| Summary: | For thousands of the tsars’ political enemies in imperial Russia, the bad news was that they were being stripped of their wealth, their civil rights, and their aristocratic privileges and exiled to Siberia, perhaps never to return home. The good news was that they were being sent to Irkutsk. In the continent-sized freezer and prison camp that was Siberia, Irkutsk was a place where formerly dignified and refined Russians not only might survive but might even be able to live with something approaching the dignity and refinement of their lives back in St. Petersburg or Moscow. “The best of all Siberian towns is Irkutsk,” Chekhov wrote on his way east to report on the prison camps of Sakhalin Island in the Pacific in 1890. The city is more than 5,000 kilometers from Moscow, 250 kilometers from Mongolia, and twice as close to Beijing’s Forbidden City as to the Kremlin, and even after the first road was cut from Moscow in the 1860s, it took a month of miserable travel to get here under the best conditions. It’s also a place where it was said that you could hear a symphony or an opera as good as any in St. Petersburg, or attend the theater in a hall that would grace the most elegant streets of the Russian capital. Where, today, you can walk down tree-lined sidewalks fronting elegant commercial blocks with well-stocked shops and cafes serving the best coffee west of San Francisco. Where green and gold spires descend to ornate white Orthodox churches and poplar-shaded log houses with gracefully carved eaves and window frames extend for what seem like miles in every direction. Irkutsk was founded in the mid-seventeenth century as a Cossack ostrog, a fort at the confluence of the Irkut and Angara rivers, and by the mid-eighteenth century it had become the administrative center of Eastern Siberia as the Russian Empire pushed its frontier ever eastward. It had also become the economic hub of the region, “the warehouse of Russia,” as the contemporary writer Mark Sergeyev puts it, where, he says, quoting a Russian proverb, ...
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