And so by mid-century the Asian motif in Europe had changed. Beguilement gave way to disgust, and Victor Hugo’s mer de poésie became the stagnant East. Indeed, those who chafed at Official Russia began to use the term “the Orient” as a metaphor for Russia itself, including as a means to get around the censors. Mikhail Bakunin, anarchist and friend of Alexander Herzen, asked, rhetorically: “Does not Asia reign throughout the entire Russian empire?”
Russian messianism took on an increasingly expansionist hue. Vasily Grigoriev, the country’s foremost Asia specialist, insisted that Russia had a higher calling, to enlighten “the tribes of Asia” with science and Christianity and “to set their lives in order.” This self-sacrifice on the part of Russia was its providence, its redemption even. Russia’s mission—its schastie, or “happiness,” as Herzen put it—had yet to be fulfilled.
Russia, then, was on the lip between radiant past and future. Its geographical location between West and East was part of the messianism, too, ennobling Russia in the task of saving Asia. In this sense, Russian tribulations under the Mongol yoke centuries before came to acquire a positive evaluation. Fate had led Russia into Asia, and geographical proximity now gave Russia its preeminent calling there, and a role as mediator between East and West. The Russian teleology began to grow clear: God had put Russia where it was, and so the salvation of Asia fell to Russia alone. “Is it not obvious,” Grigoriev demanded, “that Providence preserved the peoples of Asia as if intentionally from all foreign influences, so that we would find them?” He never paused for an answer.
Now that Russia had a new Eastern destiny, Siberia came into focus as the staging ground for its ambitions. More than that, in a handful of years a bleak region was reconfigured in the national imagination. For Alexander Herzen, in Siberia everyone was equal, including exiles. It was a “land without aristocratic origins . . . in which people are renewed, shutting their eyes on their entire past existence.” Siberia was now a reservoir of renewal, “an America sui generis.” Soon after, notions of Siberian independence blossomed, and parallels between the unrolling frontier in the Russian Far East and the Manifest Destiny of the United States’ westward push began to be made more explicit: Russians looked out at Siberia and saw America. In Irkutsk, unlikely as it now seems, some had aspirations for a United Nations of Siberia, one that would reach out across the Pacific to form a federation with the United States.
But all this eastward longing would have remained inchoate without the will and singular energies of one man. Count Nikolay Muraviev was born into the St. Petersburg court and brought up to be a soldier, fighting in the Caucasus and against the Turks until invalided because of poor health. In 1847 Czar Nicholas I appointed Muraviev to be governor-general of Eastern Siberia, at the young age of thirty-eight. The czar did not approve of everything about Muraviev, who had once advocated the end to serfdom. In the eyes of Nicholas he was a “liberal” and a “democrat,” repugnant qualities yet relative ones, for Muraviev was firmly of the establishment, and his loyalty was unquestioned. He was, moreover, unsullied by corruption, a rare quality in a province administered by men who considered Siberia “a camp to be plundered,” in the words of Prince Peter Kropotkin, zoologist, anarcho-communist, and Amur lover.
In Eastern Siberia, Muraviev made an instant impression. He cleaned out the worst of the corrupt officials and toured ceaselessly about his vast province to know it better. In Irkutsk, he gathered about him a group of young, energetic officials. Kropotkin described Muraviev as “like all men of action of the government school . . . a despot at the bottom of his heart.” Yet Kropotkin deemed him “very intelligent, very active, extremely able, and desirous to work for the good of the country.” And he had another quality: a talent for winning over those who, like Kropotkin, had set their hearts against the establishment. Muraviev did not hesitate to co-opt Siberia’s exiles—Decembrists, members of the Petrashevsky circle, Petrashevsky himself. One of Muraviev’s unlikeliest advisers was the exile Mikhail Bakunin, committed revolutionary and founding theorist of anarchism. Bakunin long remained Muraviev’s staunchest, and most bombastic, defender.
Muraviev arrived in Irkutsk clutching a memorandum on Eastern Siberia and the Far East that he had commissioned from a young archivist in the foreign ministry, Alexander Balasoglo. The two had met in St. Petersburg at the newly founded Russian Geographical Society. Balasoglo was a close friend of Mikhail Petrashevsky’s and he shared in the visions of Russia’s dominion in Asia. As a historian of Russia’s diplomatic missions to the East, he was able to supply the vision with accretions of detail, which nearly all settled on the Amur River. Balasoglo argued that the Amur was as essential to the settlement and development of Eastern Siberia as the Nile was to Egypt, or the St. Lawrence River to Canada (crowds of hungry Irish, he said, would flock to it). The river was also the route to new markets in China. Once the Amur was colonized, abundance would flow, “as if from a brimming cup, from the luxuriant valley.” More enticingly still, Balasoglo painted a future for Russia in the Pacific basin, a new and growing site for commerce and civilization, to which the Amur was the natural link. Two centuries earlier, Balasoglo lamented, the boyar-diplomats in Nerchinsk had been hoodwinked by the Manchus and their shifty Jesuit advisers into surrendering the Amur River. It would be criminal if the Russian government this time neglected to defend its strategic interests as competition intensified in the Pacific. If Russia did not claim the Amur, officials in St. Petersburg would open their paper before long to discover that England or France had reached an agreement with China to settle at the mouth of the river. “A blessed location will not remain empty!”
• • •
Muraviev was delighted with Balasoglo’s proposals, and lost no time in laying the groundwork to bring them into being. In St. Petersburg, he insisted that to control the river basin would merely be taking back lands stolen from the Russians by the Manchus. For the first time since Khabarov, the Amur had a powerful booster.
He sought others. One was the Russian Geographical Society, founded in 1845. Given the mood of the day, it was hardly surprising that from its inception, “science” was put to the service of nationalism. Nor was it a coincidence that the society’s first filial branch was founded in Irkutsk, down by the Angara River. Its imposing building of red brick and white stone in the Gothic manner, with turreted exuberances to suit the Siberian taste, is today the regional museum and unofficial shrine to Muraviev.
From the Russian Geographical Society’s inception, too, enthusiasm built around a Great Siberian Expedition, ten years in the planning. The original idea, when Russia still had an Alaskan colony, had been to survey the Kamchatka peninsula and the Aleutian and Kuril islands. But by the time it set off in 1855, the expedition had shifted its focus to southeastern Siberia, a consequence of Muraviev’s lobbying over the Amur basin. Here, inspiration came from the exploits a decade earlier of a young naturalist-explorer, Alexander von Middendorff. He had been sent by the Imperial Academy of Sciences to investigate, in the far north, the nature of the permafrost and the relationships between life and the Arctic climate. But having done that, he felt irresistibly drawn to the Amur, which, as nominally Chinese territory, the Russian government insisted was out of bounds. Many thousands of miles from any possible rebuke, he crossed the Stanovoy mountains and dropped down the Zeia River to the Amur. Von Middendorff later justified his detour by arguing that he wanted to establish the exact line of the Sino-Russian border laid down by the Treaty of Nerchinsk. Early maps had the border running to the north of the Stanovoy mountains. What markers he claimed to have found suggested the border ran along the south side of the mountains. That in itself was valuable news for Russia, for it considerably enlarged her Far Eastern territory. Valuable, too, was the impression gleaned from native tribes that China’s writ ran not at all in these parts. The tribes had not paid tribute to China in living memory, if ever.
Separately, Middendorff’s account had also pi
qued the curiosity of two naval officers. Aleksandr Gavrilov was a young lieutenant when in 1846 he set out from Ayan on the Sea of Okhotsk to seek the Amur’s as yet uncharted mouth. Everything was designed to allay the suspicions of the Chinese, should these be encountered. His was not a naval vessel but a commercial one, registered to the Russian-American Company. The crew were told to dissemble as American sailors as the need arose, and were issued with rations of Virginia chewing tobacco to reinforce the part. The expedition was not particularly fruitful. Approaching from the north, Gavrilov found sandbars and shifting banks blocking his way in the estuary mouth, between the mainland and the top of Sakhalin Island. The Amur, he concluded, was no place for oceangoing ships. When this news reached St. Petersburg, there was palpable relief, and Czar Nicholas I declared the matter of the Amur now closed.
But another officer, Gennady Nevelskoi, believed that Gavrilov’s murky description of the approaches to the Amur needed clarification. Young and active, Nevelskoi was a member of the Russian Geographical Society, friends with the Petrashevsky circle, and close to Balasoglo. In 1848 Nevelskoi took command of a ship, the Baikal, bringing supplies from the Baltic Sea to Russian settlements in Kamchatka and the Sea of Okhotsk. Nevelskoi badly wanted to go on to explore the mouth of the Amur. The head of the navy had reservations, but Muraviev, whom Nevelskoi knew through the Russian Geographical Society, was enthusiastic. Without authorization and with considerable effort, Nevelskoi arrived in Kamchatka early enough in 1849 to head south and explore the Amur. He found exactly what he was hoping for: that Sakhalin and the mainland were not, as had hitherto been believed, joined by an isthmus blocking an approach to the Amur from the Gulf (now Strait) of Tatary to the south. Most important, for all the shifting sandbanks, the entrance to the Amur was navigable by ships of deep draft after all.
Back in St. Petersburg the following year, Nevelskoi met the full wrath of the conservatives, led by Karl Nesselrode. To these men, good relations with China were paramount. And for Nesselrode, a chief value of Siberia was as a “deep net,” into which the empire’s undesirables could be cast: acquire the Amur, a route to the outside, and it was, to extend Nesselrode’s metaphor, like untying the cod end. Not just Siberia’s undesirables—exiled revolutionaries, liberals, and common criminals—would be let out, but Siberia’s own Russian inhabitants were susceptible to freethinking and even notions of independence. As one conservative put it, contact with outsiders (Americans, for instance) “could easily turn into fatal propaganda” subverting Siberians. In this environment, Nevelskoi’s curiosity was no virtue, but a vice. He was sent back to the Sea of Okhotsk with instructions not to go south to the Amur again.
Again, Nevelskoi disobeyed orders. In the summer of 1850 he charted both the Amur’s northern and southern approaches. And he founded a Russian post a few miles up the river, behind the marshes on the north bank. When the news got back to St. Petersburg, the same conservatives called for him to be broken in rank. This time, Muraviev intervened personally with the czar, underscoring Nevelskoi’s patriotism and arguing the strategic case for a Russian presence on the Amur. The czar relented. In this interview, Nicholas is supposed to have said what has gone down as Amur lore: “Where the Russian flag has once been hoisted, it should not be taken down.” The saying became the talisman for the Amur epoch, and is taught in Far Eastern schools today. I later found the dictum winding around the base of Nevelskoi’s neglected statue in the town he founded. It cannot have harmed his cause that he named the settlement Nikolaevsk.
As well as establishing a Russian presence near the Amur’s mouth, Nevelskoi presented the local natives with the good news that all the land down to the Korean border was now Russian. The Chinese could hardly protest about this land grab, since they did not know about it; and silence from Peking helped reassure the St. Petersburg conservatives. Nevelskoi also, with little ceremony, annexed Sakhalin, which later would be turned into a vast convict island (the Russian Far East became a very deep net, after all).
On the Amur, Nevelskoi played John the Baptist to Muraviev’s coming. Muraviev now knew that he needed to act fast if he was to annex the entire Amur territory and present it to St. Petersburg as a fait accompli. He set Nevelskoi to organizing surveys of the Amur and the Amgun, its first left tributary, as well as the Tartar Strait (one of Nevelskoi’s naval surveyors was Voin Rimsky-Korsakov, elder brother of the sea-loving composer). Everywhere, Russian outposts sprouted, but, for all the imperial bombast that accompanied their establishment, the Russian hold was fragile. Not least of the challenges was that of provisioning. In the winter of 1853–54, one of the garrisons was struck down with scurvy.
Now it was Muraviev’s turn to act. In the early summer of 1854 he raised an eight-hundred-strong Cossack unit in Irkutsk. At Sretensk on the Shilka he commissioned fifty barges. On them he put the Cossacks and their supplies, along with the Madonna icon that had hung two centuries before in the chapel at the fort of Albazino. And then he floated three thousand miles down to the Amur’s mouth.
Nearly the whole route took Muraviev through Chinese territory. To the alarmed commander at Aigun, the chief Manchu fort on the river, Muraviev breezily explained that he was on his way to the Pacific to defend Sino-Russian interests against an Anglo-French force cruising in the Pacific (it was the time of the Crimean War). Two similar expeditions followed. Through encroachment, diplomacy, and impudence, Russia secured the Amur basin and shortly after it the eastern side of the Sikhote-Alin mountains and the coastline beyond, denying China access to the Sea of Japan.
It was an area the size of France and Germany, and the enfeebled Qing in Peking could do little about it, absorbed as they were by the calamity of the Taiping Rebellion to the south and the depredations along the Chinese seaboard of other Western powers. Later, treaties formalized Russia’s theft. The Treaty of Aigun in 1858 gave the Russians control of the Amur’s left bank, all 2,760 miles of it, and all the land north, what used to be called Outer Manchuria. Two years later, at the Peking Convention, the Chinese surrendered the Amur’s right bank, starting from where the Ussuri joins the main stream. That gave the Russians what evocatively used to be called “Eastern Tartary”: the whole of the wild, ginseng-bearing Sikhote-Alin range right down to the Sea of Japan. To this region, the Russians gave the name Primorye: “by the sea.” Today it is known as Primorsky Krai, Russia’s Maritime Province.
But it was the Amur River flowing through this land, Muraviev insisted, that bore Russia’s Manifest Destiny. The annexation was wildly popular. In a letter to Herzen, Mikhail Bakunin was emphatic: “Through the Amur [Siberia] has been linked to the Pacific and is no longer a wilderness lacking an outlet. Siberia has been transplanted by Muraviev to another site. It is coming closer to America and Europe than to Russia, it is being ennobled and humanized. Siberia—a blessed country of the future, a land of renewal.”
On that barge trip down, to commemorate his impudence, Muraviev stopped off on the left bank of the Amur just upstream from Aigun, the Manchu fort. An obelisk went up on the riverbank to mark the occasion. Muraviev named the Cossack settlement Blagoveshchensk, or “Glad Tidings.” And there the Albazino Madonna came ashore in triumph. Later I was to go in search of her.
CHAPTER 13
52°15.3' N 117°42.7' E
Along my journey, in dusty museums along the way and in one or two of the very earliest books about the Amur that I carried with me, a number of photogravure images from the second half of the nineteenth century came to haunt me. It is when the Amur at last comes into focus for Russians as they start to pass down the river. One picture shows pocket paddle steamers beached on the glassy river’s gently shelving shingle, gangplanks running down to the shore. Another shows a raw timber town in the act of construction, as if on the film set for a western. But the most poignant image is the portrait of a peasant family staring long and hard at the camera. Beside a pile of bundles and a little shack stand a sturdy bearded farmer in jerkin and ba
ggy trousers tucked into high boots; a mother with a care-lined face; a toddler sheltering in his mother’s skirts; and a daughter holding the milch cow. The setting could have been any village in Ukraine or European Russia. And that is probably where the family had been a month earlier. But now they are thousands of miles farther east. And the whole ensemble, livestock and all, are on a raft on the river, floating down to their future.
The first Russians traveled on rafts or in heavy rowing boats. Later, in growing numbers, they came in shallow-draft steamers or barges pulled by them—floating populations in every sense. Cossack settlements spring up on the banks. Foreigners come looking for business. And with movements of people, some start describing what they see about them. Merchants, adventurers, and journalists—all three combined in the case of the anarcho-communist Prince Peter Kropotkin—begin to write about the Amur. In this sense, the river comes alive.
The early settlement of the Amur was foremost a rural phenomenon. Muraviev and his successors sent communities of Cossacks to set up posts at intervals down the river. Many of the Transbaikal Cossacks were hard-labor convicts who had served their time in the mines. Kropotkin relates that Muraviev himself went to see them off. “Go, my children, be free there,” Muraviev exhorted. “Cultivate the land, make it Russian soil.” Then someone asked, “But what is agriculture without a wife?” Thereupon, Muraviev released the hard-labor convict women, exhorting men and women to be happy in their new land. Kropotkin met these settlers six years later, their settlements hewn out of virgin forest. Muraviev’s marriages, he said, were not less happy than most.
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