Time to read: 22 minutes(s)

Author: Andrey Filimonov.

On September 22, 1835, in the village of Yamyshevsky on the banks of the Irtysh, he was born Grigory Potanin — writer and traveler, dissident and political prisoner, honorary chairman of the Siberian Regional Duma in 1917 and simply a legendary figure.

His father, Nikolai Potanin, came from an old Siberian Cossack family and left his mark on literature. "Notes on the Kokan Khanate by Ensign N. I. Potanin" were published in an 1831 issue of the Military Journal. Written in a lively style, these travel notes were repeatedly reprinted in the Bulletin of the Russian Geographical Society.

"One day [in Tashkent], I went to visit a Tatar friend of mine, and as I passed a crumbling mosque, I saw a crowd of people, in the midst of which stood a weeping woman, veiled. She had been accused of infidelity by her husband and brought to trial, who sentenced her to be thrown from the mosque. This unfortunate victim of human weakness and passions was led to the very top of the mosque and pushed off. My heart bled at the sight of her disfigured corpse, and I immediately retreated from this pitiful and at the same time terrible spectacle." (Notes of Ensign Nikolai Potanin)

However, neither Potanin Sr.'s literary nor military career took off. When his son was three years old, he had a heated argument with a fellow soldier who, as Nikolai Ilyich believed, had exceeded his authority. A violent scene ensued in the open air. The argument escalated into a fight, Cossacks came to the officers' aid, and someone fired a gun. As a result, the authorities opened a case of mutiny with the use of firearms. Although both fighters were good fighters, Nikolai Potanin bore all the brunt. He was brought to trial, spent the herds of horses he had inherited on bribes to officials, and was still demoted to the rank of private.

Unable to bear the stress, his wife died of nervous fever, and five-year-old Grigory turned from a rich heir into a poor orphan, who was placed with one relative after another.

At first, the boy lived with his aunt Melania, his father's sister. In this house, he remembered the Kyrgyz slave girls his grandfather, Ilya Potanin, had bought during the Great Famine in the steppe, when the Kyrgyz traded their children for flour. "Thus, my grandfather became a slave owner," writes Grigory Potanin. The girls were baptized and given Christian names—Vera and Avdotya.

“A sad fate befell both of them, especially Avdotya. Melania Ilyinishna disliked the girl and beat her incessantly. I witnessed some harrowing scenes. Melania Ilyinishna would chase the unfortunate girl with a poker or a frying pan, shouting, ‘I’ll kill you!’ while Avdotya would rush around the hut, crying, trying to hide under a bench or a bed. Blood ran down her bruised face. She was constantly covered in scabs. One day, she showed her head; beneath her hair, there wasn’t a single unbroken spot. She was frail and, probably driven to consumption by the beatings, died of this disease shortly after I was taken from Presnovsk to Omsk. Verochka’s fate was easier. My father took her to Omsk, and she married a soldier, but she wasn’t happy either. How many such ruined lives were there in Western Siberia!”

From Melania's home, Grigory found himself in the more cultured household of Colonel Ellizen, who owned a decent library for the Steppe region. He recalled that the colonel's wife "had a streak of propaganda in her." She brought new books from Omsk and gathered local ladies at her home in the evenings to read fashionable fiction aloud, including Gogol. The author of "Taras Bulba" was the most popular writer among the Omsk (and probably all Siberian) Cossacks. The cadets of the military academy that Grigory Nikolaevich would later graduate from knew this story by heart and chose nicknames for themselves based on the names of its characters.

The colonel himself, who read nothing but the garrison service regulations and a cookbook, was very fond of flowers and delighted in the sight of the blooming steppe, which in spring resembled a vast, colorful carpet. In July, the swimming season began, and the Ellisens would head "to the waters," that is, to the banks of the Ishim River. On these trips, Grigory gradually learned how to compile herbariums—or, as they said back then, how to botanize.

Travelers and spies

Over the years, his passion for botany became increasingly professional, and after graduating from military school, the young ensign showed his herbariums to the traveler and geographer Pyotr Semyonov, who was passing through Omsk. Semyonov played a very important role in Potanin's life. Pyotr Petrovich had not yet visited the Tien Shan, from which he would receive the second half of his surname half a century later, but he was already a well-known explorer, a member of the Russian Geographical Society, and a student of the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, nicknamed by his contemporaries "the Aristotle of the 19th century."

In Omsk, Semyonov noticed two talented young men: Grigory Potanin and his friend Chokan Valikhanov, a Chingizid intellectual from the steppe Kazakh aristocracy.

According to an ancient tradition, all explorers were a bit of a spy, and the Geographical Society also served as an intelligence agency. Semenov "recruited" Valikhanov, who, on his recommendation, traveled to Kashgaria (in northwest China) under the name of the merchant Alimbai and delivered to the Russian government important information about this territory, which was off-limits to Europeans. Along with samples of local flora and drawings of Chinese border fortresses, Valikhanov brought back the head of his less fortunate colleague, the German explorer Adolf Schlagintweint, who had been executed by order of the ruler of Kashgaria, Wali Khan.

Semyonov advised Potanin to quit military service and enroll in university. But to do so, the young officer would have to renounce his Cossack status. "The Cossacks were serf states. A Cossack officer at that time had to serve for 25 years without relief; their situation was pitiful," Potanin recalled.

He spent two years searching for a doctor who would diagnose some ailment that would render him unfit for horseback riding—a second-class citizen, from the perspective of a true Cossack. During his military service, he managed to participate in the founding of the fortress city of Verny, today's Almaty. Potanin and his detachment left Semipalatinsk in 1852 and ventured deep into territory not yet part of Russia. According to his memoirs, "the expedition had the appearance of a pleasant stroll." There was almost no shooting. Potanin disliked dramatizing the events of his life and sincerely saw nothing special in it. He even described his own civil execution ceremony in 1868 as a rather boring event in bad weather.

"Since it was early, there was no sea of ​​heads around the scaffold; the audience stood only in three rows." Grigory Potanin. Memories

Potanin's social views were shaped by the magazine Sovremennik, which he read at every opportunity. Founded by Pushkin, the magazine experienced a new heyday in the mid-19th century. It was edited by Nekrasov, Chernyshevsky, and Dobrolyubov, who strove to make each issue bolder than the last.

This process accelerated significantly after the sudden death of Emperor Nicholas I, who either poisoned himself or deliberately caught a cold at a parade. In any case, Russia lost the Crimean War, and on his deathbed, Nicholas uttered the words, "I surrender the state in disrepair," thereby reinforcing his successor's commitment to reforming the country.

Upon ascending the throne, Alexander II set about addressing the most pressing issue of the Russian Empire—serfdom. In December 1858, the young emperor approved a program of peasant reform. Several months later, the Omsk ataman allowed a military doctor to diagnose Potanin with a spinal hernia.

From Tomsk to St. Petersburg on a box of gold

"New times brought new passions. Since his father couldn't give him anything, Vanykin remembered he had a relative in the taiga who was married to the widow of his uncle, Vanykin's father's brother. He decided to show up in the taiga unannounced. He planned to serve in the taiga for the summer and then use the money he earned to go to university."

These are lines from Grigory Potanin's story "Taizhans," in which he portrayed himself under the name Vanykin.

A gold rush was raging in the Tomsk province at the time. People grew dizzyingly rich and then quickly fell into ruin. Grigory's uncle, Dmitry Ilyich Potanin, was married to the sister of Tomsk gold miner Filosof Gorokhov, who for ten years managed to maintain a reputation among his creditors as a multimillionaire. He built a mansion in the city center with a luxurious garden and a library containing hundreds of gold-embossed volumes. When creditors finally discovered that Gorokhov's promissory notes were unsecured, and bailiffs seized Filosof Alexandrovich's property, it turned out that his "library" was as fictitious as his "securities"—the book spines were glued to wooden boards. Uncle Dmitry was also destined to find fortune in the Tomsk taiga. When his nephew actually showed up there unannounced, he found disaster. The gold dust content of the land purchased by his uncle turned out to be much lower than the unscrupulous sellers had promised. The only thing Dmitry Ilyich could give his nephew was a letter of recommendation to the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, who had served his exile in Tomsk and married the daughter of a more successful gold miner, Ksavery Kvyatkovsky, whose business was doing well.

Bakunin graciously welcomed Potanin to his mansion on Voskresenskaya Hill. Arriving from the taiga, the mosquito-bitten youth passionately declared that he was ready to walk to St. Petersburg for the sake of knowledge, like a new Lomonosov.

"You should probably give up this nonsense," the anarchist replied, lighting a Manila cigarette. "I have a better idea."

He provided Grigory with a letter to his relatives in the capital, introducing him as a "Siberian Don Quixote" and securing him a seat as a passenger in his father-in-law's caravan, which consisted of several wagons with armed guards, and which took a couple of months to reach the capital from Tomsk. "A sturdy box containing gold bars was chained to the bottom of each wagon, with room for passengers on top," Potanin recalled. He still had no money, but for several weeks he literally slept on gold.

Bakunin recalled their meeting ten years later, when news of Grigory Nikolaevich’s arrest for attempting to “separate Siberia from Russia” reached London, where he had fled from exile.

"What do you know about Potanin and the open Siberian conspiracy? I not only knew Potanin personally, but I was, one might say, his creator, or rather, his discoverer. I freed him from the Cossack yoke and sent him to St. Petersburg. With his vulgar appearance, he is an extraordinarily intelligent, honest, and energetic young man—a tireless activist, without vanity, without empty phrases. I would pity him if he perished... and it seems he will perish too..." Bakunin wrote to Herzen in 1865.

Fortunately, the anarchist was mistaken. Potanin not only survived, but also became famous thanks to this "case." The ideas for which he was arrested, sentenced to civil execution, and sent to hard labor were gleaned from St. Petersburg.

Siberia as a colony

At the beginning of the Tsar-Liberator's reign, two talented Moscow historians, Nikolai Kostomarov and Afanasy Shchapov, simultaneously promoted federalism as the best form of government for Russia. Kostomarov, a graduate of Kharkov University, had already served time in prison for his views under Nicholas I. Meanwhile, Shchapov, a native of Siberia, would later become involved in the "Siberian Secession Case" in 1865, along with Potanin. Federalism advocates liked to cite the United States of America as a successful example. "The minds of young Siberians were the soil in which the seeds of this idea were destined to take root," wrote Potanin.

In St. Petersburg, Siberian students lived in poverty, sharing a single room with several others. They ate cabbage soup and kvass, with sweet kalachi (loaves of bread) serving as dessert. When Grigory, in his second year, needed a botanical atlas for 25 rubles, kalachi were banned from his diet for six months.

However, the topic of food never bothered Potanin. The main thing was that he found himself in the thick of the country's intellectual life, during one of the brightest moments in its history. St. Petersburg was seething and arguing over every issue, particularly the question of colonies.

"Meyendorff, a member of the learned society (Head of His Majesty's Cabinet), expressed the conviction that the measures taken by the government to more densely populate Siberia, to instill civic consciousness and education there, threaten the state with future danger; if the colony develops its intellectual and material strength, it will develop a desire to separate from Russia. Academician Baer objected to Meyendorff; he said that the separation of agricultural colonies from their mother countries is a natural historical phenomenon and that this does not pose any harm either to the colonies or to the mother countries. Grand Duke Constantine hastened to downplay the sharpness of the objections; in his opinion, Siberia is not a colony at all, but merely an expansion of state territory." G. N. Potanin, "The Regionalist Tendency in Siberia"

Many in the Siberian community at St. Petersburg University disagreed with the Grand Duke's opinion. A student from Omsk, Nikolai Yadrintsev, even participated in editing the boldly written appeal "To the Patriots of Siberia" by the liberal Irkutsk merchant Popov.

"Come on! Fear neither torture nor execution, join the sacred cause of liberation, shouting, 'Long live the Independence of Siberia!'" the anonymous authors called upon Siberians. It was a typical Moscow pamphlet of the time, a work in the style of "call Rus' to the axe." Popov was living in St. Petersburg at the time, moving in the circles of the revolutionary satirical magazine Iskra, where he met Yadrintsev. Few in Siberia managed to read their appeal—the gendarmes acted swiftly. A wave of arrests spread from Omsk to Tomsk, Krasnoyarsk, and Irkutsk. The arrested teachers, journalists, and other representatives of the small Siberian intelligentsia were taken to the Omsk guardhouse, where many spent three years.

By that time, Potanin had, against his will, severed his ties with the capital's university. Following the student unrest of 1862, the university was temporarily closed, and the most active and suspicious (among them, the auditor Grigory) were locked up in the Peter and Paul Fortress for about a month. Upon his release, Potanin learned that he would not be reinstated at his alma mater and began looking for work, which was unavailable in St. Petersburg. Friends advised him to go to Tomsk, where a hard-working and capable official was needed for the office of Governor Hermann Lerche, one of the most scandalous figures in the history of the Tomsk province. His police chief was a certain Serzhpinsky, a former brothel keeper. In his new job, the police chief continued his old habits and supplied Lerche with young women, as the governor was a passionate lover of "hardcore" women.

Having accepted the erotomaniac governor's offer to take a position on the Statistical Committee and simultaneously edit the unofficial section of the Tomskie Gubernskie Vedomosti newspaper, Potanin immersed himself in work. He had developed his own "love affair." After St. Petersburg, he realized that his main passion in life was Siberia—its past, present, and future. According to Potanin's recollections, it was considered "seditious" to use expressions like "our Siberia" or "we Siberians" in conversation, and especially in print—that is, to distinguish oneself from the common homeland. Loving Russia in its parts was forbidden. One had to love it as a whole, from Finland to Alaska. But the young people who gathered at Grigory Nikolaevich's for social gatherings seditiously believed that Russia was an abstraction, in reality consisting of separate regions. This is where the name of their theory—regionalism—came from. "Let each region light its own sun, and the whole earth will be illuminated," Potanin declared. This is why they and Yadrintsev were arrested in 1865.

Police Chief Serzhpinsky arrested his friends on the governor's personal orders. The case was given a grandiose title: "Concerning the criminals who intended to separate Siberia from Russia and establish a republic there, modeled on the North American States." As a reward for uncovering the "conspiracy," Lerche demanded that the Tomsk City Council recognize him as an honorary citizen, which was granted. However, two years later, Herman Gustavovich was still dismissed from his post as governor for excessive Don Juanism.

The investigation in Omsk dragged on and was tedious. Investigators tried to find a connection from the capital leading to a foreign decision-making center. But nothing came of it, simply because the Omsk gendarmes were looking in the wrong places. During those three years, while they were fabricating "Siberian separatism," a sizable chunk of territory was actually severed from Russia and handed over to the United States for a fee of $7 million. The organized group that carried out this lucrative deal was led by Emperor Alexander II, who got away with it.

Potanin, however, was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor as the organizer of the conspiracy. He good-naturedly and nobly accepted all the blame, denying nothing. Among other things, he "confessed" to authoring the appeal "To the Patriots of Siberia," the text of which he first read in the investigator's office.

Read more about the “Affair of the Secession of Siberia…” our article.

Cheated on Siberia with Mongolia

After a sentence shocking in its cruelty, the "separatist" Potanin was sent to serve a hard labor sentence in the Sveaborg fortress, on the shores of the Gulf of Bothnia, in the Grand Duchy of Finland. Prisoners there wore shackles constantly. Therefore, an important skill taught to every newcomer was how to dress, threading their chained arms through the sleeves of their prison robes.

The authorities sympathized with the intelligent prisoner from Siberia and couldn't understand why this harmless botanist had been sentenced to 15 years. Major Yasinsky, the commander of the prison company, at the first opportunity nominated Grigory Nikolaevich for a reduction in his sentence, declaring him "resolutely reforming." In 1871, Potanin was released from the fortress in accordance with the Tsar's manifesto. He was granted a full amnesty only three years later, thanks to the petition of Pyotr Semyonov (not yet Tian-Shansky).

Potanin spent these three years in exile in Vologda, in the town of Nikolsk, more like a village, where he met his future wife, Alexandra Lavrskaya, a priest's daughter and the sister of a revolutionary. She came to visit her brother, exiled to this remote place, and found in his room a man with a beard as overgrown as Viy, reaching all the way to his nearsighted eyes behind round iron glasses. Unreliable, without a higher education, no profession or social standing, no savings or prospects for the future, the 38-year-old Potanin could not be considered an eligible bachelor. More likely, a hopeless loser. Nevertheless, she chose him.

Thirty-year-old Alexandra was a spinster for her time. Vladimir Obruchev, Potanin's biographer, explains that "according to Russian clerical custom, after her father's death, she was considered a 'bride with a place,' meaning that the priest's seat in the parish, which her father held, could only be filled by a man who married his daughter. Such brutal coercion outraged Alexandra, and she begged her brother Valerian, already a priest, to take her father's place, while she remained with him and opened a home school."

“Thus, the freedom of Alexandra Viktorovna’s heart, which she so happily took advantage of in her time, having become the life partner of Grigory Nikolaevich Potanin, survived,” rejoiced Brother Valerian, who, after his exile, came to his senses and made a career in the church, but until the end of his life felt reverence for Potanin and his quixotic feat in the name of Siberia.

Grigory and Alexandra married in January 1874, a few months before the end of Potanin's exile. Their marriage was very modern, in the spirit of "What Is to Be Done?" or "Fathers and Sons," a scientific field novel that left no room for diapers and the vulgarity of everyday life. Instead of bearing children for a provincial priest and spending her life embroidering napkins, Alexandra and her husband spent their nights in a tent at an altitude of three thousand meters above sea level, melting snow in the mornings to make tea, climbing rocks, sketching plants and animals, photographing traveling merchants and mendicant monks, and subsisting on exotic, inedible food:

"I had to eat with chopsticks; there were no spoons here. Rarities like sea cucumbers, cuttlefish, shark gills, and the like were, to my great delight, absent."

She also described the chilling exotic traditions of the Eastern peoples:

"...in China, there is a custom of infanticide; this is explained, of course, by the difficulty of obtaining food, and this custom is especially widespread in densely populated areas. They say that this is usually done by a midwife; at the birth of a child whose parents do not wish to keep alive, she pours cold water on it until the child suffocates. Usually, girls are killed. Near the city, the howling of wolves is often heard at night. Missionary Keila said that wolves come to pick up the discarded corpses of children." A. V. Potanina, "About the Chinese Woman", Russkoye Bogatstvo, St. Petersburg, 1887.

Alexandra Viktorovna's notes reveal her origins as a priest. All the Christian missionaries in the East were unanimously horrified by the native customs and exterminated entire peoples, trying to convert them to the "true faith." Potanin mocked his wife's insistence on observing Orthodox fasts and holidays during an expedition across the Tibetan Plateau.

"In Potanin the ethnographer, Lamaism, Tengrism, and shamanism resisted Christianity; Potanin the natural scientist leaned toward pantheism," writes Nikolai Brennikov, a historian from Tomsk.

While traveling through Central Asia, Grigory Nikolaevich encountered many supernatural occurrences, but he always approached miracles with the good-natured humor of a scientist. In one Altai village, he decided to test the abilities of a local shaman (kam) and asked him to ask the spirits when the remaining expedition members would soon arrive from Omsk.

“Beginning his shamanic ritual, the kam first of all asked the spirits not to be angry, because he was not calling them out of his own whim, that he was a subordinate man, a subject, that a Russian official was demanding that he show him how the Altai shamans performed their shamanic rituals, and that only the fear of disobeying the official made him disturb the spirits.”

Although the results were of no practical use, Potanin and his companions generously offered the tea bricks that shamans traditionally accepted as payment for their sessions with spirits. Over time, Potanin popularized shamanic rituals among educated Siberians, organizing "tours" of Altai shamans in Tomsk. It was he who coined the term "Siberian Switzerland" for Altai and made every effort to introduce Europeans to native culture and educate the natives in a European manner.

By the early 20th century, Altai villages had become fashionable resorts in the Tomsk region. Consumptives flocked here to breathe the refreshing mountain air, earning them the nickname "air-seekers." Those with mental illnesses were called "kumysniki" (literally, "kumys drinkers") because they believed in the healing power of this horse-derived product and drank it by the bucketful. In their leisure time, tourists took an interest in shamanism and recorded folklore.

"Anos has become something like Heidelberg or Göttingen," Potanin proudly reported in one of his letters. "Here you see a lady with a Finnish knife on her belt for digging up plants, with a birch bark box on her hip for the dug-up plants; or a gentleman leaving the village with a boy, heading into the forest to look for larvae and butterflies..."

“I won’t be far from the truth if I say that Przhevalsky treated the natives of inner Asia with suspicion, Pevtsov [an explorer of the Gobi Desert and the Mongolian Altai] with condescension, and Potanin with love…,” reports Vladimir Obruchev, who accompanied Potanin on his expedition to Central Asia.

No northern nation can do without a romantic dream of a beautiful southern country. "The poetry of Pushkin and Lermontov made Russians dream of the hot valleys of Dagestan, of Queen Tamara's tower, of the Bakhchisarai fountain. When I found myself in the Trans-Ili region, I felt that it had the same right to the attention of northern poets as Italy, the Caucasus, and Crimea," wrote Potanin.

He said that, despite his love for Siberia, he sometimes cheated on it with Mongolia and China. For 20 years, he traveled through these countries accompanied by Alexandra Viktorovna and was completely happy until she died suddenly on their fourth joint expedition, heading deep into Tibet. She left a wish to be buried in Russia. Her will was fulfilled, if the border town of Kyakhta, where Alexandra Potanina's grave is located, is considered part of Russia.

Epilogue

After his wife's death, Potanin made another expedition to China and ended this chapter of his biography by moving from St. Petersburg to Siberia.

In 1902, he finally settled in Tomsk. The city had changed beyond recognition in half a century. Now there was a university, a Technological Institute, medical clinics, a botanical garden, private newspapers, bookstores, a railroad, a telephone exchange, street lighting, and a stone theater…

The city confidently assumed the role of Siberia's cultural capital. Tomsk residents still debate who coined the term "Siberian Athens." Many believe it was Potanin.

In 1909, Siberian writer Georgy Grebenshchikov made the obligatory pilgrimage for every Russian intellectual to Yasnaya Polyana to see Leo Tolstoy, after which he made a surprising discovery: in Tomsk lived a man of the same spiritual stature, but a more complete person.

"While bowing before the majestic figure of Tolstoy, I did not find in him the genuine simplicity possessed by the modest, in comparison to Tolstoy, Siberian grandfather. All the aspiring writers, poets, artists, male and female students, teachers, who reached out to him like plants to the sun, felt in him... an older, kind, simple, and kind comrade, with whom they even dared to argue and joke, and who himself indulged everyone with his jokes and funny stories, and most importantly, with tales of the East," Grebenshchikov wrote in his article "The Great Siberian Grandfather."

At that time, Potanin was indeed busy editing and preparing Siberian folk tales for publication, but he didn't feel like a grandfather at all. "I entrust my intimate sheets to the state postal service; the state will deliver my long, hot kisses to you. In love not only with you, but also with your shoe," he wrote to the Barnaul poetess Maria Vasilyeva, whom he married in 1911 after a ten-year correspondence. The canonization process proceeded against his will and desire. In 1915, Potanin's 80th birthday was celebrated throughout Siberia. In many Siberian cities, newspapers dedicated special issues to him, and city councils announced the renaming of streets in his honor. The Omsk Duma called him "the first citizen of Siberia," and Buryat representatives called him "the ideological father of the regional intelligentsia." Brochures and anniversary collections were published, and Potanin's works were reprinted; More than 500 addresses and hundreds of letters were received, among the congratulators were Gorky, Shishkov, Korolenko.

The highlight of the anniversary was a ceremonial meeting in Tomsk attended by professors and public figures. Potanin was hailed as the man who "revealed to the world the spiritual and economic might of the country of exile."

In his response, the anniversary hero spoke of the need to "rouse the provinces to action. We must facilitate the division of the territory into regions, and we must also divide state finances into regional ones."

Two years later, in the revolutionary autumn of 1917, the Siberian Regional Duma, meeting at Tomsk University, declared Grigory Potanin its honorary chairman. Formally, he was the President of the Autonomous Siberian Republic. "The situation with Siberia is murky; rumors are that it has seceded, that some kind of government with Potanin at its helm," poetess Zinaida Gippius wrote in her diary at the end of December 1917.

For a brief moment, the provinces awoke to the activity Potanin had urged. In 1918, the Russian Civil War could have become an anti-colonialist war, waged by regional governments against the central government usurped by the Bolsheviks. But this never happened, as the White generals dreaded the specter of a united Russia. Two years later, Lenin and Trotsky reassembled the empire under the new brand of the RSFSR.

The Soviet regime, which Grigory Nikolaevich lived to see established, organized a ceremonial funeral for the “President of Siberia” in the summer of 1920.

The newspaper "Banner of the Revolution" gave the "Siberian grandfather" an obituary in which, while condemning him for his participation in the creation of Siberian statehood, it gritted its teeth and acknowledged his past achievements.

"Yesterday morning, Mr. N. Potanin died. He belonged to our political enemies. The mercenaries and lackeys of the bourgeoisie managed to use him as a weapon against the workers and peasants. When, in October 1917, the workers raised the banner of liberation of the toiling masses from the yoke of the bourgeoisie; when the power of the soviets was proclaimed, Socialist Revolutionary circles nominated him as the head of the government of autonomous Siberia... As a public figure, Potanin can only evoke feelings of disgust and indignation among the workers and peasants. He became a tool in the hands of the White Guard pack. And we speak of him not as a public figure, but as a scientist, explorer, and traveler... And now that we have received news of his death, we cast aside the harm he brought to the working class. We only say that the working class knows how to evaluate the harm that its enemies bring to it, and it can never forgive anyone for this harm, and, at the same time, the working class, building a new bright socialist life, cannot remain silent about the benefits that anyone has brought to the working masses, to humanity."