Black Dragon River

by Dominic Ziegler

  The Don frontiersmen formed self-governing communities under an ataman, an elected chief. While they called themselves Cossacks, ordinary folk referred to them as “free people” and the government usually described them as vagabonds, river pirates, robbers, thieves, or escaped serfs. Certainly, it was no simple thing to know where the patriotic Cossack ended and the robber-thief began. At home they were loyal soldier-citizens. Attacking the Turks on the Black Sea, they were legitimate combatants. On the Volga, they were river pirates. The temptations were immense. The Don Cossacks’ land lay astride the great routes between Moscow and the Black and Caspian seas. One ataman, Ivan Kolzo, sailed up the Don to the point where it flows closest to the Volga, crossed to the Volga, and sailed down to the Caspian Sea, and then pushed thirty miles up the Ural River. There he and his band sacked Saraichik, the wealthy Muslim capital of the Nogai khans.

  Increasingly, neighbors start to complain about the Cossacks’ marauding. The Nogai khan protests that the Cossacks even dragged the body of his father from his tomb. Ivan IV tells the disgruntled khan that the monarch is powerless to stop these bandits and robbers: “No one incites them to work their evil doings.” Ivan was not dissembling. In sacking Saraichik, Kolzo had severely damaged Moscow’s commercial interests, for Russian trade with Bukhara, the fabulous Silk Road entrepôt, went through it. Ivan put a price on Kolzo’s head and sent an expedition in search of him and his band.

  Yet in the eyes of Russia’s rulers, Cossacks came to acquire a certain practical merit for a realm ready to expand eastward. The exchequer was empty, yet as Russia’s borders expanded, more men were needed to guard them. Russia’s kings found their solution by offering a deal to these frontiersmen. In return for land and an exemption from taxes, the Cossacks would garrison and guard the borders. In this way the bands of wild, free, marauding men became the monarchs’ most loyal defenders. It was a role made perhaps easier for them by the safe, liberating distances that lay between them and Moscow’s stern authority.

  In the 1570s a Cossack called Yermak, a Volga river pirate who had also fought a turn in the Livonian wars that were engaging Russia to the west, began on this path toward respectability. Fleeing the czar’s voevodas, the local governors, he turned up on the western flank of the Urals, then Russia’s easternmost limits, with the remnants of Kolzo’s band. There he offered his services to the Stroganovs, owners of a salt monopoly and the richest family in the empire. The family’s ambitions to expand their salt, mining, and trading interests were then facing aggravations from Kuchum Khan, another Tatar and a direct descendant of Genghis Khan, on the far side of the mountains. Engaged by the Stroganovs, Yermak went over the Urals with his pirate band to deal with Kuchum. It marked the start of Russia’s conquest of Siberia. Cossacks were at the head of it, where they remained: much later, in the nineteenth century, Cossack hosts formed the main defense along Russia’s new Amur River border with China, a role they held until the first great Soviet purges. On the Amur today, Cossack descendants call upon their rights to take up their border duties again, guarding the great motherland. Meanwhile, their ancestors, bands of river pirates, vagabonds, and scofflaws, have been turned into the patriots of Russia, and the country’s greatest folk heroes even today. None more so than that brutal, bloody, grasping Yermak. The Russian Cortés, he died fighting. An admiring czar had honored him with a heavy suit of mail. It was the gift that killed him: while fighting across a Siberian river, he sank swiftly to the bottom.

  Yermak could not have imagined that his conquest of Kuchum’s empire, the last remnant of the Golden Horde, would open the way for an unprecedented Russian migration eastward. The Russian conquest of the Siberian landmass had none of what one historian calls the glory, pathos, and sheer terror that marked the Mongols’ march into Europe. No great host existed like Batu Khan’s, no great mounds of dead. Instead, conquest came in the form of a flurry of skirmishes. Pitched battles were few and small. Power was held, and the natives pinned down, by a scattering of frontier forts and trading posts. Until only recently, historians even struggled to affix a precise date to the conquest, until a trawl of Siberian archives offered up a date. Now, Siberian history is said officially to begin with the day of Kuchum’s fall, October 26, 1582. From that day, thanks to Yermak, the blessings of Russian civilization began to be bestowed upon one sixth of the face of the earth.

  • • •

  Only at first, until about 1605, and only in western Siberia nearest the Urals, was conquest directed by Moscow, more or less. Then, in Russia proper, came the Smutnoye Vremya, the Time of Troubles, a swirl of political chaos, Polish interventions, and struggles by impostors for the Russian throne that ended at last when Russian classes rallied around the first of the Romanov line. During the troubles, Moscow failed to send shipments of grain, sent in lieu of salaries, to its Siberian garrisons. Attempts to force the natives to grow crops proved a cruel fiasco. With desertions and deaths, hungry garrisons emptied, and so Russia let drop its official grip on new lands.

  Yet still the conquest went on, led by small bands bent on freelance plunder, forceful individuals at the head. Moscow perforce was dragged along in their wake, even after the Time of Troubles was over and political order restored. A special Siberian ministry set up in 1637 did nothing to strengthen Moscow’s hand vis-à-vis the sibirskii because it lacked the initiative of the local governors, the voevodas, in Siberia itself. Voevodas were as hungry for gain as were the Cossack freebooters. Small wars broke out among them when they contested new lands. On the rare occasions when voevodas did not succeed in joining the plunder, it was because they had failed to grasp the full measure of private Russian enterprise on their patch.

  Undirected by Moscow, the speed of Russians’ eastward advance was astonishing. In mere decades they had crossed and settled a Siberian landmass greater in extent than the face of the moon. The Russian conquest began much later than the Western European one of the New World. When, in 1513, Vasco Núñez de Balboa became the first European to glimpse the Pacific, from a Panamanian hilltop, the Grand Duchy of Muscovy was still “gathering the lands” of a fragmented Russia. At that moment, it did not control even the Volga River, to the west of the Urals that divide Europe from Asia—“Mother Volga” as it later became to Russians. But starting with the conquest of Kuchum’s city of Sibir in the early 1580s, Russians raced eastward and founded Tobolsk in 1587, Narym in 1596, Yeniseisk in 1619, and Yakutsk in 1632. In 1639 Ivan Moskvitin, a petty officer in the employ of the voevoda of Tomsk, reached the shores of the Sea of Okhotsk—the Pacific Ocean, in other words. Moskvitin had stumbled upon the North Pacific from the west less than three decades after Portuguese sailors encroached into these waters from the south. In time, Russia had a permanent base on the Pacific before it ever did on the Baltic or Black seas. And from there it crossed to a new continent.

  • • •

  To grab one sixth of the earth’s land for Russia, the Cossacks took to the water. Three great rivers run south to north, emptying Siberia’s hinterland into the Frozen Sea, the Arctic Ocean. For scale, the Ob, the Yenisei, and the Lena beggar belief. The longest is the Yenisei. From where it sluices, cold and urgent, out of Tsagaan Nur, the White Lake of northern Mongolia, it runs 3,400 miles to its Arctic mouth. Even the smallest of the three rivers drains an expanse the size of Western Europe. Heading downstream, the left bank of these north-flowing rivers lies flat and low, while the right, eastern bank begins imperceptibly to change, rearing up for hundreds of miles to form high bluffs. River travelers are usually mesmerized by the phenomenon. Journeying down the Yenisei in 1913, Fridtjof Nansen, Norway’s great polar explorer, ascribed it to the force of the earth’s rotation. No one has come up with a better explanation.

  In season, the great rivers and their tributaries are navigable for thousands of miles. In spring the mouths are the last part of the rivers to thaw. The waters back up. Spilling far beyond their banks, they form navigable inland seas. The early Cossacks als
o learned in winter to make the rivers serve as frozen highways along which they dragged gear and provisions.

  One river system’s filigree of tributaries almost touches the next. On the banks the Cossacks built shallow-draft boats, clinker-planked and fastened with rawhide, benched for oarsmen, of a form the Norsemen had brought five centuries earlier to the Volga. Cossacks stitched deerskins together into a patchwork that served as a square sail hoisted aloft on the trunk of a fresh-cut fir. Then they launched into the great rivers that flowed like ocean currents. When the tributaries of one system gave out, they portaged their rough-hewn arks eastward into the next, or built boats afresh in the new watershed—no dearth of timber. At river junctions and the major portages, Cossacks put up ostrogs, wooden forts, that served as markers for the eastward advance.

  Much later, natural philosophers and projectors proposed schemes to link the great rivers and so create a waterway running from European Russia to the Pacific. The idea was brought first to Catherine the Great by Peter Simon Pallas, a German naturalist who had collected through the Altai mountains, Transbaikal, and the upper Amur (and after whom are named a species of cat, a bat, a gull, a fish-eagle, a grasshopper warbler, a cormorant, a reed bunting, a sandgrouse, and a rosefinch, among other things). In Soviet times, engineers offered up even grander hydraulic schemes to their leaders, whose hubris over controlling the natural world knew no bounds. Among other things they proposed to reverse the Yenisei’s flow in order to water the cotton fields of Uzbekistan, a thousand miles to the south, parched because in a few short decades Soviet irrigation engineers had destroyed the Aral Sea.

  As for the Cossack adventurers, it was the fish that struck them first. So close-packed were the shoals, their laconic reports explained, that their boats were lifted bodily out of the water. Along rivers and across portages, the Cossacks spread quickly from west to east. The country they passed through was the immense Siberian belt of boreal forest, larch and pine, nearly two billion acres, six times as much forest as the whole of Western Europe and the biggest terrestrial ecosystem on earth. When the Cossacks first arrived on the western edge of it, local Turkic tribes pointed to the snow-covered mountains. “Taiga,” they said. Who knows what they meant by that: “Get lost,” perhaps. But in Russia the word stuck for the endless coniferous forest.

  The taiga is, as one of its chroniclers says, “no pleasant little wood,” but a vast expanse where the weak or imprudent perish—a forest punctuated by pathless bogs in which the “corpses of the huge trunks slowly molder away in the brackish water.” In summer, on the open road or on the river, there is the Siberian mosquito. It is an instrument of torture for man and animal alike, an insect the Soviets took to calling “fascists.” No travel account of Siberia—the first was written by Avvakum, a wild, banished archpriest, in the seventeenth century—fails to mention the mosquitoes.

  In winter, of course, comes a nearly unparalleled cold, and snow that has buried armies. The temperature drops to minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit and often stays there for weeks. The “northern pole of cold,” the coldest spot outside Antarctica, lies in northeast Siberia, in the Sakha Republic, where the Fahrenheit temperature has fallen to minus 90 degrees (mercury freezes at a mere minus 38 degrees). In this continental land, the rivers melt for a few brief summer months, while all but the very top of the ground is permanently frozen. The roots of boreal trees—the pines, the firs, the larches—grow outward because they cannot grow down. Lines of scythed timber running through the forest mark the paths of sudden katabatic storms.

  Anyone who aspires to build a sturdy home atop the permafrost must first grasp what goes on underneath. Every spring the top ground warms, heaves, and slides away. A house built without foundation posts rammed deep into the frozen soil will heave and slide with the topsoil. A Siberian town is a lurching, staggering, errant assembly of wooden houses, tottering like a line of drunks along a muddy road, or sinking up to their sills in mud.

  • • •

  As for the early Russian conquest of the East, the most powerful impulse very quickly became the quest for fur-bearing animals. There was much in common with Europeans’ opening up North American lands at around the same time. Russia’s promyshlenniki were Canada’s coureurs de bois. But what the English and the French lacked was a fur so divinely soft and warm, so incomparably glossy, as Siberia’s sable, Martela zibellina, Russia’s “soft gold.” Very soon the passion for the sable overwhelmed all the other motivations of those pushing east through boreal forests—far north of where the Mongols had once pressed west—forests suddenly endowed with astonishing wealth. Since the Russian treasury lacked specie, the pelts of fur-bearing animals were fast becoming the currency of empire, in terms of both prestige and economic exchange. Not just in Russia but across Europe, aristocrats and rich merchants desired the best skins. Fur accounted for a third of the annual revenues to the Russian state exchequer.

  Now the Russian czars declared their rule over a vast Siberian realm, most of which had yet to be explored let alone conquered, but which apparently teemed with fur-bearing animals. In the northern forests the Cossacks found bears and otters and beavers, ermines and squirrels. There were wolverines and weasels, and the foxes bore pelts of red, blue, silver, black, and even white. Usually the best fox pelt could fetch eighty rubles, a small fortune. But on occasion Cossacks brought back a black fox of such gloss and splendor that the state appraisers struggled to affix a value to it. Then the skin would be sent as a gift to the czar. Back in Europe, Russian nobles’ fondness for their furs was legendary. They never seemed to take them off and they came to court balls, as Thomas Babington Macaulay later put it, “dropping pearls and vermin.”

  The taiga in those days was full of sable, a member of the marten family. Spathary, a Romanian-born diplomat who led an early Russian embassy to China, asserted that the sable was the Golden Fleece that Jason and his argonauts sought. The sable was “a gay little animal and fair to behold; its beauty appears with the first snow, and disappears again with the thaw.” So prolific a breeder was it that “the animal is regarded as inexhaustible.” Spathary was right about the beauty. The glossy sheen, the absence of a nap or direction: no fur is finer, or more sensuous.

  Yet rather than hunt the fur-bearing animals, the Russians hunted the natives. This was no Russian invention, but an earlier Mongol-Tatar practice called yasak, a tribute of fur demanded from every able-bodied male. To ensure yasak compliance, streltsy, the Russian serving men, kept aboriginal hostages in each ostrog, displaying them from time to time to both reassure and intimidate.

  In Yakutsk, in Siberia’s Far East, natives suffered in proportion to the phenomenal quantities of furs to be scooped out of the vast watershed of the Lena River. At first Yakuts could not understand the Russians’ hunger for pelts. When the first promyshlenniki offered copper kettles, the Yakuts filled each one to the brim with sable furs as payment; they seem to have thought the Russians dupes. Yet communities that accepted the czar’s protection soon felt the yasak’s sting. Official fur quotas demanded usually one sable pelt a year from every able-bodied male over fifteen. Then the more ruthless promyshlenniki and corrupt governors, that is to say all of the governors who have endured in the historical record, augmented official tribute with personal levies. Refusal to pay yasak brought awful retribution. An early Yakutsk voevoda, Pyotr Golovin, took to hanging up recalcitrants by meat hooks. Hostages were murdered, villages torched, and winter stores seized. The techniques were effective, up to a point. Just a decade after the Russians had begun building the defenses of Yakutsk’s first ostrog, 150,000 sable pelts a year were passing through its customs house.

  Still, atrocities bred first passive resistance, then open revolt. The end fate of the natives in the face of the Russian advance was sealed all along—they were mere splashes of humanity spattered across a vast land, ill-armed groups against Russian determination and weapons, both of iron. Yet from the start Siberia’s native peoples made
clear their objection, and native rebellions continually attended the conquerors’ push east. In 1608 an anti-Russian conspiracy involving nearly all the tribes of western Siberia was uncovered only when Cossacks seized a Khanty who had on him arrows, with eleven symbols representing native deities as if they were some kind of code. Later, again in western Siberia, Samoyed tribes showed impressive powers of communication across extreme distances by launching coordinated, highly mobile attacks from the Pechora River to the Yenisei. Ostrogs burned and voevodas, yasak collectors, and trappers were put to death.

  Revolt remained an option because the alternative, submission, was bleak. In the new, Far Eastern realm of Pyotr Golovin, the voevoda in Yakutsk, the Yakuts in the Lena Valley buried a thicket of animosities among themselves and with neighboring Evenki and Yukagirs and rose up as one to attack the Russians. Golovin countered with a campaign of exceptional terror. His chief henchman was a Cossack named Vasily Poyarkov, proud to report the torture and slaughter of hundreds of native men, women, and children. Whole clans of Yakuts fled out of the taiga, north toward the Kolyma basin or east to the Sea of Okhotsk. Still the Cossacks pursued them and there in the tundra or on the shore cut them down and burned their settlements. No natural disaster had ever swept this land like this. In the four decades after 1642, violence, oppression, and disease cut the Yakut population by seven-tenths.

  The brutality so colored the Cossacks’ Drang nach Osten that they were blinded to the violence’s deleterious effect on fur deliveries, which soon plummeted. Moscow noticed this first, and toward the end of the seventeenth century took the first measures to protect native Siberians. Administrative boundaries were better drawn to ensure that yasak was not collected twice from the same miserable native. Promyshlenniki, the great forests’ free unbridled agents, came under stricter state control. Executions of aboriginals were supposedly forbidden without Moscow’s approval.