The Siberian Curse: How Communist Planners Left Russia Out in the Cold is a book written by Fiona Hill and Clifford G. Gaddy, two political scientists and fellows of the Brookings Institution in 2003.
In the book they propose the thesis that Siberia, while one of the most resource-abundant regions in the world, is too big and harsh to be populated and industrialized on an economically rational basis. Consequently, since the collapse of the USSR, which planned and subsidized Siberian towns, a westward exodus to the urban European part of Russia is occurring. The large territory, they state, is not one of the greatest sources of strength of Russia, but one of its greatest weaknesses.
Robert Legvold, reviewing the book for Foreign Affairs , said that the authors "argue well with ample data to back them up" that the Russian, and particularly Soviet, efforts to develop Siberia "have always been economic folly." According to Legvold, the authors recommend that Russia try to draw its population to large urban areas in warmer regions, and treat Siberia as a "commodity-producing hinterland" akin to Northern Canada. [1]
In contrast, John Dolan, writing for The eXile , described the book as a "classic California-style real-estate scam" built on overly-simplistic "fake math" social science, aiming in his eyes to convince Russians that Siberia was worthless so that "corrupt developers" could buy it up at low prices. He felt the authors were also trying to divert blame for Russia's economic woes onto Siberia and away from the more-rightful target of "incompetent, sleazy Western consultant[s]" like Jeffrey Sachs, whose endorsement of the book he described as self-serving. [2]
Siberia is an extensive geographical region comprising all of North Asia, from the Ural Mountains in the west to the Pacific Ocean in the east. It has formed part of the sovereign territory of Russia and its predecessor states since the centuries-long conquest of Siberia, which began with the fall of the Khanate of Sibir in the late 16th century and concluded with the annexation of Chukotka in 1778. Siberia is vast and sparsely populated, covering an area of over 13.1 million square kilometres (5,100,000 sq mi), but home to roughly a quarter of Russia's population. Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk, and Omsk are the largest cities in the area.
The early history of Siberia was greatly influenced by the sophisticated nomadic civilizations of the Scythians (Pazyryk) on the west of the Ural Mountains and Xiongnu (Noin-Ula) on the east of the Urals, both flourishing before the common era. The steppes of Siberia were occupied by a succession of nomadic peoples, including the Khitan people, various Turkic peoples, and the Mongol Empire. In the Late Middle Ages, Tibetan Buddhism spread into the areas south of Lake Baikal.
Vladimir Klavdiyevich Arsenyev, was a Russian explorer of the Far East who recounted his travels in a series of books — "По Уссурийскому Краю" (1921) and "Дерсу Узала" (1923) — telling of his military journeys to the Ussuri basin with Dersu Uzala, a native hunter, from 1902 to 1907. He was the first to describe numerous species of Siberian flora and the lifestyles of native ethnic peoples.
John Carroll Dolan is an American poet, author and essayist. He has been identified as the once-secret identity behind the pseudonym Gary Brecher, fictional author of the War Nerd column for the newspaper the eXile which has ceased publication. John Dolan writes as the War Nerd, but no longer "in full character" as Brecher, the two identities having merged.
The East Siberian taiga ecoregion, in the Taiga and boreal forests biome, is a very large biogeographic region in eastern Russia.
The American Expeditionary Force, Siberia was a formation of the United States Army involved in the Russian Civil War in Vladivostok, Russia, after the October Revolution, from 1918 to 1920. The force was part of the larger Allied North Russia intervention. As a result of this expedition, early relations between the United States and the Soviet Union were poor.
The Ural-Siberian method was an extraordinary approach launched in the Soviet Union for the collection of grain from the countryside. It was introduced in the Urals and Siberia, hence the name. The Ural-Siberian method was a return to the drastic policies that had characterized War Communism in the period prior to Lenin’s New Economic Policy.
Pavel PalazhchenkoorPalazchenko is a former high-level Soviet conference interpreter who was the chief English interpreter for Mikhail Gorbachev and Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze from 1985 and 1991.
Sino-Soviet relations, or China–Soviet Union relations, refers to the diplomatic relationship between China and the various forms of Soviet Power which emerged from the Russian Revolution of 1917 to 1991, when the Soviet Union ceased to exist.
Belarusians are a major ethnic group in Russia. At the census of 2010, 521,443 Russian citizens indicated Belarusian ancestry. Major Belarusian groups live in the regions of Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kaliningrad, Karelia and Siberia. Most Belarusians in Russia are migrants from modern Belarus or their descendants, while a minor part of Belarusians in Russia are indigenous.
Andrei Petrovich Parshev is a Russian political writer. His best known book, Why Russia is not America, sets forth his climate-based theory of Russian economic problems. He also wrote Why America is Attacking, arguing that military control over oil-producing countries is essential for the survival of the American economy.
Siberian regionalism was a political movement that advocated for the formation of an autonomous Siberian state. The idea originated in the mid-19th century and reached a high tide with the White movement military activities of Aleksandr Kolchak (1874–1920) and Viktor Pepelyayev (1885–1920) during the Russian Civil War of 1917–1922.
Siberia, Siberia is a non-fiction book by the Russian writer Valentin Rasputin. It was originally published in Russian in 1991 by Molodaya Gvardiya. The second and third editions appeared in 2000 and 2006; an English translation is available as well.
The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia is a 2001 non-fiction book written by Pulitzer Prize-winning author and Washington Post contributing editor David E. Hoffman. The book chronicles events of the transitional period in Russia, from the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, and the subsequent privatization in Russia, to the 1996 presidential election, the 1998 Russian financial crisis, and Vladimir Putin's rise to power in the late 1990s.
Angela E. Stent is a British-born American foreign policy expert specializing in US and European relations with Russia and Russian foreign policy. She is professor emerita of Government and Foreign Service at Georgetown University and senior advisor and director emerita of its Center for Eurasian, Russian, and East European Studies. She is also a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. She has served in the Office of Policy Planning in the US State Department and as National Intelligence Officer for Russia and Eurasia.
The Soviet grain procurement crisis of 1928, sometimes referred to as "the crisis of NEP," was a pivotal economic event which took place in the Soviet Union beginning in January 1928 during which the quantities of wheat, rye, and other cereal crops made available for purchase by the state fell to levels regarded by planners as inadequate to support the needs of the country's urban population. Failure of the state to make successful use of the price system to generate sufficient grain sales was met with a regimen of increasingly harsh administrative sanctions against the Soviet peasantry. The state of national emergency which followed led to the termination of the New Economic Policy and spurred a move towards the collectivization of agriculture in 1929.
Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar is a 2003 popular history book by Simon Sebag Montefiore. It focuses on the private life of the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and his closest political associates from the late 1920s through to his death in 1953, covering the period of collectivization, the Moscow show trials, the purges, World War II and the beginning of the Cold War.
Fiona Hill is a British-American foreign affairs specialist and author. She is a former official at the U.S. National Security Council, specializing in Russian and European affairs. She was a witness in the November 2019 House hearings regarding the impeachment inquiry during the first impeachment of Donald Trump. She earned a Ph.D. in history from Harvard University in 1998. She currently serves as a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. She was installed as Chancellor of Durham University in June 2023.
The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia by Tim Tzouliadis is a 2008 book published by Penguin Books. It tells the story of thousands of Americans who immigrated to the Soviet Union in the 1930s.
Stalin: Breaker of Nations is a biography of Joseph Stalin by author and historian Robert Conquest. It was published in 1991 by Weidenfeld and Nicolson and Penguin Books.
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