Second Prize, a Week in Siberia; First Prize ...
Categories: Travel , Outdoors & Nature , Nonfiction
I visited my parents in South Carolina with the agenda that they might like to fund some of my son's college tuition. Instead, my mother let me ransack the abandoned WalMart that was being used to store books for her library's book sale. She said I could take whatever I wanted. These were reject books that had already been picked through during two used-book sales this year. Many, I noticed with annoyance, were my own books, which I'd left at my parents' house in the '70s. I ended up with about 6 boxes, including books and other interesting stuff I stole took from the pharmacy, which has also been abandoned since 1989.
When I got back to Cincinnati, I realized that no eBay person would ever buy about a third of the books I'd taken; another third, I kind of wanted to keep for myself. East of the Sun: The Epic Conquest and Tragic History of Siberia by Benson Bobrick, published in 1992, falls into this category.
The title alone taught me two things: (1) that Siberia had been conquered at all; and (2) that its history was tragic. The comparison throughout is between the Europeans' subjugation of the Native American peoples, and the Russians' subjugation of the Native peoples of Siberia. Both histories, obviously, are bad. There are far fewer Native American peoples and Native Siberians than there were before the 1600s. Cultures have been destroyed.
The library has lots of good books on Siberia, including East of the Sun. My favorite is A History of the Peoples of Siberia. Another book The Horsemen of the Steppes: The Story of the Cossacks, discusses the cowboy-like Russian frontiersmen--descendants of the Mongol-Tatars of Chengis Khan's Mongol Horde--who were among the first outsiders to explore Siberia. The Shaman's Coat: A Native History of Siberia is particularly interesting for its discussion of some of the individual groups of indiginous Siberians and a look at their attempts since the fall of communism for land rights and political autonomy.
The "discovery" and conquest of the Americas is a well-known story to all who attended school in the United States. Benson Bobrick argues that the subjugation of Siberia, which occurred roughly in the same time frime, was an equally amazing, and equally morally questionable, achievement. Native Americans were cheated out of their land and in general driven westward. While Native Americans were frequently forced to pay tributes of food, gold, and cotton to Spanish explorers, the situation seems to have been much worse in Siberia, because of Russia's very lucrative fur trade. Typically, Native Siberian trappers were forced to give up one pelt out of every 10 to the Russians. On the other hand, Russians were less likely to try to run the Native Siberians off their land, and more likely to assimilate with the Native Siberians, because the Siberians' manner of living was clearly more appropriate to the conditions of Northern Siberia than their own. Both stories are of course shameful, but the story of the Native Siberians is less well known.
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Strangely, one of the things I found at the abandoned South Carolina pharmacy was a whole bunch of loose pills--probably about 2000--wrapped in a series of plastic bags. I took them home and looked them up in the PDR. The only one I could identify was phenyl-2-propanone, which is used in an unpopular method of cooking up crystal meth. I took the pills home to destroy, and I doubt they're still potent because of having been abandoned in 1989. I guess I should take them to the police and that it would be a bad idea to try to sell them on eBay.
