The Treaty of Kyakhta was drawn up in 1727 to improve things. With it, China and Russia agreed on an institutional framework that was to regulate their commercial and diplomatic relations with surprising success—though not without interruptions—well into the nineteenth century. Above all, the two sides agreed—or rather the Chinese insisted—on a physical spot for two-way trade: a godforsaken place in northern Mongolia where the two empires met. Kyakhta, the Russian settlement, sprang up on the north side of a line drawn east–west across the billowing steppe. An entirely Chinese town, Maimaicheng (literally “Buy-Sell Town”), grew just to the south of this line, cleaner and more orderly. It was an exposed site that the sun baked in summer and the wind scythed through in winter. Yet both sides came to find it suitable. For the Chinese, it served to keep troublesome Russians at arm’s length, on the edge of the Qing empire far from Peking. For the Russians, it may have been a slog to fetch water from Kyakhta’s only miserable stream. But what mattered was that the spring rose in Russia and guttered south. Better an inconvenient stream than one the Chinese could poison.
Irkutsk lay some two hundred miles to the northwest. It had never prospered at the height of Siberia’s first rush for soft gold, in the seventeenth century, lying well to the south of the best fur-bearing country. The place had served mainly as a fort to hold the line against the local Buryats, the first native group to offer serious resistance to Russia’s eastward push. Until the Treaty of Kyakhta, Irkutsk was on the road to nowhere. The treaty transformed the town’s fortunes.
Suddenly, it was on a new Silk Road, the natural staging post for Sino-Russian trade. Goods traveled to and from European Russia mainly in winter, when the tormenting mosquitoes were gone, the tracks through endless bog and taiga had congealed, and rivers turned to high-speed iceways. Soon, ten thousand or more sleds would gather each autumn at Irkutsk, waiting for the first snows to fall before the race began to Moscow and beyond. At first, the sleds were loaded with Chinese porcelain and silk. Wild rhubarb was soon a staple, which constipated Europeans desired as a purgative. (The Qing emperors came to believe that without rhubarb the pitiful foreigners would die, and that all it would take to bring Europe to its knees was to withold exports of the dried rheum.) But soon, one commodity came to dominate: vast quantities of refreshing, restorative, roborative Chinese tea. Tea merchants from Kyakhta stocked the palaces of St. Petersburg right up to the Russian Revolution.
All along, the challenge had been what to sell the Chinese in return. An empire that viewed trade with official disdain was especially incurious about Western goods. It was not always surprising, given the coarse woolens and other charmless goods the Europeans sought to unload. All the West had to offer was silver, and prodigious quantities flowed to China in exchange for all the silk, porcelain, and tea.
What changed the equation, and turbocharged the fortunes of Irkutsk, was an unanticipated consequence of Enlightenment geographical inquiry. Czar Peter the Great sent out exploring and mapping expeditions to Eastern Siberia and to the Pacific beyond. One discovery was that the Eurasian and American landmasses were not conjoined, as some natural philosophers had imagined that they were. But the truly profitable discovery, with geopolitical implications that reverberated down through the years, was a fur that rivaled the sable for warmth and beauty.
• • •
Peter the Great reigned for four long decades, until his death in 1725. His entire rule was driven by a desire to draw Russia closer to Europe, to instill in wild, mystical Russia the rational, scientific inquiry of the Enlightenment. If Russia’s soul has over the centuries been torn between East and West, Peter was in no doubt about where it properly belonged. The paradox, for Irkutsk at least, was that the spirit of Western inquiry generated untold riches that flowed from the extreme Far East.
In European Russia, Peter wrought profound changes. He forced the Russian boyars, the old nobility, to give up an essentially medieval way of life. He ordered them to cut off their beards and to put on knee breeches in the place of padded kaftans. Abolishing the ancient Boyar Duma, Peter established a very European Senate.
By the standards of the day, Peter the Great had had a progressive education, raised by Western European tutors. As a young man, soon after consolidating power—he had deposed his half-sister and then ruled briefly as a joint czar—Peter sent a huge embassy to Europe. Its aim was not only to seek allies against the Ottoman empire, but also to hire Western specialists and gain expertise in all sorts of fields, especially warfare. Incognito, Peter joined this embassy.
As a child Peter had loved to sail, a Russian pursuit only among the wild Pomars on the White Sea coast in the north. Now he studied shipbuilding in Amsterdam; in England, he spent three months inspecting the naval dockyards at Chatham. Russia had never had a maritime strategy. It had no naval outlet on either the Baltic or Black seas. In time, after he opened those two seas, Peter turned east in his quest for maritime supremacy. Under a Danish navigator in the Russian navy, Vitus Bering, he dispatched expeditions to ascertain whether the Eurasian and American continents joined or not, and to look for a Northeast Passage, passing over the top of Russia. Whether a land bridge between the two continents existed or not was a lively issue of the day—planted in Peter’s mind in 1716 by Gottfried Leibniz, in the last of many meetings with the German philosopher. Scientific questions hung on the answer, chief among them whether or not humans had a common origin. If they did—as European natural philosophers believed—how to explain the peopling of the New World?
Peter, as imperialist, also had material reasons for desiring an answer. He knew of the fabulous fur wealth of French Canada, and of the Spanish and their silver mountains in Mexico and Peru. With a nearly empty treasury and the numbers of furs from Siberia declining, extending the Russian empire to North America was an appealing possibility. In addition, a maritime mind such as Peter’s must have conjectured that a northern passage over the top of Russia, if only one were possible, would offer a new and shorter sea road to China and Japan than the one the rising maritime powers of England and Holland were then using via the Cape of Good Hope—a road, moreover, that Russia could control. At the start of the twenty-first century, with the melting of the polar ice cap, the viability of a Northeast Passage, which the Russians call the Northern Sea Route, has become salient once more.
Peter was dead before Bering set off in 1728 on the first of two North Pacific expeditions, a dozen years apart. Starting in St. Petersburg, his crews dragged sea anchors, sails, nails, and cordage by land from the Baltic across the breadth of Eurasia all the way to the Pacific Ocean. There, on the shores of the Sea of Okhotsk and the Kamchatka River, they constructed vessels for exploration. To get an idea of the distance these sea crews crossed by land, think New York to Juneau, Alaska—and back.
Along the way, the Russian Admiralty established the base for its Pacific operations in a most unlikely spot: right here, in landlocked Irkutsk, as far from any navigable ocean, very nearly, as it is possible to get. Here the huge navy yard remained for a century and a half. It was marked on old town maps, and with copies in my hand I went in search of it. On the northern edge of town, on a tableland above the Angara River, behind the Znamensky Convent, abandoned warehouses now totter on the site where the yard once was. The owner of a sweet shop, the only mark of human activity in the crumbling district, knew nothing of the past.
On this first expedition, organized in Irkutsk, Bering groped his way north in the Pacific fog, up from Kamchatka and around the East Cape. When the coast turned beyond the cape and trended west, he established to his satisfaction that the two continents must be separated by water. A strait, in other words, must lie between them; later, this strait was named after him. It was the first noted proof that the Eurasian and American landmasses were not joined. But only later did it become apparent that, eighty years before Bering, a Cossack named Semyon Dezhnev had taken a boatload of fellow adventurers around that same cape an
d so through the strait.
The discovery of Dezhnev’s feat was made by a geographer attached to Bering’s second expedition, Gerhard Friedrich Müller, who was fossicking about in what counted as the archives of the northeast Siberian ostrog of Yakutsk. The related set of journeys by sea and land is usually known as the Great Northern Expedition, and was astonishingly ambitious. With three thousand men, it must constitute one of the biggest scientific expeditions of all time. It is remembered best for Bering’s discovery of Alaska, in the St. Peter and the sister ship St. Paul.
At the time, the significance of the maritime discoveries was hard to grasp. They were vague stabs in the murk of North Pacific geography, raising more questions than answers. By contrast, the expedition’s more certain effect was greatly to increase knowledge of Siberian lands that the Russians to that point had only weakly comprehended or controlled. Attached to the expedition were rafts of botanists, mineralogists, astronomers, geodesists, and other natural philosophers from the young Russian Academy of Sciences. Many were German, like young Müller, a consequence of Czar Peter’s passion for things European. Knowledge of Siberia’s natural history and its native peoples grew in leaps and bounds, as did the cartographic detail of Russia’s eastern realms. Knowledge as power: here in Siberia, Enlightenment zeal was put to the service of the state, and a vast, inchoate continent began to shrink to a more manageable, or at least comprehensible, imperium.
The scientists, who passed through the city on their way east or who settled there on the way back, all burnished Irkutsk’s image. Not so much, however, as what lay piled up in the St. Peter’s hold as Bering set sail back from Alaska. On the return voyage Bering had also discovered the Aleutian Islands, the volcanic chain that arcs east from Kamchatka toward Alaska. Fog and fatigue had led the vessel in among the westernmost group of the Aleutians, the deserted Commander Isles, on which the St. Peter was wrecked—the men had mistaken the islands for Kamchatka itself. The crew managed to get ashore. They improvised shelter out of the ship’s upturned boats. Foxes closed in around the camp, carrying away in the night the limbs of those who had just died. Bering himself went in mid-December 1741, probably done in by scurvy. But there were survivors. Out of the wreckage of the old vessel they built a new one and limped home. All along they had taken the greatest care to preserve their cargo of the pelts of sea otters, collected with native help in the Aleutians and in Alaska. When they arrived back in Kamchatka in the early summer of 1742, at the port that was named Petropavlovsk in honor of Bering’s two ships, the sight of the skins of the sea otter set off a seaborne rush for soft gold from which faraway Irkutsk prospered for the best part of a century. The Russians had discovered a commodity that the Chinese loved, second only to silver.
On a bluff above the Angara River, the Znamensky Convent, Maiden Convent of the Sign, floats over Irkutsk. Indifferent to their surroundings—traffic shuffles around the base on one side, while the warehouses of the old admiralty yard spread away on the other—the buildings are all exuberance, a carnival of the style that came to be known as the “Siberian baroque.” Whitewashed walls are smothered in curlicues and painted saints. Atop these sit domes and spires and finials. The whole swims above a walled garden of irises, peonies, and lupines of the clearest blue.
From the start, Znamensky has been a place of pilgrimage and a favorite town for family outings. An earlier traveler reports the doorway packed with beggars—“such a gathering of lame and blind with open sockets staring at you, and limbs festering with disease, I never saw.” He was also struck, as travelers have been for centuries, by the charity of Siberians, dishing out coins to the less fortunate on a Sunday morning, or leaving them on windowsills.
Very few have been laid to rest at Znamensky, none of them ordinary. A steady stream of pilgrims, women in headscarves for the most part, comes up the steps and into the darkened church, to press their lips against the gilded sarcophagus of St. Innocent, lying to one side of the iconostasis, all purple and gold, shimmering in the half-light.
The incorruptible St. Innocent was sent nearly three centuries ago to convert all of China. Though he came to rest in Irkutsk, before ever setting foot in China, the lingering memory of his presence in Eastern Siberia was much later drawn on to help sanctify Russia’s nineteenth-century expansion in the Far East, which came with a heavy dose of missionary zeal.
In 1721 St. Petersburg raised Innocent to a bishopric, named him head of the Russian Spiritual Mission in Peking, and ordered him to China. Yet the mandarins in the Chinese capital took exception to the Russian Senate’s ill-considered description of Innocent as a “spiritual personage, a great lord.” He had indeed been born an aristocrat, but China wanted not grandees but weak lowly priests to staff the Russian mission that had been allowed in Peking since 1685. It took a year for the bishop to reach the Chinese border, where he was refused entry.
For five years Innocent loitered at China’s door, at Seleginsk, willing it to open. To keep himself busy, he preached to the local Mongols and Buryats, and it dawned on him that perhaps his real mission had all along been to serve God not in China but here, among the peoples on that empire’s threshold. At any rate, after a while he was made bishop of Irkutsk and Nerchinsk, a diocese big enough in scope for one man. He built schools, and helped the poor. In 1728, during a brutal drought, he prayed for rain, ordering an intercession to be made at each liturgy, with an Athakist to the Mother of God to be sung on Saturdays. The regimen was to end on July 20, the feast of St. Elias. On that day a storm broke over Irkutsk, and people waded through the streets, the water up to their thighs.
During all his time in Siberia, Innocent’s exertions had gnawed at his health, and soon after the miracle of the waters, he died. He was buried under the altar of the original wooden church at Znamensky. Later, in 1776, masons were rebuilding the convent in stone. They came upon his body, untouched by the fire that had destroyed the old convent, indeed as perfect as the day he had reposed. From that moment the cult of St. Innocent only grew, his miracles multiplying until the Soviets demanded an end to them. In 1921 they took his corpse and banished it, sending it wandering about the Soviet Union as an exhibit in a traveling museum promoting atheism. Innocent was now no more than a “Siberian mummy.” Seven decades later, as the Soviet empire tottered, devotees at Znamensky tracked down the exiled corpse. They demanded its return to Irkutsk, and joy and tears attended St. Innocent’s homecoming. Miraculously, his vestments showed up at about the same time, and he was reunited with them in the sarcophagus. Once a year, on his feast day, the heavy lid is opened for a brief period, and crowds swarm around, drawing breath at his perfection.
• • •
Outside, by the doorway, was a beggar, wheezing. He had once been both poacher and state hunter. When those trades died—were sables declining in England too?—he had been allotted a job at a chemical plant, whose fumes corroded his lungs. Now—his chest rattled—he had just lost his only son. His boy, a teetotaler, had gone with two men into the taiga, on a fishing trip. The men drank. He must, they said, drink too. He refused. They shot him. “There are many such stories here,” the beggar said, as if for reassurance.
A sheaf of papers lived in his breast, testimony to his lot. Redemption, he said, touching the papers, lay in France. He was attempting to learn French. He was saving up the money to get to Paris. He needed eighty thousand rubles. I gave him money. It was not enough for Paris, but he said he would show me what I was looking for. We shuffled off to find Grigory Ivanovich Shelikov.
On the convent grounds, behind the sanctuary, a marble obelisk marks the grave of a man who commanded obvious respect at the time of his death on July 20, 1795, though today the grave speaks of neglect. The obelisk is adorned with a nautical compass, a protractor, and a roll of charts. Lines by Gavrila Derzhavin, the Russian poet whom Pushkin praised higher than all others, sing of the deceased. Grigory Ivanovich Shelikov was the “Russian Columbus”:
S
ailing the heavenly oceans,
Untroubled that the world will come to naught,
For he is in search of unearthly treasures.
It was the earthly treasures, however, that interested Shelikov so. In less than a decade, when already in middle age, he had netted the country’s largest fortune. Almost as a by-catch of his merchant adventures, Shelikov added to a Russian empire that already spanned Europe and Asia. He extended it across the North Pacific to another continent, America. In shaping a specifically Pacific destiny for Russia, Shelikov’s activities on the Pacific Ocean prefigured and later justified Russian aspirations on the Amur.
Shelikov was born in the inland district of Kursk—famous for racehorses and nightingales but emphatically not for seafarers. At the age of twenty-eight, he showed up in Kamchatka, that eight-hundred-mile peninsula, abutting the North Pacific, where Russia ran out of land. There he married the young widow of a Siberian merchant. She brought with her a small dowry, start-up capital for Shelikov to build his first ship. Natalia Alexeyevna was clever and brave, taking her place alongside Shelikov in his explorations.
In 1776 Shelikov sent out his first ship, the St. Paul, built at Okhotsk, to the Aleutian Islands. Not awaiting its return, he dispatched another, the St. Nicholas, to the Kuril Islands, in hopes of trading with the Japanese. It ran aground among the islands. But a brigantine sent out by Shelikov helped get it afloat, and both ships returned having profitably extorted the native Ainu. As for the St. Paul, it returned so laden that the crew had to work the ship atop piles of sea otter furs and seal skins.
The expeditions multiplied. Shelikov put a bold captain, Gavriil Pribilof, in charge of a new vessel, the St. George. It was to sail not east toward the Aleutians but north in search of the sea otters’ breeding grounds, toward the Bering Strait and the Frozen Ocean. For eight years nothing was heard of the St. George. When she reappeared in Okhotsk, her haul broke all records. On board were two thousand beaver skins, six thousand blue foxes, seventeen tons of walrus tusks, eight tons of whalebone, and—the prize that really counted—the pelts of forty thousand sea otters. The cargo was equivalent to thirty times the annual tribute extracted from all the native Siberians in Russia’s Far East. The St. George made Shelikov the richest merchant in Irkutsk.
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