by Andrew Marr
Russia is so big, above all, because of the personal ambition of one Moscow Czar, Ivan IV, known to history as Ivan the Terrible (though non-Russian speakers should note he translates just as well as ‘Ivan the Mighty’).
The Russians did not start by striving to create an empire, however, any more than the English intended to create Canada, or the United States. In all such cases Europeans were simply exploiting a small technological advantage to win themselves goods which to them felt (or were) essential. Among them are products that have already featured in this history, and will do again, such as salt, timber, iron and (before plastics) ivory, but also one that has not – fur. Before the modern age of synthetic materials, animal skins and furs were among the few ways people could keep themselves warm; and this was particularly important during the cold climatic spell, or ‘little ice age’, running from the 1550s right through to the early nineteenth century, with particular freezes in the 1650s and late 1700s.
It is from this time that we get some of the loveliest Dutch landscapes of frozen canals and peasant revelries, the great London frost fairs on the iron-hard Thames, and recordings of huge snowfalls in Spain and Portugal. From time to time Iceland found herself completely cut off by sea ice, and famines ravaged North America, France and Scandinavia. For anyone who could afford them, the pelts of bears, foxes, squirrels, beaver, mink and marten were an essential protection. The fur-trimmed ceremonial robes of some of today’s judges, lord mayors and guild officials, for instance, date back to this period, when anyone who could pay for it wanted to be able to snug up on a bench, on a civic throne, or anywhere they fancied, in rich furs. The poorer made do with the pelts of rabbits or foxes, but the real warmth came from the thicker, glossier skins of animals that lived in the great northern forests, from Alaska to Newfoundland in one direction, and to European Russia in the other.
This is an age when trappers mattered as much as coalminers, and the rise of Moscow as a rich trading centre depended heavily on the fur trade. As early as 1486 a Greek diplomat, George Trakhaniot, working in Muscovy, reported: ‘Many merchants from Germany and Poland gather in the city throughout the winter. They buy furs exclusively – sables, foxes, ermines, squirrels, and sometimes wolves. And although the furs are procured at places many days’ journey from the city of Moscow . . . all are brought to this place and the merchants buy the furs here.’15
North of Moscow the city of Novgorod (or ‘New Town’), founded by Vikings, had been a pioneer in the fur trade, pushing its influence into the dense forests of the north-east, then linking up with the German trading cities of the Hanseatic League, and through them with the Dutch. For around three centuries – from 1136, when the burghers of Novgorod dismissed their prince – this was a civic republic whose government was more like that of republican Venice, Florence or the later Dutch state than anywhere in the Russian world. Novgorod was ruled in theory by veches, or public assemblies, though wealthy merchant or boyar families and a succession of archbishops held much of the power. When they wanted princes or princely warriors, they summoned them in. The fur, honey, wax and walrus-ivory trades allowed Novgorod to create a large, sprawling state of its own, spreading towards the Urals and the White Sea, and north to the Baltic. At one end of a Silk Road stretching back to China, it was far enough north to avoid the ravages of the Mongol horde, though to keep its independence the Novgorod army had to fight native forest peoples, invading Swedes and the German crusading knights.
Famous as a centre of religion and culture, Novgorod began to lose out to the rising power of Moscow with its darker rival tradition of autocrats, who had themselves emerged from family feuding. Like the late Roman republic, Novgorod had produced a rich ruling class whose conspicuous consumption caused resentment among the ordinary citizens. An early historian describes life in the house of one of its cosmopolitan financiers: ‘The conversation went on in German, interspersed with Latin flowers of speech, as later Russian aristocrats used French. Precious wine from Burgundy was drunk there, poured from Bohemian decanters into Venetian bowls, to wash down gingerbread from Nuremberg.’16
We last discussed Russia after the Kiev princes had converted to Orthodox Christianity, then fallen to the Mongol hordes, who smashed that first Slavic civilization. Moscow was just one of the princely Russian cities that had paid tribute to the Mongols and had begun to slowly recover during the 1300s. After a bitter war between rival claimants during 1433–45, its ruling family established a clear system of single, ‘vertical succession’ which allowed a consolidation of power. Under its grand princes the state of Muscovy was ready to expand. Lacking the fertile agriculture of Western European states, however (it had a short growing season and thin soil), or obvious sources of natural wealth, Muscovy’s rulers looked north to the river-trade network dominated by Novgorod, and west to the endless fur-rich forests of Siberia. This could only mean expansion by war. After failing to get help from its neighbouring kingdoms of Lithuania and Poland, Novgorod fell to Moscow’s Prince Kholmsky in 1471–2. Had bourgeois, republican Novgorod, not autocratic Moscow, emerged as the dominant power, the political history of Russia might have been intriguingly different – and happier.
By now the Russian trappers had killed so much of the wildlife near Moscow and Novgorod that the lure of Siberia was irresistible. But it would be a family of rich Novgorod merchants who gave the Czar in Moscow, Ivan III, the chance to strike deep into the east. The Stroganovs had helped fund the Dukes of Muscovy while they built up their family wealth with salt-works. Like sub-Saharan Africa, central Russia had too little salt of its own and had imported it from Western Europe. Now the Stroganovs found supplies nearer to hand, in the forests and lakes. This brought them into conflict with Muslim warlords. It is even claimed that the family name, which means ‘strips of flesh’, derived from the unpleasant punishment meted out to an early family member who was cut to pieces (hence the strips of meat in ‘beef Stroganov’).
Apparently undeterred, the Stroganovs expanded the family business into fish, wax, hides and timber. Its most influential patriarch, Anika Stroganov, moved south to Moscow and became both the Czar’s favourite supplier of furs and other luxuries and a regular source of funds. Both Ivan III and Ivan IV, ‘the Terrible’, granted large land settlements to favoured aristocratic families, but the Stroganovs wanted to go much further. In 1558, Ivan the Terrible awarded these private-enterprise rulers charters giving them sovereignty over vast areas of untamed land for twenty years, free from taxes and laws, and from intervention from any other authorities. What the Hudson’s Bay Company would be to Canada, the Stroganovs were to Russia.
The Czars called themselves ‘commanders of all Siberia’, but this was an expression of hope rather than signifying the settled conquest of lands inhabited by native peoples – the same was claimed by Mongol rulers too. Ivan would be different. His father had died when he was three, and his mother (possibly poisoned) when he was eight. The first Muscovite prince (at the age of sixteen) to have himself crowned Czar of all the Russias in 1547 at a Byzantine-style ceremony in the gorgeously painted Cathedral of the Dormition in the Kremlin, Ivan proved a dangerous ruler from the start. He may have been bipolar – he certainly had terrible rages. Many of his opponents just disappeared or died, and later in life he accidentally killed his own son and heir in a drunken fight. But Ivan was also shrewd, and more restlessly ambitious than any previous ruler of Muscovy. He tried to find himself a cultured foreign bride, sending embassies to the courts of Western Europe. He welcomed English traders and wanted to conclude a political union, and even a personal one, with England’s Queen Elizabeth. He built up a large library and imported German craftsmen; and he was responsible for some of the grandest churches and palace buildings that still adorn Moscow.
Surrounded by the sea of troubles familiar to most rulers of the time – insurrections, long wars with neighbouring powers, and court intrigue – Ivan nonetheless greatly expanded Muscovy. He conquered the Muslim khanates of Kazan and Astr
akhan in the 1550s, finally ending Russia’s long spell in the shadow cast by the descendants of the Mongol ‘Golden Horde’. But he found himself unable to push west, despite seemingly endless conflicts with Danes, Swedes and German knights in the Baltic. Most dramatically, he created a kind of early totalitarian state, a personal realm known as the oprichnina, which, with bleak irony, occupied much of the territory of once-republican Novgorod. Ivan’s personal police-come-army, the oprichniki, were used to inflict savage repressions, and in 1570 sacked the city of Novgorod, reducing it to a sad and servile ghost of its former self. The territories the Novgorodians had developed across the Urals, reaching toward Siberia, were taken over by Muscovy.
So this was the restless, dangerous and ambitious ruler whom the Stroganov family persuaded to hand over privatized hegemony in huge territories on either side of the Urals, including permission to build forts along the rivers. They became the first Russian oligarchs, fabulously rich, exploiting natural resources, protected by monopolies; and both dependent on, and vital to, Moscow’s authoritarian ruler. With their own forts, a huge wooden family palace far from Moscow, and a private army of traders and trappers exploring ever further, the Stroganovs were something new in history, a huge capitalist enterprise and family dynasty all in one. They could be compared to the great Italian merchant-to-prince families such as the Medici and the Borgias, except that the Italians never had the Stroganovs’ almost imperial zeal for expansion.
Why would a ruler as obsessed by personal power as Ivan IV have not only tolerated, but encouraged, such an energetic potential rival inside his kingdom? Because his Russia, with its vast and porous borders and enemies on every side, needed the wealth that the Stroganovs’ constant supplies of fresh fur, never mind salt and timber, brought to Moscow. He knew, too, that their time-limited charters to lands that the Muscovites themselves had never visited could always be revoked. Not much changes. Oligarchs and tycoons depend on political rulers – so long as those political rulers are decisive – even more than the politicians need them.
The flaw in the deal was that the Stroganovs’ trappers and explorers were moving into territory others thought belonged to them. There were the various native tribes who had hunted and fished in the taiga, those vast swampy forests, since the Bronze Age, and perhaps before. These people were not too much of a military threat. But there were also the Muslim khans, who descended from the Mongol invasion and claimed overlordship; they were fiercer, and came into regular conflict with the Russians. The most threatening of these was the rising khanate of Sibir, between the Tobol and Irtysh Rivers, led by Kuchum Khan. In 1571 he stopped paying tribute to Moscow. Ivan, struggling with his wars against Poland, the Livonian knights and the Scandinavians, and threatened as always by Tatars from the Caucasus, could not afford another army to help the Stroganov fur barons subdue Kuchum. In desperation, they turned to a freebooter, a Cossack fighter called Yermak Timofeyevich.
In Russian culture Yermak has something of the status of a Daniel Boone or even a Robin Hood – a romantic hero whose exploits have been retold and embroidered for centuries. He probably fought in Ivan’s unsuccessful wars against the battle-hardened Germanic Livonian knights to the west. He was a talented military leader, able to lead some five hundred mercenaries – Cossacks, Russians, Germans and Swedes – into the Siberian khanate. These were not the Cossack cavalry of later times. For one thing, the forest, mountain and river terrain made horses an impractical proposition. Nor did they bring cannon, but only some muskets and powder. Yermak’s tiny force travelled on river rafts, and on foot.
Part of the traditional story has it that Yermak’s Tatar enemies had no knowledge of gunpowder and were as amazed by guns as the native Americans were at much the same time. Historians have recently challenged this – the Tatars were more connected to the human mainstream17 – but the invaders certainly outgunned the Muslim defenders, who depended more on bows and arrows. In 1581–2, Yermak arrived in Kuchum’s home territory and shortly afterwards seized his capital, Isker. It was a punitive and exploratory gamble, meant to teach the Muslims a lesson; it would in fact be Russia’s first thrust into a vast territory all of which it would ultimately engulf. The Cossack force did, it seems, manage to defeat an army five to ten times its size, and for two or three years Yermak was able to maintain a garrison deep in Siberian territory while sending increasingly desperate messages back to Moscow for reinforcements.
Ivan, who had previously regarded Yermak as a bandit, was impressed. He responded by sending him gifts and a pardon. Among the gifts was a suit of armour. If the story is true, the gift was an unfortunate one. Lacking both powder and men, Yermak’s position grew increasingly difficult, and he eventually died in a minor battle on the River Irtysh. He had tried to swim to safety, but had been sunk by the Czar’s armour. True or not, it is a good metaphor for the fate of successive agents of Russian autocracy, who themselves ended up unhappily while the state they served grew only stronger.
Soon after Yermak’s death, the Russians would again be pressing on eastwards. Within two generations they had reached the far coast where Siberia touches Alaska, and the Sea of Okhotsk, north of Japan.
If the Rus were the originators of Russia, Ivan the Terrible was the true founding father of modern Russia. After his death, Muscovy’s power and coherence would slither and struggle, beginning with a chaotic ‘time of troubles’; but Ivan’s achievement in pushing Russian influence south, east and north created the essential shape of the country, and thus it would remain. The Russians would continue to be hemmed in by Poles, Germans and Scandinavians to the north and west, but they found themselves able to expand over a huge area eastwards. After the defeat of the Muslim rulers of Kazan and Astrakhan, Russian forces would push further south too, eventually reaching the Black Sea and the Caspian during the time of Catherine the Great and her extraordinary lover and general, Prince Potemkin. Like the successive waves of an incoming tide, Russian expeditions washed relentlessly across Siberia, bringing the state not only hides, salt and wood, but a perpetual penal colony for its enemies.
Indeed, what had started as a hunt for furs brought the Russians a landmass one and a half times larger than the USA, and a region containing up to 80 per cent of modern Russia’s oil reserves and 90 per cent of its gas and coal – vast supplies upon which its modern wealth and global power heavily depend. Siberia is also a rich source of iron, tin, gold and other metals, and possesses the world’s deepest lake, Baikal. Without Siberia, our notion of Russia falls apart. It was to the huge expanses behind Moscow and western Russia that the country could retreat and gather itself when confronted by Napoleon, then Hitler. That combined ‘ice-box and El Dorado’ was where the Czar’s enemies and the victims of the Communist gulag perished; and it was the site of space centres and mysterious military bases.
Russia without Siberia would be a large but ordinary Eastern European state. But if Ivan the Terrible can take some of the credit for Russia’s later importance on the world stage, he must also take some of the blame for the fear-driven and personalized tradition of Russian political power ever since. Yermak may have been a dashing, romantic freebooter, but he was also the advance army of autocracy.
Two Rulers, One Problem
In the year 1604, King James had many problems. For a start, which James was he? As a Scottish king, he was James VI, ‘Jamie Saxt’, latest in a long line of Stuarts. But now he was down in London, in England, where he was James I. So what exactly was his kingdom?
He proposed the name of Britain, which the English did not like, and was working on a new flag, an eye-ache of lines and colours, which, to start with, nobody liked. He wanted peace with England’s traditional Catholic enemy, Spain. Like so many monarchs, he was also short of cash. But James, intellectually assertive, was particularly worked up about one social problem, a craze sweeping his new kingdom, which he thought utterly disgusting. He took quill to paper and wrote a pamphlet that he called, simply, ‘A Counterblaste to Tobacco’.
Across his country, men were imitating the ‘wilde, godlesse and slavish Indians’ by smoking leaves, ‘this stinking smoake being sucked up by the nose and imprisoned in the cold and moyst braines’. The king was particularly outraged by people who smoked over their food: ‘As for the vanities committed in this filthie custome, is it not both great vanitie and uncleannesse that at table men should not be ashamed, to sit tossing of Tobacco Pipes, and puffing the smoke of tobacco on to one another, making the filthy smoke and stinke thereof to exhale athwart the dishes?’ By now this drooling, red-bearded monarch was getting well into his stride. He concluded with a magnificent eruption: tobacco was a ‘custome loathsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmful to the braine, dangerous to the lungs, and in the blacke stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible Stigian Smoake of the the pit that is bottomlesse’.18
On the other side of the world, another ruler was having exactly the same trouble. Tobacco had also reached Japan, probably through Portuguese Jesuit influence. The man who was theoretically ruler, the emperor, was a cipher figure: but the country’s real ruler, the generalissimo, or shogun, loathed tobacco just as much as James did. He too decided to try to ban it. In far-off England tobacco was regarded as a freebooting and unruly habit, associated with wild gatherings in taverns and the audience for plays. In Japan, bands of unruly males, who sound like seventeenth-century punks, the Kabukimono, had adopted tobacco too.
The Kabukimono formed street gangs who dressed in outrageous clothes, using women’s kimonos as cloaks; they wore weird hairstyles and behaved aggressively in the street, attacking passers-by, wrestling and dancing, and flaunting their long fuming pipes. So in 1612 and again in 1615, the Japanese court went further than James and banned smoking. It caused a great stir. Sitting in his office in Osaka, an English merchant called William Eaton wrote on 1 March 1613 to his colleague Richard Wickham in the Japanese capital of Edo (now Tokyo), informing him that at least 150 people had been arrested ‘for buying and selling of tobacco contrary to the Emperor’s commandment, and they are in jeopardy of their life’s, besides greate store of tobacco which they have heare burnte’.19