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

by Owen Matthews

  Footnotes

  * Petlin’s account, however, was republished in 1625 by the English cleric Samuel Purchas in the fourteenth volume of his bestselling compendium of travelogues Purchas his Pilgrimage: or Relations of the World and the Religions Observed in all Ages and Places Discovr’d, from ye Creation unto this Presente. It caught the eye of John Milton, who describes Adam’s vision of ‘Paquin of the Sinaean kings’ and, as contemporary typography has it, the ‘Ruffian Kfar in Mofcow’ in Book XI of Paradise Lost, line 390.

  * The Chinese translators were baffled by this concept and concluded that the Russians were confused because they ‘do not have the benefit of Chinese education and culture’.

  * Later scholars have noted that this and similar passages unflattering to the Russians were, not altogether surprisingly, omitted in the Latin version drafted by the Jesuit Fathers François Gerbillon and Thomas Pereira and signed by Golovin. No one noticed at the time, however, because the Jesuits were the only men present able to read both versions. Nor were any Chinese mandarins present – the journey could only be made on horseback, and since this was considered beneath the dignity of senior Chinese officials, they sent their scribes instead.

  * Son of the explorer Eric Laxman who had so disapproved of Shelikhov.

  7

  Empire Builder

  Your son-in-law is not such a fool as you describe him.

  Nikita Demidov to Natalia Shelikhova, 10 December 17951

  In eighteenth-century Russia all businesses were family businesses. With his marriage to Anna Shelikhova, Rezanov had become a de facto partner in one of Russia’s biggest and most powerful trading houses. Fur, of course, was at the heart of the Shelikhov-Golikov Company’s business, but as the largest logistics network in Siberia, the Company also controlled a vast general trade stretching nearly halfway across the world. Natalia Shelikhova’s correspondence mentions whale baleen transported to Tomsk, walrus tusk brought from Yakutsk, frozen mammoth fur gathered on the northern Lena, Chinese plain cotton fabric, waxed paper and fireworks from Kiakhta, and even red millet brought from Turkey in scarlet leather sacks.2

  Natalia Shelikhova was in many ways the keystone of the operation. She was family matriarch, manager of the Company’s main office in Irkutsk and chief liaison with that city’s fractious merchants during her husband’s long absences. Company correspondence shows that Grigory was travelling for more than half of every year between 1788 and 1795. Supervising shipbuilding in Okhotsk, keeping his ear to the ground in the taverns of Kiakhta, showing a leg in the salons of St Petersburg, Shelikhov pushed the Company’s expansion in every possible quarter. But it was Natalia, with her ledgers, keys and scales, who kept the whole vast operation going on a daily basis. The Irkutsk merchants and her sons-in-law would address her and refer to her in their letters as matushka – little mother – a respectful term reserved for priests’ wives and the Empress. Natalia was in fact just thirty-three at the time of her daughter’s marriage in January 1795. Rezanov was just a year younger than his mother-in-law.

  Natalia was not merely a caretaker; she took decisions affecting tens of thousands of rubles. ‘I have been told that in Moscow these commodities are dearer, but I thought that it would be better to catch a titmouse at home than to await a crane in a field,’ she wrote to her husband in the summer of 1794 after disposing of thousands of furs in Irkutsk rather than sending them west.3 She also chose and hired most Company employees. One Vasiliy Solodenkin signed a contract written in Natalia’s own hand that pledged him to ‘behave in a proper manner as an honest man and not drink alcohol’.4 Tellingly, even Nikita Demidov, the family’s most important patron and financier, addressed his letters to ‘Grigory Ivanovich and Natalia Alexeyevna Shelikhov’, a highly unusual double form of address in a world where business was usually a man-to-man affair.

  The Shelikhovs’ relationship was close, if stormy and sometimes violent. ‘Believe me, my heart, I cannot forget you, day or night,’ Natalia wrote to her husband in 1792. ‘I can forget you only when I go into a deep sleep. I pray to God that you will come back to us soon. I myself often see you in my sleep: you were scolding me and beating me.’5 Her every letter contains touching updates on their children’s health. ‘I know not what to do to protect little Vanya from the smallpox, it is roaming our land full of wrath at little children.’ Ivan succumbed to the disease in 1777 aged six months. Of the Shelikhovs’ twelve children, only five survived to adulthood.

  But even this endless cycle of pregnancy, life-threatening childbirth and infant mortality did not stop Natalia from keeping herself attractive and pursuing the latest fashions. ‘Gracious Sire, Dear Friend, Grigory Ivanovich,’ she wrote to her husband in St Petersburg in March 1793. ‘We with our daughters ask you to deign to buy good and fashionable hats for our heads like those that are worn there; two strings of best pearls, good quality that would be seemly. And a pretty snuffbox for myself.’ She also asked for Italian printed silk and ostrich feathers. Even distant Siberia was following the fashion for large ostrich-feather hats set by Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, the previous season in London. Anna Shelikhova would probably have been wearing her grand new hat and pearls the first time Rezanov set eyes on her when he arrived in town.

  Rezanov and his young bride set off for St Petersburg soon after their wedding. He had left the capital less than a year before, a promising courtier of middling means, a talented and well connected man with powerful friends for sure, but nonetheless still a servant to the capricious favourite of an ageing empress. He returned one of the heirs to Siberia’s greatest fortune, a gentleman of means who no longer had to take orders from anyone – not even from Zubov himself. Rezanov installed Anna in a new house on the fashionable Liteiny Prospekt – number 24, not far from the Field of Mars.6 They were, by Rezanov’s account, happy. ‘Eight years of our marriage gave me a taste of all the happiness of this life, as though its loss will poison all the rest of my life,’ he wrote after Anna’s death.7

  Rezanov busied himself with Company business, working to build the vast edifice of contacts and bribes that would be required to secure imperial patronage for the further expansion of his father-in-law’s business. Naturally his first port of call would have been on Prince Zubov – still Rezanov’s employer in name, at least – who could be relied on to take a keen interest in any scheme likely to increase his fortune at no effort to himself. His old family friend and patron Derzhavin would be another. Derzhavin was now a senator and would shortly become head of the powerful Ministry of Commerce. But Rezanov was not to remain a mere lobbyist for the Company for long. In July 1795 grim news came from Irkutsk. Grigory Shelikhov had been stricken by some kind of poisoning. Anna, and possibly Rezanov too, rushed back to Irkutsk to be at his bedside.

  Shelikhov was in agony for three weeks before he died. He ‘has had extraordinary pain in the stomach and such an inflammation that he, in order to stop the fire for just a moment swallowed whole platefuls of ice’, wrote one Irkutsk acquaintance.8 Typhoid, a widespread disease in the insanitary towns of eighteenth-century Russia, produced similar symptoms, but typhoid’s most visible symptom was red abdominal splotches recognizable to those familiar with the disease. It usually killed within days, whereas Shelikhov lingered for weeks. Shelikhov frequently exposed himself to various diseases, both local and exotic, in his capacity as a patron of various Irkutsk Church-run hospitals, which he often visited. He also imported and handled foreign goods, most of them preserved or tanned. It is conceivable that he contracted a form of anthrax from animal hides. He also often ate foreign foods sent to him as gifts.

  But Shelikhov also had dangerous enemies. He was the wealthiest merchant in the fiercely competitive Siberian fur business, and had become so by ruthlessly cutting other operators out of rich otter-hunting grounds and hiring away their best people. This was reason enough for unscrupulous rivals to wish him dead. Shelikhov had also been accused more than once of unfair dealing. Only the previous autumn one associate h
ad accused him of seizing some personal effects and 2,000 (or 200, according to conflicting accounts) fur-seal pelts arriving as part of a cargo in Okhotsk.9 Certainly lesser merchants would murder each other for less. Whether Shelikhov was poisoned or not, his death exposed the extreme fragility of his business empire – indeed of any business in Russia whose strength lay not in the legal protection of the state but in the support of important patrons and the personal connections of its owners. Shelikhov, knowing he was on his deathbed, realized the vulnerability of his wife and heirs and drafted a long, heartfelt appeal to the Empress to protect their interests, which he dictated to his younger daughter on 30 June 1795.

  In Your mercy that You have as a Mother, forgive me that I dared to bother the Sacred Person of Your Imperial Highness in the hope that, from Your good heart, Your protection may be requested for my wife and my children. Almost three days have passed since I have started to suffer from a cruel disease which gnaws at me. If I die my wife and children will remain orphans, possibly harassed because they will be bothered by relatives who desperately want my property, which I gained by my own work . . . Possibly ill-willed people will exert their forces using various means in order to put my descendants in disarray in order to acquire my vast trading places in Siberia and on the Eastern Sea [the north Pacific]. In consideration of this and in the matter that my wife, who followed me in my sea voyage for the acquisition of property and who helped me in the upbringing of my children and in maintaining my house and who deserves my full confidence, she with my children, but no one else, should have possession of my property, which is in trading and hunting areas under the American Company.10

  Shelikhov finally expired on 20 July 1795; he was forty-eight years old. Just eight days later Natalia’s nine-month-old daughter Elizaveta also died, of an apparently unrelated illness. In addition to this double bereavement, Natalia was seven months pregnant. But the greed of her Irkutsk neighbours, business partners, friends and enemies gave her little time to mourn. The Shelikhovs had five surviving daughters but only one son, Vasiliy, who was just four years old. Natalia’s last child would be another son, named Grigory after his dead father, but given that three sons named Mikhail had already died, the Shelikhov inheritance was on shaky ground.*

  Natalia lodged her claim to her husband’s business empire at the Irkutsk Probate Court almost immediately, on the evidence of Shelikhov’s explicitly-worded will. But just as Shelikhov had predicted when he dictated the petition to the Empress, local rivals attacked his suddenly vulnerable company. Several minor shareholders challenged the terms of the will. Debtors to the Company refused to settle accounts. Anonymous gossips circulated rumours that Natalia had poisoned her husband. Natalia, doughty as she was, needed energetic male kinsmen to defend her interests in Irkutsk and some political traction in St Petersburg to push through her inheritance rights to the Company.

  Rezanov could at this point have made several choices. With his father-in-law dead and plenty of money in the bank, he could have distanced himself from the legacy of the roguish Shelikhov and settled down into the life of an idle and prosperous St Petersburg aristocrat. Natalia Shelikhova’s other son-in-law, who had married Anna’s younger sister Avdotia at the age of eleven, was Mikhail Matveyevich Buldakov, a merchant from the northern town of Velikiy Ustyug and one of Russia’s largest fur retailers. In most ways Buldakov was a far more appropriate leader for the Company than Rezanov. He was closer in class and background to the Shelikhovs, and indeed Natalia seems to have trusted him more than the aristocratic and educated Rezanov with his alien metropolitan airs. Buldakov was also a correspondent member of the Academy of Sciences and a man of solid intelligence. But Rezanov chose otherwise. In place of a Siberian family business, he saw the opportunity to turn the Company into a commercial empire that would change the world. The courtier, clerk and judge Rezanov was, it turned out, also a businessman, a visionary, and a gambler.

  First and foremost, prompt royal assent for Natalia’s right to inherit the Company was vital – not only to avoid a long and trying court case in Irkutsk but also to prove to its rivals that the Company enjoyed protection at the highest levels of the empire. But at exactly the moment when Rezanov was marshalling the Company’s friends at court to petition the Empress, bad news came in from Kodiak. As Shelikhov had feared, Archimandrite Iosaf had sent a series of blistering letters to his colleagues at the Synod full of bitter criticism of the conditions he and his priests had endured over their first winter. He wrote of the lack of candles and buildings, of life in lean-tos on the beach, the drunkenness, and fornication, the endless clam suppers. ‘Shelikhov used the name of Christ to deceive the government and entice thirty-five families to the savage shores of America, there to fall victim to his avarice,’ Iosaf thundered.

  Rezanov may not have known much about Arctic navigation, grading sable pelts or the intricacies of trans-Siberian finance, but he knew how to handle a crisis at court. Or rather, he knew exactly whom he needed to enlist to handle such a crisis. Zubov was now at the height of his powers, handling an ever-larger part of the ageing Empress’s day-to-day decision-making. Rezanov, on his return from Irkutsk, had secured promotion to collegiate councillor – equivalent of a full colonel – from the prince. Solving the problems of the Shelikhov-Golikov Company was easily within Zubov’s powers, but it would require suppressing the allegations of Shelikhov’s poisoning from Irkutsk, placating the Synod’s indignation at the treatment of its mission in Kodiak and persuading the Empress herself that Iosaf’s complaints of the Company’s moral turpitude were exaggerated. All this would take time and political capital. Rezanov would have to persuade Zubov that he would be well rewarded.

  Natalia Shelikhova dispatched her husband’s petition, as well as her own, to Nikita Demidov for presentation to Zubov and thence to the Empress herself. Naturally, a banker’s draft for 10,000 rubles was also enclosed to assist the petition’s passage to the Empress’s ear. Shelikhova’s tone was abject. ‘I ask for forgiveness for interrupting Your Radiance’s rest by my thoughts and requests,’ read Natalia’s petition to Zubov of 22 November 1795. ‘To whom could I apply but you in your patriotic ardour? Being a widow and an orphan and having young children, from whom can I ask patronage comparable to Your Radiance?’ Sensibly, she expressed her deep respect and reverence for Abbot Iosaf – ‘no person could be found there whose dignity and position is higher’ – and proposed that the monk be put in charge of the administration of justice in the colony. But, almost certainly on the advice of Rezanov, the Company’s lobbyists refrained from immediately offering Zubov the 10,000 rubles to take the petition straight to the Empress. Rezanov had something far bigger in mind.

  In Rezanov’s vision, the company would be renamed the Russian American Company, and its brief would be to bring all of Pacific America, from Alaska to California, under the Russian crown. Shelikhov had of course lobbied for an imperial monopoly similar to the one enjoyed by the British Hudson’s Bay Company, which traded furs in the territories that would later become Canada. But the scheme hatched by Rezanov in 1795 and brought to fruition over the next four years was far more ambitious in its scale and boldness.

  Rezanov’s model was the eighteenth century’s greatest powerhouse of wealth and imperial expansion, the British East India Company. In 1757 an East India Company army and its Indian allies had broken the back of Mogul power in India at the Battle of Plassey. In the forty years since, the Company had brought almost the entire Indian subcontinent under its rule, built fleets and cities and extended British dominion halfway across the globe. Other enterprises formed in its image included the Dutch East India Company, which had recently taken possession of New Holland (modern Indonesia), the Hudson’s Bay Company of Canada and the French East India Company, which controlled areas of India around Pondicherry. The Danish, Austrian and Swedish East India Companies and the Scottish Darien Company had also, with lesser degrees of success, tried their hand at trade and colonization.

  In all c
ases the basic formula was simple: a government charter granted a private corporation exclusive rights to trade across a specific piece of territory. The chartered companies were further licensed to build their own forts and ships, raise armies, issue money, fly their own flags and dispense justice to their employees and subject peoples. In exchange for their governments’ protection of their monopolies it was understood that the lands brought under the companies’ control would eventually be ceded to the crown. The costs of these ventures were born by shareholding speculators – now more politely termed investors. Thus eighteenth-century governments farmed out their imperial adventures to merchants and their hired armies.