Empires Apart (17 page)

In sheer determination, endurance and courage Bering's expedition far outclassed that of Columbus, but its historical importance was far less. After his death Bering was largely forgotten, although in one way he mirrored Columbus: his body continued to travel. In 1991 the graves of Bering and five of his companions were excavated. The remains were taken to Moscow for examination. Forensic scientists modelled Bering's head before he and his crew returned, to be reburied on what is now called Bering Island.

Bering was a true explorer, but like the Spanish conquistadors the early Cossack adventurers were less explorers than exploiters. They were looking for precious metals, furs and tribute and had no particular interest in exploration for its own sake. Indeed Dezhnev's amazing discovery of the North-East Passage seventy-five years before Bering would have remained unknown had not one of Bering's scientists found his papers in the Siberian city of Yakutsk.

Above all the Cossacks wanted furs. At its peak in the middle of the seventeenth century fur was Russia's second most important industry. Only agriculture created more wealth, and agriculture provided nothing to compare with the get-rich-quick opportunities in the Siberian fur trade. Beaver, wolf, squirrel, marten, bear and above all sable provided enormous wealth to those who could seize it. By the end of the seventeenth century fur-bearing animals were facing extinction in large parts of Siberia, and this, combined with the new competition from the Hudson Bay Company, drove Russian hunters into ever more inaccessible parts of the continent, making the whole of Siberia theirs. As in America at the same time only one thing stood in their way: the native inhabitants. And just as on the other side of the Pacific the battle between the interlopers and the interloped was entirely one-sided. The fate of the Siberian and American natives is uncannily similar. Guns and germs were the cornerstones of conquest. In their violence the Russian colonisers again mirrored the Spanish conquistadors. Pyotr Golovin, who arrived in the Sakha country in 1640, not only terrified the natives but his own Cossack troops, who petitioned the tsar for his removal, claiming that he had tortured them and their wives: impaling, blinding, pulling out veins and putting recalcitrant troops in giant heated frying pans. Forty years later the still rebellious Sakha rose up under their chief Dzhenik, the Russian Geronimo. But whereas Geronimo was eventually captured and shipped off to a reservation, when Dzhenik was captured he was flayed alive and, perhaps not apocryphally, his newborn son was suffocated in his still-warm skin.

Until they reached the borders of China the Russians faced none of the formidable military forces they were to face later as they expanded west, but they did face resistance. For example, the Buryats, a Mongol people living along what are now the borders of Russia and Mongolia, held them up for over thirty years. The first Russian outpost in Buryat territory, built at Bratsk on the Angara river in 1631, survived just three years before its garrison was massacred. The Buryat wars drained Russian resources but an uneasy peace was finally imposed, broken by a serious revolt in the mid-1690s and scattered insurgency well into the next century.

Yermak and his successors fought their way east with amazing brutality, but the main killer was disease, especially smallpox, syphilis and influenza. Anna Reid describes the effect on the tribes she studied: ‘The first epidemic – probably of smallpox – of which records survive broke out in 1630 and may have killed as many as half of all Khant, Mansi, Nenets and Ket. In the 1650s smallpox crossed the Yenisey, killing up to 80 per cent of the northern Evenk and Sakha, and nearly half the Yukagir. In the early eighteenth century it reached Kamchatka, cutting a swathe through the Itelmen and Koryak. Syphilis was a slower killer. Widespread among Russian settlers – no true Sibiryak, it was said, possessed a fully intact nose – it quickly spread to the indigenous people.'The plagues continued right through the nineteenth century. Smallpox epidemics in 1884 and 1889 killed almost a third of the population in parts of Siberia, although by now it struck European and native alike. It is an odd coincidence of history that at exactly the same time (the late 1630s) smallpox killed around 50 per cent of the Khant (a western Siberian tribe closely related to modern Finns and Estonians), and around 50 per cent of the Hurons (a native tribe in southern Canada).

Penetrating deep into eastern Siberia, the Russians established Yakutsk in 1632 and soon heard reports about the Amur river basin, a rich grain-producing region to the south. Three years later the first Cossacks started to settle in the area, but Chinese forces seem to have wiped the colonies out by 1658. The Russians tried again fifteen years later, but in 1686 a powerful Chinese force destroyed the Russian base at Albazin, and in
the Treaty of Nerchinsk the Manchus forced a Russian withdrawal north into Siberia, away from the Amur. For the time being the limits to Russia's eastern expansion had been drawn.

The Russian approach to colonising Siberia differed markedly from the English practice in America in four significant ways, reflecting differences in geography, economics, religion and politics.

First, the control and ownership of land was not as important. On the one hand there was no shortage of land in Siberia, so there was less need to drive the native populations off it, and on the other hand much of the land was so inhospitable that the natives were welcome to keep it. The newly conquered territories were not as attractive as the plains of North America, largely for reasons of climate, and so immigration was much lower. Consequently the Russians who did settle needed the existing populations to provide extra labour, food and staples.

Second, the Russians wanted furs, but they did not want to pay for them. It is possible to talk about the English and French fur ‘trade' in North America in which, at least in theory, both Europeans and natives gained by the exchange of goods. The Russians, with a few exceptions, did not trade: they exacted tribute – furs to send back home and women for more immediate use. This necessarily implied that the Russian fur expeditions were more brutal; there was only one way to enforce tribute and that was through overwhelming force.

Third, Russian Orthodox Christianity had little desire to proselytise. The native populations were in general allowed to continue with their old religions. The fabulous Buddhist monasteries of the Buryats, for example, were left unmolested; later, indeed, a Buddhist temple was even constructed in St Petersburg. Not until the arrival of twentieth-century communism were the native religions systematically eradicated, their priests murdered and their shrines and centuries-old manuscripts destroyed.

Finally, and most fundamentally, colonisation, although pushed forward by powerful merchants and mercenary Cossacks, was ultimately
controlled by the tsar. Russia remained an autocracy and colonisation proceeded in the manner that suited the state. Conquered territory belonged to the tsar and was administered by his centralised bureaucracy. The great departments of state included not just functional offices (like the treasury or the state department in the US) but territorial departments. Under the grand dukes of Muscovy these had been created to administer the territories, like Novgorod, that came under Muscovy's control. In the sixteenth century, when the khanate of Kazan was conquered, it was governed by a new department, and in the next century another was created to handle Siberia. At this time Russia had no concept of private property, and the new colonies simply became part of the tsar's personal estate, to be exploited entirely as he or she wished. There are parallels in the early royal colonies in North America, but these were aberrations that had no lasting impact on American history.

These four factors came together to produce a radically different imperial culture. Because the Russians had little desire to dispossess the natives, and indeed needed their support, and because they were relaxed about native customs, the pressures that led to genocide in America were almost entirely absent. This meant that the tsars were able to use the strategy that the British used so successfully in most of their colonies after the loss of America: co-option. Native chieftains were simply enrolled in the imperial civil service. Kuchum's family in Sibir and Buryat leaders on the Mongolian border were given Russian titles. Some 300 Sibir chieftains entered Russian government service. Over time they became Russified and, as Anna Reid points out, their ‘families were assimilated into the mainstream Russian nobility, as proven by the long list of famous Russian surnames with Turkic or Mongol roots'.

The Russian dependence on ‘tribute' distinguished Russian imperialism from later American trade-based imperialism, but it did closely resemble the colonialism of the first American settlers. Tribute was as central a part of early American expansion as early Russian. The concept is critical to understanding imperialism. In Russia tribute had been fundamental to the Vikings and Mongols, and continued when the Russians themselves
pushed east. The essence of imperialism is that wealth is transferred from the colonised to the coloniser. Over time American imperialism replaced tribute with trade, so that today the United States sucks in raw materials, food and manufactured product from the rest of the world to maintain its disproportionately high standard of living without having to resort to force, but in the earliest days of New England tribute was almost as important for the colonies' survival as it was for the sparsely populated Russian colonies in Siberia.

Violence was an integral part of tribute collection. Like the English colonisers Russians were not averse to taking hostages to ensure that the tributes were paid. In 1632 Pyotr Beketov started the conquest of the Sakha people on the Lena river in the traditional way, demanding tributes, and when that initially failed he killed a few warriors and took the son and nephew of one of the chiefs hostage. Another chief refused to be blackmailed in this way, so Beketov and his Cossacks burnt their village to the ground; three women were the only survivors of the inferno, and Beketov happily reported that all three had been captured by his men. Beketov's motivation may have been quite different to Underhill's at the Mystic Massacre, being naked greed uncloaked by religious bigotry, but the end result was exactly the same.

The fact that Russian imperialists had no concept of ethnic cleansing did not make them any less brutal than imperialists in the New World. Indeed, in order to extract tribute they engaged in massive and systematic terror. In the winter of 1763–64 the natives of the Aleutian Islands midway between Siberia and Alaska rose up in rebellion, killing 150 Russian tribute-collectors. The Russian reprisal two years later was horrific; eighteen villages were destroyed and prisoners in their hundreds were slaughtered. After the massacre the Aleuts never rebelled again.

Nor did the lack of a policy of genocide and the co-option of native leaders imply that the Russians were any less racist than the English. Native tribes were almost universally regarded as slovenly, idle and untrustworthy – characteristics routinely ascribed to American natives by white settlers. The native nobility may have entered the Russian
mainstream, but the mass of the native population stayed on the fringes. At best a few of the Russians sent east as imperial civil servants acted with the paternalistic colonial instincts that the British like to believe characterised their own empire. Much more typically, Russians took whatever they could and made no attempt to improve the conditions under which the natives lived.

By western standards the Russian civil service has always been fundamentally corrupt, but this is to misunderstand the basis upon which it has operated. The civil service existed primarily to collect taxes, performing exactly the same role for the tsars as the tsars' predecessors had for the Mongol khans. Each year the tsars decided how much they wanted to spend and told the civil service to collect it. How it was collected was not especially important, and crucially the servants themselves were not paid. Instead they were expected to collect something extra for themselves, just as the dukes of Muscovy had in Mongol times. It was considered perfectly natural that once they had passed on the specified sums to the tsar they then ‘fed' themselves; this tradition was known by the Muscovite term of kormlenie. Within reason how much the civil servants ‘fed' themselves was up to them. There were periodic attempts at reform; Peter the Great abolished the kormlenie and introduced salaries, but there was never enough cash to pay them and the old customs continued. At one point the government even set up checkpoints on the main road from Siberia to Moscow in order to stop and search returning bureaucrats and their families, to ensure that the amount of plunder they were bringing back was not ‘exorbitant'. Stories abound of provincial governors creeping back into Moscow along deserted back roads in the dead of night with their wagons full of ill-gotten booty extorted from the natives.

A few native families may have moved into log cabins and settled into the sedentary ways of their new masters, even in a very few cases converting to their masters' religion, but the vast majority stayed in their felt yurts and continued to worship Buddha, Islam or their shamans. The divide between Russian and non-Russian persists to the present day. Under the communists natives were often installed in leading positions,
but almost always with Slavs alongside to pull the strings. Although Siberian natives suffered enormously under Stalin it is revealing that they appear so infrequently in recent accounts of the Siberian gulags; even in their desperation Russian political prisoners could still look down on those among whom they were thrust.

Whether by force or fortune, by the middle of the seventeenth century Russia had an empire of enormous size. Its history from that time up to the recent past is one of almost continuous conquest. In seizing Kazan and Astrakhan and launching into Siberia, Ivan the Terrible not only whetted his nation's territorial appetite but also demonstrated its imperial prowess. For centuries under Mongol suzerainty the dukes of Muscovy had been accreting power and land, but they had remained one among many. Now they were no longer dukes or grand dukes or even kings; now they were emperors, and emperors determined to expand their empire.