Siberia is a vast region spanning the northern part of the Asian continent, and forming the Asiatic portion of Russia. As a result of the Russian conquest of Siberia (17th to 19th centuries) and of the subsequent population movements during the Soviet era (1917-1991), the modern-day demographics of Siberia is dominated by ethnic Russians (Siberiaks) and other Slavs. However, there remains a slowly increasing number of Indigenous groups, accounting for about 5% of the total Siberian population (about 1.6–1.8 million), some of which are closely genetically related to Indigenous peoples of the Americas.
History
In Kamchatka, the Itelmens' uprisings against Russian rule in 1706, 1731, and 1741, were crushed. During the first uprising the Itelmen were armed with only stone weapons, but in later uprisings they used gunpowder weapons. The Russian Cossacks faced tougher resistance from the Koryaks, who revolted with bows and guns from 1745 to 1756, and were even forced to give up in their attempts to wipe out the Chukchi in 1729, 1730–31, and 1744–47. After the Russian defeat in 1729 at Chukchi hands, the Russian commander Major Dmitry Pavlutsky was responsible for the Russian war against the Chukchi and the mass slaughters and enslavement of Chukchi women and children in 1730–31, but his cruelty only made the Chukchis fight more fiercely.
A war against the Chukchis and Koryaks was ordered by Empress Elizabeth in 1742 to totally expel them from their native lands and erase their culture through war. The command was that the natives be "totally extirpated" with Pavlutskiy leading again in this war from 1744 to 1747 in which he led to the Cossacks "with the help of Almighty God and to the good fortune of Her Imperial Highness", to slaughter the Chukchi men and enslave their women and children as booty. However this phase of the war came to an inconclusive end, when the Chukchi forced them to give up by killing Pavlutskiy and decapitating him.
The Russians launched wars and conducted mass slaughters against the Koryaks in 1744 and 1753–54. After the Russians tried to force the natives to convert to Christianity, different native peoples such as the Koryaks, Chukchis, Itelmens, and Yukaghirs all united to drive the Russians out of their land in the 1740s, culminating in the assault on Nizhnekamchatsk fort in 1746. After its annexation by Russia in 1697, around 100,000 of 150,000 Itelmen and Koryaks died due to infectious diseases such as smallpox, mass suicides and the mass slaughters perpetrated by the Cossacks throughout the first decades of Russian rule.
The genocide by the Russian Cossacks devastated the native peoples of Kamchatka and exterminated much of their population. In addition to committing genocide, the Cossacks also devastated the wildlife by slaughtering massive numbers of animals for fur. Ninety percent of the Kamchadals and half of the Vogules were killed from the 18th to 19th centuries. The rapid genocide of the Indigenous population led to entire ethnic groups being entirely wiped out, with around 12 exterminated groups which were named by Nikolai Yadrintsev as of 1882. Much of the slaughter was brought on by the Siberian fur trade.
In the 17th century, Indigenous peoples of the Amur region were attacked and colonized by Russians who came to be known as "red-beards". The Russian Cossacks were named luocha (羅剎) or rakshasa by Amur natives, after demons found in Buddhist mythology. The natives of the Amur region feared the invaders as they ruthlessly colonized the Amur tribes, who were tributaries of the Qing dynasty during the Sino–Russian border conflicts. Qing forces and Korean musketeers who were allied with the Qing defeated the Cossacks in 1658, which kept the Russians out of the inner reaches of the Amur region for decades.
The regionalist oblastniki were, in the 19th century, among the Russians in Siberia who acknowledged that the natives were subjected to violence of almost genocidal proportions by the Russian colonization. They claimed that they would rectify the situation with their proposed regionalist policies. The colonizers used massacres, alcoholism and disease to bring the natives under their control. Some small nomadic groups essentially disappeared, and much of the evidence of their obliteration has itself been destroyed, with only a few artifacts documenting their presence remaining in Russian museums and collections.
The Russian colonization of Siberia and conquest of its Indigenous peoples has been compared to European colonization in the United States and its natives, with similar negative impacts on the natives and the appropriation of their land.