Black Dragon River

by Dominic Ziegler

  “Excelsior,” said Konstantin, “is the last business in Nerchinsk, if you don’t count the prison.” Before there had been a mill, factories, mines, hotels, and an important airbase. All were gone. As we ate, Konstantin told me about the steady emptying of Nerchinsk, and about the trauma that marked its real end, not long after the Soviet Union crumbled. In Russia in the days of Boris Yeltsin, shadowy and well-connected people made a grab to pocket for private gain anything that could be pried from the state. Nerchinsk was no exception. As well as the airbase, there was also a huge and valuable arms and explosives depot. Moscow had got wind that a group of army commanders and mafia types had gained control of the depot and were selling off the inventory as fast as they could. An inspection team was on its way to investigate. The commanders resolved to destroy the evidence. They set fire to the depot’s office. The blaze got out of hand. And then the ordnance began to explode: howitzer shells, tank rounds, TNT. The authorities ordered the town evacuated. The same day, Konstantin said, he was sheltering at home outside the town when an enormous whoosh was followed by an explosion that rattled the dinner plates. An artillery shell had flown over their wooden house and buried itself into the hillside above. For three days Nerchinsk was in the middle of its own private Armageddon. And then silence returned.

  I asked Konstantin whether he would ever return to live in his hometown.

  “Never,” he said with firmness. “A curse hangs on that town, Nerchinsk.”

  CHAPTER 9

  52°21.7' N 127°31.0' E

  The narrative of the European conquest and settlement of new lands comes everywhere now with acknowledgment of guilt and open shows of contrition. Except in the Russian Far East.

  The Cossack conquistadores carried only necessities into new lands, but those now hang in the fusty museums that play the part of camp followers to Russian history here. The necessities are nowhere subtle: monstrous halberds, iron broadswords, knouts and heavy manacles for chastising locals. Yet all along the old line of conquest I met—the sweetest souls—museum curators, pointing stick in hand, telling me that the Russians came in peace. They said relations with locals—the “small peoples of the north,” the term Soviet ethnographers devised for them—had always been nothing but wholly warm. Vasily Poyarkov and Yerofei Khabarov, the first openers of Amuria, true Russian heroes, were above all men of peace, and of enlightenment.

  I wondered constantly at the self-deception in the Russian Far East. Insecurity lay at the root of it, perhaps. Russians have always felt their presence in the Far East to be precarious—so few Russians and so vast a space, pressed in on by a pitiless nature and by a billion Chinese to the south. A history of emphatic conquest is not enough. To convince themselves that they belonged in the Russian Far East, truly belonged, Russians had to have come in love.

  And yet the stain of early conquest lies over the Russian Far East like original sin. Cossack atrocities in the 1600s were still vivid in the collective memory of native groups as late as the mid-nineteenth century. The brute racism against ethnic Chinese and Koreans in the early twentieth century; Stalin’s banishment of millions of Koreans to Central Asia; his gulag itself and a Siberian economy that was able to function only on the basis of slave labor; the Soviet destruction of the way of life of the “small peoples”; and abiding Russian notions, official and mafia, of declaring war on nature, Siberia as a site chiefly for the exploitation of its resources—lumber, gold, gas, and fish: would all this rawness have come about without that first Cossack plunder? If nothing else, it set the tone.

  • • •

  As for those first Russians who looked for the Amur lands, they were led by their bellies. As the Cossacks pressed east, portaging from one river system to the next, the climate became ever less hospitable as the furs grew more abundant. Easternmost of Siberia’s three great north-flowing streams, the one the colonists reached last, is the Lena. They established an ostrog on its banks in 1632. They named the fort Yakutsk, after the Yakuts, a Turkic people who inhabited the valley. Outside the stockade’s walls, nothing planted could be induced to grow, while supply lines back to Russia stretched to the breaking point. It was here that the Cossacks first heard of a great river that flowed, beyond the mountains, far to the south. Grain, they heard, grew fat and golden; livestock too.

  Once planted, fantasies about Amuria only grew. Cossack hunters pushed southward. They followed the Lena up to its sources in the Stanovoy range, part of the high country that runs east for about two thousand miles from Lake Baikal to the Pacific Ocean. Native Evenki lived by these rivers, a Tungusic people, forest dwellers who are thought to share a common ancestry with the Manchus of Manchuria. The Evenki repeated the stories. The fabled land to the south was called Dauria. The broad river that ran through it watered fields of buckwheat and rye ripening in the summer sun. Explorers fanning out from Yakutsk collected ever more of these tales. By the Angara River, flowing out of Lake Baikal, they bought silver from natives, and a paint colored a vivid blue. The natives said these things came from the Amur.

  Much farther east, in 1639, a Moscow adventurer, Ivan Moskvitin, led a band of twenty promyshlenniki up Lena tributaries and over the Dzhugdzhur mountains, a spur running northeast away from the Stanovoy range. Natives had told him of a “great sea-ocean” on the far side. He dropped over the mountains and followed the Ulya River down. Five days later he reached its mouth; before him was an unknown sea (later named the Sea of Okhotsk). Moskvitin had found the Pacific, in other words: the first European to reach it by land from the west. But he had still not found the Amur.

  Meanwhile, Yakutsk was running out of grain. The situation was desperate. To find the Amur, the voevoda, Pyotr Golovin, dispatched his henchman Vasily Poyarkov at the head of 112 Cossacks, 15 hunters, 2 interpreters, 2 tselovalnik (tribute collectors), a guide, and a blacksmith. They set out up the Aldan River, a 1,400-mile tributary of the Lena. They could not have chosen a worse route, for the men had to unload their heavy craft and portage cannon, supplies, and boats around dozens of rapids. By the time winter set in, they were still not out of the Lena watershed.

  Leaving half the men to set up winter camp, Poyarkov led the rest, hauling sledges, over the Stanovoy range. They fell upon a south-flowing stream, the Brianta. The Brianta flowed into the Zeia, the Amur’s main left tributary. Russians had dropped into the Amur basin at last. Soon after, they met the first party of native Daurs.

  By now the Russians were half starving. They encountered hospitality and responded with violence. It ruled out any native cooperation over provisions—the Daurs buried or destroyed foodstuffs to keep them out of Russian hands. Cossacks foraged for roots and pine bark, and hunted what small game they could. When that no longer served, they set to tracking Daurians, as well as eating the corpses of comrades who had starved to death.

  Relations between the Russians and the natives had broken irretrievably down as word of Poyarkov’s violence ran before it. This original violence both defined Russians’ future relationship with the natives of Amuria and laid the groundwork for Russians’ eviction from the Amur paradise a few decades later. Still, Poyarkov went on to accomplish a remarkable expedition. He and his men built rafts and floated down the Zeia and at its mouth turned east into the Amur itself, the first Russians on the river. They drifted through the land of the Daurs and then entered the territory of the Duchers, a long-vanished people. Whenever they put in to shore, they met a hail of arrows. By the mouth of the Sungari, Duchers attacked a scouting party of two dozen Russians, killing all but two. Farther downstream, Poyarkov and his men came to the other of the Amur’s huge downstream tributaries, the Ussuri, near present-day Khabarovsk. This was the territory of the Olch and the Nanai, later called the Fishskin Tatars, on account of their smocks stitched out of salmon skins, like those of the Greenland Inuit. For two weeks the Cossacks passed through native peoples so remote they paid tribute to no one. Then the men floated into the lands of the Gilyaks, as t
he Manchus called them, or Nivkh, as they call themselves today, named after their four-oared boats; their language is unrelated to any other.

  The Russians were now nearly at the Amur’s mouth after a prodigious river drift. They set up winter camp and over the long dark months they fashioned crude boats for the open water. In the spring, as the pack ice broke up, they set off through the shifting sandbanks of the Amur estuary. They turned into the whitecapped Sea of Okhotsk and ran north up the coast. Three months later they were at the cabin that Moskvitin had built six years before. And the following spring—it was now 1646—Poyarkov and the survivors were back in Yakutsk, three years nearly to the day after setting out.

  Three-quarters of his original band had died along the Amur, but Poyarkov lost no time promoting the lands he had found. Three hundred men, he said, were all that were needed to conquer Amuria. The new lands, he memorialized his czar, were rich in people, crops, fish, and fur. And then, the baldest assertion: “The warriors of the Sovereign will not go hungry in this land.” Yet little did his Amur huckstering profit him. Poyarkov’s brutality had turned even the survivors of this rough band against him. He was sent back to Moscow for trial, and at this point, the Russian who opened the Amur disappears from the record.

  • • •

  The Amur dreams did not fade. A lone Evenki hunter from the headwaters of the Olekma, yet another of the Lena’s tributaries, well to the west of the Aldan, wandered into Yakutsk. He described a route to the Amur that seemed passable. Some Russian trappers made a swift probe, and the hunter proved to be right. At this point, in early 1649, another freebooter, Yerofei Pavlovich Khabarov, arrived in Yakutsk with a plan for the Amur that made this new route attractive. In the myth making of Russia’s Wild East, only Yermak, the Cossack who opened Siberia—the man who sank in the czar’s armor—rivals Khabarov among sibirskii who loom larger than mortals. Here was a man of parts. On the western side of the Urals Khabarov had opened and operated a saltworks, and with his profits had set up in Siberia. He built a grain mill on the route Russians were taking on their race eastward toward the Lena. The state seized this mill, possibly, it seems, because Khabarov so mistreated the workers. Undaunted, by chance he met the new voevoda of Yakutsk on his way to take up his post. Khabarov shared with this man, Dmitry Franzbekov, plans for Amur conquest. It could, he told Franzbekov, be done without state money but would need discreet private capital: none better than Franzbekov’s own.

  The new voevoda liked the proposition. When Khabarov submitted his official petition to take 150 men to conquer the Amur lands for the czar, Franzbekov swiftly granted permission. Khabarov set out in the spring of 1649. With the onset of winter they stopped by the Niuzhka River, between Lake Baikal and the Yablonovy range, which runs parallel to the lake a couple of hundred miles to its southeast. The following year they set off again, pulling sledges across the Yablonovy range into the Amur basin. Following either the Urka or Amazar tributaries, they came to the Amur somewhere near the top of the river’s great loop, opposite what today is China’s northernmost territory.

  The settled countryside through which they passed was deserted—the memory of Poyarkov was powerful. But near one abandoned settlement, three horsemen approached, keeping at a safe distance; one was Prince Lavkai, chief of the Daurs. Khabarov explained that he was here to trade and had brought gifts. “Why,” asked Lavkai, “are you trying to deceive us? We know you Cossacks.” He galloped off. For three days Khabarov tracked him but could not overtake him. But his men did find supplies of food that the Daurians had tried to conceal: enough oats, barley, buckwheat, wheat, hempseed, and dried peas to live on for a couple of years.

  And in one of the abandoned villages, Khabarov’s men at last found someone to interrogate, an old woman who either had been left behind in the flight or had refused to go. Some accounts say that she was Lavkai’s sister, and that Khabarov tortured her; others that she was a soothsayer, and that Khabarov stayed up all night by the fire in thrall to her. Either way, the woman told Khabarov of mountains full of gold and gems, and of Dauria’s fields of grain.

  That night, the old woman laid out the political situation. The left bank, where the Cossacks were camped, was Prince Lavkai’s. The far bank was ruled by a more powerful prince, a Manchu to whom Lavkai paid tribute. The Manchu drank from gold cups, and his army had firearms. What the old shaman did not know—or would not say—was that the Manchu tribes south of the Amur had recently united under a single ruler. They had risen up with such force that they had invaded China, ruled by the last dynasts of the tottering Ming. In the summer of 1644, the Manchus overran Peking. Their chief regent announced the downfall of the Ming dynasty and declared that the mandate of heaven had fallen to a new dynasty, the Qing. The regent put his seven-year-old nephew, henceforth known as the Shunzhi emperor, on the throne, the first Qing emperor of China. Khabarov and his ruffians had stumbled through the back door not merely of the Manchus, but the ambitious new rulers of China. The Qing remained in power until the end of all Chinese dynasties, if you do not count the present Communist one.

  • • •

  Had he grasped the implications, Khabarov would surely not have hurried back to Yakutsk in the spring of 1640 to convince the authorities that the Amur was theirs for the taking. On the Amur’s banks enough grain grew, he claimed, to feed twenty thousand. It could be brought to Yakutsk in just two months, compared with the four years to carry grain over the Urals to eastern Siberia. But Khabarov had understood, if only vaguely, that the Russians’ ultimate foe in these new lands was much more formidable than the khanate of Sibir, whose defeat at Yermak’s hands opened up a continent. For he petitioned the czar, through Franzbekov, for a force of six thousand regulars. At the time, fewer than half that number served across Siberia.

  Khabarov started out on the Amur in essence by recapitulating earlier patterns: raiding new lands for plunder and yasak, and holding the country with garrisons at the strategic choke points of waterways and portages. But in time, he saw, the policy needed to change. He needed settlers: fishermen, tillers of the soil, men who put down roots. If not, the local populations—agriculturalists on the fringes of a sophisticated Chinese realm—would only return. “If it be the Sovereign’s will,” he wrote to the czar, “he should send here exiles or any other men to start agriculture. For there are many arable lands on the Amur, grassy meadows, places abundant in fish, and many other attractions.”

  For all that, Khabarov and his allies had an absurdly poor grasp of Asian power relations, grossly underestimating Chinese might. A measure of this comes with a letter that Franzbekov wrote to the Chinese emperor, inviting him to become a subject of the czar. (If the letter ever reached Peking, you struggle to imagine that it was shown to the emperor.) Meanwhile, Khabarov and Franzbekov now suffered from the tyranny of distance that would bedevil the governors of Russia’s Far East until the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway. Their plea for reinforcements took a year to reach Moscow. The czar approved, ordering a three-thousand-strong army to be equipped for the Amur under an important man of the court, Prince Fedor Lobanov-Rostovsky. But very quickly events in Europe took precedence, as they so often did. Russia was about to launch what became a long struggle with Poland over control of the Ukraine. Lobanov-Rostovsky was needed closer to home. And so the czar dispatched a lesser nobleman, Dimitri Ivanovich Zinovev, to Yakutsk, with a far smaller detachment. He did not arrive on the Amur until 1653, by which time much had happened.

  Just weeks after returning to Yakutsk, Khabarov was heading back out for the Amur, with nearly double the men, and fresh mounts and more cannons. Moving much faster this time, they were back in Dauria by the autumn.

  This time, the villages were not empty. The Daurians had chosen to resist. Near a large settlement on the Amur’s banks ruled by a notable princeling called Albaza, the Daurians stood and fought. Their bows and arrows were no match for the Russians’ firearms. The Daurians fled in disarray. Khaba
rov hunted the fugitives down and took their cattle. His men found more hidden stores of grain, enough to feed the band for months or more. Khabarov seized Albaza’s town and fortified it. In Albazino, as the place was henceforth called, he left a small force. On November 24 Khabarov led the rest out to resume the human safari. The hunting season closed with the onset of winter, spent in Albazino.

  Early the following summer, Khabarov set out again, in boats built or repaired over the winter. By now he had more than two hundred men, three cannon, and rested horses. Floating downstream, the Russians passed native villages that had been burned and abandoned by their occupants. As the sun set on the fourth day, near a village called Guigudar (thought to be near the confluence of the Zeia and the Amur at modern-day Blagoveshchensk), they came across a group of warriors of a type they had not seen before—Manchus, the overlords of the Amur. Khabarov was not in awe from this first meeting. The Manchus told him that they had the strictest instructions not to fight the Russians. For Khabarov, it was the sweetest thing, and the cue to storm Guigudar. “With God’s help . . . we cut them all down, head by head . . . big and little we killed six hundred and sixty-one.” As well as the slaughter, Khabarov’s lot raped the women—243 women and girls seized—and led away hundreds of horses and cattle.