The Conquest of a Continent: Siberia and the Russians

Russia's conquest of Siberia, begun in 1582 with Cossack chieftan Ermak Timofevich's crushing of the Tatars, transformed the obscure kingdom of Muscovy into the world's larget contiguous empire. To Siberia's native nomads, hunters and reindeer herders, the conquest brought cruel exploitation, torture and corruption under military governors. Three and a half centuries later, the industrial complex that Stalin built east of the Urals manufactured the tanks, planes and guns that defeated Hitler, and Stalin's Siberian slave labor camps swallowed up millions of innocents. Its fragile ecology devastated by industrializers Khrushchev and Brezhnev, Siberia is today one of the world's worst environmental disaster zones. In Lincoln's ( In War's Dark Shadow ) compulsively readable epic narrative, Siberia's dark history comes alive as a vast human drama of greed, adventure, exploration, ambition, persecution and protest. Tamerlaine, Danish explorer Vitus Bering (in the service of Czar Peter the Great), Dostoevsky, Lenin, rogues, reformers and Siberia's natives people this prodigiously researched tapestry. Illustrations not seen by PW. (Jan.)