Glorious Misadventures: Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of a Russian America

by Owen Matthews

  But Russia’s fortunes – and Rezanov’s – really took off with the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War in 1757. Sparked by a colonial skirmish between British and French forces in Pennsylvania, this conflict was in many senses the true first world war. It was fought by at least fifteen European powers and principalities, with hostilities extending from Canada to India to the Philippines. Up to 1,400,000 people are believed to have been killed across the globe as a result of the prolonged hostilities, which destroyed many fledgling colonies and beggared swathes of Central Europe.15

  Russia managed to escape becoming deeply embroiled in the upheavals, but even its peripheral involvement in the Seven Years’ War was to have a profound impact on its standing as a European empire and naval power. Empress Elizabeth I – Peter’s feisty daughter, who had seized power in 1741* – began with an opportunistic land grab, ordering her armies to seize the Baltic provinces of East Prussia while Prussia’s king, Frederick the Great, was busy attacking Bohemia. In 1760 Elizabeth’s troops seized Berlin.* Russia soon retreated from Berlin but retained Königsberg, capital of East Prussia and ancient coronation place of Prussia’s kings. The loss of Königsberg to the Russians marked the definitive arrival of a powerful and unpredictable new player in the politics of central Europe. And Gavriil Rezanov, now a lieutenant general and decorated war hero, was appointed Königsberg’s first Russian commandant.

  Gavriil Rezanov probably first met Gavriil Okunev at the Admiralty in St Petersburg, a 400-yard-long complex of offices, rope-walks, dry docks and sawpits on the southern bank of the Neva next to the newly built Winter Palace. Major General Okunev, a nobleman from Pskov and a talented shipwright, had in 1746 been appointed head of Russia’s shipbuilding on the Baltic, which after the seizure of Königsburg became centred in the old Prussian port of Pillau. So Okunev and Rezanov had much business to transact together.

  Besides a professional interest in Baltic shipping, the two Gavriils had much else in common. They were both born in 1699; they were military men who owed their position to the Seven Years’ War, and their families had both been ennobled by Ivan the Terrible – the Okunevs nine years before the Rezanovs.16 They were also close neighbours in St Petersburg. Okunev lived at 2 Dvoryanskaya Street, on the Admiralty Canal, around the corner from the Rezanovs on the Neva Embankment. In terms of status Rezanov was the senior man, third in Peter the Great’s table of ranks; Okunev was, however, richer, thanks to extensive family estates around Pskov. All in all the men were well matched, financially and socially, and it was entirely natural that the two generals should eventually arrange a marriage between their children, Rezanov’s son Pyotr, a young guardsman of the Izmailovsky Regiment, and Okunev’s daughter Alexandra. In 1763 the couple’s first son, Nikolai Petrovich Rezanov, was born in St Petersburg.

  Sadly for Alexandra – and one suspects to the disapproval of both his father and father-in-law – Pyotr Rezanov’s military career proved a disappointment. A few years too young to profit from the frenzy of promotion, plunder and glory of the Seven Years’ War, Pyotr soon came to see that the outbreak of peace between Russia and Prussia made a career in the army a dead end – at least until the start of the next war. He was, however, freer than his ancestors to choose a career path outside the army. Tsar Peter III, architect of the alliance with Prussia that caused the untimely (for Rezanov at least) cessation of hostilities, reigned for just 186 days before being deposed by his energetic German wife Catherine in July 1762. But one of the few laws to survive from his mayfly reign was the liberation of the nobility from compulsory state service imposed by his illustrious grandfather and namesake, Peter the Great. Unfortunately, Peter III neglected to lift the other half of the original law on nobility, which barred members of the aristocracy from engaging in commerce. This meant that aristocrats now indeed had a career choice of sorts, but it was a narrow one between state service or idleness.

  For noblemen of modest means like Pyotr Rezanov, however, unemployment was not an option. Within civilian state service there were three pathways. The more ambitious and well connected of the nobility could attempt a career at the imperial court, the fickle fons et origo of all power, wealth and favour. For the less socially elevated, there was the civil government, consisting of the governing Senate, which supervised the bureaucracy, and ten ministries. This was the option energetically pursued by Pyotr’s younger brother Ivan, who had joined the College – Peter’s term for his embryo ministries – of Foreign Affairs and by the 1770s had risen to deputy head of its chancellery. But there was a third option: a career in Russia’s wild and distant colonies. This was risky, dangerous and not wholly respectable, but could lead to great wealth. Like many young and indigent noblemen across Europe, Pyotr Rezanov chose to leave his birthplace and seek his fortune in distant lands. For a young Russian aristocrat this meant the vast half-tamed land of Siberia.

  Footnotes

  * From the Empress Anna’s infant nephew Ivan VI, who was kept a secret state prisoner until his death in captivity twenty years later.

  * It was to be the first of three Russian invasions of Germany: ‘Iwan’ would be back in Berlin in 1814 and, in rather greater numbers, in 1945.

  2

  The Final Frontier

  In Europe we are hangers-on and slaves, but in Asia we are masters. In Europe we were Tatars, but in Asia we too are Europeans.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky, 18811

  The boiling ferment and the frantic, aimless activity which distinguishes young nations.

  Alexander Pushkin

  Spain and Russia were medieval Europe’s marcher kingdoms. Spain held the North African Moors at bay in the west, while in the east Russia battled the Mongols and their successors, the Muslim Tatars.2 Both Spain and Russia, as a result of the demands of centuries of military effort, remained more autocratic, more religious and more deeply feudal than their less-threatened continental neighbours. But both Madrid and Muscovy were richly rewarded for their struggles against the infidel in the form of vast unexplored lands full of worldly riches. Divine providence gave Spain the New World – or so Spain’s Most Catholic monarchs believed. Likewise Russia’s most Orthodox Tsars were convinced that their divine reward was Siberia, whose boundless natural resources funded the emergence of Muscovy as a European power, and forms the foundation of Russia’s oil wealth today.

  The grand princes of Muscovy had had dreams of empire since 1472, when Ivan III married Zoë Paleologina, the niece of the last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XII. Zoë brought not only her double-headed eagle coat of arms to Muscovy but also the idea that Moscow could be the successor to her fallen Byzantine homeland – a third Rome. Russia’s expansion to the west was blocked by the powerful kingdom of Poland-Lithuania and the Baltic trading cities of the Hanseatic League. But to the east the power of the Mongol-Tatars was weakening.

  It was Zoë’s grandson Ivan the Terrible who decisively turned the balance of power on Christendom’s eastern flank when he took the Tatar capital of Kazan in 1553. Ivan crowned himself caesar – in Russian, tsar – in recognition of his conquest. In 1556 he pushed his armies south along the Volga and annihilated the southern Tatars in their stronghold at Astrakhan. At a stroke Ivan had made the Volga, the great southern artery of European Russia, into a Muscovite river, opening trade to the Caspian and beyond to Persia.

  The capture of Kazan had also given Muscovy easy access to the Kama River, the Urals and the riches of Siberia itself. At the same time Europeans in search of furs and a north-east passage to China began arriving at the Arctic village of Kholmogory – later known as Arkhangelsk – at the mouth of the Northern Dvina River. The first was Richard Chancellor, head of the English Muscovy Company, London’s first chartered company of merchant adventurers, who visited in 1553.

  Meanwhile Spain’s conquests in distant America were transforming the economy of Europe with a huge influx of gold. Northern Europe was also undergoing a boom in trade and manufacture centered on wool-cloth. With this new prosperity came a bur
geoning demand for luxury goods from the East, particularly for the sixteenth century’s two greatest luxuries – spices and furs. Portuguese and English seafarers were driven to prodigies of navigation and discovery by the search for high-value spices – particularly peppercorns, nutmeg and allspice – to flavour the foods of the wealthy. In the same way Russian adventurers drove ever deeper into Siberia in search of the fox, sable and marten with which the rising merchant classes of Europe trimmed their clothes.

  Fur, in a cold and poorly heated world, was not only a symbol of wealth but also a bringer of comfort and, in the case of Russia, literally a lifesaver. Fine furs were staggeringly valuable. In 1623 one Siberian official reported the theft of ‘two black fox pelts, one worth 30 rubles the other 80’.3 The thief could have bought himself fifty Siberian acres, a cabin, five good horses, ten cows and twenty sheep on the proceeds, and still have had some of his ill-gotten money left over. No wonder painters of the new bourgeoisie, from Jan van Eyck in the Netherlands to Sebastiano del Piombo in Rome, painted their subjects’ sable collars in such loving detail. They were often worth more than the artist could hope to make in years.

  Siberian fur transformed Muscovy from a minor principality on the fringes of Europe into a great power.4 In 1595 Tsar Boris Godunov had so much of it that he sent Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II fur in lieu of military assistance against the Turks. Boris’s tribute was a dazzling show of Russia’s new wealth. The 337,235 squirrel skins and 40,360 sables, as well as marten, beaver and wolf skins Boris sent took up twenty rooms of Prague Castle. At the beginning of the seventeenth century ‘soft gold’ accounted for up to a third of Muscovy’s revenues. Without the Siberian fur rush, the wealth it brought and the vertiginous territorial expansion that it drove, the Russia of Peter the Great would have been unimaginable.

  Like the Spanish captains of the New World or the seafarers of Queen Elizabeth I of England, the conquistadors of Siberia were essentially pirates licensed by the Russian crown. The Stroganovs, a trading dynasty from the Hanseatic city-state of Novgorod, which had been incorporated into Muscovy in 1478, financed the first fur-trapping expeditions into the uplands of the Urals and pioneered the use of licensed privateers. In April 1558 Ivan the Terrible gave Anikei Stroganov rights over five million acres of Urals forest, effectively making him viceroy of the unexplored territory responsible for its development and security.5 Beyond the Urals, however, lay the Tatar khanate of Sibir, an obstacle both to obtaining furs and to the expansion of the Tsar’s dominion.

  In 1577 the Stroganovs recruited a young buccaneer named Yermak Timofeyevich. Yermak was a scion of a family of notorious river pirates who had plied the middle Volga but had found themselves out of business with the fall of Kazan and the establishment of Muscovite control over the great river. With his band of professional – and temporarily jobless – marauders Yermak headed eastwards, pushed deep into Tatar territory and in 1580 took Sibir. To placate the Tsar for taking such a step without royal permission, Yermak sent a vast haul of 2,500 sables to Moscow. Ivan was suitably impressed. In return for his gift, he made Yermak Muscovy’s viceroy in Siberia – just as Yermak’s former employer Stroganov had become lord of the Urals. Yermak also received a handsome suit of armour from the Tsar, which was to prove his undoing five years later as he attempted to swim away from a Tatar ambush but was drowned by his heavy breastplate.

  Yermak was a Cossack, one of a growing community of men who had fled serfdom in Poland, Livonia and Muscovy and sought freedom in the no-man’s-land of the mid-Volga and the south-east steppes of European Russia. Cossacks were a social caste, not a racial or national group. Their freedom was a precarious one because of the regular Tatar slaving expeditions which filled the markets of Constantinople with hundreds of thousands of new Slavic captives every year. Moscow itself had been raided and burned by Khan Devlet Giray of Crimea as recently as 1571, and the Crimean Khanate would not be finally subdued until the reign of Catherine the Great in 1783.6 Ivan the Terrible, borrowing the Stroganovs’ methods, was the first tsar to harness these outlaws to the service of the state. In the absence of any natural boundaries to his fledging empire, Ivan offered the Cossacks freedom from serfdom and a licence to exploit native peoples in exchange for their service as guardians of Russia’s eastern and southern borderlands.

  The Tsar organized the Cossacks into ‘hosts’, a military and administrative term for a tribe of armed colonists who could be instantly turned into a military force. The names of the successive hosts is a chronicle of Russia’s growing empire – Don, Kuban, Terek, Asktakhan, Ural, Orenburg, Siberian, Turkestan, Transbaikal, Amur, Ussuri. The Cossack sotni, or hundreds, elected leaders known as atamany, and when the host was not in state service it was free to explore – and maraud – on its own account.7

  These Cossacks were tough men. ‘I believe such men for hard living are not under the Sunne, for no cold will hurt them,’ wrote Richard Chancellor of the men he saw on the northern Dvina in 1553. ‘Yea and though they lye in the field two monthes at such times as it shal freeze more than a yard thicke the common soldier hath neither tent nor anything else over his head.’8 Of the three drivers of Russia’s eastward expansion – the quest for security against the Tatars, a consciousness of its imperial destiny as the inheritor of Byzantium and the adventurous avarice of Cossacks – it was the last which was by far the most potent.

  The Cossacks went east not as farmers or traders but as masters and conquerors. Muscovy was in many ways a kind of Christian khanate, and as they expanded eastwards the Russians behaved towards the natives exactly as the Tatars had behaved towards them. The peasantry was considered the personal property of the Tsar, tied to the land, and the nobility his servants. ‘When a poore Mousick meeteth with any of them [nobility or the emperor] upon the high way he must turn himself about, as not daring to look him on the face, and fall down . . . as he doth unto his Idol,’ wrote Giles Fletcher, another English visitor to the court of Ivan the Terrible.9

  The Cossacks therefore saw themselves as a kind of eastbound horde. From the native peoples they encountered they demanded hostages and tribute – tellingly known by the Tatar term yasak. In many cases Cossacks also considered the ‘provision of women’ an obligation.10 In exchange, the natives would be brought under the protection of the Tsar – a dubious privilege, since it was mostly the Russians from whom the natives most needed protection – and spared massacre.11 Over in the New World the fledgling fur trade on Canada’s St Lawrence River and Hudson Bay was based on trapping and barter with the natives. On the east coast of North America the English colonies of Virginia and Charleston were made up of property-owning agriculturalists. In Russia, however, the colonization of Siberia began and remained an economy of confiscation – just as it was in the Spanish empire in Central and South America.

  For those indigenous Siberian communities who refused to pay yasak the Cossack hosts held a crown licence, as one seventeenth-century charter put it, ‘to wage war and capture [native] children’.12 In 1642 the Buryat chief Bului was made to swear to his new Cossack overlords that his people would pay tribute in sables and foxes, or else ‘the sun will not shine on me, I will not walk the earth, I will not eat bread; the Russian sword will cut me down, the gun will kill me, fire will destroy all our villages’.13 Initially any native converts to Orthodoxy were spared the payment of yasak.* But by the mid-seventeenth century priests were accompanying Cossack raiders with orders to ‘burn all idols and toys’, herd natives into rivers for mass baptism and force them to choose just one wife.14 In 1706 all natives, regardless of religion, were made subject to the Russian yasak.15

  The Cossacks were excellent at the application of violence, but not so good at grasping the principles of sustainability. The gathering of fur-tribute was more like mining than farming – when a particular area was exhausted of its population of fur-bearing animals, usually within two decades, they would move on to new lands.

  On a modern map Siberia appears as a vast block of land
stretching 170 degrees of longitude across almost half the earth. Cossack explorers, however, would have seen it as three separate, huge river systems: the Ob-Irtysh, the Yenisei and the Lena. Each river runs south to north and drains into the Arctic Sea an area bigger than the Nile basin.16 To the south of these great river systems lie the steppes of Eurasia, the historic highway of grassland which stretches from Manchuria to Hungary. But though more easily passable, the steppes were inhabited by civilized and warlike peoples such as the Bashkirs, Kazakhs and Kyrgyz, who were subdued by the Russian Empire only in the late nineteenth century. Moreover, they yielded no furs.

  So the Cossacks became river farers and forest dwellers, making their zigzag way across Siberia up and down the great rivers and their tributaries in flat-bottomed boats, which they carried across the low hills between. Where they stopped, usually at the confluences of rivers, which were also often traditional native trading places, they built forts they called ostrogs. These rectangular timber compounds were around a hundred yards square with stockades ten to twenty feet high, with bastions mounting artillery in the corners and a parapet around the top. Inside, typically, were the house of the voevoda, or chief, a granary, barracks and a church.17 Groups of Cossacks caught by winter too far from the nearest ostrog would build zimoviye, so called from the Russian for winter. These fortified blockhouses would house as many as fifty men as they sat out the impassably deep snows and lethal frosts of the Siberian winter. In 1639, 120 years after the Spanish explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa stood on a peak in Darien and became the first European to see the Pacific,* a Cossack party of trappers under Ivan Moskvitin crossed the Okhotsk Mountains and reached the ocean from the other side. Just fifty-eight years after Yermak had taken Sibir, Russians had crossed Siberia.