Empires Apart (15 page)

The colonies to the north of Chesapeake Bay, in a great swathe from Delaware up to Newfoundland, differed significantly one from another, but they differed much more profoundly from the colonies further south. By the middle of the eighteenth century the northern colonies were developing the heterogeneity of cultures – German, Dutch, Scandinavian, as well as British – and the economic dynamism that would become such a feature of later American history. Economic prosperity depended on trade and expanding markets, and that brought with it more toleration of the religion and cultures of others. That tolerance extended to toleration of the intolerable. Slavery still formed the bedrock of life in British North America. New England's economic well-being depended on providing supplies to the Caribbean colonies, and it soon became home to one of the world's largest merchant fleets, benefiting enormously from the British Navigation Acts, which decreed that only British ships could carry cargo to and from its colonies (and British included New English). As well as protecting their commerce from Dutch and other competitors, the American colonies depended on a British army willing to protect it from the French to the north, the Spanish to the south and hostile natives to the west. Safe behind barriers of tariffs and gunpowder, the English colonies started to prosper.

With wealth came power. Whereas in the early days the English colonial heart lay in the West Indies, it now moved to the mainland. Boston assumed a commanding position controlling the mercantile wealth of all the English colonies, but it was later overtaken by the more cosmopolitan New York. Philadelphia too grew in importance as it took over from Boston the role of provisioner to the southern and Caribbean colonies, being both closer to them and to the more fertile farmlands of Pennsylvania.

Ostentatious displays of wealth began to characterise the cities of the north as much as the grand plantations of the south. The elites aped European culture and started to develop their own. Harvard was founded in 1636, but civilisation was a fragile flower. Forty years later, and only a few miles from Harvard, the new colonists showed another side of their
character, demonstrating their continuing intolerance for anyone who crossed the line that separated the godly from the godless.

Joshua Tift made the mistake of quite literally going native. He married a native woman and went to live with her family. Furious Puritans raided their village and captured Tift. What happened then is open to dispute. One respected historian has recently described how the settlers tied Tift's limbs to horses and tore him apart. Another version claims that he was hanged, taken down before he died, cut open and forced to watch his entrails and genitals burning before being beheaded. His body was then cut into four parts and his head displayed on a stake. Whatever the precise form of his death, it was an act of savagery Ivan the Terrible would have understood all too well.

Such acts are not what the early colonists are remembered for. The first English settlers are held up not as exemplars of tsarist-style savagery but as the forerunners of modern democracy. In 1893 historian Frederick Turner argued, in his enormously influential work
The Significance of the Frontier in American History
, that a limitless supply of free land occupied only by insignificant natives led almost inevitably to the values of equality and democracy that form the bedrock of the American political culture. It was the westward expansion of the American frontier, he argued, that ensured that Americans developed the individualism that he thought was the hallmark of American democracy. Proponents of the ‘Turner Thesis' argue that the ever-present frontier allowed those dissatisfied with their lot to move on, and so those that remained did so only by consent. That consent was achieved through the granting of personal liberty, individual rights and democracy. At the same time those who moved to the frontiers and beyond were demonstrating the spirit of independence and self-reliance that is the natural corollary of democracy. Later American experience may lend support to this thesis, but the history of the first American colonies presents quite a different picture. In the south, the presence of the frontier made more territory available not for the creation of democracy but for the expansion of slavery. In the north, those moving to the frontiers were not yearning for freedom but were as often dedicated to the theocratic suppression of liberty.

A clearer vindication of the Turner Thesis occurred on the other side of the world. On the wilderness frontiers of southern Russia in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries disgruntled serfs, escaping criminals and soldiers who had ended up on the losing side created their own society beyond the arm of tsarist autocracy. These horsemen of the steppes were the nearest Russia ever produced to the noble frontiersman and gunfighters of American legend. Eventually their descendants were reabsorbed into Russian society, inspiring hero worship among their compatriots while enemies cowered at the very thought of their name. They were the Cossacks. Thanks to them, Russia would expand to the Pacific at a pace that America would never come close to matching.

CHAPTER 5

RUSSIA BETWEEN WEST AND EAST

History is made up of words, and the nuances of history are determined by the words chosen to describe the events of the past. Russians seized and settled the region on the eastern Baltic coast where the city of St Petersburg now stands just as the English seized and settled the region on the western Atlantic coast where Boston now stands. The settlement of St Petersburg was on an altogether larger scale, and history books talk not of the ‘settlement' of Livonia but of its ‘conquest'. Nobody talks about the conquest of New England. The creation of the American empire was hidden behind other words. America expanded not by conquest but by ‘settlement' or ‘colonisation' or, occasionally, by ‘annexation'. Russia conquered its way to empire; America merely grew.

America advanced slowly to the Pacific, exploiting the rich resources it found by planting its own natives to replace those already there. Russia advanced to the Pacific more rapidly and found a land that was largely inhospitable; to gain other resources it had to look elsewhere – to ‘conquests' in the south and west. Whatever the terminology used, the imperatives that drove Russia to conquer territory in its paths to the Baltic and the Black Sea were the same that drove it to seize the barren lands of Siberia. In the same way the imperatives that drove America westward were the same that led it to attack Canada or annexe Florida from the Spanish. Settling New England and Livonia; annexing Texas and
Turkistan; occupying California and Chechnya: all were manifestations of the same desire to push forward the wild frontiers.

Children's tastes are fickle. This year's must-have toy is next year's embarrassing antique. Fads are created and, once their full commercial value has been extracted, they are lost in the dark corners of childhood memory, only to be resurrected much later as sepia-tinted nostalgia.

In 1955 the annual craze was manufactured by Walt Disney with a new television show. Some of the episodes were not long enough, so to pad them out the scriptwriter wrote a song. He had never written a song before, but in just twenty minutes he and a colleague produced words and music; in six months 7 million copies were sold. No record had ever sold so fast. It seemed that every child in the English-speaking world was singing endlessly about ‘the land of the free' and its hero, Davy Crockett, ‘King of the Wild Frontier'.

A relatively obscure nineteenth-century politician had been turned into a national hero. Within weeks parents were buying Davy Crockett watches, guitars, toothbrushes and lunchboxes. The trademark coonskin cap became obligatory for the street cred of every six-year-old boy (the price of raccoon reportedly leapt from 25 cents a pound to $8 a pound). A year later the craze was over. Television's Davy Crockett had died heroically at the Alamo and actor Fess Parker was off to pastures new, eventually becoming one of California's top winemakers. But the folk-memory remained; a genuine national hero had been created. His name became synonymous with a virile patriotism, so that when the US army decided the next year that XM-388 was not the most gripping of names for its new wonder-weapon, a tiny nuclear warhead that could be fired from a recoilless rifle, they chose to call it the Davy Crockett. (As if to illustrate that the American attitude to foreigners had remained unchanged since Davy Crockett's days, critics concerned about nuclear fallout were told not to worry: the Davy Crockett would stop the Russians in their tracks – and so would only ever be used in Europe, well away from America.)

The equivalent figure to Crockett in Russian mythology is Yermak Timofeyevich, a frontiersman and explorer who preceded Crockett to a martyr's death by 250 years. Yermak's name has remained as commercially potent as Crockett's (one of Moscow's leading restaurants is named after him today), and he has the same heroic significance in the folk-memory of his nation. When the Russian navy commissioned the world's first true icebreaker in 1898, Admiral Makarov named it Yermak. Yermak even has his own song, the tune of which is known to millions of Russians, although unlike Davy Crockett's his is a genuine folk song. Yermak symbolises the coming of age of Russia, and in this too he parallels Crockett. America formed as a collection of dissimilar colonies, uniting in conflict with a distant empire, and then cementing themselves together in a massive expansion that eventually reached the Pacific. Crockett represented that post-colonial frontier spirit when for the first time it became meaningful to speak of ‘America' as a nation state. Yermak did just the same for Russia, appearing on the stage of history at a critical point when Russia, having shrunk from the glories of Kievan Rus to the Mongol-dependent Duchy of Muscovy, finally became recognisably ‘Russia'.

Muscovy had been just one of many principalities into which the kingdom of the Rus fractured before and after the Mongol invasion. In 1300 it covered more than 7,500 square miles. When Ivan III, Ivan the Great, mounted the throne in 1462 he inherited 166,000 square miles. The secret of Muscovy's astonishing growth was sycophancy; when the khan growled Muscovy grovelled. Such obeisance was rewarded with grants of land and authority. Muscovy not only provided the Mongols with taxes and troops raised from its own lands but also collected taxes from neighbouring princes for the khan. When those princes could not pay the Muscovite princes they first lent them money at usurious rates and then foreclosed on the debts. Not for nothing was Ivan I known as Ivan Moneybags.

When the Mongols finally conceded power in Russia they left no state behind them. Their immediate successors were not monarchs in
the sense that the Tudors were monarchs on the other side of Europe. They were warlords whose rule extended as far as their military might; their borders moved from year to year with the vicissitudes of battle. Ivan III may have employed Italian architects to remodel Moscow, and Ivan IV, Ivan the Terrible, may have crowned himself Caesar and styled his capital the Third Rome, successor to the glories of Constantinople, but few western visitors would have shared their vision. Indeed at that time Russia was not even part of Europe, as Peter the Great's court cartographer had yet to move the frontier of Europe east to the Urals. To European monarchs Ivan the Terrible was another barbarian despot who threatened from the east, a bothersome but fortunately unsuccessful invader. This view reflected an innate sense of superiority in the west that was not entirely fair; when Ivan came to the throne his realms were already larger than England, France and Spain put together. But the west's condescension seemed justified by their own military strength and by the weakness of Ivan. That Russia was an alien land with a king some way below the standards of western Europe was made very obvious in 1571 when Devlet Giray, the Muslim khan of Crimea, one of the Mongol successor states, sacked Moscow and captured thousands of Slavs to be carried off as slaves.

Ivan the Terrible needed lands to conquer. Warlords by definition live by war. He could wreak continual terror on his duchy and pass his fearsome reputation on to his heirs, but sooner or later someone more warlike would wrest the crown from his family. He needed external success. Yermak Timofeyevich provided that success, although not in the way Ivan had expected.

In looking for territory to conquer, Muscovy was torn between attacking a prosperous ‘civilised' Europe to the west or the crumbling remnants of the Mongol empire to the east. Ivan's preference, like most of his successors, was to go for the richer target rather than the easier, but in the long-running Livonian wars he was outclassed by the Poles and Swedes. In frustration he turned to the south and east. He attacked and destroyed the Tartar khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan. In doing
so he doubled the size of his kingdom, pushing down the Volga to the Caspian. In terms of land and people, if not in wealth, the conquest of Kazan represented a step change (indeed a steppe change) in the fortunes of the Grand Duchy.