Black Dragon River

by Dominic Ziegler

  By the early summer of 1685, however, the Qing forces were ready. Their preparations had not gone unremarked, yet Moscow’s efforts to boost Albazino’s defenses seemed blighted. Albazino was at the farthest edge of the empire. Neighboring voevodas showed indifference to Albazino’s looming plight.

  On June 23 Pengcun brought three thousand soldiers to the Amur bank facing Albazino. He rowed out into the river and read out the Kangxi emperor’s edict demanding the fort’s surrender. The Russians’ leader, Alexei Tolbuzin, son of a Nerchinsk voevoda, replied in a graphically offensive manner. Battle began three days later, with the Manchus attacking from the south over the water, as well as firing cannons from both flanks. Pengcun then began piling dry wood at the base of the fort’s wooden walls. When the Manchus made to light the tinder, Tolbuzin sued for peace.

  Some six hundred Russians surrendered. They were allowed not only to return to Nerchinsk but also to take their belongings with them. Among the surrendered were women and children. “Tolbuzin and his people,” a Chinese account records, “bowed low when the imperial favor was communicated to them.” But when the party reached the Argun River, forty-five of the soldiers told their Manchu guard that they would prefer the Chinese service. “Moved by our great generosity,” the account goes on, “they wished to become the subjects of our magnanimous emperor.” Their only conditions were that they be allowed to bring their families—perhaps they were unwilling to return to Nerchinsk because they had taken native wives—and their priest. These “pacified” Russians went to Peking. There the mercenaries formed a separate unit of the imperial guard, under the “yellow-bordered standard.” The Russian family names of Yaklovev, Dubinin, and Romanov were rendered into the Chinese names of Yao, Du, and Lo, and spouseless “Albazinians,” as the group became known, were given permission to marry the wives of executed Chinese criminals. They lived in the northeast of the old Tatar city near Dongzhimen, the massive East Straight Gate. Father Maxim Leontiev, their priest, was given an abandoned lamaist temple, and there he set up an Orthodox mission that survives in China today. An icon of St. Nicholas, rescued from Albazino, was set up in the temple, soon rededicated to the Holy Wisdom.

  The Kangxi emperor was exultant at the Russians’ defeat. In a round of ceremonial dialogues with ministers, he made clear how it was his leadership and meticulous planning in the affairs of state that had brought about the desired result. He also emphasized his magnanimity in sending the Russian defenders home. He seemed convinced that the Russians would never push into China’s frontier lands again. And so he deemed the cost of a permanent Manchu garrison at Albazino to be a wasteful expense.

  Yet in one crucial respect, the emperor had misjudged things. He had underestimated the value, both territorial and psychological, that the Russians of eastern Siberia placed on the Amur Valley and on the Albazino fort that stood foursquare at the heart of Amur territory that Russians still considered their own. And just as the emperor’s general, Sabsu, had disobeyed orders to destroy the crops the Russians had planted around Albazino, so Russian officials in Eastern Siberia ignored instructions from Moscow to withdraw from the Amur and seek reconciliation with Peking. Distance in this pretelegraphic age gave locals wide latitude, and when the refugees from Albazino petitioned the voevoda of Nerchinsk to be allowed to return to harvest grain they had sown in the spring, the governor sent a scouting expedition down the Shilka “in order not to lose the state lands in Dauria.” The scouts returned to report that the fields of grain were still standing. The voevoda was not going to pass up this chance of extra victuals, and so allowed Tolbuzin to return to Albazino with 677 men, five cannons, powder, lead, and provisions.

  The Albazinians were back home by the end of August, barely two months after their eviction. They set to work reconstructing the old settlement. Early the following spring, with the Amur still frozen, Tolbuzin sent three hundred Cossacks downriver to round up the former tribute-paying natives, or any new ones who could be coerced. The band stumbled upon a Manchu scouting party coming to investigate rumors of the Russians’ return. The Albazinians set upon them, slaughtering three quarters of them and taking one “Chinese named Godoveika” for questioning. Godoveika’s account was consistent under torture, and therefore probably truthful—testimony to Russian techiques. He said two thousand Manchu soldiers and thirty cannons lay in Aigun, with three thousand more soldiers coming up from China.

  At first, the Kangxi emperor refused to believe reports that the Russians were back (and an uncomfortable Sabsu had been in no hurry to inform him about it). But then the emperor dispatched men and supplies with haste, with orders that camels should follow with more “when the grass becomes green.” The emperor instructed Langtan, his trusted general, that if the Russians could not be persuaded to surrender peaceably, then this time they were to be threatened with death. Further, after capturing Albazino, the Manchu force was to march on Nerchinsk and put an end to Russian capers for good.

  Throughout the summer and autumn of 1686 the Manchus laid siege to Albazino. The defenders—826 armed men with a dozen brass and iron cannons, 112 poods of powder, 60 poods of lead (a pood is about 36 pounds), and 140 grenades—dug in for the long haul. The Manchus attacked from their base on the right bank. During the bombardments, smoke sometimes obscured the fort. Inside, the Russians began to die. Tolbuzin was killed by November; the rest began to starve. As a defiant taunt, the Manchus sent out a fifty-pound meat pie.

  Kangxi issued orders to extend the siege through the harsh winter, but all along he struggled to grasp quite why the Russians had returned and were holding out. Even at this stage, he still sought a diplomatic solution, and when envoys from the czar arrived in Peking to discuss frontier issues and offer hopes for peace, the emperor seized the chance. He swiftly issued a decree in early November ordering that the siege be lifted.

  The courier carrying these orders reached the Manchus in front of Albazino at the point when Langtan was readying a decisive assault. The general pulled his troops back and opened communications with the besieged Russians: fewer than seventy men remained alive inside. On Christmas Day, Baiton, the late Tolbuzin’s lieutenant, sent out a man to ask for provisions, which Langtan provided. By then fewer than twenty Russian defenders were left. Sickness was not confined only to the fort; dysentery was also raging through the Manchu camp. The Kangxi emperor dispatched two doctors with medicines for an army he considered to have his finest soldiers. But he also gave instructions that the Russians be treated as well. Still keeping diplomatic options open, he pulled back his forces and made sure the Russian survivors knew he was doing this so that whenever the czar’s ambassador arrived, peace would top the agenda.

  War, Kangxi wrote around this time, “is a terrible thing,” and always the emperor seemed in his writings to place its bloodiness and destruction in the balance with benevolence:

  Because our army is excellent and our equipment strong, in the long run the Russians cannot resist us. . . . Then do not kill one single man, but let them return to their own native land. In this way, we shall demonstrate to them our sublime idea of treating foreigners kindly.

  The Russians on the Amur had vexed the Kangxi emperor in two respects. The first was that Russia was pressing in upon the Manchus’ homeland, the dynasty’s territorial and spiritual heartland in Manchuria. Having seized the dragon throne, and aware that earlier conquering dynasties had lost their potency the moment they started down the road of assimilation with the Chinese, he believed that preserving a territorial home base was key to preserving Manchu identity—and power.

  Not only did it mean keeping out the Russians; it also meant excluding their Han Chinese subjects. Almost as soon as Peking had fallen to the Manchus, the Qing ordered the construction of the “Willow Palisade,” networks of ditches and embankments, planted with willows on top, that ran for hundreds of miles along the southern and western sides of Manchuria. Han Chinese were barred from passing beyond the palisa
de into Manchuria, an enforcement that remained in place until the late nineteenth century. Where the Manchus got the idea from is unclear. But some have argued that the purpose of the Great Wall itself, built by the Qing’s predecessors, the Ming dynasty, was less to keep the barbarians out than to keep the Chinese in. At any rate, less than a century ago, signs of the Willow Palisade were still visible. The last willows were grubbed up for fuel by Russian and Japanese soldiers at war in 1904–5 in southern Manchuria.

  The second vexation was that, both as conqueror and as assiduous student of Chinese history, the Kangxi emperor knew well that the greatest threat to dynastic power in China came from invasions and raids from steppe nomads in Central Asia, from what is now called Xinjiang (and before that was Turkestan) and from Mongolia. Russians in south Siberia already had ties and influence in Mongolia (a century later Russian influence would begin extending into the heart of Central Asia too). For the Manchus to guard their northwest flank, and particularly against the Dzunghars under their brilliant leader, Galdan, Russian noninterference needed to be secured.

  And so, having dealt successfully with the Russians, the Kangxi emperor then turned to Galdan, pursuing him over three years across the deserts until their armies joined in battle in Mongolia, near the Kherlen River. Galdan’s men fled, and Galdan himself committed suicide. The Qing empire was now secure:

  My great task is done. In two years I made three journeys, across deserts combed by wind and bathed with rain, eating every other day, in the barren and uninhabitable deserts—one could have called it hardship but I never called it that.

  Heaven, earth and ancestors have protected me and brought me this achievement. As for my own life, one can say it is happy. One can say it’s fulfilled. One can say I’ve got what I wanted.

  CHAPTER 11

  53°59.3' N 123°56.2' E

  We pulled into Skovorodino through a pall of mist, the color of sand, hanging in the river valley, but at the station the setting sun bathed all in a still, golden light, as if for eternity. Travelers climbed down onto the low platform, lit cigarettes, and stretched. The long train creaked and sighed as it exhaled after a long, long haul. Gangs of railwaymen in fatigues dropped onto the track carrying ball-peen hammers on long, slender shafts. As they walked down the train they tapped wheel-truck bearings, side frames, and axles, checking for fatigue and fractures. When the hammer strike sang out warm and clear, all was well; the train chimed and tinkled in the evening air, its own gamelan performance.

  Most of the town, it seemed, was also wandering across empty tracks toward the platform. It was less a passeggiatta than a dazed stumbling toward the light, as if the town had not expected such a wonder from afar. One solitary woman in her nightclothes and slippers was carrying on a sad private conversation. Perhaps the train really did hold out the promise of some other land, another life, other loves.

  Skovorodino had been founded as an encampment called Zmeiny (“Snake”), which sprang up when the Trans-Siberian Railway reached this spot in 1908. In case the name sounded too whimsical, it was renamed Never-1, after the River Never along which it sprawls. Under Communism the town got its current name in honor of the head of the local Soviet, shot in 1920 by Japanese forces who had moved into the Russian Far East, ostensibly to help the White Russians, during the chaos of the civil war. These days, not much happened here. A research station was looking into the effects of permafrost. And there was talk of a pipeline being laid from the gasfields of northern Siberia, past Skovorodino, under the Amur River and into China to feed the industrial revolution to the south. It was the biggest thing heard in years. But no one said anything about it bringing prosperity.

  The train pulled out, the townsfolk dispersed, and night came down. Only in the shop selling vodka on the far side of what counted as the station square was there life. Under a bare bulb hanging in the porch, young men were settling down, with bottles. The town had no hotel, only a rooming house on the upper floors of the station building. I booked an iron bed and a ticked mattress; thirteen others shared the room. All night was a constant to and fro, and the air was thick with the Russian traveling cocktail of stale tobacco, used tea bags, gherkins, and a babylike musk from undershirt-wearing men. In the morning, the shop was still open, the bulb still alight; the bottles were empty, and the young men sprawled over the steps.

  Skovorodino lay forty-odd miles north of Albazino, which itself lay within the Russian frontier zone. Clearance to go to Albazino was required from the Federal Security Service, known usually as the FSB, the successor to the KGB and the Cheka before that. Once you have FSB clearance, you need to apply for a permit from the Border Guard, run by the same ministry. In the Soviet Far East, guarding the border and guarding against spies and other enemies in Russia’s midst were much the same thing, and the outward form has not changed.

  For the first four centuries, the expanding frontier had, for those who dwelled there, been a zone of possibilities, a positive force field of fortunes and even national rejuvenation. Under the Soviets, it became a perimeter fence keeping the “other” at bay while locking down Russians. Paranoia and ceaseless vigilance were the new features of the frontier society. In the Far East, leaders fostered a siege psychology: enemies (first Japanese, and then Chinese, and then it wasn’t clear who) were everywhere, intent on infiltration, espionage, and sabotage. They wanted to “harm our life in every way—to blow up bridges and factories, to poison wells, to kill people.” On September 1, 1983, Korean Airlines Flight 007 from Anchorage to Seoul strayed into Soviet airspace, all because of a faulty autopilot. Under orders, an Su-15 fighter shot it down over the Sea of Japan, killing all 269 passengers and crew. The pilot of the interceptor later said he had not hesitated to fire on this passenger plane, because it had crossed a frontier “that should be under lock and key.” A newspaper headline in Khabarovsk had told it like it was: “Motherland Frontiers Are Sacred.” “From Chukotka to Khasan’s crest, we guard our land’s happiness,” goes the song of the Far Eastern Border Guards. Those who grew up along the Amur in the 1970s and 1980s wearing the red kerchiefs of the Young Friends of the Border Guards can still sing it.

  Relations between Russia and China are now officially supposed to be incomparably warm—“as close as lips and teeth,” as the Communist Chinese phrase puts it. Outwardly you wouldn’t know it at the FSB in Skovorodino, or anywhere along the Sino-Russian border marked by the Amur River itself. The “frontier sciences”—pursuits such as stalking, martial arts, handling German shepherd dogs, and interrogation—were going strong. A sandy strip about twenty feet wide still runs nearly the whole 2,700 miles of the Sino-Russian border, all along the north bank of the Amur. The KSP (the kontrolno-sledovaya polosa or “control tracking strip”) is kept raked in corduroy furrows in which the tracks of infiltrators show up.

  The FSB officer was wearing jeans and a sweater and a very large watch. He had a stony face, and I pictured him in a Chekist’s leather greatcoat. Clearance for Albazino, he said, could take fourteen days; and why did I want to go anyway? I tried to explain. Perhaps he thought of this foreigner embarrassing his anteroom for the next two weeks. At any rate, he took my passport and said he would call Moscow. Half an hour later, he was back. He returned my passport, with clearance. As I left, I realized that he could not have spoken more than forty words at me.

  By contrast, the officer at the barracks was a chatty blonde in an old-fashioned green uniform, high boots, and bold mascara and lipstick. The paperwork we had to fill out was gargantuan, she said, but it wouldn’t take two weeks. With a twinkle, she drew me into the conspiratorial game, a shared joke at the massive and pointless bureaucracy. At the end of it all, she handed me my permit and flashed an open smile. “Only in Russia,” said this uniformed protector of the motherland, “do you have to fill in a thousand forms to visit a tiny museum.” I wanted to hug her. I could take the next fifty commissars in my stride.

  Outside the station, I hired an Armen
ian driver, because he was proud of his new tires. Yervant was up for Albazino, though he had never been there before. He insisted that before anything we first go home for lunch. Home was a crumbling block at the edge of town. We climbed six flights of stairs and as we entered he barked once at a silent woman, standing at the kitchen sink, wearing a scarf, ankle-length stockings of brown nylon, and sandals. Food began to pile up on our low table: lavash and mutton soup and a salad of cracked wheat and herbs; and then dried apricots and crunchy pomegranate seeds. Yervant never did introduce me to his wife.

  After lunch, on the gravel road out of town, he began telling me his story. He had been in the Far East long enough to form strong views about the local Russians. The men were good-for-nothings, too lazy to appreciate the wealth that lay about them for the taking. Armenian men were not like that. Worse, Russian men were soft on their women and had become effete themselves—Armenian men were not like that either. I had not noticed much softness on my travels. On the few occasions in Irkutsk and perhaps Chita when I had seen a couple hand in hand, the girl carrying a rose, I had felt mawkishly touched. A sight like that in Skovorodino struck me as improbable.