The urge to explore new places is something we all feel, individually and collectively, young and old (though the young, with fewer strings attached, generally tend to act on it more). I’ve been struck recently by the relationship between people and their physical surroundings, particularly the notion of the frontier. Do frontiers breed certain traits? Are some frontiers better than others or do they all have something in common? Is space really the next (or indeed final) frontier?
The historian Frederick Jackson Turner famously argued in 1893 that America’s success was due largely to its exploration and settlement of the West. This movement, which required discipline, endurance, and perseverence, engendered the nation with certain broad character traits – optimism, a fixation on the future, and innovation. The “frontier thesis” remains relevant in recent decades as Americans have domesticated the frontier and come to terms with the brutal reality that resources are not unlimited.
But is the frontier thesis a general phenomenon? (or even correct in the first place?) I recently got back from Russia, a country that knows a thing or two about frontiers and the settlement of remote places, and I hoped to delve into the Russian psyche to understand their relationship with their seemingly endless territory. Needless to say, this was a tall order for a week-long stay split between the country’s two largest cities and a non-existant knowledge of the language, but I may have made a little progress.
In Western Russia, the pine forests of the taiga stretch on for miles, extending asymptotically toward the horizon. I bet these forests looked pretty good to settlers of centuries past: resource-rich and fertile. In fact, much of the push eastward was inspired by the pursuit of one such resource: furs. More of a luxury than a necessity in today’s consumer landscape, I would imagine furs both eased and facilitated settlement in increasingly numbing environments. The legacy is seen in souvenir stalls all over St. Petersburg:
Although the Russian frontier was resource-rich, it was not exactly the most alluring place to live, with notorioulsy harsh Siberian winters taking their toll on settlement enthusiasm. I think the general view emerged that Siberia and the Russian east was a great place to own, but a bad place to live – a phenomenal resource that could be exploited for timber, furs, and minerals in order to make life better in the more inviting western part of the coutnry. So it seems that the resources of the frontier reinforced traditional ways of living rather than necessitating the innovative adaptations that Turner describes. Today, the trend continues as the nation rides gas and oil profits from Gazprom into the economic promised land.
To generalize enormously, Russians seem a little closed off, private, contained. This surely has something to do with leftover social stress from the Soviet period, but it might just also reflect a deeper view of their surroundings as a harsh, threatening place — a place to be used, but kept at arms length.
And so, as I sat in a train for a gorgeous evening ride from Moscow to St. Petersburg, the passengers around me closed the curtains, impervious to the beauty gliding by.
