity also of thanking those members of the Society who have so usefully contributed to the discussion.

NOTES ON THE SOUTH-WESTERN AREA OF "GERMAN" EAST AFRICA

Owen Letcher

THE two territory parts, approximately hitherto known equal as German in size, East by Africathe Central is divided Railway, into which extends right across the colony from Dar-es-Salaam on the coast to Kigoma Bay on the eastern shores of Lake Tanganyika, a distance of 778 miles. This railway, completed a few months before the outbreak of the war, is the main economic artery of "German" East Africa. It was con? structed for the purposes of military strategy and trade development; and there can be but little doubt that one of its intended functions was the invasion of the Congo Belge, on which Germany has always east envious

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