Black Dragon River

by Dominic Ziegler

  The first consequence of the Manchus’ expulsion of the Russians from their Amur Eden in the late 1600s was to deflect the fur trade northward, over the top of the territories—Outer Tartary or Outer Manchuria, another name Europeans used—that China had made so clear belonged to it only. Yet later, that deflection reached its limit with Russian colonies in Alaska and northern California. Then the impulse rebounded in the mid-1800s, with lightning speed, back to the Amur. It is worth following the course of the rebound.

  It was no coincidence that right after the Treaty of Nerchinsk, in the 1690s, Russia began its exploration and colonization of Kamchatka. Beyond Kamchatka, the Eurasian landmass went no farther, so Russians took to the sea, working along the island chain of the Aleutians until they reached Alaska. With this geographical shift came a shift in the furs the Russians gathered: sable, squirrel, and fox gave way to the thick, sleek pelts of the sea otter. There was a shift, too, in whom they sold their furs to. Rather than haul skins back in search of European customers, as of old, Russians found it more profitable to sell them to China, via the border market of Kyakhta.

  Meanwhile, though thoughts of the Amur faded, they never went away. One reason was the perennial—and chronic—matter of provisioning remote Russian fur settlements. Furs from Kamchatka and Russia’s growing American operations tended to be shipped back to Okhotsk, halfway up the coast of the sea bearing the same name. Okhotsk was (and still is) an abysmal port. During storms, the town flooded. A sandbar blocked the river entrance. And the supply route from Yakutsk to Okhotsk was a grueling overland trek.

  Slowly, proposals were made to get around the challenges, some less fanciful than others. In the 1780s it was suggested that the fur colonies should be supplied by ship from Kronstadt, the port that served St. Petersburg half a world away at the head of the Gulf of Finland. The idea led to some notable Russian voyages in the early 1800s, but they did nothing to fill the larders of Russian settlers on the Pacific. Later, in the 1820s, a wide-eyed scheme was hatched to extend Russia’s dominion to the Sandwich Islands, present-day Hawaii. The hope was to supply the North Pacific settlements of the Russian-American Company with Hawaiian pineapples, hogs, and tobacco. Russia’s agricultural colonies were to be defended by a series of formidable forts on the main island. Secret excursions were made to the Sandwich Islands, and diplomatic moves launched. Construction of a fort began, but one of the flightier European attempts at colonization fizzled not long after.

  Yet a small number continued to believe that the Amur held future promise—no longer as a land of furs and gold and grain, but as a waterborne supply route conveying provisions from the relatively fertile lands of western Siberia to the Russian fur colonies, or as an outlet for trade more broadly on the vast Pacific Ocean. As early as 1730, after his first expedition to the North Pacific, Vitus Bering, the great Danish mariner in Russian service, petitioned the crown about the potential of the Amur River for trade with Japan. Later that century, a Russian geographer, Gavril Sarychev, wrote of the “incomparably greater advantage over other European powers” that use of the Amur would furnish; from it, Russia could “without doubt” control the whole Pacific.

  Those who saw the river as a conduit for supplies and trade did not at this point necessarily envisage its possession: most would have been happy to “share” the Amur with China. Yet grievances soon began to be nurtured over the loss of the Amur—grievances wholly absent at the time of the Treaty of Nerchinsk. In 1741 Mikhail Lomonosov, Enlightenment Russia’s greatest poet and scientist (and great-grandfather of Maria Volkonsky), wrote this ode for the coronation of Tsarevna Elizaveta Petrovna:

  We will praise your gift to the heavens

  We will erect a marker of your munificence

  Where the sun rises, and where the Amur

  Winds in its green banks,

  Desiring to be taken from the Manchurian

  And be returned once again to your dominion.

  Early the following century, the question of the Amur Valley again resurfaced, this time as an inchoate part of the Decembrist program. Pavel Pestel was one of the chief instigators of the Decembrist uprising (and son of Ivan Borisovich Pestel, the governor-general of Siberia whose passion for order and cleanliness in Irkutsk was matched only by the scale of his tyrannical corruption). In the 1820s the young Pestel, in a display of geographical confusion, called for Russia to seize “part of Mongolia, so that the entire course of the Amur River, which begins with Lake Dalaia [sic], will belong to Russia.” Had Pestel been exiled to Chita along with the other Decembrists, he would have sharpened his topographical knowledge and learned that the Amur does not flow out of Lake Baikal. But he was one of five Decembrist leaders whom Nicholas I hanged in the Fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul.

  For long, these were minority opinions. The official line was to do nothing that might disturb an already precarious flow of trade through Kyakhta, which the Chinese shut off at will, sometimes for years at a time. The authorities still considered China to be a formidable power and were loath to tweak the dragon’s tail. In 1756 Russia sent a mission to Peking to negotiate rights of navigation on the Amur, but nothing came of it. In 1805 another embassy made its way to China among whose requests was the use of the Amur for supplying Kamchatka. The embassy was turned back at the Mongolian border.

  When Nicholas I ascended the throne in 1825, even such missions seemed too daring. He pursued as rigid a policy of status quo toward China as he did in every other aspect of his rule. Apart from the importance of not disturbing the Kyakhta trade, Nicholas I believed in the natural order of relations between powers as much as he believed in his own divine right to rule. The Treaty of Nerchinsk was a moral commitment to recognize China’s right over its Amur possessions and the tribes who lived there. Meanwhile, nothing had changed to suggest the military balance in the Far East had tilted any more in Russia’s favor than at the time when heavy Chinese superiority defeated the Russians at Albazino.

  Russia’s rightful preoccupations—Nicholas was emphatic—were not with the Far East, but with Europe. In Europe, the post-Napoleonic order laid down by great powers at the Congress of Vienna seemed under threat from the appalling prospect of growing popular nationalism, and of liberal and at times revolutionary impulses. Such impulses threatened Russia too. The Decembrists, at the very start of his rule, had given Nicholas I a premonition of what would happen if he let down his martinet guard. Nicholas, mocked by his enemies as “the Gendarme of Europe,” resolved never to do that.

  • • •

  Yet perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of Czar Nicholas’s martinet rule is how a remote river that hovered vaguely off Russia’s eastern realms only grew as symbol and then site for national redemption. The Amur eventually became bound up as part of the cure for what ailed Russia. And to understand what ailed it, you have to start with the czar.

  Just as Nicholas insisted on overseeing the tiniest details of the Decembrists’ internment, so he micromanaged his entire empire in order that no subject disobeyed him in anything. It was the obsession of a mindless man. Every person in the empire had to know his station. The czar ordered uniforms for professors, students, engineers, and the aristocracy, and he laid down their cut and color. It meant no social mobility. And that, Count Sergey Semionovich Uvarov, the czar’s close adviser, reasoned, meant no need to educate the lower orders. It was a curious priority for a minister for education, but Uvarov tackled it with relish, working to deny education to anyone but the nobility. No “university Pugachevs” would be bred on his watch, he said, referring to the Don Cossack who, claiming to be the late Czar Peter III, had led an insurrection of Cossacks, peasants, blacksmiths, schismatics, and native tribesmen challenging the reign of Catherine the Great before he was captured and drawn and quartered before the crowds in Moscow.

  Uvarov, too, came up with the formula that defined Nicholas’s rule: “Pravoslavie, Samoderzhavie, Narodnost”: Autocracy, Orthodox
y, and Nationality—or Official Nationality for short. A century ago Alexander Presniakov, a historian of Russian autocracy, aptly summed up what it meant: patriotism as the state defined it, and the unconditional admiration for the governing apparatus and police power. The harshness of the czar’s rule—“the apogee of absolutism”—ensured few overt challenges. The Decembrists notwithstanding, no national emergency or broader revolutionary fervor prevailed in the land. Apart from the Decembrists’ attempted putsch, the Polish revolt of 1830 was the only major show of defiance during Nicholas’s reign. No Pugachev rose up from among the peasants or Cossacks. On the other hand, Nicholas I was never able to suppress intellectual dissent entirely. When detected, dissent or the expression of radical ideas was punished, especially after the European revolutionary events of 1848. But repression only fed a growing if still clandestine hunger for change.

  At around the time of the European revolutions, a secret society began meeting at the St. Petersburg home of Mikhail Petrashevsky, a utopian socialist who railed against abuses of power. The group’s members—writers, scientists, young officers, and junior government officials—held a range of progressive views and were often at odds with one another. But all were disgusted by the debilitating institution of serfdom, by czarist orthodoxy, and by official corruption and abuse. When the czar’s secret police busted this freethinking group, the long-run consequences for Russia’s position on the Amur were profound, though no one could have known it then.

  Once caught, those in the Petrashevsky circle faced severe punishment. One member was Fyodor Dostoevsky, then in his late twenties. On November 16, 1849, Dostoevsky, Petrashevsky, and others were sentenced to death. They were brought to the Semenovsky parade ground in St. Petersburg, and in the snow were tied to execution posts; Petrashevsky insisted no hood be put over him. The commanding officer gave the soldiers their orders to ready their rifles and aim. But he did not order them to fire. The mock execution was presumably stage-managed by the czar himself.

  Their lives spared, the men were sentenced to katorga, penal servitude, in Siberia. Later, Dostoevsky told his brother that his years in prison had been like being “shut up in a coffin.” Out of his experience of captivity came the masterpiece of prison literature, The House of the Dead. When released, Dostoevsky had to serve in the Siberian regiment. He emerged from the whole experience a changed man: more conservative, deeply religious, deeply affected by old, peasant-inspired notions of community, and now opposed to the Western idealization of the individual and of reason. As for Petrashevsky, after serving out his sentence, he was exiled to Irkutsk. There, as we shall see, he became a vigorous promoter of a new Russian destiny on the Amur. He even founded a newspaper to which he gave the river’s name. In it, he railed constantly against local abuses of power until he was removed to a remoter exile. Petrashevsky had changed less than Dostoevsky.

  After the Petrashevsky circle was smashed, the last seven years of Nicholas’s reign were the “gloomy septennium.” But at no point in his rule did Nicholas succeed in repressing intellectual inquiry altogether. Clandestine opposition only grew. Heavy censorship and state spies everywhere held back but did not stop a rising flood of liberal and nationalist sentiment seeping from Western Europe into the salons of St. Petersburg and Moscow. At the same time, Western ideas were challenged by homegrown ones. Among groups of friends or trusted acquaintances, a lively, even turbulent debate about Russia’s future grew in opposition to the prevailing orthodoxy.

  During this period of clandestine ferment two broad intellectual camps, the Westernizers and the Slavophiles, united against the czar’s autocracy but opposed each other on much else. At heart, the Westernizers believed the answer to Russia’s problems lay with European ideas and practice, and especially with European traditions of constitutional government, respect for individuals, the rule of law, and rational thought. To some, Europe offered not only ideas but also a radical path to action, what Hegel called the “algebra of revolution.”

  The Slavophiles, by contrast, saw too much of Europe already in what ailed Russia. To them, the root of the illness lay with the reforms a century earlier of the great autocrat and Europhile Peter the Great. His lifetime project had been to force medieval Russia into the modern age, using terror against those who resisted. But for all that he forced the landowning boyars, who till then went about in long beards and kaftans, to assume Western habits of manners and dress, the aristocracy’s leisure still rested upon the labors of an enserfed peasantry. They continued to be exploited, extorted, and conscripted. Russia’s serfs dwelled, in the words of Alan Wood, a lively historian of Russia, “in a vast swamp of ignorance, misery, superstition and periodic famine.” To the nineteenth-century Slavophiles, Peter the Great had created, and Nicholas I was reinforcing, not one but two Russias separated by an unbridgeable chasm. It was the second Russia with which the Slavophiles found common cause—the Russia of the narod, the people. For all their backwardness, or as a result of it, it was from the narod that the vanished harmonies of Russian society and the lost glories of the Orthodox Church and a Muscovite past might be retrieved. Above all, it was the collective organization of the peasant commune, the obshchina, that offered a path toward a harmonious society of the future, one that would redeem the current hell.

  The controversy between the Westernizers and the Slavophiles over how to cure Russia had a profound and long-term effect on the country’s political and intellectual development. The intellectual tendencies of the time were advocated by a bewildering melee of liberals, utopian socialists, mystics, and radicals. But many of the country’s later disputes and divisions can best be understood in terms of those who looked for a rational, universal solution to Russia’s woes and those, to draw on Alan Wood again, who “professed to be more alive to the idiosyncracies of Russia’s own peculiar cultural and social traditions.” This broad controversy shaped Russia’s political history right through the Russian Revolution and beyond. Even today, it largely defines the passionate debate among Russians about what the West has to teach Russia.

  Though it is hard to exaggerate the Westernizer-Slavophile controversy and its impact, for a period toward the end of the reign of Nicholas I, it is possible to divine, through all the swirling, semisubmerged debates, a common faith, one that soon merged in views about Russia’s rightful position on the Amur. However much these intellectuals fought, they were united in seeing the need for social reform and, above all, an end to serfdom. They sought nothing less than national rebirth. Theirs was a Russian nationalism that stood in vehement opposition to the Official Nationality. The most fanatical of the Westernizers, Vissarion Belinsky, asserted in 1846 that the Petrine reforms had “done for Russia everything they could and should have done” and that “the time had come for Russia to develop autonomously, out of itself.” Other Westernizers shared the Slavophiles’ passion for the obshchina. Alexander Herzen, the towering thinker of a radical, agrarian left, argued from exile in London that the peasant commune advantaged Russia over the advanced West because it brought Russia closer toward the progressive socialist order of the future. As for the Westernizer-Slavophile disputes, years later Herzen insisted that both camps shared, from childhood, a strong, instinctive love:

  The feeling of limitless love for the Russian people, for the Russian way of life, for the Russian case of mind . . . And, like Janus or the two-headed eagle, we looked in different directions, but at the same time a single heart was beating within us.

  With a single beating heart, Russians were for the first time asking, if only in whispers at first, to share in a common dream for a future that brought national renewal and fulfillment. It was an atmosphere ripe for messianic thinking, and the point for the Amur’s story is that the tendencies did not stop on the geographical borders of European Russia. Most extraordinarily, in the mid-nineteenth century the messianic spark leaped across the Urals, raced into Siberia, and soon claimed to encompass an ever bigger chunk of non-Russian Asia t
oo. Here, more often than not, contradictory impulses dwelled in the same breast, and even the traditional battle lines between establishment conservatives and progressives dissolved, especially after Russia’s humiliating defeat in the Crimean War in 1856 at the hands of Britain, France, and Turkey. By then the milder Alexander II had ascended the throne upon the death of Nicholas I a year earlier. Expansion in the Far East became the fount for national renewal.

  The messianism started, perhaps, with the rediscovery of the barbarous Cossacks, fur traders, and promyshlenniki, whose Siberian exploits lay in musty provincial archives. When Russian nationalists began ransacking the past, they found a huge Siberian repository for national myth making. It was a time when Russians felt themselves being measured up against Europeans and found lacking. Yet here, in the archives, were the exploits of Yermak, Khabarov, and the rest to set against the European conquistadores Cortés or Pizarro. Russia was uncovering a past out of which to fashion a future, and the Cossacks were being pressed into the part of noble visionaries.

  It was only a short hop for nationalists to fashion a mission civilisatrice to justify Russia’s advance deeper into Asia (for a chief contradiction was that the farther they attempted to move from Europe, the more they wished Russia’s moral worth to be compared favorably to it). But for a mission, there had to be lands worth saving and civilizing. That at first was not self-evident. For decades it had been the thing in Europe and Russia to admire Asia, and especially China, which Voltaire had called the “oldest and most polished nation of the world.” Count Sergey Uvarov, high priest of Official Nationality, saw China as an exemplar of an absolutist state run on moral principles. As in Europe, in Russia there was a craze for chinoiserie (imported through the Kyakhta entrepôt) and a tendency to idealize the exotic Orient. But Western powers were encroaching by sea, and the Oriental ideal was fast being revised in favor of dystopian visions. Lord George Macartney, who led a British embassy to Peking that met with haughtiness, pettifogging, and obstruction, was unimpressed. He described Qing China as “an old crazy first-rate man of war,” of more harm to herself than others. Britain’s easy defeat of China in the first Opium War a few decades later, in 1842, laid bare Chinese vacillation and military weakness. The Manchus, once vigorous and intelligent, had grown flaccid and incurious.