Guest Post: Siberian Treaty System

This post first appeared on Today in Alternate History with assistance from Philip Ebberell.

June 1st, 1992

 Siberia might once have become a mighty Khaganate, but instead her fate was to be a vassal state ruled from Moscow by Great Russians for over four centuries. Ironically, the only exception was a brief interval caused by the Russian Civil War when the region was controlled by White Generals Aleksandr Kolchak and Viktor Pepelyayev. Colonized by ethnic Russians, but with a sizable indigenous population, the country would never have achieved independence without the complete dissolution of the Soviet Union. This was because the region contributed seventy percent of the land mass and provided a vast flow of revenue to Moscow. Yet in the limited imagination of the European mind, Siberia was a distant and remote location only known for the Tunguska event or where dissidents such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn were sent to the gulags.

Defeated in the Cold War, the Soviet Union quickly lost control of her satellite states and then began to balkanize. Various determined attempts were made to form a Russian Federation and sign a Siberian Agreement, but ultimately the force of nationalism sweeping across Eurasia was simply too strong. Representatives from Novosibirsk argued that the demands of Siberians were ignored and consequently they would "accelerate the creation of a Siberian republic." For this long-term project, they would need international assistance and hence the necessity of the Novosibirsk Agreement. With talks going nowhere, and the Soviet Union beginning to break-up, hard-line communists seized control the country in order to maintain rule from the Kremlin. Unfortunately for more moderate Russian nationalists, there had been too little time for the aging drunk coup leaders to be replaced with a credible new leadership who given the time might possibly have built trust around a new consensus.

Unlike the break-up crisis in the former Yugoslavia, the nation did not slide into civil war. Instead, complete dissolution led to the creation of multiple autonomous regions. In the west, First-World living standards created the expectation of a new modern state emerging through market orientation. The reality of such an economic project was that the shocks of market transition and liberalization might be better controlled in a smaller rump state than in a vast federation.

Siberia, no longer defended by Moscow, was largely unprotected and did not have the resources to self-organize. Equally importantly, international assistance was required to construct the Chita-Khabarovsk Highway. In time, this infrastructure would become as significant as the Trans-Siberian Railway had been earlier in the twentieth century. To the suspicions of anti-globalists, President George Bush had strong connections to the oil and gas industry, having successfully run an extraction company in west Texas. Only six months out from re-election, he would claim the Novosibirsk Agreement was in the "interests of all mankind," a key plank in the building of the new world order. Bolstered by the realization of what he would disparagingly call this "vision thing," Bush would narrowly defeat Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton in the fall.

Cynics would argue Bush's vision of "planetary resource storehouses" was a thinly disguised neo-conservative play by the American hyper-power. In fact, the idea dated back a century to American geopolitician Admiral Mahan who argued "highly civilized states accumulate surplus energy. This energy should be directed to conquering new spaces in the very near future." Regardless of the triumphalism, the US had circumvented their worst case scenario, the emergence of a strong man who wanted to siphon off the land-locked wealth using China. By the time that Bush passed in 2018, Siberia would be undergoing a second revolution with the help of this emerging technocracy.

Author's Note

In reality, while it was much smaller than the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation did not dissolve; however, there is a broad view that Siberia will eventually secede.

In the documentary film called Russia. New History, Vladmir Putin describes the 1991 break-up as "a major humanitarian tragedy. It was a disintegration of historical Russia under the name of the Soviet Union. We turned into a completely different country. And what had been built up over 1,000 years was largely lost."Provine's AddendumThree decades after the Novosibirsk Agreement, Siberia was a very different region than it had been under Soviet rule. International investment often dubbed by critics as a "resource grab" had sponsored extensive infrastructure and brought in a generation of immigrant workers, many of whom settled in government-sponsored programs for increasing population. The 2008 Recession combined with increased use of hydraulic fracking hamstrung the Siberian economy, which had grown so rapidly through the '90s that it was dubbed the "Siberian Tiger" in comparison with similar tiger economies in Southeast Asia. After some recovery in the 2010s primarily from ecotourism, the 2020 Pandemic virtually shut down the Siberian economy, leaving the region's future in question. Over a dozen sovereign nations, including the remaining members of the UN Security Council, gathered in Novosibirsk to sign a historic agreement to regulate international relations with respect to Siberia. Loosely based upon the Antarctic Treaty System, this nation-building framework was designed to protect rich oil and gas reserves as well as the security of forty million Siberians sparsely populating a vast region of 13.1 million square kilometers.