Black Dragon River

by Dominic Ziegler

  • • •

  I wanted to follow the cranes across borders to test this new openness, and my plan was to move deeper east into Dauria and cross over into China. From there, I planned to head north, into that portion of Dauria that was in Russia. That way I could pick up the Onon again as it flowed on to the point where it bound its destiny to the Shilka River and, farther downriver still, to the Amur itself.

  It was still a good distance to the China border, and Gala wanted to get me there before the crossing closed for the night. But, a few hours later on the open steppe, on what counted for a road, was what counted for a roadblock: a stout middle-aged woman in a white coat and white cloth mask over her mouth, fixed on with elastic straps behind her ears, was sitting at a wobbly table by the track. Two ragged policemen waved us down. The stout woman explained. Foot-and-mouth disease had broken out among the livestock of the adjacent soum. Since these counties ran along the Russian and Chinese frontiers, a general quarantine had been declared and all the borders closed. We had to turn back and leave the county, she said. There was no way of knowing when the region would be declared free of foot-and-mouth disease and when the authorities would allow the borders to reopen.

  Closed borders: it seemed like an echo of the recent, troubled past among these countries. There was nothing to be done. Less than one hundred miles away was the principal eastern town of Mongolia, Choibalsan—if only in a neglected town’s name, Mongolia’s dictator, Stalin’s stooge, hung on in these parts. We turned across the plains and headed for the place. A few hours later we were trundling across the wooden bridge over the Kherlen River, now a dozen times wider than when I last crossed it, by Mongonmorit.

  Choibalsan had lost interest in keeping up appearances. It once boasted a good-size Russian garrison, in the days when Mongolia was a Soviet client state; the soldiers lived in high-rise concrete barracks on the edge of the steppe. But democracy came. Then, in 1992, the Russian garrison, the Russian townsfolk, Russian construction workers, and the Russians who mined uranium at a half-mile-wide open pit all suddenly decamped. The exodus took just two days from start to finish, as files of tanks and trucks pulling artillery pieces thundered north toward the border. The gaunt ruins of the former bases were now sinking back into the steppe. A deserted building in the town center housed the dictator’s oversize desk, Choibalsan’s telephone and spectacles still on it.

  As for me, my options were constrained. Taking up my journey from the Chinese side of the border meant a detour of formidable length, via Ulan Bator and Beijing and then out to China’s badlands by long, long train. Time was running out. Winter would come fast in these parts. Soon the stream I was following would shut down, its course entombed in ice. I chose to return home to Japan for the season and try the following year by another route. I would begin in Irkutsk, in the heart of Russian Siberia. There, I intended to learn more about what brought the Russians to Asia, to this unlikely and not obviously promising part of the globe.

  CHAPTER 4

  48°12.3' N 108°29.0' E

  We do not know where these evil Tartars came from. Whither they went, only God knows.

  CHRONICLER OF OLD RUSSIA

  The Mongol wave that reared up on the Onon River lashed the shores of Central Europe and then receded. But it broke with full force upon Russian lands. If Russians see themselves today as somewhat apart from Europeans, and vice versa, the distinction sets in here. And so, to stretch the reasoning a bit, but not outrageously so: to the extent that the Amur’s source shaped Genghis Khan, it also shaped Russia, long, long before Russians became aware of the river. It is why the story of the Mongols’ European and Russian invasions thousands of miles to the west of where I am traveling is all of a piece with the story of the Amur itself.

  Before the Mongol invasions, the center of Russian authority, culture, and Christianity lay in Kiev, a city bound into a European cultural and political tradition and which the nomad warriors destroyed entirely. The society that emerged after the destruction was still Russian, but it differed in profound ways. For a start, it had a wholly new geographical center, based on Moscow, well to the north and east. The priorities of the emerging Muscovite state were also directed toward the east, not least because of the tribute the Mongols forced it to pay. From the steppe, Muscovy absorbed social influences and even habits of dress (think of the Russians’ kaftan). Above all, it absorbed notions about the unassailable authority of an absolutist ruler—for a European king was answerable to God at least. And so from the Mongols came the source blood of czarist despotism, Soviet totalitarianism, and the post-Soviet autocracy of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Some Russians today will dispute the causality, but more will argue over whether the despotism is desirable or not.

  The Mongols underscored the imperative of political unity. Once that began to fragment, so did Mongols’ control of their lands. Centuries later, when Russians started to go eastward to empire, somewhere at the back of their minds they held the Mongols’ lesson. The Mongols gave Russia not just its geopolitical destiny, with a sense of the vastness to the east, but also the autocratic means to act out that destiny. If the Mongols had not come west, if Kiev had not suffered its holocaust, the Russians might never have pushed east.

  The Mongols had appeared early on Russia’s borders, while Genghis Khan still lived. Soon after he forged a Mongol nation from disparate groups, he turned to the conquest of settled lands. He moved first against the emperors of north China, in 1211, then the overripe Central Asian empire of Khorezm, and after that Russia. The plains of northern China, with their fields of millet and apple orchards, were another world to the Mongols used only to the steppe. Genghis Khan’s soldiers took two years to fight their way beyond the Great Wall; they spent another two before the walls of Peking itself. The Mongols had no siege experience; over time they captured Chinese siege engineers, and with their help breached the capital’s walls in 1215. The cost to the Chinese was immense. The Mongols carried off a vast haul of precious stones, silk, and gold. Bones of the slaughtered “formed whole mountains, and the soil was greasy with human fat.” The Jin emperor and his family fled to Kaifeng, the dynasty’s southern capital.

  It took the Mongols another two decades of hard fighting to unseat the Jin. But after the sack of Peking, Genghis Khan himself wheeled immediately west on a punitive expedition to Central Asia. The Khorezm shah, Ala al-Din Muhammad, was the richest ruler of the Islamic world and the most powerful, straddling the known world’s most important overland trade routes. In Samarkand, his capital, manufactories turned out fine cottons, silk, silver lamé. In the fields, eggplants and melons were picked and laid in lead-lined boxes, packed with snow and sent to distant markets. The shah’s courtiers rode out to hunt wearing robes of gold, cheetahs clinging to their saddles.

  To a hungry conqueror, this empire weakened by palace intrigue was low-hanging fruit. Ala al-Din Muhammad had executed a number of the great khan’s envoys and merchants, and now came Genghis Khan’s satisfaction. With two hundred thousand warriors at his back, he sacked Bukhara, that great Central Asian town of trade and learning, the “cupola of Islam.” Less than a month later he laid waste to Samarkand, on which his Chinese siege experts rained stones and naphtha from beyond the range of the defenders’ arrows. He murdered the whole town except for thirty thousand artisans and engineers, whom he sent back to the Mongol heartland. A year later, Genghis Khan held not just Central Asia but also Afghanistan, while two of his four “dogs of war,” Jebe and Subutai, had reached the Crimea.

  In 1227 the great khan died suddenly while on another punitive raid, on the Tanguts who lived in what is now northwest China. They had once vowed submission but later rose up. After his death, the empire that Genghis Khan founded was divided into four separate khanates. Each khan—the two most powerful ruled Persia and China respectively—owed fealty to the supreme khan in the Mongol capital of Karakorum. In all other respects, they were powerful and independent rulers. Batu Khan w
as promised an empire that stretched from the Siberian borderlands, south to the Kazakh steppes and west “as far as Mongol hooves have beaten the ground.” No one was quite sure how far that was, but Batu Khan was eager to know.

  For a decade, warlike nomadic groups stood between Batu’s force and Russia. But by 1237 the Mongols were ready for a powerful assault on the squabbling patchwork of princedoms that made up Russian civilization. At the time, Moscow was a backwater. The cultural, religious, and political center of Rus’, forerunner to the Russian state, was at Kiev, now capital of Ukraine. The most prosperous city was Novgorod, northern outpost of the Baltic’s Hanseatic League, which lived by trade.

  The merchants defending Novgorod could, it turned out, have sent their ships to Yarmouth in 1238 after all. Spring came, and the frozen routes to the city turned to boggy mire. The Mongols vanished. But a year and a half later they reappeared, this time before Kiev, mother-city of the Slavs, the seat of Russian Orthodoxy, with four hundred churches gathered “like a halo,” as John Man puts it, around St. Sophia’s cathedral. Kiev lay on the Great Amber Road and grew rich from trade between the Baltic Sea and Constantinople. There was no finer prize.

  It was at Kiev that Russians first tasted the fury of the onslaught that Mongols had already inflicted upon Peking, at the extreme edge of Europe’s known world, and Khorezm. The old chronicles take up the story of a citizenry unhinged by fear and brutish noise: “Like thick clouds the Tatars pushed themselves forward toward Kiev . . . The creaking of their innumerable carts, the bellowing of camels and cattle, the neighing of horses and the wild battle cries were so overwhelming as to render inaudible conversation inside the city.” The Mongols circled the town and the Chinese siege engines battered the town wall. Molten tar poured down, and arrows darkened the day. So intensely did men fight that “the earth began to moan.”

  Camels in Europe, and all the hellish rest of it: Kiev’s citizens and their princes fled in confusion. The city burned, the Mongols slaughtering anyone left behind and ransacking the churches. Horsemen seized the relics of Russia’s early saints and scattered them to the winds. They trashed the treasures and destroyed the learning that had formed the basis of the city’s fame.

  The disaster is the only instance in its long history of Russia’s near total subjugation by a foreign power—neither Napoleon nor Hitler managed half as much. Only Novgorod, deep in the northern forests and ringed by marshes, was spared. The barbarity, the sweep of the Mongol depredation, the slaughter and enslavement of the population: modern Russian historians as much as early chroniclers of legends describe a national holocaust of unparalleled breadth and scale—the Nazi attack on Russia, the battle of Stalingrad, the siege of Leningrad, and all the atrocities of the eastern front not excepting.

  • • •

  The princes of Kievan Rus’ fled to Moscow, which now began a long, slow accretion of influence over other Russian princedoms. The Mongols who ruled Russia called themselves the Golden Horde. They set up their capital a distance away, on the banks of the lower Volga River. They never ruled directly, but rather through the proxy of the Russian princes, who swore allegiance and paid tribute. From the start, then, Mongol power over Russia was mediated, exercised at arm’s length. It was perhaps inevitable that over time, Russians grew restless, obstreperous even. A string of missed tribute payments and other insolences culminated in a direct challenge to Mongol domination in 1380, at the Battle of Kulikovo Field, south of Moscow. There the Muscovite prince Dmitry routed the Mongol armies.

  For Russians since, Kulikovo marks the day they threw off the Mongol yoke. Yet it was another century before Ivan III, or Great, formally renounced the subjugation of Russia. And it was then a good century after that before the armies of the Golden Horde cast their last shadow on Moscow’s walls. Still, at Kulikovo Field, Mongol power over the Russians was challenged for the first time, and in the long run was fatally undermined. The way was now open for the Muscovite rulers to “gather the lands”; that is, bring a congeries of Russian principalities together under the unified rule of Moscow and so forge a nation. The process came to its conclusion in 1547, when Czar Ivan IV, the Terrible, grandson of Ivan the Great, became the first ruler of all Russia. Ivan had himself crowned “Czar of all the Russias,” in conscious emulation of both the Byzantine emperor and the past Tatar khans, whom the Russians also called tsar in their language. And just as the Mongols did not properly push out of their heartland until Genghis Khan had forged a nation, so Russia did not discover the motivations for expansion—a hunger for natural resources, a shortage of land, a desire for trade and plunder—until Ivan IV had gathered the lands. After that, it was appropriate to move beyond them.

  A western route to imperial aggrandizement, to the Baltic Sea and Western Europe, was blocked by the powers of Sweden and Poland. More apparently tractable was a push east over the Ural Mountains and into vast new territories, a whole new world, the general direction from which the Mongols had come three centuries earlier. By now the military technology had shifted emphatically away from fast, lightly armed nomads, or forest natives who knew intimately the lay of their own lands. The Russians now had guns with which to overwhelm natives and hold new territory. Just as Mongols had once raided from inner Asia to seize rich grazing lands for their horses in the west, so in the second half of the sixteenth century the Russians reached east to lands filled with another, irresistible attraction: a continent brimming with fur-bearing animals.

  Eastward routes were not entirely unknown to the Russians. Ivan the Great had sent expeditions to Siberia’s northwest corner during the last years of his reign, on one occasion bringing back a thousand native prisoners. But to approach Siberia by that route was cold and arduous. About five hundred miles to the south lay an easier path, though one blocked by the Tatar khanate of Kazan, a remnant of the Golden Horde that had settled on the banks of the Volga. To reach Siberia, Kazan would have to be taken. The job fell to Ivan the Terrible. He had piercing blue eyes, a shaven head, and a huge beard in the Muscovy style. He drank quantities of alcohol and took poisoned mushrooms to dull the crippling pain that came from a spinal deformity. His military judgment seems not to have been affected. He reorganized Russian forces, adding a new corps of musketeers to reinforce the traditional cavalry, both backed by artillery. Kazan was stormed in 1552. Russia now had control of river routes running from the Urals to the Volga.

  From then on, Russia’s eastward expansion happened not through the organized powers of the state, but through the actions of freelance individuals, bent on plunder and loot, bringing along the government in their wake. These were the “Cossacks.” Who exactly they were seems always to have challenged historians of Russia. Countless ragtag bands of warrior-adventurers, calling themselves Cossacks, burst onto the early historical record and then fade away. Whether the ur-Cossacks were even Russian is not clear. The appellation kazak seems to have come from the Tatars, the Turkic peoples, perhaps Golden Horde remnants, on Russia’s southeastern fringes. The first mention of Cossacks in Russian chronicles comes in 1444, and the soldiers in Russian service to whom the term refers could have been Russians or they could have been Tatars in Russian pay. These men helped Ryazan, a far-flung Russian principality in the southeast, fight off a Tatar attack. Soon after, Cossacks are found taking part in a state-sponsored expedition up the Kama River, which rises on the western flank of the Ural mountains. Perhaps these men were Tatars. At any rate, soon afterward Ivan III engaged as trusted family guards a certain Murtaza, a princeling, and his Cossack followers.

  Cossacks of Russian or Slavic origin start to pop up more clearly by the sixteenth century, or at any rate Tatars with Russified names. Before long, neighbors are complaining about the marauding of “Russian Cossacks” from places like Kiev, at the heart of the Russian realm. King Sigismund II of Poland protested over raids by Smolensk Cossacks in Lithuania. The term was coming to be applied to any group of free but rootless frontiersmen, hard me
n who would take up shovel or sword as profit seemed to afford.

  The Cossacks of the Don, one of European Russia’s great rivers, soon earned the chief notoriety. The first men were presumably Tatar desperados from the Crimean region. Another grouping may also have contributed to their origins: runaway slaves. From the fourteenth century Crimean Tatars and neighboring Nogais often raided Russian lands, dragging thousands of Russian captives to the slave markets of Crimea. Many if not most were sold as oarsmen in Turkish galleys. Some of these may have escaped and joined the Cossack adventurers. In the early seventeenth century one Don Cossack leader was nicknamed Katorzhyni, from kadirga or katorga, a galley in Turkish—the same word that later came to be used in Russia for penal labor.

  Yet by the middle of the sixteenth century the Don Cossacks’ numbers were being refreshed by a new breed of men from the north, Russian fugitives from Moscow’s harsh justice or from the intensifying institution of serfdom. For in consolidating Moscow’s grip on Russian lands, Ivan IV had set about the creation of a dictatorial state, built on a special secret police, repression, and terror. This period was the Oprichnina, and the targets of the oprichniki, the enforcers of repression, were the princely clans, whom the czar suspected of disloyalty. A new feudal class, pomeshchiki, grew up who owed allegiance not, as before, to local boyars and princes but to the czar in Moscow. Their military service was the foundation of state violence. In return for allegiance, pomeshchiki got blocks of state land, and free peasants who had worked the land now became dependents of the pomeshchiki. Many peasants chose the alternative, a flight to the borderlands. Siberia never had serfdom, and peasants fled there right up until 1861, when all serfs were freed, a year before emancipation in the United States.