The City and the Tsar: Peter the Great and the Move to the West E-Book

Harold Lamb

• Herausgeber: Reading Essentials
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Here is Russian history focussed on when her ruler, Peter the Great, turned West. The main body of the text highlights the great "new Russia" formed in the years 1648-1772. The scene shifts from Moscow in its heyday, to St. Petersburg. Peter was treated as a barbarian when he visited Western potentates, and made up his mind to show his might. He built a vast fleet; he trained a vast army; he was the aggressor in an endless succession of foreign wars; he extended Russia's boundaries to the West. Here is Russia's history, and Peter's story too - the story of a man great in his age, whose stamp was put on his country for all time.

Leseprobe

The City And The Tsar: Peter The Great And The Move To The West 

by Harold Lamb

First published in 1948

This edition published by Reading Essentials

Victoria, BC Canada with branch offices in the Czech Republic and Germany

[email protected]

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, except in the case of excerpts by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

The City And The Tsar: Peter The Great And The Move To The West 

by Harold Lamb

Foreword

THIS is the story of a man, a city, and a land. It was not always the same man. For four generations one man took the place of another, when a son succeeded his father. At times the man was an imbecile, helped by others to appear able to do what was expected of him. And at times daughters or wives of the family contrived to do his work. The family were the Romanovs.

But always the member of the family served, although often challenged or endangered, as the master of the Kremyl the Kremlin. The greatest member of this family, Peter the son of Alexis, declared himself to be one “who does not have to answer for any of his actions to anyone in the world/’ Alone of the family Peter endeavored to change the Kremlin into something else; when he could not manage to do that, he deserted it and built himself a city elsewhere.

For the Kremlin was the citadel of the growing city of Moscow. Fortified by its medieval walls, it dominated Moscow. Rising above the Moskva River, from which the city had its name, and the Kitaigorod, the abode of the nobility and great merchants, it formed the nerve center of the old city of the White Wall. Beyond that wall of whitish stone lay the metropolis inhabited by many different people, within the earthen or Red Wall. And beyond that, the villages and monasteries stretched out into the wooded plain that was the heart of ancient Rus.

In that plain the Volga took its rise, and the headwaters of other rivers, the Dvina and Father Dnieper, that had served $s tht?rOTighf*^ s F(ir r people in old time. Over those rivers the Kremlin held dominion, but not always to where they discharged iiko the outer seas. The dominion had been of Moscow—Muscovy. East of Moscow, beyond the Volga, lay a new land. It stretched almost interminably along the eastern steppes through the far rivers and the mountain barriers of the Eurasian continent, to the ocean known to the Muscovites as the Eastern Ocean Sea.

Visitors from Europe in the west called this almost unmapped new land Independent Tatary, and they described it as “an empire of settlements.” Certainly it lay within Moscow’s grasp. Yet, as the Europeans understood, it was not yet an empire under Moscow’s control. The settlements were too new and they had stretched thousands of miles away from the city.

In the middle of the seventeenth century, when Alexis had become head of the Romanov family and in consequence Tsar of All of Rus the only name this embryo empire hadit was by no means certain if he controlled the city itself. He did hold mastery over the boyars and merchants of the inner White City.

Nor was it certain during these four generations if the city would succeed in dominating the vast area of the outer land, or if in the end the hinterland of the continent would reject and so destroy the city.

I. The Two Gates Of Muscovy

Great Master

IN THE YEAR 1648 the long wars had ended in the German states. They had lasted for thirty years. Although peace had been made and signed by the victorious powers, the Thirty Years’—War had left Europe bleeding and disillusioned. The German states which had served as battlefields had shrunk within their boundaries and had lost more than two thirds their population. Even the victorious peoples labored to fight hunger and plague in their homelands. The Thirty Years’ War, however, had not affected Muscovy. During that long generation Moscow had become as isolated from western Europe as at the time of the Tatar conquest. Although Muscovy had freed itself from the yoke of the Tatar khans a good while ago, the older grandfathers of the city families could still remember how Tatar horsemen had raided into the suburbs. The yoke of the eastern despots was gone, yet its impress remained on the minds of the Muscovites. They had had their own Time of Troubles, as they called it, after the death of the fierce and mystical Ivan the Terrible. At the end of that time of fear and disintegration they had chosen a new dynasty to rule in the Kremlin, calling out of seclusion in a monastery a lame sixteen-year-old boy, Michael Romanov by name. Michael Romanov had been a mild man, particularly fond of clocks, and more than ready to be guided by the patriarch, after he had wept and cried out at being called to become Great Prince of Moscow and Tsar of All Rus.

The year 1648 was the marriage year of Alexis, the son of Michael Romanov. Gentler even than his father, Alexis let himself be robed and paraded forth as ancient usage required, for his councilors and boyars and the men who served him to see the light of his eyes. In this, his nineteenth year, he had married the girl of a great family. Maria had been selected for him by his councilors, and the patriarch himself approved of her, because both the young people were religious at heart. Alexis, young, amiable, relishing a sly jest, liking to have wine poured for him in the company of merry friends, could recite his prayers without prompting’ and he sang well in a choir, often leading the other singers. Before the throne of the patriarch the young tsar spoke of himself as “I, the sinner ...”

“A true servitor of the Most High,” another patriarch from fhe east exclaimed, watching the handsome Alexis moving quietly about the altar space of a great cathedral while the choir chanted an age-old Kyrie eleison. The stranger was a venerable soul, no less a person than Macarius of Antioch, a visitor from the very gateway of the Holy Land.

When Alexis went forth from a gate of the Kremlin, people ran and crowded together against the armed guards to catch a glimpse of his flushed and smiling face. Monks and merchants, soldiers and peasants on pilgrimage to Holy Mother Moscow of the White Walls they thought themselves fortunate if he glanced their way. To them, Muscovites and visitors alike, the nineteen-year-old master of the Kremlin was apart from other human beings. In the opinion of the nobles he had become the “born tsar”; to the common folk he had become the Veliki Gosudar, the Great Master. He was at the same time their prince and their priest. Did he not appear on that most joyful day, Palm Sunday, with robed clergy swinging censers before him and behind him? That was a happy time, when strangers kissed each other and sang at sight of the waving branches!

Then the most ancient holy pictures of the shrines in the Kremlin were carried forth for the multitude to behold. If the sun shone through the clouds over the Red Place, its rays did not illumine the jeweled hat and collar of Alexis because he walked under a canopy held by his servitors, the sons of the highest noblemen. Only the grandfathers among the crowd nodded their aged heads and muttered that the Tatar khans of old days had appeared in like fashion under such canopies. To most of the Muscovites, dwellers in that human warren of makeshift wooden houses, the phenomena around them seemed to be unchanging because nothing had changed within their memories. The processions of the tsars, the ringing of the great bells in the Kremlin towers, the incensing of the priests, the bent heads, the bearded mouths moving in prayer all this was as it had been in ancient days. A promise and a testimony of divine protection for their troubled lives. Any slave of that multitude could go forward and offer a petition for the eyes of the gentle tsar to read or at least for. the eyes of his serving folk. To change this ancient usage would be sinful, a surrender to Antichrist.

So reasoned the majority of the Muscovites, who guided themselves by precedent and by parables, heedful pf the instinct that led them to seek protection. But some thought otherwise.

Foreigners in Moscow on business wondered at the Muscovites on such festival days, when middle-aged folk amused themselves by sitting in swing seats, and boys fought mimic battles with clubs while their fathers got drunk liquor being allowed them during a feast and stretched out in the snow or mud before tavern doors. To the foreigners who might remember the splendor of the court of France under the boy king, Louis XIV, the Muscovites appeared to be two centuries behind the times, living still in the faint far dawn of a renaissance. “The only modern thing in Muscovy,” an Englishman wrote home, “is the Yam, which is to say the horse-relay post on the roads. And that they got from the Tatars.”

On the rare occasions when he left the Kremlin, Alexis passed by some landmarks of progress. The tower over the gate to the Red Place had a giant clock in it, set there by “the English clockmafker”,who had served his father. There was also Tsar Kapushka, the enormous bronze cannon cast by an Italian cannon maker for Tsar Ivan the Great. Because Tsar Kapushka had been too heavy to move and too huge to be fired off without endangering the walls around him, he had been placed on a pedestal for folk to see and admire the only monument inside the Kremlin.

Still more rarely did Alexis leave Moscow itself, to make the day’s journey to the great Troitsko monastery, to hunt afield with his following of boyars and dog tenders, or to visit his rambling summer cottage in Ismailov by the river. He liked particularly to climb to the Hill of the Sparrows where he could look across at the blue and gold domes, the white walls, and the tiny bridges of the city telling himself in silence that it did resemble Jerusalem.

So when he looked across at his city lying so majestically beneath its canopy of white clouds the young tsar felt in him a joy that was like pain. Was not this the Jerusalem of the years to come? Did not that other hallowed Jerusalem remain lifeless as a chained slave under the hand of the pagan Turks? Its glory had passed, by God’s will, to other sanctuaries to ancient Antioch, to Constantinople, and now, with the loss of Antioch and Constantinople, to his city of Moscow. For Alexis thought only of simple things. You bowed your head in prayer to make your submission to the power of the everlasting God; you drank wine^ with friends because by its warmth their merriment increased ....

Somewhere near the place of the sun’s setting in the west reigned another mighty servitor of God, the Pope of the Catholic faith pent up within the walls of the dark Vatican; somewhere in the heights beneath the sun’s rising in the east dwelt still another potentate, the Dalai Lama in his citadel of Tibet. Of these others Alexis was aware because among his thirteen books he had one cosmography that explained the earth and the fortunes of its peoples since the catastrophe of the Flood. Although this chronicle of the earth had been written by a Lithuanian, Alexis could read it. And he read conscientiously, comparing the ideas of the Lithuanian scientist with the jact that Jerusalem, by God’s will, would be an everlasting city. It never crossed Alexis’ mind that he was himself as much a prisoner within the walls of the Kremlin as the popes within the Vatican, or the Dalai Lamas within the cloudtouching Po-tala. From mid-seventeenth-century drawing Olearius

The Old Russia; blessing before Moscow church on religious festival

It was both simple and comforting to think about Moscow when he reined in his horse on the Hill of the Sparrows. Yet he felt troubled in mind when he rode at foot pace through the mud of Moscow’s alleys, in the stench of human dirt. He felt vaguely that his own sins were responsible for that stench, and for the sick faces that bowed to himeven in the feasts of his terem when he shared his own overflowing dishes with his boyars, Alexis would flash out in temper, rushing to beat the nearest man with his staff. In such outbreaks he had never crippled a man, and he sent gifts to the offender afterward. Another impulse seized on him, when he hurried his young wife out of her apartments upstairs in the terem to a carriage or sleigh, bidding the driver take the two of them at a gallop out of the clock gate, along the river to a village or even up to Troitsko in its gardens. True, in such swift rides utterly different from the pace-by-pace parade into and out of the Red Place his wife Maria bundled up so that her white face, tinted with rouge, could hardly be seen. At other times in duty bound, Maria kept to ancient seclusion within the women’s quarters, looking out at a feast from behind a screen, or out at a service in the Usspensky cathedral from the grilled gallery of the imperial ladies.

Alexis was aware, because his body servants told him, of the jests that foreigners made about this seclusion of Muscovite noblewomen. The foreign ambassadors and merchants called it monastic and Byzantine to keep women hidden from the eyes of other men. But it was an ancient custom in Muscovy, and who was so bound by it as the tsaritsa herself?

One of the foreigners, a certain Adam Olearius, had published a book about the Muscovites in the German language only the year before. Parts of the book had been read to the young Alexis, who remembered Adam Olearius vaguely as a neat foreigner with curled hair and waxed mustache but ‘without a beard. Olearius had been forever measuring things and looking at the sun through a brass instrument called an astrolabe. Some among the Muscovites believed him to ‘be a sorcerer. After he had left Muscovy he had written in his book: “The greatest honor a Muscovite could do a friend is to let him see his wife ... a nobleman led me after dinner into another room where he told me that I could not have a greater proof of his esteem than this. Immediately, I saw his wife come in, clad in a festive dress and followed by a girl who carried a flask of spirits and a silver cup. The lady touched the cup with her lips and bade me empty it three times. After that the nobleman wanted me to kiss her, which surprised me greatly because even in our country of Holstein we do not offer such civility. That is why I wished to content myself with kissing her hand. But he forced me so obligingly to kiss her mouth that it was impossible to refrain from doing so.”

Alexis believed that the shrewd scientific Olearius had not understood his Russian people.

These western notions did not agree, certainly, with ancient Muscovite usage. It seemed both simple and pleasant to Alexis to borrow from the west such needful things as clocks and cannon and books, while still keeping to the way of life of his father, the first Romanov ... as simple as stealing out to ride with Maria in the fast sled, where he could feel her shoulder touching his and watch the steam of her breath merge with his.

Maria was not with him when the hands touched his reins. He was riding in at a foot pace from Troitsko with his boyars and grooms. At the city gate the crowd that waited, instead of bending heads and shouting “Qosudar!” came around him complaining, the lined faces sweating, the voices crying out complaints. Some hands even plucked at his sleeves; after he had listened to them he told them he was sorry they felt wronged by the councilors who served him, and that he would see that any offenders should be made honest.

But the younger boyars with him whipped the nearest of the common crowd away from him with their nagaikas, and peasants threw stones at his escort, not harming him but shouting, “The tsar is kind his dog boys bite us. 77 After that day when hands touched him, crowds pressed against the Kremlin gates, even after meat and beer had been sent out to them. They demanded that the offending councilors be put to death, and Alexis spoke to them again, feeling tears in his eyes .... Smoke rose over Moscow when whole streets burned, and the guards of the gates were replaced by foreign soldiers who stood their post with flintlocks raised and drums beating.

Alexis knew little more of the rioting than that. Two of his councilors were sent away to exile in the east, and he heard that the leaders of the rioting, had been made to feel their deaths. After that outcry of the people, his councilors made new laws, a new< or black the binding Alexis, of>

common folk closely to the land on which they worked, and forbidding them sinful amusements.

Like a wave rising on a wind-swept lake, the disturbance spread. It spread along the thoroughfares of the rivers. Fisherfolk of the northern rivers stripped government taxpayers to their shirts; at Ustiug workers in the textile mills beat up inspectors. Cities like Pskov far from Moscow stormed and raged, and fought soldiery sent to quiet them. On the western frontier crowds broke into government warehouses and seized the stores of grain.

The wave of restlessness had no single impulse. It went against payment of tax money, against “German science” like that of the mathematician Olearius, against the new laws forbidding singing and dancing or the movement of peasant families from one property to another. Not that the stubborn and ignorant people of the hamlets understood in the least that this new law chained them to their fields to work henceforth unceasingly as serfs. They simply resented the ukaz that forbade them to change fields and masters on St. George’s day, after the last of the harvest was in. The mass of the people held fast to the religion of old time, of saints, fasts, and miracles. More than that, all these people had in common a great craving for land, for good land to till. The old faith and new land such might have been the creed of the moujik of Muscovy if he had been articulate enough to utter it. By it he lived, after his fashion, in the toilsome mir or small community where tasks were shared, and the folk invoked the village priest for the protection of the saints of God. The life of the mir had developed not in the few cities but in the many settlements scattered over a vast and inhospitable land. The peasants feared anything that attacked this ancient life of the mir. And when they feared a thing they were apt to run away from it.

Even at nineteen years of age Alexis Romanov had an understanding of his people. He himself felt troubled when a western invention like an astrolabe was held up to the sun, and Maria protested and wept when the young, sharp-minded patriarch, Nikon, forced people to read from a new book of prayer. Was it not a sin to change what the saints had fashioned in elder days? What truth could ever be found greater than the word of ancient truth?

“Be merciful to these rebellious folk,” Nikon warned his young monarch. And Alexis granted mercy.

In the darkness of the Usspensky nave, where the walls were stained with candle smoke, Alexis prayed for guidance. He prayed to be preserved from the sickness of mind of the Romanov family, from the misfortune that had made his grandfathers exiles in the new land of the east, and, above all, that his country of Muscovy should be preserved from a second Time of Troubles such as his father had known. It was not told him, because even the “eyes” of the government hardly perceived it, how masses of people were in motion from the Moscow area toward the east. They followed the frozen threads of the northern rivers. They trundled in carts along the highroad to Kazan and Perm. They escaped from punishment in the rebellious cities of Novgorod and Pskov by taking to the forest.

They wandered as only Slavs can wander, growing harvests on the way, working for food or going without food, but always tending east, to the water of the Volga.

Beyond the Volga there were fewer government garrisons to stop them. They rode the empty salt barges up the Kama River, they climbed the grassy shoulders of the Urals. By the paths of charcoal burners they crossed the ridges to the eastern slopes.

Slipping by the customs stations, they followed bands of hunters or colonists where no roads led, farther to the east. Here, beyond the customs, they called themselves “free wandering men.”

Dezhnev the Hunter

In June of that year 1648 one hunter, Semyen Dezhnev, ventured farthest east. On the records of the government post at Yakutsk he is called a “cossack,” which meant a frontiersman under hire either as colonist or fighter. And what he actually did, unwittingly, was extraordinary. With twenty-five hunters one of the exploring groups by which the Slavs had penetrated to farther Asia, more than a year’s travel and more than a hundred degrees of longitude east of Moscow Semyen Dezhnev departed from the blockhouse of Yakutsk. Passing through the coldest region on earth (the Cold Pole), the Dezhnev band built two longboats of hewn timber bound with hides, using reindeer skins for sails. In the brief summer thaw when marsh water flooded the dark rivers flowing toward the Arctic, the two boats of the cossacks joined the expedition of a merchant Alexiev who had made his way to this jumping-off place to hunt for a new supply of sables, the most precious of furs.

Dezhnev had a fancy. On that bleakest of all frontiers he had heard of a river named the Pogicha where birches grew and corn could be planted, and sleek deer hunted. So the natives said. But neither cossacks nor Muscovites had been able to set eyes on the Pogicha. Sables for the merchant Alexiev? Certainly, Dezhnev swore, there would be sables on the Pogicha.

So in June the three boats passed down the last explored river, the Kolima, into the ice-studded waters of the Arctic where the sky lowered over their heads. Following the bare coast eastward, they came upon no trace of the elusive Pogicha, or of Alexiev’s sables.

Instead Alexiev was wounded by a spear fighting the fishskin-clad natives, the Chukchi whose only wealth consisted of ivory tusks. And when they tried to round a great cape veiled in mist, Alexiev’s boat was wrecked.

Later Dezhnev said in his report: “This cape is different ... lying north by northeast, it turns in a circle. On the near side there is a stream, and beside the stream the Chukchi have built a thing like a tower of whalebone. Out from this cape are two islands where Chukchi were seen with walrus tusks in holes in their lips. On its far side the cape turns toward the river Anadir.”

Wind drove Dezhnev’s ill-made boats out to those islands, and then south. Mist hid the shore. Yet the cossacks were sailing south instead of northeast. They did not know where. In October Dezhnev’s boats were wrecked on this southern shore and his party made their way back where natives told them a river was. They found it at the tip of a great inlet, without timber or native villages.

They had no gear for fishing. Twelve of the party sent upriver died, all but two or three, from starvation. Dezhnev built huts to winter in, and found out that his river was named the Anadir. Next year they made a new boat and discovered a sandbank where “sea cows” gathered and tusks were to be picked up. This was all the wealth that Semyen Dezhnev had in his quest of six years for the Pogicha.

Still, he kept alive with his surviving comrades, exploring their barren southern coast, finding more ivory or collecting it by guns from the natives, who fought them savagely. After 1650 other cossack bands reached them, coming down the Anadir, overland from the Kolima. And with these Dezhnev struggled for possession of his sandbank with its yearly trove of a few walrus tusks.

When at last he returned to Yakutsk, he made his famous report which fills about a page and a half. This he did because he wanted it clearly understood that he had reached the sandbank by sea, in boats from the Kolima, while the other interlopers had come across the heights by land. So the sandbank and its tusks belonged to him, by right of discovery. Unknowing, Dezhnev had made a greater discovery. His

“impassable” cape is actually the tip of Asia: its islands are those in Bering Strait between the cape and the western tip of America. The cossack Dezhnev had discovered the end of the Asiatic continent.

His report, written down, and signed, was put away among piles of documents in the Yakutsk office, and there it lay for gotten for nearly a century, until 1736. Of his discovery and the forgetfulness of Yakutsk much was to come later on. 1 Semyen Dezhnev, who had made the passage of an ice-filled polar sea, to emerge in the mist-veiled waters of the Pacific Ocean, survived the ordeal. But he was the only leader who survived this particular quest for the elusive river Pogicha. Alexiev, the merchant adventurer, had died of his wound. So a Chukchi woman explained to Dezhnev. As for Alexiev’s companions, “Their teeth fell out of their gums” which meant that scurvy had carried them off. As for the other explorers who arrived at the sandbank on the Pacific side, Michael Staduchin, a cossack from Yakutsk, disappeared on a venture inland; Motora, another cossack, was killed by tribes up the Anadir River from whom he had taken captives to sell And few of Dezhnev’s surviving companions returned to Yakutsk, because the stubborn cossack spent years building more longboats in the limbo of the Arctic to search by sea for the missing Pogicha.

The Freebooters of Yakutsk

Few among the inhabitants of Yakutsk could have had any interest in the story of Semyen Dezhnev when he found his way back to that frontier town on the frozen Lena River. The inhabitants of that blockhouse town known as an ostroghad other more important matters to occupy them. The handful of Muscovite soldiers, armed with matchlocks, had the wooden towers of the gates to guard against hostile tribesmen no natives were allowed to spend the night within the gates, except captured young women. The “Liths,” or foreign soldiersprisoners of war shipped out from Moscow had their own barracks and families to provide for.

On the crest of the hill within the stockade, the voevode or military governor had his “palace,” like a citadel, guarding the priceless stocks of grain, honey, and wine shipped out so laboriously on heavy barges from river to river. The dyak or secretary-inspector had all he could do to watch the governor. The priests built a towering log church with whitewashed cupola, and they quarreled with the governor who endeavored to—exact furs by force from the natives instead of converting them.

Icebound during the long winter months, and left to their own devices for the most part by the far-off government at Moscow, the people of Yakutsk struggled among themselves Isbrandt Ides

Russian explorers in Siberia, with short skis and dog sleds and contrived ways to keep warm and alive, while they dreamed of lush rivers, of gold and silver mines, of troves of sables, ermine or black fox furs, the finding of which meant a fortune gained and the chance to live, released from their exile, in the comfortable cities of the west.

When they sallied out in bands to search through the snowbound forests for such will-o’-the-wisps, they found only the reality of beaver skins, small hoards of silver coins to be plundered, or fish-ivory and the tusks of mammoths buried in perpetually frozen ground. Beyond the Urals, ghosts walked the forestshades of great conquistadors. The ghost of Irmak, the son of the Don, who had driven the Tatars from the threshold of Sibir, and the shade of that other ataman, Poyarkov, who had built a fleet out of forest timber to sail down the last river, the Amur, and come back alive with a thousand souls to sell as slaves. Beyond the Urals such men as these gained dominions or fortunes by their ready wit and tough consciences. Squire Honey was one of them. A Pole, Khmielnevsky, a learned soul who could read books in Latin, and quote an authority named Ovid on the twin joys of life, drunkenness and love. He had made a great name for himself in Moscow during the late Time of Troubles. So he had been exiled beyond the Urals, and jailed as well But how could a log jail hold a man of such superior education? After only a few years at the terminus of Tobolsk the disciple of Ovid was given the rank of squire and sent farther east to inspect the newest ostrog, which was then Yeniseisk. Tobolsk, it seemed, was glad to be rid of Squire Honey.

Thus freed, Squire Honey made an inspection journey that became the talk of the folk from Tobolsk to Yeniseisk. First he had only a few men to follow him, then he had an army; first he had at his side only one Lithuanian girl, then she was joined by a bevy of Tataresses.

Apparently he started with a portable still as well. By borrowing stocks of government grain, he obtained a supply of corn brandy. At that time a glass of brandy was worth a sable skin, and ten sable skins could buy a woman. As he proceeded on his journey, Squire Honey acquired a thousand sable skins, without counting in beaver or fox. And he changed his Tatar girls for Ostiaks.

At each post he explained that his new possessions were gifts from voevodes down the road. So the voevode at that post usually hastened to make a gift of his own a keg of wine or sack of precious tobacco. If he did not, this educated inspector would shake his head ominously over the account books, and hint that his friends in Tobolsk would not be pleased with the accounts.

At the native villages he gave the chieftains a little liquor or tobacco, and selected their best furs as gifts in exchange. His Lithuanian girl, however, he would never sell.

Since Squire Honey traveled so slowly, in this fashion, news of his manner of inspection caught up with him and passed him. Again he found himself in jail, stripped of his rank, wealth, and volunteer army. One voevode had sent all the way to Tobolsk to discover that the inspector actually had no powerful friends there. As before, however, he did not remain long in jail.

It happened that the two voevodes of the town whert he was incarcerated had been quarreling and Squire Honey had not been long behind a locked door, before the rival voevodes began a civil war. Squire Honey’s educated tongue could tell them about feuds such as that. To settle the war he was released. Whereupon he drew up a “plan for conquest of the Lena River region” and he was shipped east again to carry it out. He must have died on this—last journey because he never reached the Lena.

But a greater than Khmielnevsky reached the Lena, and the tale of his fortunes was told like the saga of Squire Honey’s inspection. Yarka Khabarov, who came from Ustiug, had a way of transforming things into money. When he moved east, to the fur terminal of Mangazeia in the northern forest, the fur trade was at its flood, and Yarka Khabarov turned skins into money.

A few years later when Mangazeia burned down the boom town was not rebuilt because the flood of furs was ebbing. Khabarov moved east to the Lena. Where the river Kuta portage joins the Lena he built a saltworks, getting as much silver for his salt as other men did for smuggled tobacco. To feed his workers this enterpriser tilled miles of land, and raised corn to sell.

By the time Khabarov had become not a mere merchant prince but a merchant emperor, the voevode of Yakutsk took his holdings from him by a writ of authority and the guns of soldiers. He moved a little way up the Lena and started new plantations where the soil waskich. Again the governor of Yakutsk interfered, sending out a draft of settlers to join Yarka Khabarov’s followers.

By this time the intelligent Khabarov had learned his lesson that settlements could be confiscated by better-armed rivals. Settlements could not be moved away to safety.

So, having turned first furs and then salt and corn into money, this great enterpriser tried a new field of enterprise by moving about armed. The settlers from Yakutsk he drove away by gunfire from his stockades, and speedily he went himself to Yakutsk, where he raised an army of some hundred and fifty adventurers easily enough by offering more pay than the governor of Yakutsk. In that frontier metropolis there were plenty of men like Dezhnev to follow a strong leader. And Khabarov was not only strong but overbearing.

Under the circumstances the voevode of Yakutsk was not only agreeable but eager that Khabarov should depart, with full authority to find what enterprise he could undertake beyond the frontier, down the Amur River, where he would be the neighbor, not of Yakutsk, but of the Chinese Manchus. For years this energetic conquistador launched his fleets down the Amur, toward rich grainlands and hamlets of human beings who could be captured and sold. His small army was supplied with cannon by the governor of Yakutsk. He captured a Manchu garrison town and made it his headquarters. By stealing down the river in boats or making forced marches farther into the fertile river basin, he managed to surprise villagers before the inhabitants could escape. Or if they did flee, burdened with carts and herds, he overtook them. When they shut themselves up in the hamlets, his cannon pounded the wooden walls to pieces, and his freebooters surged in to take captives. After one assault he reported;

“With prayers to God ... after hard fighting we counted six hundred and forty-one, big and little, killed. We took captive two hundred and forty-three women and girls, and one hundred and eighteen children, with two hundred thirtyseven horses.” These captives, human and animal, could serve as slaves in Khabarov’s new army of the Amur, or they could be sold for money. He sold the best of them for forty to a hundred rubles a head. The conquest grew along the Amur, yet fighting broke out endemically among Khabarov’s own bands. Some of his cossacks moved away to start enterprises of their own; more cossacks journeyed out from Yakutsk with powder and lead.

Still, there was no proper place in the government scheme of things for a Yarka Khabarov. He was summoned back. to Moscow, accused of cruelty, extortion, and murder, and his greatest conquest was taken from him entire by the Siberian Bureau.

However, Khabarov, the successful, was not punished. He described in Moscow how a new empire could be extended along the Amur, and grain and salt, furs and silver be had from its inhabitants. Ermine could be found, and sold to the Chinese—jewels could be mined from the mountains of that fortunate land! Gravely Yarka Khabarov told the secretaries in Moscow chat the pillars of conquest of no less an explorer than Alexander the Great had been found on his river “where the sun rises beyond the mountain Karkaur.” Khabarov was pardoned, given noble rank, and sent back to organize his conquest. Today out there a city is named for him. Irmak of Sibir, Ivan Petlin, who found his way into and out of the Great Wall of China, Khmielnevsky, Poyarkov the ataman, and Yarka Khabarov they had iron in them, they went where devils feared to go. They kept and used the land and human beings they found, in whatever way.

“Old dwellers” on the frontiers not one of them came out of Moscow three of them Cossacks 2 from the free brotherhoods of the steppes, they held tenaciously to their conquests, not flitting on after game like hunters, or wandering the—paths between settlements like traders. Not one of them—started out with the blessing of Moscow, or even with authorization from Moscow. Irmak, the greatest of them, had been a Volga brigand pursued by Muscovite officials, and Khmielnevsky had been a jailbird of strange plumage.

No, they had gone their own way like the thousands of “free wandering men” who crossed the invisible frontier of the Urals after them, drawn for the most part by the wealth to be gleaned from furs. The government agencies, following cautiously behind, had also tapped this wealth by making it a monopoly, by sending out dyaks to keep the accounts of the new settlements, and by claiming a tribute of furs from the natives.

Never had the take of pelts been so enormous as after the mid-seventeenth century. Yakutsk sent in the value of thirty thousand rubles in a year. That had been the valuation of the dyaks in the far east; in Furriers’ Row and the Sable Treasury in Moscow it was much greater. During these years single hunters along the Lena could kill with clubs as many as a dozen of the heedless sables that strayed into their camps in a day. At that rate they were exterminating the valuable beasts. 3 Already the explorers of the land’s end, Dezhnev, Motora, and Staduchin and their comrades, had found the hunting bad beyond the Lena. The flood of furs and the resulting tide of wealth that flowed westward to Moscow was destined to dwindle by the end of the century.

Already hard reality was dispelling the hope of untold wealth. Khmielnevsky had profited most from his portable still; Khabarov had made his fortune from grainland and the sale of captives, while Dezhnev had had to fight for his few ivory tusks.

By this time the bureaus of Moscow rather than the artels of the frontier sought for fabulous fertile rivers, for mountains of silver, for gold rock and precious stones shining with their own firefor simple iron, lead and tin, the metals Moscow lacked utterly. “Sibir has a golden soil” was said in the Red Place, not on the frontier. Naturally, the tall tales told for their own ends by the Khmielnevskys and Khabarovs did not serve to disillusion the secretaries in the Kremlin about the wealth of “Sibir.”

For by now this new land of the east had gained a name, Sibir. It had been known vaguely as the new land beyond the Urals, or as Tatary. The Tatar town of Sibir had become the gateway of the migrants to the east, and the first Muscovite terminal, Tobolsk, had been built close to it. Sibir had been the Alamo rather than the Seven Cities of Cibola of this unknown east, yet it gave the east its name.

Sibir yielded the migrants soil rather than gold. Grassland edged the headwaters of the great Arctic-flowing rivers. Here the illimitable hills were blue with timber, the rushing waters so full of fish that often shoals of them would be forced out on the banks. The feather-grass plains were so rife with deer that herds of them could be driven and caught against a palisade. It was this craving for soil to cultivate that anchored the migrants to the new land in spite of great hardships. The churches also took root in the new ground. The clergy who followed the migrants across the Urals came prepared to cultivate the earth as well as lead prayer; their small log churches rose quickly enough in the best fields; the peasants of their monasteries cleared the forest edge. The monasteries themselves were built like blockhouses, with storage space for grain and towers to shelter the congregations against raiders. True, the first archbishop who ventured out to Tobolsk, with a chest of holy relics for the new altars, had trouble separating the monks from the nuns in this wilderness, and in separating priests from wine drinking. And when he wished to canonize Irmak as a saint to give to Tobolsk a saint of its own he found that the great pathfinder could not be named a saint. The folk of the countryside remembered him too well. These archbishops of Tobolsk, like the village priests elsewhere, understood very well that the first need in the new land was to feed the people. They devoted themselves, above all, to acquiring acreage and “souls” to work the acres, until very soon commands began .to arrive from Moscow to the voevode of Tobolsk to “watch carefully that the archbishop does not seize any more land.”

The archbishops, however, developed skill in frustrating such commands. From their side the Urals they petitioned Moscow: how were the blind, the crippled, the starving and homeless to be cared for, by God’s will, unless more acres could be harvested?

One of them, Gerasim, fairly triumphed in this bloodless battle of agriculture. As soon as he reached Tobolsk he petitioned that his salary be paid in grain, not money. He besought gifts of land, not money. In due time arrived an order from Moscow that “the archbishop must not gain more land by donation.” But Gerasim had anticipated such an order, and he had put settlers with a hastily built chapel on the disputed ground. As the tsar had his “eyes” in Tobolsk to spy for him, the archbishop had his “ears” in the halls of the Kremlin to listen for him. To Moscow he wrote a truly heartbreaking petition. How could he deprive poor people of their living, or tear down a house of God? Again the victory was to the archbishop. When death came to Gerasim, the church of Tobolsk had more than six hundred souls to sow and harvest, and more than twelve thousand acres. It was secure against famine and the anger of the voevode of Tobolsk. For the devout Alexis, son of Michael, had been tsar during these last years of Gerasim, and the young Alexis, of all people, had been least able to refuse one of Gerasim’s soul-searching petitions.

Slowly, with all the tenacity of Slavs, out of this craving of an illiterate peasantry for land, and this “old usage” of a backt ward priesthood, a human core was being formed at the entrance to Siberia. For both the settler and the village priest, unlike the conquistadors, had come to stay on the land,

The Tsar’s Plan and the Bureau’s Performance

Strangely enough, as the seventeenth century drew toward its end, these same settlers and priests became the most stable force in the new dominion of Siberia.

There was of course a plan of government for this land. Alexis, the Great Master, had issued in his Uluzhenie some regulations for the people in the east. Mildly enough, the tsar wished both the native folk and the settlers to be taxed only moderatelyat a tenth or so of their produce, crops and furs. No natives were to be oppressed, forcibly converted, or enslaved by agents of Moscow. Beyond the Urals, however, the intelligent plan did not seem to operate. The folk there had a saying, “Mosfiow is far and heaven is high.” Alexis himself had never ventured far out of sight of the Kremlin towers. The boyars who issued the orders to be carried out in the three and a half million square miles of “Siberia” occupied a few chambers in the Razriad or Bureau of Military Affairs within the Kremlin. The secretaries who actually managed the accounts of the Sibirsky Prikaz or Siberian Bureau had to submit their accounts in turn to the Treasury, and naturally they desired to show as much revenue taken in as possible, even after the fur trade dwindled, and “gold rock” failed to materialize.

Roughly, the bureau regarded the new territory as a source of taxation, a vast military encampment into which political exiles might be sent to labor, as the powerful Razriad demanded. But the human integers of the plan had a way of trying to make a profit for themselves. So the plan worked itself out somewhat in this fashion:

I THE VOEVODES

The voevodes, for instance, the governors of the posts in the east, should have been war veterans of the upper noble class; actually they were often friends of the heads of the Sibirsky Prikaz. Given good salaries, they were allowed to journey eastward with wives and household serfs, and cartloads of wine and honey. In coaches bearing the emblem of the two-headed eagle, these voevodes often traveled for a year or more to reach their posts, following not the roads because there were no roads as yetbut the traces of routes where post stations stood every fifty versts stations modeled on those of the Mongol yam or horse post, manned by yamschiks sent out by order of the bureau, with horses, a stock of food for themselves, a pair of watchdogs, and enough land to support their families .. It was the duty of the yamschik to take on to the next station every traveler who could show the seal of the bureau. In summer this often meant working a boat upstream along a river; in winter the stage could be made more swiftly by sleigh on the river ice. Often yarnschiks disappeared—with their families to seek better living elsewhere. So, more often than not, the post stations did not exist.

Since the voevodes remained on duty only two or three years, most of them exerted themselves to gather a private stock of the best furs and the money available in their districts, to carry back with them. Such accretions were explained as “gifts” from the native headmen, or settlers. The dyaks, the secretaries who kept the post accounts, and the customs agent who collected the official tax might be expected to overlook such gifts, if they received similar gifts themselves. The exactions of these governors and secretaries served to set them at feud with the settlers, hunters, and priests of the post. Alexis’ regulations forbade the departing voevode to leave his citadel until the new voevode had checked his accounts. But sables and ermine pelts could be hidden, and who could prove where silver money came from? Customs inspectors at the Ural frontier often found the mattresses of homecoming voevodes stuffed with furs, and the voevodes themselves wearing long coats of the finest dark sable or valuable black fox. The bureau decreed that no voevode could bring out of Siberia more than an accountable increase over the money and goods he took in. Many voevodes contrived to borrow money and gear from friends, to register with the customs on their entrance, and to return to their friends thereafter. Then the home-coming voevodes could display their private stock of furs and goods to the bureau’s inspectors at Verkhuturie, the main control point in the Urals, and swear on the holy books that they were bringing back no greater value than they had taken out.

II THE PROFITEERS

The bureau that existed to glean taxes from the new land could not check the rapacity and the ingenuity of its officials in profiting for themselves. A copper pot at the Ilimsk post was worth as many sable skins as would fill it; those same sable skins smuggled back to Moscow would be worth three times their price at Ilimsk. The voevode at Ilimsk, exiled to a river in the wilderness of dark fir forest, was distant more than five hundred miles by trail from higher authority in Irkutsk or Yeniseisk. What was to prevent him from forcing his private stock of trade goods “iron implements,” woven cloth, cheap beads on the traders of the post, for good furs? The traders in their turn could force the native villages to give up new furs for the cheap goods. Khabarov took more than nine thousand sable pelts from the northern Giliaks alone.

The saying “No one comes back empty-handed from Siberia” became a proverb. The Uluzhenie of the mild Alexis forbade officials to exact more than the lawful yearly tax of some eight skinsfrom a native household. But the fur-bearing animals and native hunters alike tended to thin out in a voevode’s district. It was unquestionably much simpler for the voevode to demand more pelts from the surviving hunters than to explain in writing to the secretaries of the bureau, four thousand miles distant in Moscow, why the customary tax could not be collected. An official who showed a profit usually escaped the vague threat of “the tsar’s anger, and cruel punishment.” Alexis increased the term of service of voevodes; the result was more fighting between the voevodes’ henchmen and the “old dwellers” of the settlements

III THE VUDKA MONOPOLY

Vudka added to the trouble. Officially the brewing and saie of spirits was a state monopoly, as it had been under the Tatar khans. In consequence the Sibirsky Prikaz operated public pothouses throughout the eastern settlements and along the post roads. Since the price of vudka, brandy, or plain honey beer was fixed, the keepers of these kabacs or taverns thrived by selling a glassful for a sable skin out the back doors. Voevodes and some of the foreign soldiery had the right to distill spirits, not to sell them. But where such “wine,” as they called it, could be sold for nearly five rubles (equivalent to about four English pounds sterling in 1670) a wooden pailful, voevodes often brewed a stock to hand over to their agents to “feast the chieftains” of the native villages and to bring back furs for every drink. The voevodes brewed these spirits from precious grain abstracted from the public granaries.

IV THE GRAIN DEFICIENCY

In Moscow, where the boyars of the bureau climbed the palace stairs with their accounts every month to bow to the floor before Alexis and discuss their problems, the shortage of grain in the east appeared to be one of the trials imposed on them by God’s will. Every year the bureau sent, or tried to send, a boat caravan of grain out, even to Yakutsk, the farthest terminal. These weighty grain barges had to be worked across the northern rivers, across the Arctic gulfs, a journey of nearly two years. Inevitably much of the caravan was lost or appropriated on the way. Muscovite agents, accustomed to a bread staple, sickened on a diet of abundant fish and salt meat. Attempts to transplant peasant cultivators to the Yakutsk area failed, because many died on the journey out, and the peasants could not bring crops of barley and oats out of the strange soil in the fleeting summers. The peasants themselves drifted away from the “sovereign’s land,” where they were allowed only half their produce, to virgin territory where they could keep all their crops. Such escaping serfs could be caught in the Moscow area where the roads were guarded; in the eastern lands they disappeared into the wilderness, or hired out in strange settlements. Men were badly needed east of the Urals where some eighty thousand souls, including perhaps fifteen thousand servants of the bureau, had pushed their tiny habitations into the limbo of a continent. *

V THE SOLDIERY

The bureau had drafted some two thousand soldiers for the Siberian service. Each strelitz matchlock firer who began the march across the Urals, convinced that he would never return, had been given a ruble and a half to pay his way. Contingents of Streltsi paid their own way, additionally, by looting villages along the road. On the appearance of such a soldier draft, the settlers barred their gates and went out armed with food and money to offer the marchers, if they would pass on without tarrying.

If the marching Streltsi looted and then obliterated by fire an outlying settlement, who was to enforce punishment on them? Not the “Liths” or foreign soldiery Poles and Lithuanians, Danes *and Ukrainians, either mercenaries or prisoners of war or the adventuring cossacks. Beyond the Urals such troops as these would obey, in a pinch, only their own leaders.

Exile for the armed guards was worse beyond the Ob, out on the great plateau swept by Arctic winds. At Yana, near where Dezhnev and Alexiev had built their first boats, the longer half of the year was spent in twilight, in the grip of extreme frost. No Russian women penetrated that far. And in the winter bands of masterless men who had existed through the summer in the forest came and besieged the stockaded forts, driven by hunger.

Conditions were still worse for the Muscovites who had to keep the out-camps, the “year men” who made the far furcollecting rounds. When their horses and weapons were stolen by invisible thieves, they took dog sleds and skis from the villages, and women as well. They could not adapt themselves to the land like the steppe-born Cossacks or the riverbred Volga burlaki boatmen. Even the Cossacks had a song about this land:

Hard are the winter days, lad.

When your hide cracks open,,

And ice grips your heart

Ahaithe sun is gone!

Hard are the winter days, lad!

VI ENSLAVEMENT OF ASIATICS

The bureau’s agents may have been told of the Uluzhenie of the tsar in Moscow that forbade enslaving the eastern peoples. Yet inevitably they acquired natives as body servants to gather berries and wood, to guide them from village to village and to “hunt with hawks.” If, in spite of that, they were near starvation, ^they loaded their guns and seized hostages from these same villages, to exchange for food. Some of the native Siberians declared that Muscovites had been seen to eat human flesh when hungering

VII THE DESERTERS

The bureau punished desertion heavily. Leaders of deserters were hanged, while searchers were knouted with the irontipped lash if they returned without the missing men. Also, if a man disappeared from a squad or company, the unit was punished as a whole which often led to the disappearance of squads or companies as a whole.

Then, too, the bureau had formed its military guards by classes, the superiors being listed and paid as “boyars’ sons,” the better pioneers as “cossacks,” while the foreigners were kept apart in detachments of their own. This led to trouble when different classes were immured together in a post like Yakutsk, especially in winter. At Yakutsk the cossacks petitioned the voevode not to be sent out on expeditions with the boyars’ sons (superior in rank to them). This petition complained that the boyars’ sons brewed “wine” to sell from the grain reserve, that they sent out wandering traders to collect furs, thus sharing profits with the traders (instead of with the cossacks,. it seems), that the boyars’ sons took bribes to allow hostages held by the cossacks to escape, while they tortured their own hostages in the hope of getting ransom. Finally, the cossacks claimed that such conduct on the part of the boyars’ sons caused the natives to waylay and kill cossacks.

. On its part the bureau complained that its servingmen tended to dress and act more like “Tatars,” while the bureau itself began to hire Tatars to replace deserters, thus creating a new class of armed servants, not according to plan.

By the i66os deserters from isolated posts like Ilimsk and Yakutsk were drifting in strong bands over the heights through the combative Mongols and Buriats, southerly to the warmer basin of the Amur which lay beyond the authority of the voevodes, being close to the Chinese frontier posts. Since the bureau had set a reward of three rubles for the capture of such deserters, the tribesmen had learned that they could profit from the fugitives. The Buriat and Mongol horsemen would examine a captured Muscovite to decide whether his clothing and kit was worth more than three rubles; if not, they would take him in to the nearest Russian post. In retaliation the Russians often tied a captured Buriat to a tree and “put a red cap on him” a copper pot heated red-hot, and put over his head.

This mutual retaliation between the war bands of the bureau and the still powerful Mongols and Buriats did not help to keep the peace along the far eastern frontier.

And always the bureau was vexed by the resentment of its own servants beyond the Urals. That bitter resentment grew out of the pittance of pay given lower-class guards, inspectors, and clerks in an area where boyars’ sons and higher officials waxed rich from loot and from withholding the pay of their inferiors; it increased under the almost intolerable hardships of the posts in northeastern Siberia. At all the posts the military and clerical detachments resented the enforced labor at building stockades and cultivating the adjacent ground. To remedy this last, the bureau drafted skilled workmen and peasants in the western towns and sent them into the Siberian service. Whereupon many of the workmen and peasants disappeared from the posts to join the growing ranks of the “free wandering men.”

VIII MIGRATION FROM THE POSTS

Another phenomenon troubled the Siberian Bureau. The posts themselves tended to disappear especially in the north while settlements never marked on the maps tended to appearespecially in the south. The great northern terminal of Mangazeia near the gulf of the Ob was now an ash heap sprinkled with the huts of wanderers. The fur traffic from which Khabarov had profited had ceased to pass through the Mangazeia route forty ‘years after the post was built. Along this same northern route, thousands of miles to the east, the posts of Turukhansk and Yakutsk were half deserted. Their stockades, churches, and warehouses still stood; their inhabitants had drifted away to warmer climates, better soil, and freedom from the authority of voevodes, in the south. One portion of the population of Turukhansk and Yakutsk remained fixed: the inmates of the katorgas or state prisons for political exiles recently built there by order of the Razriad which dictated the plan of the Siberian Bureau. The katorga exiles could be called upon to do the labor of the missing inhabitants of these northern posts. The icebound ostrog of Yana could be manned only by a skeleton force of drafted men.

On the other hand, newer settlements in the milder southeast tended to grow unexpectedly and not according to the bureau’s plan. Nerchinsk, founded on one of the headwaters of the Amur, near the caravan route to the Great Wall of 28

China, was thronged with human flotsam of the frontier. Irkutsk, overlooking Baikal, the holy lake of the Mongol peoples, had been almost unknown a generation after the building of Yakutsk and Yana; now Irkutsk was developing into a large town. So large that the bureau built a katorga for women there, near the nunnery.

The northern routes, of course, were being deserted because the fur intake that had brought them into being was diminishing. The bureau made an attempt, late in the day, to set aside areas as game preserves, to protect the better sort of gray squirrel, black fox, and sable. The chief consequence was that independent hunters moved elsewhere.