Glorious Misadventures: Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of a Russian America

by Owen Matthews

  A Cossack sea-going koch.

  Other Cossacks, travelling in the same manner in similar boats, traversed the Arctic Ocean by hugging the northern coast of Siberia and reached the Pacific by sea in 1648. Semyon Dezhnev, a Cossack from Veliky Ustug, had assembled seven snub-nosed square-sailed riverboats known as kochi, each crewed by up to nineteen men. Sailing east in search of sable his expedition rounded what is today known as the Bering Strait, passed between Little and Big Diomede Islands – the modern-day border between Russia and the USA – and founded an ostrog at Anadyr on the Chukchi peninsula. Four of his boats were lost, along with sixty-four out of his eighty-nine men. Undaunted, Dezhnev returned later with a new expedition, discovered a portage through the tributaries of the Kolyma River to the Sea of Okhotsk, from where he sailed as far as the border of the Chinese empire on the Amur River in 1650.18

  News of the explorations of Russian travellers was greeted with keen interest in Western Europe. The Dutch trader Nicolaas Witsen, one of the first Europeans to travel in Siberia and thirteen times mayor of Amsterdam, incorporated Dezhnev’s observations into the groundbreaking world map he produced in 1690 alongside his encyclopedic study of the Russian Empire, Noord en Oost Tartarye. Unfortunately for Russian navigators, however, Dezhnev’s discoveries remained virtually unknown in his home country. The only extant copy of his official report19 was buried in an archive in Yakutsk until discovered in the 1730s.20

  Peter the Great may not have been aware that his countrymen had already succeeded in rounding Russia’s eastern extremity, but his twin enthusiasms were seafaring and the expansion of the Russian Empire, and the exploration of Eurasia was a lifelong interest. In Siberia, and what lay beyond, Peter met a challenge vast enough for his ambition. In 1681, when Peter was nine, one of his father’s final acts was to order a royal fort built at the Cossack ostrog of Okhotsk, the first Russian settlement on the Pacific.21 In 1711 Peter ordered a naval wharf built at Okhotsk – an optimistic move, for there were as yet no Russian naval ships on the Pacific to use it.22 Peter fantasized about trade missions to China, Japan and India and of extending Russian sovereignty over the North American coast from the Bering Strait to the Spanish empire. But it was not until 1724, when Peter was already dying, that he finally commissioned Vitus Bering, a Dane with twenty years’ service in his navy, to explore the ‘Eastern Ocean’, Russia’s final frontier.

  There being no Russian ships sturdy or fast enough to make the round-the-world journey, Bering and thirty-four officers, shipbuilders and workmen set off across Siberia to build their own craft when they arrived at the Pacific. It took the party over two years to drag their tools and equipment such as anchors and cordage across eleven modern-day time zones to the Kamchatka peninsula. There, with the help of workmen and sailors they had picked up on their way, they built the three-masted barque Arkhangel Gavriil. Bering set off across the Pacific in 1728. He mapped parts of the Bering Strait and the north-eastern corner of Russia in some detail, but, to the frustration of St Petersburg, failed to find the ‘great land’ beyond, which had been appearing on Cossack seafarers’ primitive maps since 1710.

  Bering was sent off again in 1733 on a more ambitious two-ship expedition along the same gruelling route. His men, who now included naturalists and scientists, built the barques Svyatoi Pyotr and Svyatoi Pavel on the shores of one of the world’s greatest natural harbours, Avacha Bay on Kamchatka, which they named Petro-Pavlovsk after their vessels. Stepan Krasheninnikov, a young botanist who became the expedition’s chronicler, found the natives of Kamchatka unusually degenerate and disgusting even by Siberian standards. They ‘eat their own lice and wash in urine . . . share their food with their dogs and smell of fish’, Krashennenikov reported. They also ‘cannot count beyond three without using their fingers’.23

  View of Avacha Bay and the settlement of Petropavlovsk of Kamchatka, 1740.

  This time the expedition made landfall in America. Bering’s first officer, Alexei Chirikov, aboard the Sv. Pavel, almost certainly hove to just south of Jakobi Island, near the modern-day Alaska–Canada border. Chirikov dispatched a longboat to explore the shore, but it never returned. Nor did a smaller jolly boat sent to search for it. Both were probably lost in the tidal undertow that even today makes the Jakobi Channel extremely treacherous.24 Fires were seen ashore and a native canoe briefly emerged and signalled to Chirikov, but he had no boats left to follow it.* After several days’ fruitless waiting he had no choice but to abandon any possible survivors to their fate and turn for home.25 More serious even than the disappearance of fifteen men was the loss of both the Sv. Pavel’s boats. Without them the ship could take on neither supplies nor water. During his return journey Chirikov had to exchange valuable knives for bladders full of fresh water brought out to the ship in canoes by Aleut islanders.

  Bering was even less lucky. Separated from Chirikov’s ship early in the voyage, Bering’s brig the Sv. Pyotr cruised along the American coast, spotting Mount St Elias near modern Yakutat. But he was unable to make it back to Kamchatka before the end of the sailing season and was forced by contrary winds to winter on the island which today bears his name. The ship dragged its too-small anchor in a storm and was wrecked. That winter the sixty-year-old Bering died, probably of heart failure,26 along with thirty-one of his seventy-five men, who mostly perished of scurvy.27 The survivors, including the German naturalist Georg Steller, lived on the meat of the giant slow-moving sea mammals Steller named sea cows. A full-grown specimen weighed nearly 7,000 pounds and could feed the entire crew for a month.28 In the spring of 1742, nine years after they had set out from St Petersburg, the remaining members of the expedition built a smaller boat from the salvaged wreckage of the Sv. Pyotr and limped back across the short distance remaining to Petropavlovsk. Bering’s party had spent the winter just four days’ sail away from salvation.

  Despite its high death toll, the second Bering expedition marked a breakthrough for Russian expansion to the New World – not least because in Russian eyes Chirikov had made the land Russian by right of first discovery. Chirikov was not the first European to explore the northern Pacific coast of America – that honour goes to the Elizabethan privateer Sir Francis Drake, who sailed up the coast as far as San Francisco in his ship the Golden Hind during his 1577–80 round-the-world voyage. But Chirikov was the first navigator of modern times to record a landing on the coast, albeit a disastrous one, and had thereby staked a claim to the New World in Russian blood.

  But like the conquest of Siberia, it was not state ambition but private enterprise that drove Russians forward towards America. Word of Steller’s descriptions of islands full of fur seals spread quickly across Siberia. Over the next decade over thirty groups of Cossack explorer-adventurers visited the Aleutian Islands, sailing in forty-foot shtitik boats – single-masted square-sailed vessels of archaic design – out of Okhotsk and Petropavlovsk. For the crews who returned from these two- or three-year fur expeditions the profits were vast. One merchant returned from the Aleutians in 1754 with the pelts of 1,662 sea otters, 840 fur seals and 720 foxes. For the natives, however, the consequences of Russian violence, disease and the depletion of their fragile fishing grounds were devastating. Vladimir Atlasov, an early Cossack explorer of Kamchatka, reported a population of two to three thousand adult males on the peninsula in the 1730s. By the first official census in 1773 only 706 souls remained.29

  The Bering–Chirikov expedition also fired imaginations in St Petersburg with dreams of adding America to the Russian Empire. ‘O, Russian Columbuses, scorning a grim Fate;/ Between the mounts of Ida will open a new path to the East;/ And we will plant our State on America’s shores,’ wrote Mikhail Lomonosov, the autodidact scientist who founded Moscow University, in his 1747 ode ‘Peter the Great’. Lomonosov, as well as being Russia’s first secular public intellectual, was also part-Pomor, a northern Russian people who had been the first explorers of the north Siberian coast. He therefore had an inherited, as well as an academic, interest in Arcti
c navigation. In 1755 Lomonosov penned an influential essay, ‘Letter on the Northern Route to East India via the Siberian Ocean’. He also drew the first map of the world as seen from the top, with the North Pole at its centre, showing Alaska as a natural adjunct of Siberia.30 Lomonosov suggested that a navigable north-east passage along the Arctic would open all Asia to Russian shipping.* Russia, he wrote, was now ‘an Empire on three Continents: Europe, Asia and America’.

  The reality of imposing the Tsar’s laws on these vast new territories was, however, trickier than the armchair strategists of Moscow University imagined. Authority died over Siberia’s vast distances. If detached from European Russia, Siberia would still be the largest country in the world – it is bigger than the United States and Europe combined. Feudal Russia’s institutions – serfdom, aristocracy and the authority of the Church – all dissolved in the rough egalitarianism of the frontier. The self-reliant Cossacks were followed by equally independent-minded ideological exiles. First came the Old Believers, adherents of a traditional Orthodox liturgy who had been vigorously persecuted by Peter the Great’s father. They were followed by restless and ambitious peasants attracted by the freehold land they were able to own in Siberia, as well as by fugitives from justice. Like frontier America, the empty land filled with a mismatched population of God-fearing schismatics and violent criminals.31

  But Siberia was not just a place of escape and new beginnings. Almost as soon as it was colonized, it also became a place of banishment and punishment. As early as the 1690s the state began to use Siberia as a dumping ground for its criminals, as though its vastness could quarantine evil.32 Katorga – from the Greek word for galley – was the judicial term for a penal settlement where inmates performed hard labour in the service of the state. The sentence was commonly imposed in place of death from the reign of Peter the Great onwards.

  Under the Empress Elizabeth, who swelled the ranks of convicts by abolishing the death penalty for most offences in 1753, the crimes for which a man could be exiled included fortune-telling, vagrancy, ‘begging with false distress’, prizefighting, wife-beating, illicit tree-felling, ‘recklessly driving a cart without use of reins’ and for a brief puritanical period in the 1750s, even taking snuff.33 Until the mid-eighteenth century these exiles were always branded, usually on the face or right hand, to prevent them ever making their way back to the world. The convicts would spend up to two years shuffling in columns to their exile along the great Siberian trunk road known as the Trakt. The jingle of their chains and the ritual cries of ‘Fathers, have pity on us!’ as the condemned men held out their caps for food was, for all the travellers who passed them in their high-wheeled carriages, the sound of Siberia. By tradition at Tobolsk, 1,100 miles from Moscow, the prisoners’ leg irons were removed – a mercy, but also a sign that they had gone too far into the wilderness for escape to be survivable.

  Irkutsk, founded as a Cosssack ostrog in 1652 where the Anadyr River flows into Lake Baikal, straddled the trade route between Russia and China. It soon became the entrepôt and then official capital of eastern Siberia. By 1754 there was a government school there for navigators, geodesists, mining engineers and – a sign of where the strategists of the capital were focusing their hopes for trade – translators of Japanese, taught by Japanese sailors shipwrecked on the Pacific coast of Siberia.

  The combination of a vigorous outlaw culture and a thriving merchant class made Irkutsk vital and dangerous in equal measure, a place filled with turbulence and opportunity. Fur traders came from thousands of miles around after months or years in the wilderness to turn their pelts into gold and their gold into swinish pleasures. The drinking dens and gaming tables of Irkutsk were as notorious in eighteenth-century Russia as those of Deadwood would become in nineteenth-century America. The archives of the Irkutsk criminal court record at least one murder every day. The French monk and astronomer Abbé Jean Chappe d’Auteroche, sent to Siberia by Catherine the Great to observe the passage of the moons of Jupiter in 1770, reported that the clergy were so drunk and libidinous that priests were ‘often found in the streets unable to walk home’.34

  Cut off from European Russia like the French of Quebec or the British of Bermuda, the merchants of Irkutsk preserved a language and dress considered antiquated even by the late eighteenth century. The Mongol belted kaftan, abandoned in the capital under Peter, was worn in Irkutsk into the twentieth century. Merchant money built grand mansions along boulevards lined with pine-plank boardwalks against the mud, but the backstreets stank, reported Auteroche, with pigs feeding in the open sewers.35

  Government postings in Siberia attracted the desperately ambitious or the desperately disgraced. The tone was set by Matvei Gagarin, Peter the Great’s appointee as governor of Tobolsk, in western Siberia. Early in his nine-year reign the wilderness called to something greedy and vicious in Gagarin. He began minting his own coinage and made such a fortune from smuggling that he shod his horse with silver and dispensed his own justice, ordering arsonists burned alive. Peter had his wayward lieutenant brought back to the capital in chains and hanged. The Tsar ordered that Gagarin’s body remain on the gibbet as an example to others. When the rope around the corpse’s neck rotted Peter had it replaced by a chain.

  Yet even such drastic punishments did little to improve Siberia’s notoriously corrupt, rapacious and brutal government officials. ‘Written laws should not be treated like playing cards,’ stormed Peter in a decree of 1723. ‘This ukaz seals all orders and regulation like a stamp so that nobody can act according to their own whims or in breach of instructions.’ But repeated laws to protect natives against extortion, abuse, sex slavery and being deprived of their hunting grounds are clear evidence that previous laws to that effect had been ignored.

  Pyotr Rezanov must have viewed the prospect of a job in this barely-civilized outpost of the empire with trepidation. But he knew that if he was lucky and clever the post promised lucrative possibilities for patronage and self-enrichment. As an aristocrat he required no legal qualifications to become a judge, and this was the post he sought and received. In spring 1769 Rezanov left his wife and young children in St Petersburg and set off to dispense justice in the wilderness. The foundations of a long and lucrative – for his son, if not for him – family connection to Russia’s wild east had been laid.

  Footnotes

  * A similar rule regarding converts to Islam applied in the contemporary Ottoman empire, which was at the time powering through the Balkans.

  * Pace John Keats; not ‘stout Cortez’.

  * The natives commemorated the disaster in petroglyphs found nearby, which appear to show a sailing ship and boats.

  * Thanks to global warming, the north-east passage has since 2008 become navigable (with the help of icebreakers) for enough of the year to make it a commercially viable shipping lane.

  3

  The Court

  I am a Tsar – I am a slave,

  I am a worm – I am a God . . .

  Gavriil Derzhavin, ‘Ode to God’, 1784

  For the Russian aristocracy the court was the centre of the world: it was the source of all power and patronage, gossip and scandal, disgrace and ruin. The sovereign’s favour could raise ambitious men like Catherine the Great’s lovers Grigory Orlov and Grigory Potemkin to the heights of wealth and power. Catherine may have corresponded with François-Marie d’Arouet Voltaire and Denis Diderot about enlightened ideas for ruling Russia, but in reality her court was as unpredictable, Asiatic and dependent on the caprice of the monarch as Ivan the Terrible’s had been two centuries before. The glittering reception halls of the Winter Palace were a giant casino of fortune, and the two thousand wax candles that burned every interminable St Petersburg night on the palace’s chandeliers illuminated an elegant game of risk which the milling men and women below were playing for their lives.

  From a tender age the young Nikolai Rezanov was put to work cultivating powerful patrons. The Russians, like the eighteenth-century English, called it ‘i
nterest’ – the network of connections without which no job could be lobbied or career made. Noble rank alone was no guarantee of advancement. The Russian monarchy may have been the most absolute in Europe – peasants were expected to prostrate themselves flat on the ground as the imperial carriage passed by – yet Russian society was surprisingly upwardly mobile.1 This was partly the legacy of Peter the Great, who had gone out of his way to break the power of the Moscow boyars by promoting both foreigners and humble men such as his favourite Prince Alexander Menshikov, a former pie vendor, to greatness. Tsar Peter himself married a buxom peasant girl from Livonia who succeeded him as the Empress Catherine I.

  The prevalence of self-made men – or rather, tsar-made men – in the upper ranks of Russian society was a sign not of any democratic instinct but rather the desire of the tsars to surround themselves with their own protégés. Aristocrats with inherited wealth and connections could have complex and shifting loyalties. Foreigners or Russian men of no rank owed their advancement solely to the favour of their monarch. They were therefore their sovereign’s creatures, and his or her most obedient lieutenants. As a result the court history of eighteenth-century Russia is full of talented parvenus and pampered lover-favourites. Gavriil Derzhavin, a poor nobleman who rose to the highest posts in the state, was the archetypal brilliant upstart and was to play a vital role in the life of young Nikolai Rezanov. Derzhavin was from an impoverished gentry family from Kazan who were, like the Rezanovs, of Tatar origin. Derzhavin had made his way to the capital as a teenager and joined the Preobrazhensky Guards as a private, not being able to afford to buy an officer’s commission. He quickly rose through the ranks. The young Derzhavin was befriended by Nikolai Rezanov’s uncle Ivan, who was himself busy hustling his way upwards through the Foreign Ministry.