Empires Apart

by Brian Landers

  Until they reached the borders of China the Russians faced none of the formidable military forces they were to face later as they expanded west, but they did face resistance. For example, the Buryats, a Mongol people living along what are now the borders of Russia and Mongolia, held them up for over thirty years. The first Russian outpost in Buryat territory, built at Bratsk on the Angara river in 1631, survived just three years before its garrison was massacred. The Buryat wars drained Russian resources but an uneasy peace was finally imposed, broken by a serious revolt in the mid-1690s and scattered insurgency well into the next century.

  Yermak and his successors fought their way east with amazing brutality, but the main killer was disease, especially smallpox, syphilis and influenza. Anna Reid describes the effect on the tribes she studied: ‘The first epidemic – probably of smallpox – of which records survive broke out in 1630 and may have killed as many as half of all Khant, Mansi, Nenets and Ket. In the 1650s smallpox crossed the Yenisey, killing up to 80 per cent of the northern Evenk and Sakha, and nearly half the Yukagir. In the early eighteenth century it reached Kamchatka, cutting a swathe through the Itelmen and Koryak. Syphilis was a slower killer. Widespread among Russian settlers – no true Sibiryak, it was said, possessed a fully intact nose – it quickly spread to the indigenous people.’The plagues continued right through the nineteenth century. Smallpox epidemics in 1884 and 1889 killed almost a third of the population in parts of Siberia, although by now it struck European and native alike. It is an odd coincidence of history that at exactly the same time (the late 1630s) smallpox killed around 50 per cent of the Khant (a western Siberian tribe closely related to modern Finns and Estonians), and around 50 per cent of the Hurons (a native tribe in southern Canada).

  Penetrating deep into eastern Siberia, the Russians established Yakutsk in 1632 and soon heard reports about the Amur river basin, a rich grain-producing region to the south. Three years later the first Cossacks started to settle in the area, but Chinese forces seem to have wiped the colonies out by 1658. The Russians tried again fifteen years later, but in 1686 a powerful Chinese force destroyed the Russian base at Albazin, and in the Treaty of Nerchinsk the Manchus forced a Russian withdrawal north into Siberia, away from the Amur. For the time being the limits to Russia’s eastern expansion had been drawn.

  Life in the Wild East

  The Russian approach to colonising Siberia differed markedly from the English practice in America in four significant ways, reflecting differences in geography, economics, religion and politics.

  First, the control and ownership of land was not as important. On the one hand there was no shortage of land in Siberia, so there was less need to drive the native populations off it, and on the other hand much of the land was so inhospitable that the natives were welcome to keep it. The newly conquered territories were not as attractive as the plains of North America, largely for reasons of climate, and so immigration was much lower. Consequently the Russians who did settle needed the existing populations to provide extra labour, food and staples.

  Second, the Russians wanted furs, but they did not want to pay for them. It is possible to talk about the English and French fur ‘trade’ in North America in which, at least in theory, both Europeans and natives gained by the exchange of goods. The Russians, with a few exceptions, did not trade: they exacted tribute – furs to send back home and women for more immediate use. This necessarily implied that the Russian fur expeditions were more brutal; there was only one way to enforce tribute and that was through overwhelming force.

  Third, Russian Orthodox Christianity had little desire to proselytise. The native populations were in general allowed to continue with their old religions. The fabulous Buddhist monasteries of the Buryats, for example, were left unmolested; later, indeed, a Buddhist temple was even constructed in St Petersburg. Not until the arrival of twentieth-century communism were the native religions systematically eradicated, their priests murdered and their shrines and centuries-old manuscripts destroyed.

  Finally, and most fundamentally, colonisation, although pushed forward by powerful merchants and mercenary Cossacks, was ultimately controlled by the tsar. Russia remained an autocracy and colonisation proceeded in the manner that suited the state. Conquered territory belonged to the tsar and was administered by his centralised bureaucracy. The great departments of state included not just functional offices (like the treasury or the state department in the US) but territorial departments. Under the grand dukes of Muscovy these had been created to administer the territories, like Novgorod, that came under Muscovy’s control. In the sixteenth century, when the khanate of Kazan was conquered, it was governed by a new department, and in the next century another was created to handle Siberia. At this time Russia had no concept of private property, and the new colonies simply became part of the tsar’s personal estate, to be exploited entirely as he or she wished. There are parallels in the early royal colonies in North America, but these were aberrations that had no lasting impact on American history.

  These four factors came together to produce a radically different imperial culture. Because the Russians had little desire to dispossess the natives, and indeed needed their support, and because they were relaxed about native customs, the pressures that led to genocide in America were almost entirely absent. This meant that the tsars were able to use the strategy that the British used so successfully in most of their colonies after the loss of America: co-option. Native chieftains were simply enrolled in the imperial civil service. Kuchum’s family in Sibir and Buryat leaders on the Mongolian border were given Russian titles. Some 300 Sibir chieftains entered Russian government service. Over time they became Russified and, as Anna Reid points out, their ‘families were assimilated into the mainstream Russian nobility, as proven by the long list of famous Russian surnames with Turkic or Mongol roots’.

  The Russian dependence on ‘tribute’ distinguished Russian imperialism from later American trade-based imperialism, but it did closely resemble the colonialism of the first American settlers. Tribute was as central a part of early American expansion as early Russian. The concept is critical to understanding imperialism. In Russia tribute had been fundamental to the Vikings and Mongols, and continued when the Russians themselves pushed east. The essence of imperialism is that wealth is transferred from the colonised to the coloniser. Over time American imperialism replaced tribute with trade, so that today the United States sucks in raw materials, food and manufactured product from the rest of the world to maintain its disproportionately high standard of living without having to resort to force, but in the earliest days of New England tribute was almost as important for the colonies’ survival as it was for the sparsely populated Russian colonies in Siberia.

  Violence was an integral part of tribute collection. Like the English colonisers Russians were not averse to taking hostages to ensure that the tributes were paid. In 1632 Pyotr Beketov started the conquest of the Sakha people on the Lena river in the traditional way, demanding tributes, and when that initially failed he killed a few warriors and took the son and nephew of one of the chiefs hostage. Another chief refused to be blackmailed in this way, so Beketov and his Cossacks burnt their village to the ground; three women were the only survivors of the inferno, and Beketov happily reported that all three had been captured by his men. Beketov’s motivation may have been quite different to Underhill’s at the Mystic Massacre, being naked greed uncloaked by religious bigotry, but the end result was exactly the same.

  The fact that Russian imperialists had no concept of ethnic cleansing did not make them any less brutal than imperialists in the New World. Indeed, in order to extract tribute they engaged in massive and systematic terror. In the winter of 1763–64 the natives of the Aleutian Islands midway between Siberia and Alaska rose up in rebellion, killing 150 Russian tribute-collectors. The Russian reprisal two years later was horrific; eighteen villages were destroyed and prisoners in their hundreds were slaughtered. After the massacre the Aleuts never reb
elled again.

  Nor did the lack of a policy of genocide and the co-option of native leaders imply that the Russians were any less racist than the English. Native tribes were almost universally regarded as slovenly, idle and untrustworthy – characteristics routinely ascribed to American natives by white settlers. The native nobility may have entered the Russian mainstream, but the mass of the native population stayed on the fringes. At best a few of the Russians sent east as imperial civil servants acted with the paternalistic colonial instincts that the British like to believe characterised their own empire. Much more typically, Russians took whatever they could and made no attempt to improve the conditions under which the natives lived.

  By western standards the Russian civil service has always been fundamentally corrupt, but this is to misunderstand the basis upon which it has operated. The civil service existed primarily to collect taxes, performing exactly the same role for the tsars as the tsars’ predecessors had for the Mongol khans. Each year the tsars decided how much they wanted to spend and told the civil service to collect it. How it was collected was not especially important, and crucially the servants themselves were not paid. Instead they were expected to collect something extra for themselves, just as the dukes of Muscovy had in Mongol times. It was considered perfectly natural that once they had passed on the specified sums to the tsar they then ‘fed’ themselves; this tradition was known by the Muscovite term of kormlenie. Within reason how much the civil servants ‘fed’ themselves was up to them. There were periodic attempts at reform; Peter the Great abolished the kormlenie and introduced salaries, but there was never enough cash to pay them and the old customs continued. At one point the government even set up checkpoints on the main road from Siberia to Moscow in order to stop and search returning bureaucrats and their families, to ensure that the amount of plunder they were bringing back was not ‘exorbitant’. Stories abound of provincial governors creeping back into Moscow along deserted back roads in the dead of night with their wagons full of ill-gotten booty extorted from the natives.

  A few native families may have moved into log cabins and settled into the sedentary ways of their new masters, even in a very few cases converting to their masters’ religion, but the vast majority stayed in their felt yurts and continued to worship Buddha, Islam or their shamans. The divide between Russian and non-Russian persists to the present day. Under the communists natives were often installed in leading positions, but almost always with Slavs alongside to pull the strings. Although Siberian natives suffered enormously under Stalin it is revealing that they appear so infrequently in recent accounts of the Siberian gulags; even in their desperation Russian political prisoners could still look down on those among whom they were thrust.

  Whether by force or fortune, by the middle of the seventeenth century Russia had an empire of enormous size. Its history from that time up to the recent past is one of almost continuous conquest. In seizing Kazan and Astrakhan and launching into Siberia, Ivan the Terrible not only whetted his nation’s territorial appetite but also demonstrated its imperial prowess. For centuries under Mongol suzerainty the dukes of Muscovy had been accreting power and land, but they had remained one among many. Now they were no longer dukes or grand dukes or even kings; now they were emperors, and emperors determined to expand their empire.

  Empire

  It is worth stepping back from a gradual chronological approach to Russian history to consider the grand sweep of imperial expansion that continued through to the twentieth century. Over the next 250 years there were victories and, less often, defeats that each left their particular marks, but none individually changed the current that Ivan the Terrible set in motion.

  After the conquests of Yermak and his successors in the east, Russian eyes turned west again towards the kingdoms of Poland and Sweden, then both far larger than the states of the same name today. Sweden surrounded the whole Baltic; Poland encompassed a great swathe of eastern Europe. In the 1650s, helped by Cossack rebels, Russia took north-eastern Ukraine, including Kiev, from Poland. Then Estonia, parts of Latvia and the site of the future St Petersburg were taken from Sweden. This was particularly important as, following the pattern of the Siberian conquests, the Teutonic nobility of these territories were absorbed into the Russian aristocracy and played a major part in political and cultural life. Towards the end of the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth Poland was again the victim of Russian expansion, losing Belorussia, Lithuania and most of what remained of Ukraine. (Poland in particular suffered from Russian imperial ambition in the nineteenth century. Having been on the losing side in the Napoleonic wars, it was taken by Russia in the Vienna Settlement of 1815 and rebellions against the new masters were bloodily suppressed.) At the same time the other frontiers were not forgotten, as Catherine the Great expanded to the Black Sea and seized Crimea from the Turks. Moldavia (also known as Bessarabia) was seized from the Ottomans and Finland from the Swedes.

  For a while Russia rested on its western conquests and turned its eyes south-eastwards again. Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan were seized from the Turks and Persians between 1803 and 1828. Russian forces then moved east, facing easier targets as they seized the lands of the Turkmen, Uzbek, Kirghiz and Tadzhek. Even farther east territory was taken from the Chinese, including the port of Vladivostok.

  With the coming of the Russian Revolution expansion went into reverse for a while (with the odd exception of the Bolshevik conquest of Mongolia), only to spring into action again after the Second World War when the swathe of ‘Soviet bloc’ territories from eastern Germany through to the Balkans fell into Russian hands.

  Purely in quantitative terms the growth of Russia is startling. As previously mentioned, in 1300 the Duchy of Muscovy covered some 7,500 square miles, while in 1462 Ivan III inherited 166,000 square miles. The growth continued. In 1533 Ivan IV inherited almost 1.1m square miles, and by the end of the century the figure had reached 2.1m square miles: Russia was already as large as the rest of Europe put together. In the next fifty years another 3.8m square miles of largely Siberian territory was added. Russia was by far the largest state in the world and indeed the Russian empire is the largest contiguous empire the world has ever known. Between 1550 and 1700 Russia gained an average of 13,500 square miles a year – as Richard Pipes puts it that is equivalent to adding a country the size of Holland to its empire every year for 150 years. (But as Pipes also points out most of this territory was almost empty: even in the most developed areas in the west of its empire the population density stood at only one to three people per square mile in the sixteenth century compared with one to thirty in much of western Europe.)

  The details of its imperial expansion form the core of Russian history, but it is easy to get lost in that detail and lose sight of the overall picture. One of the reasons that the scale of the Russian empire has rarely registered in the west is because of the division between western Christendom and barbarian east that first appeared at Châlons. When Yermak first crossed the Urals Europeans knew more about South America than they knew about eastern Siberia. Maps of the period show improbable kingdoms populated by mythical creatures. Even today the geography of Russia remains unfamiliar. Most educated Europeans could locate the Mississippi, but how many even know that the Ob and Lena are two of the world’s mightiest rivers? Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan sound so much more alien than the equally un-English Arkansas and Utah.

  Not only are Asiatic Russia and its colonies unfamiliar but the Europe that Russia faced to its west seems strangely disconcerting to modern readers. There are few natural frontiers in the world, and especially so in central and eastern Europe. Modern countries like Ukraine and Belarus simply did not exist. Others have changed beyond recognition. The largest country in medieval Europe was not France or Spain but the union of Poland and Lithuania. In the early medieval period the kings of England still ruled over large parts of what is today France (indeed in 1415, two years after the merger of Poland and Lithuania, the English victory at Agincourt s
eemed to confirm that position). The Iberian peninsula was still divided between Christian and Muslim. Germany as a nation was unheard of. The path of Russian imperialism is difficult to follow precisely because the patchwork of nation states kept changing. Furthermore, although Muscovy emerged from Mongol rule as the leader of a unified Russian state, what Russian histories often overlook is that the Russia that entered the Mongol realm was not the Russia that emerged centuries later. Much of what had been Russia was liberated not by Muscovy but by Lithuania. The all-powerful Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which soon incorporated Poland, ensured that much of Kievan Rus was oriented not eastwards to the relative barbarism of post-Mongol Muscovy but to the self-consciously civilised Catholic west. For centuries afterwards Russia was obsessed by regaining Kiev and the lands we now know as Ukraine and Belarus. Not until the Second World War were the last remnants of these territories ‘returned’ to Russian rule, by which time their inhabitants felt anything but Russian; and half a century later they were independent again.

  Although the motivation behind this imperial expansion may have been largely economic, few have been crude enough to proclaim their imperial ambitions in purely mercenary terms. Just as American imperialism was cloaked in the philosophical robes of John O’Sullivan’s ‘manifest destiny’, so Russia proclaimed a manifest destiny of its own. Ivan III told the Lithuanian Grand Prince that Kiev and other parts of Ukraine then held by the grand prince were ‘all the land of Rus’ and ‘by God’s will, since the days of old, are our patrimony inherited from our ancestors’. At least Ivan III had the justification that Ukraine had once been Rus, but Ivan IV used the same manifest destiny argument in the Livonian wars when invading territory that had never been part of Kievan Rus. Later the doctrine of ‘Slavophilism’ was developed, which proclaimed the right and duty of the Russian people to occupy the various territories they had conquered.