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Электронное приложение к журналу «Международная жизнь»
scendant of the Genghisids and one of the Sheybanids, replaced him on the throne.
For some time, Kuchum continued paying tribute to Moscow. In 1571, however, as soon as in-
formation about the Crimean Tatars' raid against Moscow had reached Siberia, he discontinued
this practice; a military clash between the Muscovite State and the Siberian Khanate became in-
evitable: There was no other way to return the Siberian Tatars into the Moscow orbit. Moscow's
peaceful initiatives had failed, the ambassador had been slain, the fur tribute stopped. Ivan IV
had no choice: Despite the military defeats of the final stage of the Livonian war, he moved
against the Siberian Khanate.
Ethnic Tatars and Orthodox Christians, the Stroganovs were a new generation of Great Russians.
In the fourteenth century, the Great Russian ethnicity was taking shape by the religious rather
ethnic affiliation and was based on the substrata of the ancient Russian ethnicity, Orthodox
Tatars, Lithuanians and Finno-Ugric tribes. Having become, in fact, "the Russian sons of the
Tatar people," the Stroganovs, through their business activities and their service to Ivan IV, pro-
moted contacts between the Russians and the Tatars, representatives of two different cultures
and did a lot to solidify Russia's security and positions in the East.
This explains why they "won the tender" for an organization of a large-scale military expedition
in Siberia. The army headed by ataman Yermak was organized on their money and equipped for
a mission "beyond the Stone" to subjugate the Siberian Khanate.
Today, very much as in the past, there is a dearth of charismatic leaders in Russia of unquestioned
authority and unquestioned influence in the Center and at the local level alike. This void is espe-
cially obvious in the subjects of the Russian Federation either based on the national-state or the
national-territorial principles; the exceptions are few and far between.
Peter I transformed the Russian state into a transcontinental power; this process that required
consolidation of all Siberian ethnicities under the Romanovs. It was at that time that the Siberian
peoples started joining Russia at their own free will.
IT SHOULD BE SAID that the experience of czarist Russia in the development of Siberia and
the Far East had nothing in common with colonial expansion of the Western powers in new
and recent times. Today, however, certain national-patriots and local historians have revived an
assessment of the czarist politics in Siberia as a manifestation of the colonialist essence of au-
tocracy.
The "Siberian thesis" of Albright is supported by the patriarch of anti-Soviet politics Zbigniew
Brzezinski. In fact, his approach has served the cornerstone of America's policy: Siberia, says
Brzezinski, is the main geopolitical prize for the United States in the twenty-first century.
Nobody, Americans included, can play the Siberian card with the help of the Siberian ethnicities;
their past and future are inseparable from Russia and its destiny.