Siberia: Lost in Translation?

[Irina Dubinina]

As a Far-Easterner, I absolutely agree with Josh's friend from Blagoveschensk.  I was born and raised in the Far East and would never call myself, nor would be called by another Russian "a Siberian".   At some point in my life I stumbled on an article that shed light on the origin of differences in the names used for the region in the West and in Russia.  Unfortunately, I don't remember either the author or the title of the article, but the gist is:   the word Siberia used to refer to the entire region since the beginning of the eastward expansion beyond the Urals.  But the territory turned out to be too big, and other terms were used to describe its various parts:  e.g., krainii severo-vostok (1885) or zemli "kotorye prilegli k Sibirskoi storone" (1727) or Sibir i (!) dalnii vostok together (from wikipedia article on the Russian Far East).    The article whose author I don't remember claimed that the word Sibir stuck in the West (is it the same in let's say German?) while
 in Russia both terms continued to be used:  Sibir and Far East.  There were no official boundaries between the two regions until recently; they have existed mainly in the minds of the people.  To me, Siberia is almost as far away as Moscow:  I had to fly for 6 hours to get to Novosibirsk and another 3 hours to Moscow.   
   
  So the distinction is not that recent, it must have existed since the end of the 19th century at least.  Kolyma does not mean the Far East, it means either "the Magadan region" or by metonymy the labor camps (and not only under Stalin; some of them continued as labor camps for ugolovniki later in the Soviet period)).  Kolyma has been known to the Russians at least since 1639 when Dezhnev sailed from its mouth around the northeastern tip of Eurasia through the strait which was later named after Bering.
   
  Best wishes,
  Irina Dubinina
  

Josh Wilson <jwilson at SRAS.ORG> wrote:
  Dear Seelangers, 



I recently had the occasion to look up "Siberia" in Russian and English. It
seems that every English language dictionary defines Siberia as running from
the Urals to the Pacific. Russian dictionaries, however, have Siberia
running only "do gornyx khrbtov tikhookeanskogo vodorazdela." The difference
is fairly substantial. 



In speaking with Russians, it seems that none of them would consider
Chukotka, Kamchatka, or Khabarovsk to be Siberia. One woman who I know in
Blagoveshensk actually went on at length about how tour companies in her
city bill it as being in Siberia - and about how they are wrong - very, very
wrong. 



Does anyone know the historical explanation as to why "Siberia" in English
seems to be much bigger than "Sibir'" in Russian? 





Josh Wilson

Asst. Director

The School of Russian and Asian Studies

Editor-in-Chief

Vestnik, The Journal of Russian and Asian Studies

www.sras.org

jwilson at sras.org




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