The economic recovery was quicker than the demographic. The leading American economic historian of Russia, Richard Hellie of Chicago, concludes that normal economic activity’ had been restored by 1630. But Russia’s ability to break through the ramparts that separated her from the West depended on more than this — indeed, on something like an economic miracle. Hellie argues that the absence of guilds, which had inhibited economic development in western Europe, was one advantage. The government created another in 1649, when it removed previously existing restrictions on urban craftsmen and traders, and limited the economic privileges of the Church. Furthermore, the state maintained a stable currency, enforced standard weights and measures, reduced the number of internal toll charges, and kept communications relatively safe from bandits for most of the time. All this helped to promote the economy. On the other hand the final imposition of serfdom, according to Hellie, was bad for the country’s development, because it confined the peasant labour force to the Volga—Oka region around Moscow, where soils were relatively poor, hampering agricultural development in the more productive Black Earth zones of the south and east. 4
Yet the maintenance of a large labour force around Moscow was essential if the state, which protected the economy, was to function. A free labour market would not have guaranteed that. Nor would a free market necessarily have promoted faster economic development. The problem arose not so much from the state and the autocracy squeezing initiative out of society (as some historians argue) as from the conservatism of most Russian merchants, who showed much less initiative than their Western counterparts. They viewed their privileges merely as monopolies to be exploited. 5 At the same time wealthy magnates, so far from investing productively, tended to stockpile wealth and acquire luxuries, otherwise engaging with the market as little as possible. They continued to produce the bulk of their needs in their own households on their own estates, as in bygone times. Rather than the Russian state restricting economic growth through its interference in economic life, it could be argued that the taxes it imposed stimulated production and that it filled some of the gaps which unenterprising Russians of means had neglected. 6
Siberia was to be a major factor in Russia’s recovery. Ivan IV’s backing for the Stroganov venture (see Chapter 5) continued to pay handsome dividends, but at the beginning of the seventeenth century the vast potential of Siberia had not yet been recognized. Its huge expanses remained almost entirely terra incognita, its population, chiefly native peoples, small. Although the disruption of the Time of Troubles had displaced many Russians and encouraged migration to the periphery of the Empire, most migrants preferred to move south rather than east; and although the laws required the return of runaway serfs to their landlords, those who benefited from their labour were reluctant to surrender them. So population movement into Siberia remained a trickle. Trappers and traders went there, but they lacked the resources, the capability and perhaps even the inclination to organize the exploitation of the territory in any thoroughgoing manner, and so the task fell to the state. 7
Concern to secure the biggest possible tax income led it to build forts at distant trading stations and to devise settlement programmes. In 1601 the Godunov regime had mounted an expedition to a winter trading station called Mangazeia on the Yenisei river deep in the icy tundra at the very edge of the Arctic Circle. The purpose was to build a log fort and administration centre, where traders would gather and taxes could be collected. Although the dismal area was a hunting ground of the feared Samoyeds, who were reputed to eat their own children, they could be forced to pay tribute to the benefit of the state. Mangazeia was to become an important base for the penetration of Siberia as far as the Pacific.
At the same time, since all virgin land was regarded as crown property, the state was anxious to make cultivable parts of Siberia productive. It therefore encouraged peasants not already in the tax net to settle around new log forts, providing them with food and seedcorn, and sometimes much more, to get them started. 8 Such opportunities were to be announced in the market places of appropriate towns. ‘Whoever is willing to go to the Taborinsk area …’ ran one such proclamation, ‘will be given a plot of arable land and money from our Treasury for horses and farm buildings … and tax exemption for one year or more depending on the condition of the land they settle, and one ruble or two for transportation depending on the size of the family.’ 9
The river Yenisei, Russia’s eastern limit in 1601, also marked the eastern limit of cultivable land in Siberia, so the lure of free farms for would-be homesteaders did not work beyond that point. Nevertheless, within half a century Russians and the Russian state had reached the Pacific. Yakutsk, where there are frosts for nine months of the year, was founded in 1637; Lake Baikal was reached in 1647, the Bering Strait in 1648.
The quest had originally been for furs, then salt (the foundation of the Stroganovs’ fortune), iron, fish and walrus tusks. Siberia’s gold was as yet undiscovered, and its rich oilfields and natural gas and aluminium deposits — the bases of future wealth — were unknown and unneeded.
The pioneers were Cossacks, boatmen, trappers and traders. Their technology was simple, and they lacked navigational instruments. They sailed Arctic seas from estuary to estuary in boats they had built themselves; they traversed permafrost landscapes, and braved their ways across 4,000 miles of uncharted taiga to Chukhotka, Kamchatka and the frontiers of China. Many died in the process. Yet these Russian explorers found their way across the vast, inclement tracts of northern Asia amazingly quickly. Often they were oblivious of their achievement. One such was the Cossack Semeon Dezhnev, who found the straits separating Asia from America in 1648, eighty years before Vitus Bering.
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, w
hen 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. 11 In 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. 12 The 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’. 13 Taming 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. 14 If 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?
The state’s policy of demanding native tribute provoked resistance and retaliation as well as compliance. Distance from Moscow encouraged some officials to collect more than was due and pocket the difference, to demand bribes, to sell justice, and to take natives as household slaves. But the natives sometimes retaliated. In 1634 Buriat tribesmen burned down Fort Bratsk, and ten years later, angered by the Russians, they mustered over 2,000 warriors to massacre them in their scattered settlements. The government understood at an early stage that ill-treatment of natives could lead to costly campaigns of pacification. As a result, it introduced a policy that took account of native fears and past experience. In 1644, for example, the governor of Irkutsk was told that
The Sovereign Tsar … has ordered that [tribute-paying native people] always be treated with consideration, that they suffer no violence, losses, extortions or impositions, and that … they should live in peace without fear, pursuing their occupations, and serve the Sovereign Tsar … and wish him well … Servicemen are ordered to bring men of newly-discovered lands who do not yet pay tribute under the exalted arm of the Sovereign Tsar, but in a kindly, not a violent manner.
Furthermore, a governor receiving such an order was to announce the policy with formal ceremony to representatives of the natives concerned. Enforcement was sometimes difficult, but the government did take steps to enforce the rule and punish oppressive agents and officials.
Prejudice was confined to religion, but conversion was strictly a voluntary matter. Tributary people were to be baptized only ‘after careful investigation to determine that they wish it of their own free will’. 15 Once baptized, however, a native was regarded as acceptable even to enter the tsar’s service. Unlike most other colonizing peoples, the Russians were free of anti-native prejudices.
Two portraits of seventeenth-century Russian tsars reflect a massive change in vision and attitude that took place within a few decades. The first is of Michael, the first Romanov tsar, who was depicted in formal, almost symbolic, style as a passive, callow youth, albeit with crown and sceptre - a potential ‘sufferer for Christ’s sake’. The second, by a Dutch artist, portrays his son and successor, Alexis, realistically as a majestic and vigorous man of this world. The contrast is partially explained by caution. The new dynasty was vulnerable under Michael in the 1620s and ‘30s. It was therefore careful, acting well within the confines of tradition. By the 1660s, however, the dynasty was more strongly established. True, Alexis took care to claim descent from Ivan IV and, through him, the Roman emperors, but this was as much to justify an imperial role as to reinforce his legitimacy as a ruler. Although Alexis played the pious tsar as assidu
ously as Michael had done, in his reign Russia began to taste success again after a long interval. And, as confidence returned, the regime became more outward-looking, more open to the modern world.
Russia’s first attempt, under Michael, to regain lost ground in the west proved premature. A two-year war with Poland ended in ignominious defeat in 1634. An even more shaming moment came a few years later. In 1637 the Cossacks of the Don stormed the Turkish citadel of Azov. Thanks to material aid from Moscow, they held it until 1641, when, after being bombarded by over a hundred heavy guns which the Turks had brought up to help them retake the place, they asked the Tsar to take it over. But this would have meant war with the Sultan. Could Russia afford it? The question was put to an Assembly of the Land. The answer, in effect, was ‘No’. The chance of a break-through to the Black Sea was rejected.
At that juncture the security of the Volga—Caspian route was a greater priority. Robber bands up to 3,000 strong infested the lower reaches, and the Dagestan coast of the Caspian was the base of some of the most notorious robbers in the world in the 1630s. 16 A strong garrison had to be maintained at Astrakhan in order to protect the trade with Persia and beyond, and even then the city was occupied by robber Cossacks for a time in the later 1660s. The chief impediment to expansion in the south and west was no longer economic or demographic but lack of up-to-date military expertise and technology. It had long been Russian practice to engage foreign military advisers on an individual basis, but now, following the general European practice of the time, Moscow began to engage entire units of professional soldiers on the open market, and to use entrepreneurs to provide whatever military services and expertise it needed.
The Muscovite equivalent of the Habsburg Emperor’s Wallenstein was a Scottish soldier of fortune, Alexander Leslie. Leslie’s speciality, modern siege warfare, was particularly relevant now that Russia’s military efforts had to be focused against Europeans and the Ottoman Turks rather than against Tatars. Expertise in steppe warfare was not enough to win wars on other fronts. The siege of Smolensk, at which Leslie served, demonstrated that. Well-drilled infantry units and improved artillery were the new priorities. At the beginning of the 1630s Leslie had been sent to western Europe to help raise ten infantry regiments trained on the Dutch and German model. 17 They fought in the Smolensk campaign, but were disbanded once it was over because of the expense. It was only under Alexis (r. 1645—76) that there was a sustained effort to modernize the army’s weaponry and training.
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