Imperial Entanglements? Telling the Story of Exploration in Far Eastern Siberia, c. 1700–1800

Narratives of exploration in far eastern Siberia are at one and the same time the stuff of legend, and filled with the sordid, even murderous and genocidal treatment of Indigenous peoples, notably the Itel’men, the Evens, the Chukchi, and the Koryak. In short, the historiography of eastern Siberia’s exploration narratives presents two very different visions. On the one hand, we have a literature featuring the struggles of men like Vitus Bering and Aleksei Chirikov, and, later on, Joseph Billings and Gavril Sachyrev, to explore Siberia’s frozen and forbidding lands. These scholars narrate exploration from the perspective of the men leading the expeditions, highlighting their struggles to traverse Siberia and navigate its adjacent Arctic and Pacific waters. On the other hand, there are scholars who discuss exploration as integral to Romanov imperialism. They stress the destruction that Russian expeditions of exploration left in their wake, such as the Great Northern Expedition. It has the dubious distinction of initiating a shooting war with the Itel’men People of the Kamchatka Peninsula c. 1741, who objected to the expedition’s labour demands. In defeating the Itel’men, Bering and his men used grenades against their less well-armed opponents. The reality of the eastern Siberian context, however, was far more complex than either of these viewpoints would have it. For in eastern Siberia the Russians were never able to use violence to exclude or subjugate all Indigenous peoples. Nor were the Indigenous completely successful in driving out the Romanovs’ Cossack shock troops. To tell the story of exploration in 18^th-century eastern Siberia fully, then, requires a narrative including both perspectives that inevitably entangles explorer and “explored”. Using expedition reports, travel narratives, ethnographies, and standard institutional sources, this presentation shows that this more complex (and more accurate) narrative transforms what we know about exploration in this arctic world.