Uncharted Territory (Look to the West Book 2)

by Tom Anderson

  It was a grand speech, and such was Volynov’s sudden presence, in one so young, that few questioned how on earth so few Jews could pull off such a strategy, when against them were thousands, millions of Russians. Yet almost all the surviving Jews of Krementchuk followed him. They marched across the countryside, living off the land as best they could, indeed like the Twelve Tribes wandering in the desert of the Sinai, but potato and cabbage was their manna. Volynov’s money allowed him to buy off numerous companies of mercenaries who made up the garrison troops in that area, and even hire some of them in turn to defend the Jews from roving Russians.

  It did not take long before the word spread like wildfire, and by the time that great mass of tired, hungry people finally reached its destination, it had been joined by columns from several other Ruthenian towns – nor would that first migration be the last. Not everyone had made it, of course, and the surviving Jews of some towns had been trapped enroute and slaughtered by Cossacks – but thousands had, and now finally looked upon the Promised Land that Volynov had chosen.

  He had known of it from his uncle, a trader. He knew that, for a time, the Russians had practically vassalised it; yet, with the weakness caused by the Civil War, it had once more fallen back into its old position as a close ally of the Ottoman Empire, enemy of Russia and friend of the Jews – or at least those Jews that were useful to it.

  None of the truly Ottoman borders with Russia were close to Ruthenia, but this border was. On February 5th 1807, the Jews crossed the Dnieper and into the Khanate of the Crimea. The reigning Khan, Devlet V of the House of Giray, viewed the influx of Jews as an advantage. He had long heard of their exodus as it approached, and had prepared his small and often embattled country for their entry. Crimea had always been an eclectic place, and despite the Russians’ temporary weakness, he was under no illusions that the Romanovs would not rest until his old realm, like all the other little khanates that had once ruled European Russia, was brought under their boot. Likewise he knew how Volynov and many others had fought hard to defend themselves. The Jews would be the ultimate fighters for Crimea, for if the Russians indeed won, they would be doomed: the best motivation possible to defend unto the death.

  And despite their poverty from having fled from looting and stealing with very little, Devlet knew that many of Volynov’s Jews were skilled workers, and that skill they carried in their heads; it could not be stolen. Crimea’s economy was based on trade, and always had been, right from the start when it had been a Greek trading colony – when the Jews had still been in Israel, warring with Sennacherib of Assyria. These Jews could be useful indeed to him…

  In the final assessment it is hard to say whether Devlet was right or not, and who ultimately benefited from this Third Exodus, the Crimeans or the Jews.

  One thing can be certain, however: if it is uncertain who won, the Russians definitely lost.

  Chapter #57: Go-Nanboku-cho

  From: “IMPERIUM ORIENTALE: The Rise of the Russo-Lithuanian Pacific Company” by Brivibas Goštautas (Royal Livonian Press, 1956)—

  1805 saw the end of the golden period for Lebedev and Benyovsky. In those four years, ever since the conquest of Matsumae and the quiet infiltration of European trade into Japan’s Sakoku, its closed market, a great deal had happened in the outside world. The Jacobin Wars raged on in Europe, as Jean de Lisieux sought to redraw the map with blood as his ink. War too was ignited between the exiled Infantes of Spain and their republican rivals in the UPSA. Russia, however, backed away from the brink of war with the Ottoman Empire, focusing on repairing and reuniting herself after her punishing civil war. The Pacific venture, which had run merrily along in the background while Russian fought Russian – at the end of a very trade long route, with the nearest big Russian town being Yakutsk, Lebedev’s men had no choice but to be self-sufficient – presented certain opportunities to the newly confirmed Emperor Paul I.

  The Tsar was placed in the unenviable position of having to neutralise his many remaining political enemies without taking actions so harsh or drastic that they might reignite the civil war. Just as the British had discovered, transportation was a useful compromise between inflammatory executions and inconclusive imprisonment. Paul used this method to exile both General Sergei Vasilievich Saltykov and Ivan Grigorevich Potemkin to Yakutia. This was quite a clever strategy, certainly compared with his father’s more short-range exile of his wife Catherine to Yekaterinburg, where she was still close enough to the beating heart of Russia to continue influencing many important Russians, sowing the seeds that would, after her death, grow into the Civil War. By contrast, Yakutia was so distant from Moscow and St Petersburg that there was no chance of staying part of court gossip – as Lebedev’s men had already discovered. Therefore, Potemkin had no choice but to use his formidable talents for organisation to help improve the colony as Paul wished, in the hope that the Tsar might eventually recognise his achievements and let him return to more hospitable climes. Paul had no such intentions for Saltykov, who had only escaped execution because of the plea of his relative Nikolai, who had fought on Paul’s side during the Civil War. As it turned out, though, it was just as well for Russia that Nikolai’s argument had convinced the young Emperor…

  Saltykov and Potemkin were only two of the many former Potemkinite leaders – and not a few common soldiers of suspect background – who were sent to Yakutia. They swelled the Russian population of the region, probably doubling it in fact. Ivan Potemkin’s position was unofficial and subordinate to the formal governor-general of the Russian Far East, but he soon established himself in the administrative structure – such as it was. Some of his early innovations included a more consistent teaching of at least basic Russian to the local allies and subjects sometimes recruited as workers or soldiers; among them the Yakuts, the Nivkhs of Sakhalin, and of course the Aynyu of Edzo. This meant that anyone, regardless of ethnicity, could be shifted from one part of the region to another without requiring interpreters, and also helped cement Russian cultural dominance at a time when this was a hot topic in European Russia. It is possible, of course, that this was part of Ivan’s attempt to impress the Tsar.

  Some emancipated serfs also came to Yakutia of their own accord, though many did not come the whole way and instead settled around Krasnoyarsk or Irkutsk. Even these, though, arguably helped develop the Russian Far East in that their presence led to the expansion of those midway towns and thus the improvement of the roads linking them to Yakutsk to the east and Yekaterinburg to the west. Although the climate was considerably harsher than European Russia, the former serfs came because the region was declared free and farmland was doled out to those who moved there. Some of them doubtless regretted it when the Tsar was forced to expand emancipation to a wider area of European Russia a few years later, although a steady trickle continued, enamoured with the idea of owning land even if it was rather less fertile than that which they had farmed as serfs.

  The exact status of the Lebedev-Benyovsky venture also needed clarification. Up until this point it had had a vague definition; partly under the auspices of the Russian government in the Far East, partly under the Lithuanian government, but largely independent. Paul therefore proclaimed the “Russo-Lithuanian Pacific Company” in 1802, modelled on the trading companies of other European powers such as the Dutch, the French and the British. The new Company had a broad umbrella and encompassed not only Lebedev and Benyovsky’s adventures in Yakutia and Edzo, but also the establishment by Aleksandr Baranov of a fur trading colony in Alyeska.[23] Although Benyovsky knew and respected Baranov, the two ventures were as yet not really that connected and continued to run their own affairs. Nonetheless, the Company charter – from both Paul and his son Peter in his role as the Grand Duke of Lithuania – granted legitimacy to what had previously been a mad scheme, and attracted more immigration and recruitment.

  Of course, these processes were only just beginning by 1805, and still had a long way to run. There had nonetheless been some direct impacts.
After visiting Edzo in 1803, Potemkin agreed to certain ideas of Benyovsky’s (while quietly ignoring the more far-fetched ones) in order to expand trade and stick the Russian boot in the Japanese door before it could close. In this Benyovsky was prophetic, although perhaps it could be said that his own actions brought about his prophecy.

  The situation as it stood was always going to be unsustainable. Benyovsky had successfully infiltrated Japan by a combination of factors in one of those unlikely sequences of events that would sound implausible in a work of fiction, yet can be found in any history book. The conquest of Matsumae Han (Domain) with the assistance of Aynyu rebels had been the easy part. The infinitely harder task was in keeping the knowledge of this conquest from the Japanese Court and Bakufu,[24] making them believe that the Matsumae had in fact defeated the Aynyu and the regent of the new young Daimyo, Matsumae Hidoshi, was another Japanese and not Moritz Benyovsky. It is perhaps hard to believe that this situation persisted for even four years, but one must consider a number of factors that lay to Benyovsky’s advantage:

  1. Matsumae was on the very frontiers of Japan, and its position meant that it was permitted certain privileges by the Shogun. The Han was of course permitted to trade with the Aynyu, whereas most Hans were forbidden foreign trade of any kind. It was exempt from the sankin kotai, a system that required other Hans to send members of the ruling house as hostages to the Bakufu in order to ensure their loyalty. It was assumed that the Matsumae were no threat to the Tokugawa. Ultimately, Matsumae’s distance and isolation meant that the Emperor and Shogun were used to having little contact with that Han; it was not as if the Russians and Lithuanians had tried to take over Koromo Han.

  2. A century earlier, the Matsumae had been almost overwhelmed by an earlier Aynyu rebellion, the Shakushain Revolt. That had required imperial troops to put down, and this meant that Matsumae Han had lost its special privileges for a generation and been subject to imperial inspectors poking their noses in. Even those Matsumae who despised the Russian presence were thus hesitant to appeal to the Court or Bakufu as a means of throwing them out.

  3. The Court and Bakufu themselves did not want to know. Emperor Tenmei was determined to see his reign as a bright new dawn after the disasters of the 1770s (tsunamis, earthquakes, economic meltdown) and suppressed reports of any negative news throughout his empire. This was not purely a propaganda exercise, as the Japanese people were inclined to view such disasters as omens against that Emperor’s reign. The Shogun, Tokugawa Iemochi, as usual kept his network of spies alert, but in that time was chiefly concerned with reports that the Satsuma Han – the large, rich, southern, and always independent-minded domain covering a large part of the island of Kiusiu [Kyushu] – was violating trade restrictions and becoming high-minded due to the fact that the Daimyo of Satsuma possessed a full kingdom, that of the Ryukyu islands, as his vassal. Thus the eyes of suspicion were turned to the south, not the north, and anomalous reports from Edzo were initially dismissed.

  4. Benyovsky pursued a deliberate policy of secrecy and employed Sugimura Goro, the disgraced and vengeful family surgeon of the Matsumae, as his guide in Japanese affairs and effective viceroy of Edzo.

  This policy thus succeeded for four years. Its end has two explanations, the romantic and the economic. As usual, the latter likely has more truth to it, but it is the former which is remembered. The economic theory simply states that sufficient goods from Matsumae had become recognised as clearly of European manufacture for the Shogun to become suspicious regardless of the suborning of his local spies. This observation was doubtless achieved with the assistance of the Dutch, who were Japan’s only outlet to knowledge of the West – indeed Western science was known as Rangaku, or ‘Dutch learning’, in Japan. And the Dutch, though hamstrung by being limited to the artificial island of Deshima in Nagasaki Bay as a trade post, were nonetheless jealous of their monopoly on Western trade with Japan and were just as willing as the Japanese to help crack down on other Europeans who might violate Sakoku.

  The romantic explanation ties into the economic. It states that, at last in 1805, the young Daimyo of Matsumae came to give homage to the Emperor as he should have done upon gaining his position. Hidoshi was no longer able to realistically claim the situation was still too unstable to make the journey, and so he came. He was accompanied by an ‘Aynyu servant’, who aroused much talk in each of the towns that Hidoshi and his entourage visited enroute to Kyoto. Few Japanese had ever actually seen an Aynyu, and to many – even the educated – all barbarians were the same, a reflection of the country’s century and more of isolation. Hidoshi therefore indeed gave homage to the Emperor in Kyoto. Tenmei was by that point ailing from an illness, though he was not old. It would be in a few months’ time that Tenmei would become one of the few Japanese Emperors of this period not to be forced to abdicate or deposed by political intrigue: he would die upon the Chrysanthemum Throne.

  Hidoshi then left for Edo to establish relations with the Shogun. Even at this point it seems that the Russian venture might have escaped discovery. Tokugawa Iemochi remained concerned both with the intransigence of Satsuma and a problem of imperial succession. Emperor Tenmei’s son Crown Prince Yasuhito had… dangerous ideas. He was familiar both with Rangaku and with Chinese writings, and had developed a philosophy not unlike Bourbon absolutism, indeed possibly derived from it. He was dangerous enough for Tokugawa to consider assassination, but the fallout would be problematic. Despite his best efforts, Tenmei had no more sons, only five daughters. It might be possible for the Emperor to make a pragmatic sanction and adopt a male child from another branch of the imperial family as his son,[25] but this would first require that he had no sons of his own. Thus the business of diplomacy, the letter and the knife, went back and forth from Kyoto to Edo as the two leaders of Old Japan pondered the problem.

  In the midst of all this came Daimyo Hidoshi and his Aynyu servant. Hidoshi met with Tokugawa and submitted to the Shogun as the system required, but it was at this point that things started to go awry. Tokugawa had a Dutch representative at the Bakufu. Bringing the Dutch out of Nagasaki was unorthodox and probably illegal, but the Shogun made his own law. The Dutchman, a trader named Pieter Roggeveen, had probably been invited there by Tokugawa so the Shogun’s agents could ask him about possible European influences on Crown Prince Yasuhito’s ideas. But this is supposition; no records survive of such subterfuge (as indeed few records survive of anything from Old Japan).

  In any case, the Dutchman immediately recognised the ‘Aynyu servant’ of Hidoshi as a European – none other than Ulrich Münchhausen, Captain of Marines on the Lithuanian flagship Skalvis. Roggeveen spoke out, partly in surprise and partly in outrage, and knew that someone (presumably the Russians) had indeed suborned the Matsumae.

  Tokugawa immediately ordered the arrest of Hidoshi and Münchhausen, regardless of the Daimyo’s protests and attempted explanations. While they were imprisoned, the Shogun questioned Roggeveen in more detail and accepted the Dutchman’s conclusions. Matsumae must pay, he decided, and it would start with its Daimyo.

  Unfortunately for Tokugawa, when he summoned the guard to bring back Hidoshi and Münchhausen in chains, they found the cells empty. In an act of unlikely courage worthy of any of his father’s tall tales, Münchhausen had broken the two of them out of the dungeons and fled. For all Tokugawa’s spies and soldiers, they were never found. It later emerged that Hidoshi commandeered a fishing boat in Edo harbour and Münchhausen threatened its crew until they sailed all the way back to Matsumae – an epic voyage later commemorated in the Russian epic opera Lodka (“The Boat”) by Konstantin Vereshchagin, which unusually includes some verses with Yapontsi lyrics.

  Deprived of this prey, Tokugawa ordered the assembly of a punishment army and the acquisition of sufficient ships to carry them across the Tsugaru Strait to Edzo. As usual, he raised a levy from each of the Hans, each contributing troops to the operation. However, Satsuma and a number of other southern Hans were rather late and sen
t fewer troops than their requirement. Tokugawa made a note to deal with this southern problem after he had crushed Matsumae and driven the barbarians out; after all, he would have an army ready to do it with.

  Except, of course, it did not happen that way.

  Most commentators have attributed the Russian victory to technological superiority, which is at best an oversimplification and at worst utter nonsense. Even with regards to the direct armed clashes, training and experience played as big a part as the presence of firearms. The Japanese knew of muskets, but had deliberately banned them from the islands in the 17th century as part of the Sakoku policy, with the justification that the impersonal nature of firearms destroyed the honour and chivalry of the samurai code. This was quite a reasonable claim, as guns had indeed ultimately led to the end of the knight in Europe. But back when the early Tokugawa Shogunate had banned muskets, they had been imprecise, slow-loading matchlocks that could still be matched in destructive power by skilled longbowmen. Thus the ban had been realistic; it was possible to enforce it, defeating a small number of musket-armed men with the gunless regular army. However, the Russian infantry, though not the best-trained in the world, could fire one or two rounds a minute from comparatively far more accurate weapons – and a few of their elite snipers bore rifles, the very antithesis of a chivalrous view of warfare.