Talk:Siberia

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  • Our path has not been an easy one. Our people are proud that in a historically short period of time, after the victory of the Socialist Revolution, backward Russia transformed itself into a major industrial power and achieved outstanding successes in science and culture. We take pride in having built a new society — a most stable and confidently developing society — which has assured all our citizens of social justice and has made the values of modern civilization the property of all the people. We are proud that dozens of previously oppressed nations and nationalities in our country have become genuinely equal, and that in our close-knit family of nations they are developing their economy and culture. We have great plans for the future. We want to raise considerably the living standards of the Soviet people. We want to make new advances in education and medicine. We want to make our villages and towns more comfortable to live in and more beautiful. We have drafted programs to develop the remote areas of Siberia, the North and the Far East, with their immense natural resources. And every Soviet individual is deeply conscious of the fact that the realization of those plans requires peace and peaceful cooperation with other nations.
  • One after another, the peoples of Eurasia were subjugated; indeed, by 1900 non-Russians accounted for more than half of the population of the Tsar's domains. In 1858, capitalizing on Britain's victory over China in the Second Opium War and the outbreak of the Taiping Rebellion, Russia had seized Chinese territory north of the Amur River; China was also forced to cede the land between the Ussuri River and the Sea of Japan. It was here that the Russians built their principal Pacific port, Vladivostok - 'ruler of the east'. Perhaps nothing symbolized Russian power in Asia more strikingly than the vast Trans-Siberian Railway, which runs six thousand miles from Moscow to Vladivostok, passing through Yaroslavl on the Volga, Ekaterinburg in the Urals and Irkutsk on Lake Baikal, before finally reaching the Pacific coast just north of the Korean peninsula. By the turn of the century it was all but complete; work had begun on the final stretch of line, across Manchuria to Vladivostok, in 1897.
    • Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (2006), p. 48
  • By dramatically reducing journey times between European and Asiatic Russia - from a matter of years to a matter of days - the railway greatly accelerated the Russian colonization of Central and East Asia. Between 1907 and 1914, no fewer than 2.5 million Russians made new lives for themselves in Siberia, the great northern strip of Asia that stretches from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific. Despite the region's later notoriety as destination for political prisoners, only a small minority of these migrants were forced to go. In any case, many of those who were exiled there were pleasantly surprised by what they found. In 1897 Vladimir Ulyanov, a hereditary nobleman who had embraced socialism in his student days, was sentenced to three years' 'administrative exile' in Siberia for his involvement with the revolutionary Union of Struggle. He found life in Shushenskoe, in the Minusinsk district, remarkably pleasant. 'Everyone's found that I've grown fat over the summer, got a tan and now look completely like a Siberian,' he wrote cheerfully to his mother. 'That's hunting and the life of the countryside for you!' When not hunting, shooting and fishing, Lenin - as he would later prefer to be known - was free to read and write prolifically. He was even able to marry and to bring his wife and mother-in-law to live with him.
    • Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (2006), pp. 48-49
  • Many scientists are now warning that we are moving closer to several "tipping points" that could — within as little as 10 years — make it impossible for us to avoid irretrievable damage to the planet's habitability for human civilization. In this regard, just a few weeks ago, another group of scientists reported on the unexpectedly rapid increases in the release of carbon and methane emissions from frozen tundra in Siberia, now beginning to thaw because of human caused increases in global temperature. The scientists tell us that the tundra in danger of thawing contains an amount of additional global warming pollution that is equal to the total amount that is already in the earth's atmosphere.
  • It is needless to rehearse the utter and degrading loss of individual liberty which results from the orthodox communistic theory that society is itself an organism in which each person is merely an insignificant cell. It is not in anti-Soviet libels, but in the proud reports of Soviet leaders, that we read of the forcible transfer of whole village populations from their ancestral abodes to new locations in the Arctic, and of the arbitrary ordering of Moscow clerks to tasks of manual labour in the farms and forests of Siberia. All these things are logical outgrowths of what the Bolsheviks call their “collectivistic ideology”, and typical examples of the horrors which might fall upon us if communism were to gain a foothold here.
    • H. P. Lovecraft, "Some Repetitions on the Times" (1933). Reprinted in S. T. Joshi, ed., Miscellaneous Writings (Arkham House, 1995)
  • Comrades, it is in strenous circumstances that we are today celebrating the twenty-fourth anniversary of the October Revolution. The perfidious attack of the German brigands and the war which has been forced upon us have placed our country in jeopardy. We have temporarily lost a number of regions, the enemy has appeared at the gates of Leningrad and Moscow. The enemy reckoned that after the very first blow our army would be dispersed, and our country would be forced to its knees. But the enemy sadly miscalculated. In spite of the temporary reverses our army and navy are heroically repulsing the enemy's attacks along the whole front and inflicting heavy losses upon him, while our country - our entire country - has formed itself into one fighting camp in order, together with our Army and our Navy, to encompass the defeat of the German invaders. There were times when our country was in even more difficult straits than today. Recall the year 1918, when we celebrated the first anniversary of the October Revolution. Three-quarters of our country was at that time in the hands of foreign invaders. The Ukraine, the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Urals, Siberia and the Far East were temporarily lost to us. We had no allies, we had no Red Army - we had only just begun to form it; there was a shortage of food, of armaments, of clothing for the army. Fouteen states were pressing on our country. But we did not despond, we did not lose heart. In the fire of war we forged the Red Army and converted our country into a military camp. The spirit of the great Lenin animated us in the war against the invaders. And what happened? We routed the invaders, recovered all our lost territory, and achieved victory.
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