Consul Jonas Lied and Russia

This interdisciplinary anthology with five Russian and six Norwegian contributors discusses the forgotten Norwegian businessman Jonas Marius Lied's adventurous life and activities in Russia from 1910 to 1931. With his great project "The Siberian Company", founded in Christiania in 1912, Lied opened an arctic sea route between Western Europe and Asiatic Russia, via the Kara Sea and the great Siberian rivers Yenisei and Ob. Success was secured when Fridtjof Nansen in 1913 accepted to join Lied's second expedition from Tromsø to Siberia, but in 1918 the Company was nationalized by the Bolsheviks. A range of leading specialists discusses Jonas Lied's pioneer activities as industrialist and Consul of Norway in Siberia before the October revolution and the importance of his unique collection of art from Pushkin's time, acquired in Moscow in the 1920s and preserved quite anonymously on his ancestral farm Sølsnes in Romsdal. Among the contributors are Professor Zinaida Bonami, Vice-Director of the State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow; Jens Petter Nielsen, Professor of History and Circumpolar Studies at the University of Tromsø, and Per Egil Hegge, Former Editor of Norway's most important newspaper Aftenposten. Marit Werenskiold, Professor of Art History at the University of Oslo, has written an ample introduction.