The Black Sea

by Charles King

  The survey of the southern lands ended in Crimea. Catherine briefly visited the khan’s former palace at Bakhchisarai and made provision for its renovation. (It was because of Catherine’s decision to preserve the palace rather than raze it, as had often happened in conquered lands, that it remains a tourist attraction even today.) Some of the procession’s dignity was lost in negotiating the narrow streets around the palace, where confused Tatar residents and shopkeepers looked on in amazement. A visit to the newly constructed naval base at Sevastapol followed, where Catherine received a salute from the small Russian fleet assembled in the harbor—all the while under the watchful eye of Ottoman vessels anchored just off the coast. By the middle of the summer, Catherine had tired of life on the road and gave orders to return to St. Petersburg, where she arrived to a momentous reception in July.

  Segur eventually returned to France and found himself caught up in the pandemonium of the French revolution. The barbarism of the streets of Paris, he later recalled, contrasted sharply with the grandeur of Catherine’s procession to the south. Russia was now in the middle of a transformation from backwardness to civilization precisely at a time when the center of enlightened thought and culture seemed to be moving in the opposite direction.

  Having quitted the magic circle, I was not longer to see, at each moment, as in our triumphant and romantic journey, new objects of surprise; fleets suddenly created, squadrons of Cossacks and Tartars, coming from the remote parts of Asia, illuminated roads, mountains on fire, enchanted palaces, gardens raised in a night, savage caverns, temples of Diana, delightful harems, wandering tribes, dromedaries and camels wandering through deserts, hospodars [princes] of Wallachia, and dethroned princes of Caucasus and persecuted Georgia, paying homage, and addressing their prayers to the Queen of the North.15

  The action and romance of life along the Black Sea had been traded for the plodding march of history.

  Segur was right about the major changes at work along the northern shore, but one of the most significant developments in the social life of the newly conquered steppelands had taken place already more than a decade before Catherine’s procession. Large-scale steppe nomadism, a way of life that had remained little changed since the Scythians of antiquity, was giving way to settled agriculture and state-sponsored colonization. That shift was exemplified by a massive movement of people far more tragic but no less grand than the empress’s own journey of 1787.

  The Flight of the Kalmoucks

  One evening during their trip with Catherine, Count Segur and the Austrian emperor Joseph II took a stroll to see the steppe in the moonlight. Watching camels and shepherds lazily drift across the landscape, the count remarked to the emperor that “it appears to me rather like a page from the Arabian Nights Entertainments, and that I am walking with the Caliph Haroun-al-Raschild.”

  A bizarre sight soon shook them from their reverie. The emperor rubbed his eyes and strained to see in the dim light. “In truth, I do not know whether I am awake, or whether your allusion to the Arabian Nights has enchanted me,” he said, “but look on this side.” Segur turned to where the emperor had pointed to find a large tent gliding across the grassy plain, apparently propelling itself. As they rushed forward to investigate, out popped thirty men, who had been moving the tent to a new location by holding onto the wooden staves from the inside. Everyone had a good laugh.

  The men were “savage Kalmoucks,” as Segur called them, “who bear a true resemblance to the Huns, whose ugliness in days of yore inspired as much terror in Europe as did the renowned sword of their ferocious monarch Attila.”16 Although Segur could not have known it, they were also among the last of their kind, the remnant of a people that had once dominated the lands to the northeast of the Black Sea, all the way to the Caspian. Less than two decades before Segur encountered them, most had left the region behind in the last dramatic wave of nomadic movement across the Eurasian steppe.

  The Kalmoucks—or Kalmyks in modern spelling—were a nomadic Mongol population, Tibetan Buddhist by religion, who had migrated from western China in the middle of the 1600s.17 The traditional grazing lands for their immense herds of horses, sheep, and cattle had become threatened by neighboring Muslim peoples, and like the many migrants before them, from the Scythians to the Mongols of the Middle Ages, they moved en masse toward the west, to the lands between the Volga and Don rivers and beyond. More than a quarter of a million people may have been included in this search for new pastures.

  In the seventeenth century, there was little to stand in their way. Much of the Black Sea steppe, especially to the east, was under no strong central control. Russian power was limited to concluding alliances with local Turkic rulers and with the Cossacks. The advance of the Kalmyks had important consequences. By displacing local nomadic allies of the Russian state, the Kalmyks left the southern borderlands open to raids from a host of groups westward as far as Crimea. In the winter of 1636—7, another group of Turkic pastoralists, the Nogays, fled across the Don and took refuge in Crimea after news of an impending strike by the Kalmyks. The movement of the Nogays to the west may actually have opened up a route for the Cossack advance on the Azov fortress in 1637.

  As in the past, the tsars learned to make peace with their new southern neighbors. With the annexation of eastern Ukraine in 1654, Russia was in need of strong friends to counter the threats posed by the Tatars of Crimea, the Poles to the west, and, farther afield, the Ottomans. Written agreements were drafted under which the Kalmyks pledged support for the Russian tsar in return for payments to Kalmyk nobles and protection against local raiding parties. The goal was to reduce the Kalmyks to the status of loyal subjects by identifying and privileging one of the many Kalmyk tribal rulers—in effect, creating a centralized Kalmyk authority which had not existed in the traditionally diffuse pastoral society. Things never worked that smoothly, however. The Kalmyks often played both sides of the table, trading horses with the Crimean Tatars while professing loyalty to the Russians. When Moscow objected, the Kalmyks countered that the alliance was an arrangement between two equal and sovereign powers, not between a suzerain and a subordinate.

  The relationship changed significantly over the next century. As the power of the Russian state grew and the steppe ceased to be the danger that it had been to Muscovy, the need for mobile border guards decreased. Peter’s seizure of Azov and advances in Russian military technology, especially the use of heavy artillery, reduced the threat posed by both Ottomans and small-scale raiders in the south. The pacification of the frontier attracted settlers, who were encouraged to move to the Don—Volga region by the government. Along the two rivers, Slavicspeaking Orthodox populations grew as traders and business people flocked to take advantage of new opportunities. State-run enterprises such as vineyards, silk factories, and salt mines attracted Russian workers and their families.18 Farmers turned the soil of the steppe, making hayfields of the grasslands that had once fed Kalmyk herds.

  As in the American West, the relationship between settlers and nomads was tense. Kalmyk raiding parties, continuing the tradition of stealing from local rivals, now targeted the newly arrived Russian settlers, who saw in the practice little more than common thievery. Some Kalmyks, grown dependent on hand-outs from the Russian state, gave up the nomadic life and settled in the burgeoning frontier towns, where they eked out a living as fishermen and occupied the lowest stratum in the new society. Even then, as a later traveler remarked, “their uncontrolled and vagrant habits” put them at odds with life in agricultural settlements. 19 Horsemen could be seen “galloping their horses through the streets of the town, or lounging in public places … Like all nomad tribes, they are so much accustomed to an uncontrolled and erratic life, that nothing but extreme indigence can compel them to cultivate land and reside in any fixed habitation.”20

  The ties between Russians and Kalmyks had once been of mutual benefit. The Russian state provided some degree of military protection and even monetary gifts to Kalmyk leaders; the Kalmyks in
turn provided a mobile military force to protect the southern frontier and a ready supply of horses for the Russian cavalry. By the late eighteenth century, all this had changed. Grazing lands were quickly disappearing beneath the plow. Hostile settlers derided nomadic traditions. Representatives of the Russian government fueled internecine rivalries that decimated the Kalmyk population and destroyed communal institutions. Missionaries, sent out by the state-supported Orthodox church and by German Protestant colonies in southern Russia, worked to convert the Kalmyks and, as a later missionary wondered, perhaps even “make them into Russians or Germans.”21 The loss of grazing space decreased the size of the remaining herds, which in turn impoverished those who chose to maintain their nomadic way of life.

  Among Kalmyks dissatisfied with the fruits of civilization, there had long been rumblings about returning to western China, a far-away idyll of endless grasslands, crystal-clear rivers, and no settlers. Whenever the issue had arisen, gifts and cajoling from Russia, as well as the threat posed by hostile nomads to the east, usually deterred them. In late 1770, however, the Kalmyk leader Ubashi Khan came before his people with a daring proposal: that the entire Kalmyk people would pick up their tents and drive the herds eastward, back to the lands of their ancestors.

  What followed was an exodus of epic scale. In January 1771, exactly sixteen years before Catherine’s triumphal procession to Crimea, as many as 300,000 people carrying tens of thousands of tents and driving ten million head of sheep, cattle, horses, and camels set out on a 3,000-km journey to China.22 The spectacle must have been breathtaking. The horde was headed by the chief lama and other religious leaders, followed by the khan and his retinue. Women and men alike were dressed in their finest clothes and displayed their wealth in the adornment of their horses, which were decorated with red ribbons and tinkling silver bells. Loping pack camels, draped with bright carpets that skimmed the feather grass, carried bundles of folded tents and household goods. Children clung tightly to the top of the swaying pile. Poorer families hauled their goods on wooden carts or on oxen. The immense, cacophonous herds brought up the rear, goaded forward by swift outriders. On the margins of the troupe, young men hunted with dogs or intentionally fell behind, racing at full gallop to catch up to the main column. The whole multitude stretched out for many kilometers in every direction, tied together only by the long, thin strings of the camel trains.23 The English writer Thomas De Quincey was so taken by the story of their flight that he composed a fictionalized account of the journey, which he saw as an event both majestic and primordial: “In the unity of purpose connecting this myriad of wills, and in the blind but unerring aim at a mark so remote, there is something which recalls to mind those almighty instincts that propel the migrations of the swallow and the lemming, or the life-withering marches of the locust.”24 (De Quincey’s prejudices were not much different from those held by Greeks about the Scythians or Russians about their nomadic neighbors.)

  By mid-January news of the mass emigration reached St. Petersburg. Catherine, worried about the loss of her subjects to a foreign power, ordered her governors to put a halt to it, and a detachment of dragoons and Cossacks was assembled for the task. Yet, by the time they set out in pursuit in early spring, the Kalmyks were too far ahead to catch, and the poorly provisioned Russian troops were no match for a people whose food supply—the herd—was itself always mobile. The Russians were the least of the Kalmyks’ worries, though. Along the way, they were frequently attacked by raiding bands of enemy nomads, particularly Kazakhs, who were eager to exact revenge for the Kalmyks’ own raids on their herds and tents. (There may have been as many as 1,000 Kazakh captives traveling with the Kalmyks, hostages who had been taken only a year earlier.25)

  In a final pitched battle on the border with China, Ubashi Khan led the Kalmyks to victory in a nighttime attack on Kazakh forces, opening the doorway to China and a return to the pasturelands of the past. Catherine protested vehemently to the Chinese authorities to hand over her Kalmyks, but the Qing emperor refused, insisting that they had come under his sovereignty of their own free will.26 He soon organized them as frontier guards, with the nomads serving the same function in China that they had earlier served for the tsars. The Kalmyks who marched into the realm of the Qing emperor were greatly diminished, however. Two-thirds of those who originally set out perished during the eight months en route.27 Those who survived, as one contemporary observer noted, “were reduced to the depths of misery.”28

  But not all the Kalmyks fled. In the 1790s, the Russian naturalist Peter Simon Pallas reported 8,229 tents, perhaps as many as 50,000 people, on the western bank of the Volga river, the area of the present-day Republic of Kalmykia inside Russia.29 A few were to be found as far west as the Dnestr. These were the “Kalmoucks”—either real Kalmyks or perhaps misnamed Nogays—encountered by Segur and Joseph II. Future travelers would continue to see the few genuine nomads who remained on the steppe as the epitome of picturesque restlessness, denizens of a wild landscape that was quickly becoming, for better or worse, domesticated. Segur even picked up a peculiar souvenir, a young Kalmyk boy named Nagun—“the most original Chinese little figure that could be seen”—as a present from Prince Potemkin. He taught him to read and remained his guardian for some time, before giving him away, like an unwanted pet, when he returned to France.30 Nagun was even more of a rarity than Segur could have known. By the time the count arrived on the Black Sea steppe as part of Catherine’s entourage, the long era of the steppe peoples had already passed.

  A Season in Kherson

  The gradual sedentarization of the peoples of the steppe, the rise of new towns, and the emergence of Russia as a Black Sea power were incentives for European merchants to establish trade ties with the newly acquired ports along the northern coast. Although European ships were still formally prohibited on the sea, they could evade the Ottomans’ strictures by flying Russian flags of convenience. That was a beneficial arrangement not only for traders but for the Russian state as well: Crews and ships sailing under Russian flags could be impressed into military service in times of war, a boon for a navy that was still inadequately manned and provisioned.31 From the late eighteenth century, the sea was slowly reintegrated into a pan-European—and for some goods, genuinely global—commercial network that had not been seen since the demise of the Italian trading colonies in the fifteenth century.

  Under the direction of Potemkin, the Russians had begun to establish improved port facilities at Kherson on the Dnepr river, a new city that was to become the headquarters of the Russian Admiralty as well as a major economic center. Warehouses were constructed and European businessmen invited to sample the wealth of the newly conquered steppe, now increasingly tilled and sown with wheat. In 1780, the first Russian ship sailed from Kherson to Toulon, carrying a cargo of salted beef, and interest in the possibility of commerce was piqued.32 In the early days, however, trade was a perilous business, not only because of the continuing political tensions between Russia and the Ottomans, but also because of the hazards of living and working in a place that could still seem frightfully close to the edge of the world. The formal annexation of Crimea and Catherine’s ostentatious procession seemed to make a second war with the sultan inevitable, and the practical aspects of commerce—assembling ships and crews, transporting goods on an inhospitable sea, and negotiating with fickle Ottoman officials at the Straits—could be daunting.

  One person who knew these perils intimately was Antoine-Ignace Anthoine de Saint-Joseph. Anthoine staked his good name and fortune on being the first businessman to establish regular contact with the Russian ports. His goal was to link them to the French Mediterranean, to create a system of economic ties that would enrich the state and place France in the position of sole commercial intercessor between the tsar and the rest of the world.

  In the early 1780s, Anthoine was commissioned by the French government and the Russian minister in Istanbul to undertake a study of the feasibility of Franco-Russian commerce and, if pos
sible, to outfit an expedition to sail from Marseilles and return with Russian goods. He was well-placed to do so. France was Russia’s greatest ally in western Europe, and Anthoine’s backers enjoyed the favor of the French court. Anthoine himself had worked for one of the greatest commercial concerns in Marseilles, the House of Seimandy, and had also served for a time as head of the French community in Istanbul.33 He thus had the necessary experience in business and shipping, as well as the essential connections in several important cities.

  In April 1781 Anthoine made an exploratory voyage from Marseilles to Kherson, visiting several other ports along the Black Sea’s northern shore and finding many opportunities for commerce. With his Russian counterparts eager to do business, Anthoine secured a loan from the French government to buy warehouse space in Kherson. The government also granted a reduction on import duties and supplied ships and seamen, while Louis XVI gave his own royal imprimatur to Anthoine’s commercial house.

  By early 1784, Anthoine had assembled three ships in Marseilles. Hopeful of even further favors from Catherine, he christened the ships after three of her ministers (and probable lovers) and set off on a fair wind for Kherson, under a Russian flag. The sea journey was uneventful, and later in the summer, the ships returned to Marseilles laden with hemp and wheat, along with samples of wax, honey, pork bristles, and tea as possible commodities for future shipments.