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

by Owen Matthews

  Shelikhov set out from St Petersburg for Irkutsk with his group of monks on 22 January 1794. Midwinter, when rivers were frozen hard and sleighs could make fast progress over snow-covered ground, was Russia’s travelling season. In spring and autumn roads became impassable because of mud and rivers dangerous because of floating ice. The monks carried with them a collection of prayer books, crosses and a mobile altar to bring the word of God to the Empress’s newest subjects and comfort to themselves. They also took a brand new icon of the Virgin and Child painted at Valaam in the modern taste.*

  Rezanov set off a little later, probably in late spring; he never caught up with Shelikhov’s fast-moving party. Zubov was famous for fitting his household servants out in liveries finer than many noblemen’s own best clothes. It is likely, then, that Rezanov, a trusted secretary and the prince’s personal representative, was sent off to Siberia in some style. Several of Catherine’s long-distance coaches of the period are preserved in the Kremlin Armoury and at Tsarskoye Selo. The latest fashion was for travelling carriages of English design, with high axles and two pairs of enormous wheels six or even eight feet in diameter. The bigger the wheel, the less likely it was to get stuck in potholes. City carriages were sprung on steel arcs, but the springs of the time were fragile, and rugged long-distance vehicles were usually suspended from stout leather straps instead. Luggage, in heavy leather cases, was strapped to the roof. Armed footmen would have perched behind while Rezanov’s valet and secretary sat inside. Four or six horses, ridden by Cossack postilions and changed up to three times a day, could haul such a carriage up to thirty miles between dawn and dusk.

  A round-trip to Siberia entailed an absence of a year at least, most of it spent on the road. On the evidence of contemporary inventories of gentlemen travellers’ luggage, Rezanov would have taken trunk-loads of summer and winter clothes, boots and shoes, bed linen, tents and furs, wet-weather gear of greased cotton canvas, storm lamps and candles, dry provisions and cognac, a medicine chest, a travelling library, a canteen of cutlery and pewter plates, a writing desk and in all likelihood a small arsenal of fowling pieces and pistols, dress swords and cutlasses.

  Thus equipped, Rezanov’s little expedition bowled along the beaten earth of the Royal Road from St Petersburg to Moscow reserved for government traffic and persons of quality bearing special passports. Lesser subjects trundled and plodded with their carts and nags along the road’s rutted verges. At Moscow they joined the stream of humanity and merchant carts on the Trakt, the great road which linked European Russia to Siberia – not really a road at all in the modern sense, but a wide swathe of sandy tracks criss-crossing the flat farmland and pasture, dotted with clutches of peasant izbas – log houses – clustering around the stumpy bell towers of churches.

  Rezanov had travelled before, of course, on manoeuvres with the Izmailovsky Guards, but it was here on the Trakt, as it passed through the Volga towns of Nizhny Novgorod and Kazan and on into the emptiness of the steppes, that the bustle and traffic of Russia proper fell away and Rezanov first tasted the true vastness of his own country. Even today, without the dust and the bedbugs and the saddle sores, the thieves and the smell of horse dung and unwashed bodies and the clouds of horseflies, travelling by road across Siberia is almost hypnotic. The monotony of the landscape lulls you into an almost metaphysical state where you become acutely aware of your own insignificance. You are a mere human speck, crawling slowly across the face of a great and barely-changing land.

  Shelikhov, with at least two months’ head start, had made excellent speed. By early May he was already in Irkutsk, with the monks lodged at his newly built house, where their gravity and piety made a great impression on Shelikhov’s six surviving children. Shelikhov’s aura of celebrity had never been stronger now that he was in the favour of the Empress.11 Irkutsk’s new governor Ivan Pil* issued an order echoing Catherine’s ukaz that Shelikhov’s venture was ‘useful to the State’.12 Pil also hurried to fulfil Catherine’s command to round up some colonists for the New World from ‘among the exiles’ – convicts for whom Irkutsk was an open prison to which they had been condemned for life. What Pil’s criteria were in recruiting men for Kodiak is not clear, but judging from the reluctant colonists’ later attempts to escape from, murder and rebel against their masters in the Company, it’s safe to say that the governor did not send his best people. Shelikhov had requested ‘skilled artisans’, and in this at least his request was honoured – Pil selected eleven convict blacksmiths, coppersmiths, carpenters and their families to live out the rest of their lives in the Kodiak colony.

  Russia’s roads, such as they were, stopped at Irkutsk. Beyond lay rivers and trackless taiga – subarctic scrubland dotted with marshes and small trees. Shelikhov, his little party reprovisioned and shriven, set out in the early summer of 1794 as great sheets of ice on Lake Baikal buckled and the floes jostled down the River Lena as it flowed northwards to Yakutsk, 800 miles to the north. The monks and their reluctant new flock, along with their equipment and supplies, were piled onto a flotilla of flat river barges of a design pioneered by the first Cossack settlers of Siberia. For two weeks the barges were punted, rowed and towed by sailing skiff up the 450-mile-long western shore of Baikal, the party camping every night on stony beaches on the edge of the forest. Local tribesmen – Buryats, then Lamuts and Tungus – would shyly emerge as the smoke of the party’s cooking fires curled into the spring air to trade game for chunks of the Russians’ tea bricks and hard bread. A two-day portage then brought them to the head of the Kirenga River, a tributary of the Lena, and from there the boatmen left the little flotilla to drift with the river’s flow. They were carried north at the river’s sedate pace, fending off flat islands in the stream and the riverbanks with long poles. They were in the hands of nature now, the land and the water pushing them forward relentlessly, further into the wild.

  The forest gave way to taiga. The barges drifted past the felt yurts of the Yakuts, watched impassively by grazing oxen. After three weeks on the river, the summer days lengthened as they approached the Arctic Circle. The hypnotic monotony of the landscape was broken by the sight of the trading post of Yakutsk, founded as a Cossack ostrog a century and a half before and now boasting 362 Russian log houses and five wooden churches surrounded by an untidy huddle of native huts. Shelikhov and his party now transferred their baggage and provisions to packhorses for the two-month overland crossing to Okhotsk, since no wheeled vehicles could negotiate the Stanovoi Mountains. The Yakuts provided the horses as a kind of tax to the empire. Caravans of a hundred or a hundred and fifty horses were usual, with one Yakut leading a team of ten horses tied nose to tail. Goods thus transported to Okhotsk could increase in value up to forty times, such was the expense and difficulty of carrying them overland. In 1805 a pood – thirty-four pounds – of flour cost half a ruble at Irkutsk, one and a half at Yakutsk, ten rubles at Okhotsk and forty rubles in Kamchatka.13

  The trail to Okhotsk wandered between royal post houses, dripping lonely huts manned by solitary Cossacks and their native concubines. Novice Herman reported that bears attacked the party in the Stanovoi foothills. They would have met mounted Cossack postmen coming in the opposite direction carrying leather post cases with one, two or three pigeon feathers fixed to the seal to signify the urgency of the mail. These official letters, written in the counting houses of Okhotsk or the chancelleries of St Petersburg, would be carefully placed for the night out of harm’s way in special alcoves on the brick stoves while their bearers ate the government’s soup and swapped news of floods and landslides, spreading bogs and Yakut war parties.

  On 13 July, after seven months on the road, they reached the end of the world – or so it must have seemed as they trudged into Okhotsk. This ramshackle port on the Pacific coast was considered grim, violent and desperate even by the standards of contemporary Siberians. A few plank-built houses clustered around the remains of wharves built by Vitus Bering in 1742; a pine-built quay knocked together for Joseph Billin
gs’s expedition to the north Pacific in 1790 was already disintegrating.* Okhotsk was the ultimate, in every sense, wild eastern town. It was a place with no government officials and populated by fugitives, chancers and trappers so wild and tough that they seemed barely human to civilized men. The Shelikhov-Golikov Company headquarters offered the only half-decent accommodation and kept a good table for visiting managers, Company and naval officers. The taverns were a different story. Hunters and settlers came from a thousand miles around to swap the season’s furs for gold, which they lost no time spending on vodka, native whores and gluttonous feasting.

  ‘Most of the men who come here are depraved, drunk, violent and corrupted,’ Rezanov wrote later from Russian America. Out in the colonies ‘hardship and work makes them behave more quietly and there are few opportunities to get drunk. But returning to Okhotsk they resume the old life again and in a few weeks spend on drink and debauch the products of four years’ labour. Then they return to America. What example can we expect from them?’ Some would bring their half-breed children to Okhotsk ‘and after spending all money on drink leave them to shift for themselves. Being unused to the climate and the food, lacking clothes and exposed to smallpox, they die.’14

  Archimandrite Iosaf was predictably shocked by the licence and brawling of Okhotsk’s hard-drinking citizens. The unctuous Shelikhov was quick to assure him – entirely falsely – that conditions in the Company’s outposts were far more regular. Indeed when Shelikhov stretched out in his pine-walled office after enjoying the Company’s banya, or bathhouse, he would have read desperate and wheedling letters which awaited him from his chief manager on Kodiak, Alexander Baranov. They spoke of scurvy ravaging the settlements and of hostile natives enraged by the murdering and raping indulged in by rival trappers from the Lebedev-Lastochkin Company. Baranov pleaded for iron, for food, for his personal supplies of vodka to be sent, for sailcloth and money and trade goods. None of this grim litany of want and disaster was shared with Iosaf and his convict charges. Instead, Shelikhov fired off one of his customarily breezy letters to introduce the new settlers. ‘You will lay out the convict settlement with taste and due regard for beauty of construction so that when visits are made by foreign ships it may appear more like a town than a village, and that the Russians in America may live in a neat and orderly way, not as in Okhotsk, in squalor and misery,’ Shelikhov instructed his long-suffering manager, adding, high-handedly, that ‘your work will be reviewed and discussed at the Imperial court’.

  In August 1794 Shelikhov sent the party off in two Company-built brigs, a new Three Hierarchs named for the ship that had carried him and Natalia to Kodiak and back the previous decade, as well as an older boat, the Svyataya Ekaterina. In total there were 183 souls on board: the 52 settlers and 10 priests, together with 121 new hunters recruited from the stews of Okhotsk and a handful of natives. Shelikhov, encouraging the illusion of the high moral and intellectual tone of the colony, sent out books for Kodiak’s school on ‘classical, historical, mathematical moral and economic’ topics.15 He also sent seeds, with detailed instructions on planting, as well as dogs, rabbits, goats, pigs, two pairs of cattle and a mare and foal.*

  The two ships reached Kodiak on 24 September but struck rocks at the entrance to St Paul’s Harbour, so the passengers had to struggle ashore through the surf from their foundering ships. After this inauspicious start, things became considerably worse. The priests discovered the church, the school and indeed the town about which Shelikhov had spoken so enthusiastically did not, in fact, exist. Instead of a well-ordered settlement at Kodiak they found a collection of mean barracks, no candles and barely any food or shelter.

  The general manager’s house was the only decent building in the settlement. In 1788 the Spanish Captain de Haro found the house ‘hung with Chinese paper, with a large mirror, pictures of saints and well-painted and rich beds’.16 The rest of the settlers lived far less well. Baranov was able to offer the new arrivals accommodation only in communal barracks where the Russian settlers lived in sin with their native concubines. Iosaf and his priests preferred to camp in a lean-to on the beach, where they gathered clams for food while the colony’s workers caroused drunkenly with native women in their crowded and stinking quarters. Daily services were held by the beleaguered monks in the lee of an upturned boat on the beach.17

  The convict settlers found they didn’t like Kodiak much either. Within a month Baranov got word that some of the newly arrived exiles were plotting to plunder the Company warehouse, seize a ship and sail home. The only detail that the would-be rebels were still debating was whether to cut Baranov’s throat before they left or not. The manager had the plotters rounded up and soundly whipped, then sent the ringleaders in irons to distant outposts.

  The priests did not, at least, plot to kill Baranov, but they nonetheless turned out to be nearly as big a nuisance as the convicts. The monks constantly complained to the general manager of the colonists’ drunkenness, licentiousness and their cruelty to the natives. Baranov attempted to placate Iosaf with a personal pledge of 1,500 rubles of his own money – ten years’ wages for an ordinary seaman – to build a church at Kodiak named for the Holy Resurrection.18 Construction began on 21 November 1794,* but Shelikhov’s idea to send priests to Russian America would become a terrible liability for Baranov, and for the Company, for decades to come.

  Footnotes

  * A century later these petitioners’ spiritual (and doubtless actual) descendants would flock, similarly present-laden, to the apartments of the Siberian self-described holy man Grigory Rasputin, who, like Zubov, gained a powerful hold over the Tsarina and whose word decided appointments and favour.

  * Even after Stalin had them exiled to Kazakhstan as a potential fifth column, the Volga Germans’ villages were famously orderly, sober and well kept.

  * Catherine’s son Paul, on acceding to the throne in 1796, immediately threw Altesti into solitary confinement in a dungeon in Kiev, where he would keep his secrets to himself. The old rogue was freed in 1801 and deported to Italy in a closed carriage, like a bacillus. He lived to be almost one hundred in comfortable retirement in his native Sicily.

  * Unusually the Mother of God wears a red robe, as opposed to the traditional blue, and the background is a jaunty azure rather than gold. The icon still hangs in the Church of the Holy Resurrection on Kodiak Island, blank-faced and inscrutable as all icons are, her golden halo understandably battered by its extraordinary travels. A heavy iron penitential cross that Herman, one of the monks, wore under his robes all his life is also preserved in the church as a relic.

  * Pil was a former governor of Pskov and Rezanov’s old superior in the Pskov bureaucracy. Pil became an enthusiastic supporter of the Russian American Company; he also befriended and helped Rezanov’s old Treasury colleague Alexander Radishchev after he was exiled to Irkutsk for his radical 1790 Journey from Petersburg to Moscow.

  * Okhotsk was also a poor harbour. Like Bering, Billings had built two ships on arrival in Okhotsk, but one had become stranded in surf while trying to cross a sandbar at the entrance to the shallow bay and stuck fast. Unable to move her and unable to continue without the supplies she carried, Billings had the brand new ship unloaded and burned to the waterline to recover the valuable iron used in her construction. Symbolically the ship that was burned had been christened the Good Intentions; only her sister ship the Glory of Russia made it out to the open sea.

  * Shelikhov’s exalted ambitions for stockbreeding and agriculture would end up sacrificed to the more pressing demands of hunger: of all the animals on board, only the dogs escaped being eaten by that winter’s end.

  * The church still stands today, much rebuilt, across the road from the old Company log-built storehouse.

  6

  To China

  This is a true desert – you will shudder to look at these bare hills with no vegetation with icy peaks or these forests as thick as reeds . . . Sometimes the silence is so absolute that one is afraid to wake t
he wilderness with the sound of one’s voice.

  Ivan Goncharov, author of Oblomov, on crossing Siberia, 18551

  Rezanov’s fine coach rolled into Irkutsk in early August 1794. Garbled accounts of a powerful messenger en route from the capital had been circulating for some weeks before he actually appeared. ‘I have heard recently that there is a rumour in town that [Captain] Billings tattled on you to Her Majesty saying that you cheated Her in that you asked for a group of people [to go to America] for no reason,’ wrote Natalia Shelikhova to her husband in Okhotsk on 5 August. ‘Billings said he saw that you have nothing in America and that you made up everything and that you lied to Her Majesty, having made up things in your own mind. They say that Her Majesty became angry and sent a courier to bring you back from the road and take you to St Petersburg in chains. It is said the courier passed by in secret, and no one knows about him.’2

  The truth was fortunately far less worrying. Rezanov and Shelikhov had in fact been corresponding furiously all year – between May and July Natalia Shelikhova mentions that she has forwarded at least four of Rezanov’s letters. The letters themselves do not survive, but it is clear that Zubov’s emissary and the head of Siberia’s largest business had much of mutual interest to discuss. More important for Rezanov personally was the prospect of seeing his father, probably for the first time in his adult life.