Black Dragon River

by Dominic Ziegler

  Jubilant, Khabarov stayed at Guigudar for six or seven weeks. He sent his men across the country to demand yasak and threaten destruction if furs were not offered up. What few natives the Russians found had recently paid tribute to the Manchus; they were now destitute. The rest of the Daurians had fled. But still the Russians did not understand that in the end their depredations would deprive them of the very grain they had come for.

  In September Khabarov and his men returned to their boats and sailed out of Daurian and Ducher lands and past the Sungari River, the Manchus’ White River, now known to the Chinese as the Songhua, the Amur’s longest tributary. Here lived a people the Russians called the Achans—possibly relatives of the Fishskin Tatars. Somewhere near present-day Khabarovsk, the city that took his name, the Russian leader built Fort Achansk. At first, the natives were peaceable, and paid tribute. But the Russians, as ever, demanded more, and tortured hostages. On the night of October 8, an Achan-Ducher force of about one thousand attacked the ostrog. The uprising cost nine hundred lives, just one of them a Cossack’s.

  By now broader forces were at play. For so distressed were all the peoples of the Amur that collectively they turned to the Manchus for protection. Petitions were forwarded to Peking. As the Russians wintered at Achansk, a powerful Chinese force was being assembled, with orders to drive Khabarov from the Amur.

  That it did not succeed immediately seems puzzling. The two-thousand-strong Chinese force included seasoned Manchu and Korean warriors. Though most soldiers were armed with only bows and arrows, at close range these were lethal. Their matchlocks, though few, were better than the Russians’, as were the Manchu cannon. Yet when this host attacked Fort Achansk in the spring of 1652, it was a rout. In his braggadocio account, Khabarov claimed 676 from the Chinese army killed, against only 10 Cossacks. In flight the Manchus left muskets, cannons, eight silk flags, more than 800 horses, and provisions. The defeat of this far larger force was extraordinary. But it can be explained. Yet again, the Manchus’ hands were tied. Their general, Haise, head of the main garrison in northeast China at Ninguta, had ordered his men not to kill the Cossacks but to take them alive.

  Yet the victory seems, for the first time, to have rattled Khabarov. Perhaps, he felt, he had driven off merely the vanguard of a main Chinese army. Within days he left Fort Achansk, sailing upriver. He then headed overland in a sweeping run under the Yablonovy mountains in hopes of skirting the Chinese forces. Even then, a Chinese army of six thousand lay across his path. As fog hung over the country, the Russians slipped past in the dark.

  Farther on, Khabarov met up with a band of Cossacks sent out a year earlier as reinforcements. They were mutinous, keener to look for natives to oppress than to worry about the Chinese, whose numbers, Khabarov was told, now reached forty thousand. Some of Khabarov’s own men joined the mutineers. For the rest of the summer, when he was not ducking from the Chinese, Khabarov was chasing down the renegades. When he caught up with them he attacked the mutineers’ camp and flogged the survivors to death. His remaining Cossacks, though nominally still loyal, were by now seething with resentments—not least, they had not been paid.

  Khabarov was back at the mouth of the Zeia with barely two hundred men. He faced a fourth, dangerous winter in Amur lands when salvation came in the shape of Zinovev, dispatched from Moscow, at the head of reinforcements. He had supplies, pay, and even gold medals for Khabarov’s Cossacks. Zinovev lost no time in asserting that he was in overall command, with orders to inspect the whole sweep of Dauria. Khabarov demanded to see his written orders, whereupon Zinovev seized his beard, beat him, and placed him under arrest for insolence. With the tyrant shackled, Khabarov’s own men heaped grievances on him. Khabarov, they said, had enslaved Russians and natives alike; tended to his own business affairs at the expense of the czar’s by keeping back the best furs; laid waste to Amuria; and sent back official reports that dissembled about all this. Zinovev had plenty to work up into a formal complaint.

  Restoring order among the Russians, the general set about establishing a more permanent presence on the Amur. He ordered Khabarov’s men to enlarge their tiny fort at Albazino and build two new ones, upstream and down. The men were to cultivate the fields around Albazino from which the Daurians had been driven, in readiness for the great Muscovite army that Prince Lobanov-Rostovsky was still assumed to be bringing. But Zinovev was a martinet, more at home on the Moscow parade grounds than at the head of a ruffian band in the wilds. The men soon missed Khabarov’s earthier style and grew mutinous. Zinovev probably feared for his life. He turned on his heel for Moscow. Taking Khabarov with him, he left the Cossack rabble in the charge of a prikashchik, a government official, Onufry Stepanov.

  It took Khabarov fifteen months to reach Moscow. Once again, the career of a conquering Siberian hero ended in disgrace. The man who claimed a vast region for the czar and delivered a horde of sable pelts was stripped of property and rank. It took a year for Khabarov to clear his name—his powers of persuasion still at work. He was later given the rank of a boyar’s son, but the catch was that he had to go back to Siberia to administer land near Irkutsk. His appearance in the historical record then grows patchy. “I am perishing of hunger,” he complains at one point. In 1658 an order from the Siberian Office stipulated that if Khabarov refused to act as guide for an expedition then on its way to the Amur, he should be put in irons. At this point Khabarov fades from view. Yet in the popular Siberian imagination his feats only grew, until they were being compared to Yermak’s.

  The Russian presence on the Amur was tragic for its aboriginal inhabitants, dangerous for the Russians. Khabarov’s daring and force of character had opened up a new country, one that tantalizingly promised enough grain to feed Siberia’s eastern lands and more. The discovery now led to a rush of immigrants—farmers, trappers, and service men: a “colonizing fever.” Plundering state stores for food, lead, gunpowder, and money, Russians pushed over the mountains into Amuria. “Neither home, wife or children,” wrote Johann Eberhard Fischer, the eighteenth-century historian of Siberia, “nor even the laws of God or man could turn the people to change their habitation for the far-famed Dauria.” The authorities grew alarmed that Amur fever was causing depopulation in the Lena Valley. Eventually, they ordered a barrier station to be built on the Olekma, the route to Dauria from Yakutsk, in order to stem the flood of Russians into the Amur watershed.

  All the while, Manchu assertiveness along the Amur only grew. Stepanov struggled to build on Khabarov’s conquests. Food became the chief obsession. In a new policy to deal with Russian-infested areas, Manchus ordered Daurs and Duchers, their tributary peoples, to abandon their fields and move to the valley of the Sungari in Manchuria proper, a scorched-earth policy designed to starve the Russians out. At the Zeia there was not food enough even for Stepanov’s 320 Russians, so he led them downriver. The following summer, 1654, they were sailing up the Sungari in search of Duchers and their grain when they were attacked by a big Chinese force bombarding their boats from the shore. Short of lead and powder, Stepanov fled downriver. To the Russians, the enemy seemed formidable and well disciplined, nothing like the usual native rabble: “They fought as trained men, in companies, under white, black, red and yellow colors, and wore uniforms corresponding to the particular color of the standard under which they fought.” These were Manchu banners, in other words: the hereditary military castes, often along ethnic lines—Manchu, Mongol, Korean—that were the Qing army’s organizing principle as the dynasty tightened its hold over Chinese lands.

  One Ducher later taken captive told Stepanov that the Manchu emperor of China had ordered an army of three thousand to remain at the mouth of the Sungari for some years, with two thousand more warriors soon to arrive. No longer did these soldiers have their hands tied. They had, said the Ducher, orders from the emperor to seek out and fight the Russians and drive them from the Amur. Rattled, Stepanov abandoned plans to build permanent blockhouses and instead re
treated to a bluff overlooking the Kumara River. He and his men built there an embrasured fort atop an earthen platform, surrounded by a moat, palisade, and concealed pits with body-skewering iron spikes. In this fort, the Russians waited. In March a Manchu army came, ten thousand strong. For two weeks it besieged the fort. But on April 4 it suddenly retired, perhaps because the Manchus, too, were going hungry. It rendered Stepanov’s position no less precarious. Once the ice melted, the starving Russians abandoned Kumarsk and sailed once again down the Amur. Now Manchu detachments harried them from place to place.

  Stepanov and his men longed to leave the accursed land, but all orders arriving from over the mountains insisted they stay. A fortuitous raid back on the Sungari that summer seized enough grain to last the Russians a year. But when they showed up on the Sungari the following summer, 1656, they found the entire course of the lower river abandoned. Now no more grain grew in a vast region where native agriculture had until recently flourished. Slowly, the Muscovite authorities became aware of and then concerned about the perilous situation of the Russians on the Amur.

  A position for a voevoda of Nerchinsk was created, and Afanasii Pashkov, at the time the voevoda of Yeniseisk, was ordered to fill it. Arriving in 1658, Pashkov began building an ostrog at Nerchinsk and sent men down the Shilka in search of Stepanov. It was too late. That spring, as usual, Stepanov had led five hundred men down the Amur on a foraging expedition. On the wide Amur below the Sungari he ran into a Manchu fleet—forty-five barges strung across the river, armed with cannons. On sight, 180 Russians fled for the shore. The rest were surrounded. Most were killed or drowned, among them Stepanov himself. A handful of survivors escaped to carry the news to Pashkov.

  • • •

  What Khabarov had set in train appeared to have ended in failure. For fifteen years after Stepanov’s annihilation, the government abandoned the Amur. War with Poland absorbed all of Moscow’s energies. In Eastern Siberia, Russia thereafter maintained an official Russian presence no closer to the Amur than Nerchinsk. That settlement was plagued by illness, Mongol raids, mutiny, and desertion. But the Russians’ withdrawal from the Amur also encouraged the Manchus to shift their attentions elsewhere.

  A vacuum, then, and small bands of Russian freebooters returned to fill it. In the early 1660s a Polish noble and prisoner of war showed up with a group of eighty-four renegades. Nikifor Chernigovsky had been foreman of the saltworks at Ilimsk, near Irkutsk, when his gang attacked and killed the local voevoda—because, Siberians say, he had taken a shine to the foreman’s young wife. Chernigovsky and gang fled to the Amur. They came upon the abandoned fort at Albazino. The men set about rebuilding it. Albazino now became the “outlaw ostrog,” an independent state, in effect, drawing fugitives and adventurers to it.

  Chernigovsky was a man of abilities. He set his men to reinforcing other of the Russians’ abandoned forts along the Amur. These were used, once again, to enforce a local protection racket over natives beginning to drift back after their time of troubles. This time Chernigovsky seems to have calibrated the racket so as not to drive all the natives away again; and he grasped the utter futility in always raiding the natives for grain. Before long, not just outlaws but Russian men and women of the soil were turning up under Albazino’s walls. Under Chernigovsky, 2,700 acres around Albazino were cleared and tilled. A village grew up outside the stockade, and then even a monastery was built. In this monastery an icon of the Virgin Mary was installed, greatly revered then and one day to be venerated even more.

  As for Chernigovsky, the memory of the lynching of the voevoda of Ilimsk began, as one historian from the last century put it, to “upset his peace of mind.” On his own initiative, he sent to Moscow a delegation to plead his case and at the same time to deliver a bundle of some of the very best Albazinian sables. Chernigovsky had twin motives. Cetainly, he was keen to sidestep retribution for his crimes. But he was also aware that his freelance operations on the Amur risked stirring the Chinese dragon, and he needed official protection: Chernigovsky feared a Manchu attack on Albazino.

  Back in Moscow, the Siberian Office investigated Chernigovsky’s case. Finding him guilty of murder and more, it condemned the Pole and half a dozen accomplices to death in absentia. But this was to keep up appearances. As it happened, murdering the voevoda had rid Moscow of an ineffective governor. The pelts, meanwhile, were superb. When the delegation got back to Albazino, it carried with it a pardon for Chernigovsky, and two thousand rubles.

  Now Chernigovsky’s operations had the protection of the fort at Nerchinsk, which sent officers to Albazino and, after Chernigovsky stepped down, appointed voevodas for the place. A coat of arms was created for Albazino, for use on the governor’s seal. The coat of arms is exceptional among Siberian cities in not sporting a furred animal. Instead, an eagle clutches a bow in one claw and an arrow in the other. Whether this was a conscious choice or not, priorities were different on the Amur from elsewhere in Siberia. Yet for more than a decade along the Amur, the Chinese remained exceptionally—disturbingly—quiet.

  PART FIVE

  Albazino

  CHAPTER 10

  53°21.2' N 124°05.3' E

  Giving life to people and killing people—those are the powers that the emperor has.

  THE KANGXI EMPEROR

  I was on my way to Khabarovsk, where I wanted to look for the house where the last Qing emperor of China, Pu Yi, the last Manchu in effect, spent the best part of five years in Soviet captivity before being returned to the Chinese Communists. He was to die a gardener in Beijing in 1967, the day Hair opened off-Broadway.

  As a boy, after he had abdicated in 1912 and the Qing dynasty no longer existed, Pu Yi had scampered alone about the high roofs of Peking’s Forbidden City, now abandoned except for the corner that the rump of the once-imperial family was allowed to inhabit. Two decades later, the Japanese set him up, a mild young man with a somewhat peevish sense of his due, as the puppet emperor in the state of Manchukuo, that is, Manchuria. He and his consorts seemed contented enough until that fateful day on a Manchurian airfield in 1945 when the war was going badly and he was waiting for a plane to whisk him to Japan. He was with a small group of family members and courtiers and Big Li, his loyal retainer who had once nearly killed a Japanese for not stepping aside for his master.

  Suddenly the air reverberated with the sound of Soviet aircraft landing. Within minutes, soldiers with machine guns were surrounding the last emperor. Pu Yi and his entourage were flown to Chita and from there to Khabarovsk. They were treated well enough, put up in a house to themselves with a yard. Pu Yi took to growing tomatoes, eggplants, and green peppers, about whose health he worried during the endless, obligatory lectures on Leninism. Others in his entourage played mah-jongg or told fortunes to learn when they would return home. This was the last court: no one dared address Pu Yi as the emperor anymore, though even in Khabarovsk he still fretted about etiquette—who would bring him his rice bowl, for instance.

  • • •

  The last Qing emperor was a cipher in Soviet hands. Yet once, under Pu Yi’s great ancestor, the Kangxi emperor, the Qing had been puissant, and it was the Russians—right here where I am traveling—who felt their might.

  The Manchus at the imperial court in Peking had not at first made the connection between the wild, red-bearded Cossacks marauding around Albazino and the czar’s fur-gowned envoys from Moscow appearing from time to time in the capital, seeking openings for trade. But once that connection was made, in the early 1670s, the Manchus displayed power, certainly, but also a remarkable pragmatism and give-and-take: they were, they said, ready to give Russians the trading privileges they wanted in exchange for an understanding that the Amur Cossacks would abandon their settlements along the Manchus’ northern frontier. Given that these Cossacks were undermining hopes for a potentially huge trade with China in furs (at a time when European markets were glutted with pelts from North America), Moscow ought to have been of a
mind to consent. But by the time the misunderstandings, on both sides, had been set right, Moscow’s writ no longer reached as far as the Albazino renegades. Meanwhile, the Manchus had become wholly distracted by the need, in southern China, to suppress Ming loyalist rebellions against Manchu rule. Shaping an aggressive policy toward the Russians would have to wait. That led to further misperceptions: in particular, among the Russians on the Amur, that the Manchus were soft and weak-willed and posed no very great threat. They were wrong. Under the great Kangxi emperor, the Manchus were establishing a powerful rule, a Chinese empire whose extent has not been matched before or since.

  The Manchus were young and vigorous: as a people, they had existed for barely half a century. They drew much inspiration from the Mongols, alongside whom they had lived. They shared a passion for horses and archery, and had a thrill for the hunt. They worshipped the Mongols’ sky god, Tengri, from whom China may have borrowed the concept of tian, sky, and the “mandate of heaven” through which successive dynasties ruled. One-third of the Manchurian vocabulary had Mongolian roots. But above all, the Manchus were an invented people. They did not exist until their ruler, Hong Taiji, said that they did, in 1635, just before their assault on China.