To be more concrete in my remarks from class: N. M. Iadrintsev was the most prominent advocate of Russia's cultural role in Siberia in the late nineteen century. “Knowledge and science did not take part in all our discoveries in Siberia,” he cautioned in his famous work on the colonization of the region, since only unbridled lust for resource wealth had driven initial imperial incursions. “If only they had mastered knowledge of nature, the struggle in this virgin land would have been easier and not cost so many victims.”[1] Though the priesthood scarcely figured in his account, its weak contribution to the imagined civilizational process was underlined, and Iadrintsev also thought it unwise to focus on converting the non-Orthodox population.[2] The clear implication was that science should now play an important role in securing Siberia as Russian in the imperial setting, where religion would not.
[1] N. M. Iadrintsev, Sibir’ kak koloniia v geograficheskom, etnograficheskom i istoricheskom otnoshenii, 2nd ed. (St. Petersburg: M. Sibiriakov, 1892), 548. On Siberian natural resources and the strengthening of Russian nationality, 584.
[2] Iadrintsev, 180. “The fate of Orthodoxy among lowly-developed foreign [inorodcheskie] tribes, along with the struggle and competition of ancient religions of Asia, has, of course, been expressed in peculiar fashion. In the propagation of a religion, aside from the fact of conversion, it is extremely important to know how much a religion has been assimilated and understood, and whether religious education and the example of a cultured race can be supported. This also depends on the nationality [narodnost’] doing the inculcating. As an outcome of the struggle we see, judging by the numerical data, that mastery and predominance are far from being left solely to Orthodoxy.” (175)