Empires Apart

by Brian Landers

  Ivan the Terrible needed lands to conquer. Warlords by definition live by war. He could wreak continual terror on his duchy and pass his fearsome reputation on to his heirs, but sooner or later someone more warlike would wrest the crown from his family. He needed external success. Yermak Timofeyevich provided that success, although not in the way Ivan had expected.

  In looking for territory to conquer, Muscovy was torn between attacking a prosperous ‘civilised’ Europe to the west or the crumbling remnants of the Mongol empire to the east. Ivan’s preference, like most of his successors, was to go for the richer target rather than the easier, but in the long-running Livonian wars he was outclassed by the Poles and Swedes. In frustration he turned to the south and east. He attacked and destroyed the Tartar khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan. In doing so he doubled the size of his kingdom, pushing down the Volga to the Caspian. In terms of land and people, if not in wealth, the conquest of Kazan represented a step change (indeed a steppe change) in the fortunes of the Grand Duchy.

  The seeds of empire were planted on the warm shores of the Caspian Sea but their most dramatic growth was in a far colder climate. One of the world’s greatest ever imperial adventures started almost by accident. Countermanding his own earlier instructions, Ivan gave his blessing to a military expedition east across the Urals. Leading the way was Yermak Timofoyevich. Like Davy Crockett, Yermak is revered as an intrepid explorer who went where no white man had gone before (or in Crockett’s case at least no non-Hispanic); like Crockett he took it for granted that whatever he found was his – even if the natives disagreed; like Crockett he died a heroic death; like Crockett he is commemorated today as a representative of all that is noble in the nation’s past.

  Other nations have heroic martyrs who died pushing forward the boundaries of nation and empire. But whereas the iconic status of Gordon of Khartoum in Britain, for example, faded as imperialism lost its seal of popular approval, in America and Russia the hero-worship lavished on the champions of expansionism remains undimmed. What most of these heroes have in common is that the reality differed from the legend.

  Crockett’s tombstone reads ‘Davy Crockett, Pioneer, Patriot, Soldier, Trapper, Explorer, State Legislator, Congressman.’ The order should perhaps be reversed. Crocket spent much of his adult life as a professional politician. He used ghost-writers to burnish the frontiersman image as a hardy pioneer and bear hunter. That image helped him to progress from the Tennessee Legislature to the US Congress; Crockett was one of the first Americans to appreciate the value of PR and spin. In turn that spin, enormously magnified by the magic of Disney, is what now constitutes popular history. But the crux of the Crockett legend is true. He did survive the perils of a dangerous frontier – his grandparents were killed in a native attack when his father was away fighting the British – and his major claim to fame during his lifetime was as a commander in the Creek Indian War. (For one group, though, Davy Crockett is famous for something entirely different: to etymologists he is the man who invented the word ‘blizzard’.) Above all Davy Crockett died at the Alamo trying to push the frontiers of Anglo-Saxon America further still. Recent research suggests that rather than fighting to the end gun in hand, as legend has it, Crockett and his companions were killed after they had surrendered. Whatever the truth Americans are right to believe that he largely embodied the virtues of independence and freedom under the law (at least for adult white males) which they have long cherished.

  In that respect Yermak was totally dissimilar.

  In the years after his death Yermak was quickly raised to the pantheon of heroes. He was described as a brave, intelligent and humane conqueror who crossed the Urals to subdue the pagan natives for the greater glory of God and Muscovy. Much of this is nonsense. Yermak was a Cossack freebooter who made his living by following his family into a life of crime, leading a gang of river pirates on the Volga. Chased by troops sent to protect the river shipping, he and his men escaped into the Siberian wilderness.

  Russian settlement east of the Urals had started in 1517 when the Stroganovs, a leading Boyar family, were granted a royal charter to mine iron and salt. Once in Siberia, Yermak seems to have operated a protection racket offering to protect the Stroganovs from himself and from the natives. History has taken the rough edges of this part of Yermak’s life. One American academic source relates prosaically that Yermak ‘entered the service of a merchant family, the Stroganovs’ who ‘sent Yermak on an expedition to protect their lands in Western Siberia from attack by local tribes’. Yermak’s idea of ‘protecting’ the nascent Russian colonies was strikingly similar to Underhill’s approach to ‘defending’ the nascent English and Dutch colonies. The best form of defence is attack.

  Yermak faced a more formidable opponent than the unsuspecting natives of Mystic. Although Ivan had conquered two of the khanates into which the Mongol empire had fragmented, two others stood in the way of his further expansion: Crimea, to the south and the east, and what is today called Siberia – and the city of Sibir and its khan, Kuchum. By medieval standards Sibir was relatively civilised: it exacted tribute from the pagan tribes around it and Kuchum himself read Arabic, although with over a hundred wives he may have had little time for reading. He felt powerful enough to refuse to pay tributes to Muscovy, and Ivan agreed with him, nervously ordering the Stroganovs to stop fomenting trouble with the Siberian chieftain and specifically to halt the practice of hiring criminal mercenaries. However, both Ivan and Kuchum had underestimated the military strength of the Cossack freebooters, and in particular their technological superiority. As the native Americans were discovering on the other side of the world the bow and arrow were no match for the musket and cannon.

  Yermak paid no more attention to Ivan’s desires in Siberia than he had back on the Volga. And when Yermak captured Kuchum’s capital of Isker, Ivan promptly forgot his previous misgivings. Yermak found a treasure trove of furs and sent samples to Moscow. Ivan, licking his wounds after the Livonian wars, was overjoyed. Yermak was pardoned for all his former crimes and reinforcements were dispatched eastwards. Unfortunately conditions had changed dramatically by the time they arrived:Yermak was pinned down in Isker and the arrival of new troops only made matters worse. Soon they were reduced to eating human flesh to stay alive. By then Ivan had died a lingering death. Yermak’s death came more quickly. Leading a skirmishing party, he had camped on a river island thinking that the water provided ample protection. He was wrong. Kuchum’s warriors forded the river and attacked the sleeping invaders. Legend has it that in a cruel twist of fate Ivan himself was responsible for Yermak’s death. Among the gifts Ivan had lavished on his new-found hero were two chain-mail coats bearing bronze double-headed eagles. Seeing his men cut down, Yermak fought his way to the water and tried grab a boat in order to escape, but, weighed down by Ivan’s two tunics, he drowned.

  Only one survivor made it back to Isker, and when he brought news of Yermak’s death the remaining Russians abandoned the town and retreated home.

  The Eastern Frontier

  Yermak died in August 1585. In the same month a group of settlers landed on Roanoke Island in Chesapeake Bay. The hostility of the natives and lack of supplies sent them packing ten months later, but they took back to England tales of Virginia’s rich natural resources, not least in the impressively accurate work of a young settler named Tomas Hariot, whose Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia was published in Frankfurt in 1590. Reports like Hariot’s gripped the imagination of western Europe, encouraging further adventures to the west.

  Similarly Yermak’s exploits seized the imagination of eastern Europe. His initial success had shown not only what wealth lay beyond the Urals but how easy it was for that wealth to be looted. Soon Russians in far greater numbers were heading east. They eventually cornered and decisively defeated Kuchum in a battle on the river Ob. Eighteen of his wives and daughters and five of his sons were captured. Kuchum himself escaped south and sought refuge with his allies, the Nogais, who, s
ensing how the balance of power was shifting, murdered him.

  Isker was reoccupied, and when Kuchum’s successor was hawking nearby he and his courtiers were invited in for talks. Their food and drink were drugged and the whole group was massacred. It was a tactic used thirty years later by the English settlers in Virginia (and after them by the Puritans of New England), and for the Russians was stunningly successful. With the destruction of the Sibir khanate there was no organised army anywhere in the vast territory that stretched, in a broad band between the Arctic Ocean and the Mongolian steppe, all the way to the Pacific.

  No sooner had the bodies of Yermak and Kuchum been laid to rest than the forces of popular prejudice started rewriting their stories. Reality gave way to myth, parts of which then resurfaced as accepted historical fact. In the folk tales of the victorious Cossacks Yermak acquired magical powers, and seemed to have developed the ability to travel through time: in some stories he appeared as an Arthurian knight in ancient Rus; in others he fought not the Sibir but the Turks who had ravaged Constantinople. On the other side Anna Reid reports that among the native Tartars history was inverted completely, and Yermak appeared in their ballads as Kuchum’s sly servant-boy.

  As has happened frequently in Russia the selective rewriting of history was led from the top. Tsars recognised the value of the Yermak story and to the Soviets he was the perfect hero; they attached his name to everything from a power station to whole towns. As happened time and again in Russian history the Church occupied the myth-manufacturing role played in America by Disney and Hollywood. Archbishop Kipriyan of Tobolsk, Siberia’s first prelate, declared Yermak a saint and commissioned histories that portrayed Yermak receiving divine guidance, conversing with Christ and working miracles. Once established, the myth became fact. Tales of the martyred Yermak and his noble conquests were passed on in the storytelling of illiterate serfs and the nursery games of the nobility. Just before his death Pushkin was planning an epic poem on the theme. Alexander Kasyanov’s opera Yermak premiered in 1957 and in 1996 Viktor Stepanov took the title role in the epic film of the same name. The power of Yermak’s image as the embodiment of Russian virtue persists. The film-maker Vladimir Menshov has said of his film version of Yermak, ‘Our intent was to create the image of a strong Russian man who could make decisions. We wanted to offset the sense of humiliation which has characterised the nation since the Soviet Union broke up.’ Yermak represents for Russians just the sort of virile patriotism Crockett has represented for Americans.

  Although Yermak’s raid ended in his death and Ivan’s initial conquests beyond the Urals were small their importance was enormous. Ivan the Terrible’s greatest legacy was the concept of empire. He turned a Muscovy obsessed with self-preservation into a Russia determined on conquest. It could be said that in Ivan’s reign Russians brought the frontier spirit that was to so characterise America to the plains and forests of Asia. Russians raced across Siberia at an amazing speed. In 1639 Ivan Moskvitin reached the Pacific, just fifty-eight years after Yermak had crossed the Urals. Although Russian colonisation of Siberia and English colonisation of North America started at the same time, Moskvitin had traversed the much larger continent 166 years before Lewis and Clark reached the same ocean from the other side. In less than a century Russia had conquered a third of Asia.

  The conquest of North America has been commemorated in so many films that it is easy to forget that the scale of the Russian achievement was so much larger. Siberia is vast. The whole of the continental United States could be placed in the middle without touching any of its edges; indeed the whole of western Europe could then be crammed into the margins and still leave space to spare. Not only were the distances travelled by the early pioneers so much longer, but the conditions they encountered were very much more extreme. The white man’s arrival in Siberia at the end of the sixteenth century had more in common with the American expeditions of the Spanish conquistadors at the beginning of the same century than with the far less adventurous exploits of the Anglo-Americans in the two centuries that followed. For example, Vasily Poyarkov mounted a 4,000-mile expedition to the mouth of the Amur river. He returned, but most of his men did not; those that did not starve to death were killed by natives. Semyon Dezhnov’s expedition suffered a similar fate: only twelve of the ninety who set out returned. Dezhnov became the first European to find the North-East Passage between America and Asia in 1656, but news of the discovery did not reach Moscow.

  The first person credited with proving that Asia and America were not linked arrived in Siberia in the next century, and demonstrated both the amazing achievements of the Russian explorers and the scale of the efforts that the Russian tsars, and in particular Peter the Great, who came to the throne in 1689, threw into imperial expansion. Vitus Jonassen Bering was born in Denmark in 1681. In 1703 he emigrated to Russia and enlisted in the new Russian navy. He distinguished himself during Russia’s war with Sweden, and in 1725 was chosen by Peter to lead an expedition in search of the North-East Passage. First Bering had to get men and supplies across Siberia to Okhotsk, which they reached two years after leaving St Petersburg; then he built a ship to carry them to the Kamchatka peninsula, and once there constructed another, Gabriel, on which, in the summer of 1728, Bering finally sailed north through what we now call the Bering Strait. On 13 August he rounded the north-east corner of Asia. Bering was convinced that he had sailed far enough north to establish that Asia and North America were not connected, proving the existence of the North-East Passage, but when, five years after leaving, he returned to St Petersburg he was criticised for not actually having seen the American coast – which had been shrouded in fog and so invisible to the expedition.

  Three years later Bering left his wife and family for the last time. The Great Nordic Expedition may well have been the largest scientific expedition the world knew before the start of space exploration. Bering led 10,000 men, intending not only to chart the coasts of Siberia and America as far south as Mexico but also to establish Russian imperial claims to as much territory as possible. He planned to send ships to America and Japan to promote Russian commercial interests and to carry out a whole range of scientific research. After again spending two years reaching Okhotsk, Bering spent the next six years exploring Siberia before sailing eastward in 1741 and at last sighting the St Elias mountains on the northern Gulf of Alaska coast on 16 July. Conditions were appalling, and on the way back Bering collapsed with scurvy. The decision was made to seek shelter for the winter on an isolated island off the coast of Kamchatka, huddled in huts made from driftwood dug into the sand. A week before Christmas 1741 Bering died. A few survivors reached home the next summer, carrying news of Bering’s momentous discovery.

  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 se
venteenth 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.