Philip Longworth - Russia

Dezhnev was a Siberian serviceman who had been sent into the wilderness in search of ‘new people’ from whom the government could extract tribute. He set out with twenty-four other trappers, hunters and traders, most of them working on their own account. They went by sea and land — whichever seemed more practical, given the topography and the season. Eventually they came to the river Anadyr. ‘We could catch no fish,’ he reported subsequently; ‘there was no forest, and so, because of hunger we poor men went separate ways… [Half the party] went up the Anadyr [overland] and journeyed for twenty days but saw no people, traces of reindeer sleds, or native trails,’ so they turned back.

Eventually the twelve survivors went by boat up the river, and at last came upon some Yukagirs.

We captured two of them in a fight [in which] I was badly wounded. We took tribute from them by name, recording in the tribute books what we took from each and what for the Sovereign [Tsar]’s tribute. I wanted to take more… but they said ‘We have no sables [for] we do not live in the forest. But the reindeer people visit us and when they come we shall buy sables from them and pay tribute to the Sovereign.’

The arrival of a rival tribute collector, however, sparked some violence and dried up the flow of tribute.

Dezhnev worked on in Siberia, and some fifteen years later we find him bombarding the Siberia Office with petitions:

I, your slave, supported myself on your… service on the new rivers with my own money and my own equipment, and I… received no official pay in money, grain and salt from 1642 to 1661… because of the shortage of money and grain… I risked my head [in your service,] was severely wounded, shed my blood, suffered great cold and hunger, and all but died of starvation… I was impoverished by shipwreck, incurred heavy debts, and was finally ruined… Sovereign, have mercy, please. 10

Russian petitioners commonly expressed themselves in piteous as well as slavish terms, but Dezhnev’s plea has the ring of truth, and in due course the government authorized reasonable compensation to be paid to him — though one may assume that it corroborated his claim with its records first. The discovery of places and people continued apace, driven by the state’s unassuagable appetite for more assets and more income, whether in coin or kind. But there were limits. One day venturers came across tribesmen who, when accosted for tribute, asked why they should pay the Tsar of Russia when they already paid tribute to the Emperor of China. By the 1680s the two countries were engaged in a border war. The Russians built forts — Albasin and Argunsk — on the lower reaches of the Amur river. The Chinese brought up a small army with artillery, and proceeded to destroy them. Hostilities were tempered by a mutual interest in trade, which, since the Manchu government banned the export of bullion, had to be carried on by barter, the Chinese paying in silk and tea for Russian furs and hides. A formal treaty between the two governments was concluded at Nerchinsk in 1689. The negotiation was conducted in Latin, Jesuits based in Beijing and a Romanian emigre to Moscow serving as interpreters, and, since at this point Chinese strength in the region was greater than Russia’s, the deal was struck largely on China’s terms.

The conquest of Siberia turned out to be a factor of critical importance to the development of a new Russian empire. It ensured a continuing supply of furs which soon accounted for as much as a quarter of the entire revenue of the tsar’s exchequer. 11In this way the ermine skins that trimmed the robes of English peers, the bearskins worn by European soldiers, and the sables prized by German burghers and by grandees at the imperial court of China contributed to Russia’s rise to world power. Siberia furnished other assets too: rare falcons, prized by hunters in Europe as well as Arabia; oil and grease from the blubber of the seals that frequented the coasts; narwhal tusks, which some alchemists and physicians mistook for magic unicorns’ horns; and the more common but still valuable walrus tusks. Siberia turned out to be rich in minerals, too — including gold — and its possession was to revolutionize Russia’s strategic position, providing access to China, the Pacific and North America.

Some time was to pass before Moscow appreciated all this, however. Ironically, this generation of Russia’s empire-builders found great difficulty in comprehending the geography of its possessions. In 1627 Tsar Michael did order a book to be compiled which described all the more significant settlements in his dominions and explained their accessibility to each other. The result was a great atlas in words, which was to be in almost constant use in the decades that followed, providing practical guidance for the tsar’s messengers, who would take copies of the relevant sections before they set out on a mission. 12The information was updated as new and better routes were reported, but the first conventional map of Siberia produced in Russia dates from 1667, and finding one’s way to Siberia’s extremities continued to depend very largely on directions given by old Siberia hands.

If geography was one problem, administration was another. The great distances involved (it took two years for a convoy to reach Moscow from Yakutsk), the very low density of population, and the harsh climate made supply, especially to remote outposts, a nightmare. The Russians in central and eastern Siberia needed regular supplies of rye flour and salt, besides fishing line, canvas, tools, clothing and other necessities, and beads and buttons for the natives. Merchants who provided such services risked life and limb as well as privation, though the rewards could be commensurate. The government often used them in fulfilling many of the state’s functions. It had to enforce tribute and tax collection, and protect consignments of valuable furs and ivory from robbers; it was ultimately responsible for supply, especially of food, and for maintaining order and administering justice. All this had to be done with scarce resources. The officials who ran Siberia enjoyed greater freedom than most, but their responsibilities could be awesome.

Until 1637, when a separate department was set up exclusively to administer Siberian affairs, thirty or so clerks in the Kazan Department had to manage the logistics, finance and taxation, security and defence, justice and food provision for the entire south-east as well as Siberia. Since there was insufficient money to pay all its officials, the government allowed them to deduct their reward from the revenues they collected — usually in the form of furs, which in effect became currency in Siberia. Hostile natives were another problem. The state could not spare many troops to keep order, nor much equipment, and the natives’ weaponry was not invariably Stone Age. One petition to Tsar Michael from a service outpost pleaded for 200 carbines and coats of armour, because Buriat tribesmen in the area ‘have many mounted warriors who fight in armour and helmets… whereas we, your slaves, are ill-clothed, lack armour and our musket shot cannot pierce their armour’. 13Taming Siberia was a shoestring operation.

Siberia’s native peoples comprised a colourful variety of ethnological and linguistic types. They included Mongols, reindeer-herding Tungus (Evenki), Yakuts and Itelmens, in addition to smaller populations of Chukchis, Kets, seal-hunting Yugits and Eskimos, the great majority of them pagan animists. 14If they suffered less from the colonial experience than did the peoples of Central and South America or Africa, it was largely due to very low population density. There could never have been more than a quarter of a million of them in the whole wide country in the seventeenth century. This limited the toll taken by epidemics, and increased opportunities to avoid danger, whether from Russians or from other tribes. Some clashes with the Russians were inevitable, especially since some of the first Russian venturers were desperate and violent men, but did the high profile of Russian officialdom make relations with native peoples any less bloody than they were in other empires being created at that time?