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

by Owen Matthews

  Pyotr Rezanov had left to take up his post in Siberia in 1767, when his son Nikolai was just three years old. He had been appointed a judge at the civil court of Irkutsk, having satisfied the two major qualifying criteria, an ability to read and the possession of noble blood. By 1785 Pyotr had risen to the rank of collegiate councillor, the equivalent of a full colonel, and was the head of his own bench, the region’s equity court responsible for settling civil disputes.

  That year, however, the older Rezanov got mixed up in a scandal that was to taint his reputation for ever. The convoluted details are described in Irkutsk’s surviving court records. According to a complaint of 22 January 1785, one Shirayev, a (presumably former) serf from Ustyug and worker at an Irkutsk glass factory, claimed his employer, the Moscow merchant Ivan Savelyev, had promised him 292 rubles, 33 and a quarter kopecks more than he had actually been paid for his work. The case was transferred to Rezanov’s court, and rather than fight the claim Savelyev chose to settle, depositing the disputed amount with the court. But the money – about two year’s wages for a working man – disappeared from the court’s strongbox. An investigation by the local criminal court was launched. One suspects that presiding Judges Vedenyapin and Maltsev had axes to grind against Rezanov for reasons now lost to history. In any case Rezanov, as head of the equity court, was ruled to be legally responsible for the missing cash and, insultingly, was banned from leaving Irkutsk for the duration of the investigation of the theft.3

  It is highly doubtful that Pyotr Rezanov himself was the culprit. He earned 2,000 rubles a year and lived modestly in the Parish of St Procopius in a house with just three stoves, served by only two housemaids and a stable boy. In order to close the case, however, Rezanov chose to return the money to Savelyev, almost certainly from his own pocket. But Savelyev was no longer in town, and his Irkutsk man of affairs was, in Judge Rezanov’s opinion, ‘untrustworthy because of his un-sober lifestyle’. Eventually, in 1787, Rezanov sent the gold by courier to Savelyev in Krasnoyarsk, but it took him a further five years to clear his name, obtaining a formal exoneration from the Senate in St Petersburg only in 1793 – probably with his son Nikolai’s help. This Dombey and Son-like legal nightmare drained the old judge, who died in 1794, soon after the arrival of his son in Irkutsk. As Nikolai was to find out for himself when he took over Shelikhov’s business empire, the political intrigues of Irkutsk could be every bit as vicious as those of the capital, the passions higher even as the stakes were lower.

  Irkutsk was the last outpost of Russian civilization before the true wilderness. By Siberian standards it was a well established town, boasting forty churches, a stone cathedral and a handsome governor’s mansion, the neoclassical columns of its façade hewn from whole Siberian pines. The prominent citizens of Irkutsk, an eccentric collection of exiled nobles, merchants, frontiersmen-made-good and reformed criminals, marooned in their sea of forest, clung fiercely to their respectability and their brief history. But in reality it was a town on the make, a place where the class distinctions of St Petersburg faded and the merchants were the kings. The arrival of such a prominent personage as Rezanov – titular emissary of the Empress, actual emissary of her all-powerful favourite and the son, to boot, of a prominent Irkutsk judge, generated considerable excitement. Grigory Shelikhov hurried home from Okhotsk to greet Rezanov, arriving some time in early autumn to welcome the distinguished guest.

  The Shelikhovs spared no effort or expense in entertaining the young nobleman. Shelikhov may have been a self-made millionaire and a ruthless operator who did not shy from using violence to impose his will on natives and rivals. But he was socially ambitious and keen to acquire the polish and graces of noble rank. He also needed to win over Rezanov for political reasons. The showman Shelikhov had told a number of lies when describing the Kodiak settlement to anyone who would listen in the capital – including Zubov – and would need powerful friends to protect his name when Iosaf and his colleagues eventually reported the shabby truth of the colonies’ disorder.

  But Shelikhov had not prospered in the lawless and violent world of Siberian commerce by being a bad judge of men. It’s clear from his later writings that Rezanov was charmed and impressed by Shelikhov in equal measure. Furthermore, the two men had much in common, despite the differences in their social rank. Certainly both saw in the wide wilderness the promise of fortune, adventure and greatness. Rezanov, from his teenage years in the Guards to his brief career at court, had spent his life in a series of institutions governed by protocol and birthright. Now, in Siberia on the first independent journey of his life, he found himself in a world where tough, clever men like Shelikhov could rise above their station by bending nature to their will. Rezanov was a child of the Enlightenment. Here before him in Irkutsk, on the tables from which he ate and the roofs under which he slept, was arrayed the ample evidence of wealth that could be won if reason and order could be applied to exploit the apparently endless bounty of nature.

  Shelikhov lost no time in introducing Rezanov to the intricacies of the Siberian fur trade. They toured the Shelikhov-Golikov Company’s tanneries, warehouses, counting-houses, exchanges, armouries and the chancellery, where bearded prospectors, fur caps in hand, signed up for service in the Company by scratching a shaky X on their contracts. As the Siberian winter closed in on Irkutsk, Shelikhov prepared to dispatch convoys of furs in special closed sleighs under armed guard to the great annual trade fair at the entrepôt of Kiakhta, which had resumed the previous winter after being closed for seven years on the orders of the Emperor of China.

  A view of Kiakhta, 1799.

  The tiny Inner Mongolian frontier town of Khiatka was the only trading post where Russians could legally offer their wares for sale to Chinese merchants. China was the world’s largest market for fur, while Russia was fast becoming China’s largest market for the dried herb both countries called chai – tea – which over the last thirty years had gone from a fashionable beverage for the rich to a staple drink of nearly all social classes. By the 1780s a million cases of tea were coming across the border every year. Khiatka was therefore the heart of the Shelikhov–Golikov empire, of Irkutsk’s trading wealth and of all Russia’s Asian commerce.

  For centuries both Russia and China had viewed the great Eurasian steppes with deep suspicion. Violent wandering nomads from Central Asia had raided east as well as west, and had plagued the Celestial Empire since the First Dynastic Period, 2,000 years before the birth of Christ. Of China’s four great borderlands – Tibet, Sinkiang (known to the Russians as Turkestan), Manchuria and Mongolia – it was Mongolia which was always the most volatile and vulnerable. As the Mongol and Tatar empires crumbled and Russian Cossacks began to push eastwards in the sixteenth century, Muscovy put out tentative feelers towards its great southern neighbour. The Cossack Ivashko Petlin of Tobolsk became Russia’s first emissary to the court of Peking in 1618. Ming officials assumed that he was a tribute-bringer from a hitherto unknown pale-skinned northern tribe and put Petlin up in a special guesthouse for such missions run by the Imperial Board of Rites. The following year Petlin reported to the court of Tsar Mikhail Romanov on the enormousness of the Emperor’s palace and the Great Wall. He was not believed.*

  As Russia expanded steadily across north Asia it was clear that the two empires were destined to become rivals.4 Cossack raiding parties were rapidly encroaching on native Siberian peoples who had been Chinese tribute-payers for hundreds of years. And in China itself a series of peasant revolts and weakening Ming power allowed a new, warlike dynasty from Manchuria to seize power in Peking in 1644. The new Qing dynasty, also known as the Manchus, with their power base in the northern marches of the empire, were naturally more sensitive to the encroachment of the Russians on their historic homelands. Diplomatic relations of a sort were established with the Qing through a Muslim merchant, Setkul Ablin of Bukhara, who delivered polite letters from Peter the Great’s father, Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, to the Emperor of China during his fur-trading visits to Pekin
g.

  In 1670 the Manchus were forced to take notice of their upstart neighbours when Cossacks established an ostrog at Albazin on the Amur River, the Chinese empire’s only natural northern boundary. The Cossack voyevoda, or leader, underestimating his opponent’s strength, even provocatively wrote to the Chinese emperor suggesting he accept the suzerainty of the Tsar.5* At least one Amur native leader defected to the Russians, was baptized, and received a princely title from Muscovy by way of reward. In 1683 a punitive Manchu force of 3,000 was eventually sent north to demolish the upstart ostrog. It was barely a skirmishing party by Chinese standards – the Ming had maintained a permanent garrison of one million men guarding the Great Wall. Nevertheless it took the Chinese three years and two sieges before the Cossacks were finally forced out of the Amur River basin, Siberia’s natural link to the Pacific. The Russians were not to return to the Amur until the middle of the nineteenth century.

  To avoid further conflict, Asia’s two great land empires needed to define a commonly agreed border. Peter the Great sent his childhood friend Fyodor Golovin to the Qing emperor in Peking with a guard of 500 musketeers and 1,400 Cossacks to negotiate a lasting peace. A treaty was drawn up with the help of two Jesuits fluent in Chinese and was signed in the frontier town of Nerchinsk in 1689. Monumental stones carved in Latin, Manchu, Chinese and Russian would mark the mutually agreed key border points. Crucially for the Russians, the Chinese had agreed to trade – though only at a single spot, the tiny settlement of Kiakhta on the steppes of northern Mongolia. ‘The mutual trade at Kiakhta does not benefit China, but because the Great Emperor loves all human beings he sympathizes with your little people who are poor and miserable, and because your Senate has appealed to His Celestial Majesty He has agreed to approve of the petition,’6 read the preamble in Manchu.* But for all the Manchus’ high-handed bluster it was the first treaty ever to be signed by China which treated a foreign power as an equal rather than as a vassal.

  ‘Two towns quickly arose upon the site appointed as an entrepôt and place of barter,’ wrote Charles William Vane, Marquis of Londonderry, who visited the border in the 1830s.

  The one, Russian, was called Kiakhta, from the name of the little river which bathed its walls; the other, Chinese, was known by the appellation of Maimachine, which signifies ‘the town of sales and purchase.’ These two towns were separated only by an esplanade of small extent; on one side, to the north, appeared a gate of European architecture, a Russian guard and sentinels; on the other was seen one of those fantastical edifices which the Chinese erect at the entrance of their towns, having its walls covered with grotesque sculptures, inscriptions and paintings in gaudy colours. At Kiakhta regular streets are formed of those neat houses that compose the provincial towns in European Russia and near the vast storehouses belonging to the [Russian] American Company . . . behind them rise the cupolas and bells of several churches. At Maimachine the streets, gloomy and narrow, are formed by walls with no windows in them.’7

  By late December 1794 the Siberian rivers were well frozen, and Shelikhov set off for Kiakhta for the traditional Sino-Russian winter trading fair. His party was carried south across the ice of Lake Baikal by fast three-horse troika, pounding across the powder snow as the passengers huddled under blankets of sable. The southern shore of Baikal is fringed with steep cliffs, now pierced by the tunnels and bridges of the Trans-Siberian Railway. In the south-east corner of the lake they subside to the lakeside, and the road snakes down to Ulan-Ude, tribal capital of the Buryat, the only Siberian people who knew how to write and forge iron when the Russians conquered them two centuries before. South of Ulan Ude the woodlands of Siberia give way to rolling grassland, then finally open steppe. In summer crossing northern Mongolia on horseback is mesmerizing. The land is so open that a day’s travel appears not to change one’s place in it at all, while underfoot an apparently infinite number of tiny gerbils scramble into their holes at the sound of a horse’s hooves, making the ground tremble and seethe at the periphery of one’s vision. The skies on this high plateau are a deep midnight blue; they seem as big as the world. In midwinter these steppes are an endless, featureless desert of snow.

  We have no direct evidence that Rezanov accompanied Shelikhov to Kiakhta, but it seems likely that he did. There are no letters, or records of letters, between the two men for the winter of 1794–5 so they either broke off the furious correspondence that they had been carrying on all year or Shelikhov took his curious young protégé with him to the winter fair. In later letters Rezanov speaks of Kiakhta’s prices and merchants with a familiarity that suggests that he saw it at first hand.

  Kiakhta would have been Rezanov’s first glimpse of Asia. The trading post still moved to the medieval rhythms of the Silk Road. The Chinese town was enclosed with high mud-brick walls and guarded by Chinese serf soldiers with long queues and halberds. In the Chinese trading rows were warehouses full of paper, lanterns, gunpowder, candles, brass lamps, nankeen cotton cloth, silk and of course tea. In the Russian town were pungent rows of carefully tanned sable, fox, mink, ermine, sea otter, marten, beaver, wolf, squirrel, hare and lynx. In the smoky fug of the Russian merchants’ tea houses the great merchants down from Irkutsk drank rough vodka with their employees and rivals and listened to the grumbles of the traders. By 1794 they would certainly have heard complaints about how the English were undercutting the Kiakhta trade by shipping Pacific furs direct to Canton.

  Rezanov was a worldly modern man, brought up on the shores of the Baltic. His visit to Irkutsk and Kiakhta seems to have convinced him that the ancient land routes of Asia were inefficient and archaic. Sea trade, not land trade, was the future. The germ of the idea that was to dominate the rest of Rezanov’s life was formed during the winter he spent on the Silk Road. If the Dutch could trade with Japan at Nagasaki and the English with China at Canton, why should Russia, the largest empire in Asia, not also trade across the Pacific – or, for that matter, dominate that Pacific trade?

  Certainly trade with Japan had recently been a topic of much debate at court. At Tsarskoye Selo in 1791 Rezanov must have seen and perhaps even spoken to a most unusual vistor. The Japanese merchant Daikokuya Kōdayū had been shipwrecked on the Aleutian Islands eight years before, and was seeking the Empress’s permission to mount an expedition to his homeland. Kōdayū, desperate to return home, had offered to help the Russians break the Dutch monopoly on trade with the hermit kingdom of Japan.

  Catherine duly approved a trading expedition headed by the Finnish–Swedish Captain Adam Laxman.* Laxman landed at Hokkaido, the northernmost of the Japanese home islands, in 1792, but found the Japanese suspicious and disinclined to trade in any way with anyone but the Dutch. Laxman returned to St Petersburg empty-handed except for a passport from the Japanese authorities for a single further Russian ship to visit in the future. This document would play a fateful role in Rezanov’s life.8

  If Rezanov’s thoughts were beginning to hum with visions of a grand Pacific triangle trade between Russia, the Alaskan colonies and Japan, then Shelikhov too was doing some strategizing of his own. In Rezanov he had found a clever, noble, well-connected political fixer in the capital to promote his interests at court. Shelikhov decided the time had come to bind the well-connected young nobleman to his house and join their fortunes more permanently. Anna Grigoriyevna Shelikhova, third of the Shelikhovs’ twelve children, was fourteen and a half years old in January 1795, a year older than her mother had been when she wed Shelikhov. Rezanov was, at thirty-two, already an ageing bachelor. For a man of rank like Rezanov the match was technically a mésalliance. But perhaps his months in the freebooting world of Siberia had sown a healthy respect for the merchant class into which Shelikhov now proposed he marry. Moreover, Russia’s class system was, even at the end of the eighteenth century, far less rigid than that of Western Europe. Russia’s wealthiest aristocrat Nikolai Petrovich Sheremetev would soon push propriety to its very limits by marrying Praskovya Kovaleva, known as the Pearl, one of the serf
actresses from his personal theatre troupe. Marriage to the daughter of the merchant King of Siberia, then, was by no means social suicide for Nikolai Rezanov.

  It helped, of course, that Anna Shelikhova was staggeringly rich. Not only did she bring with her a hefty dowry, but she was also one of the heiresses to a company which had turned over three million rubles in the previous decade at a time when the entire budget of the Russian state was around forty million rubles a year. Trade wealth was admittedly not quite the thing in St Petersburg society, but the fabulously wealthy Demidov clan had completed the journey from blacksmiths to senior nobility inside a century without stigma. And as Rezanov was to argue – perhaps a little defensively – in coming years the modern world’s greatest and most vigorous empires like Britain were rising on commerce, while those who snobbishly disdained it, like Spain, were wilting before the white heat of trade.

  This was an age where marriage, even among the peasantry, was first and foremost a property transaction and very rarely a love match. Rezanov seems to have been lucky in achieving both. He wrote of the happiness of his marriage to Anna, ‘my gentle angel’,9 and was, his contemporaries remarked, quite indecently distraught when she died in childbirth seven years later.

  Their wedding marked the union of two worlds: not only of aristocrat and merchant, but of an older, traditional Russia and a newer, westernized one, the provinces and the capital. Anna would leave the pre-Petrine world of Irkutsk for a new life among the powdered wigs and accented French of St Petersburg. We have few details of the Rezanov–Shelikhova wedding other than that it was considered a great and lavish affair. But other contemporary accounts of Siberian weddings show that they were deeply steeped in the Asiatic traditions of the Russian heartland. Rezanov would have appeared at the gate of his father-in-law’s house in a new red Russian tunic and soft boots, while his bride, in a high kokoshnik headdress and heavy veil, would have prostrated herself in front of him in the yard. The tradition was for the groom to offer his bride a lock of his hair; she would hand him a bowl of bread and salt with bowed head. In merchant families well into the nineteenth century the bride’s father would also strike his daughter with a specially made whip, pronouncing the words, ‘By these blows you, daughter, know the power of your father. Now instead of me, your husband will teach you with this lash.’10 The whip would be ceremonially passed from father to son-in-law. Shelikhov, a stern paterfamilias, certainly beat his wife and children (Natalia wrote about it in her letters), and it is not hard to imagine him fulfilling this time-honoured part of the ceremony. In any case, a three-day bout of general feasting, with barrels of vodka, was the norm, at which the local merchants would drink themselves insensible. Rezanov, for all his book-learning and foreign ideas, was marrying back into the Asiatic Russia of his grandfathers.