The Muscovite invasion of Siberia was a catastrophe for the native peoples. They fought back, but Muscovy prevailed for the same reasons the Spanish, Portuguese, French, and English prevailed in the Americas: the invaders enjoyed military superiority; they were merciless; and they brought with them diseases—especially smallpox, tuberculosis, measles, and influenza—against which the native peoples had no immunity. Once they had conquered a group, the Muscovites and the Cossacks exacted tribute in the form of furs, particularly the much-prized sable, black fox, and marten. When the animals were trapped out, which occurred in the more accessible areas by the end of the 1600s, the invaders switched to requiring monetary payments.
From time to time the tsarist government denounced the exploitation of Siberian tribes, but it could do little to stop it. Officials working thousands of miles from the capital cast in their lot with the exploiters, selling trade goods at exorbitant prices, hiking taxes, spreading disease, hunting fur-bearing animals to extinction, chopping down forests, and polluting waterways. When Muscovites began settling permanently in Siberia, the displacement of the native peoples began.
The gruesome parallels between the conquest of the Americas and that of Siberia extend to the consequences for women. James Forsyth has written, “Wherever the Muscovite invaders went, it was women and girls that they seized first of all in their assaults upon the native inhabitants.”33 Initially some Siberians permitted the newcomers to have sex with native women, because this was an accepted gesture of hospitality. But soon they found that the conquerors considered themselves entitled to such favors. Muscovites and Cossacks also grabbed women and children as spoils of war, holding them hostage to compel tribes to submit, enslaving them, or even trading them for furs. When the invaders built settlements, they forced captive women to do the work of wives. This began a process of native women leaving their communities to settle among the Europeans and give birth to children with ties to both cultures. These women may have played the role of cultural intermediaries, helping to ease tensions between the conquerors and conquered. Because many Cossacks and Russians soon moved on, native wives could also find themselves abandoned or passed to other men. All these practices, from rape to intermarriage, occurred in the western hemisphere as well.34
Native men who resisted were often killed; those who survived suffered a continuing assault on their masculinity. First their standing as warriors was diminished by their inability to fight off the conquerors. Then they were forced to trap furs for the Muscovites, which left them less time to provide for their families. Some of the native men became dependent on the conquerors for food because their traditional lands had been despoiled or claimed by Muscovite settlers. The result was a profound demoralization that expressed itself in alcoholism and apathy.
The conquerors could not devastate all of Siberia, for the land was vast and the people were resourceful. Along the southern frontier, the tribes of the Lake Baikal region were able to limit the damage because they were more numerous, organized, and prosperous than the smaller peoples of the north. They were also effective soldiers, and their long-standing contacts with Central Asia and China may have strengthened their immunity to the diseases the Muscovites brought. Some of the more ferocious peoples, such as the Chukchis of the Pacific coast, managed to keep the Muscovites at bay for more than a century. Others, such as the nomadic Tungus, headed off into remote terrain that was harder for the conquerors to penetrate. By 1700, although Muscovite rule was established in Siberia and immigrants from Muscovy made up at least half the population, there were still great tracts where native peoples pursued their traditional ways of life relatively undisturbed.
Extraordinary Women in Troubled Times
The history of Muscovy is pockmarked by upheavals. The worst of these was the Time of Troubles (1598–1613), a period of political and economic instability that climaxed in a vicious civil war. A much shorter and less catastrophic uprising occurred in the 1670s when a former slave, Stenka Razin, led an army of Cossacks, peasants, and urban poor up the Volga in an attempt to overthrow the government. Even as Razin’s army surged along the river, moreover, a religious dispute was producing fiery confrontations between tsarist officials and defiant members of a new sect called the Old Believers. In all these conflicts, a few women played leading parts.
It had long been common across Europe for women to join in riots, rebellions, and wars. Muscovy was no exception to this rule. In Pskov in 1581, townswomen defended the city against Polish troops by firing artillery at the attackers, pelting them with rocks, and finally, in the words of a chronicler, “hurl[ing] themselves against the remaining enemy troops in the tower, fighting with all the arms given them by God.” Women also joined Stenka Razin’s revolt. Most did the chores usually assigned to women by armies: they cooked and nursed the sick and injured. A few also fought. The most famous of the female warriors was Alena Arzamasskaia, a nun from the town of Arzamas east of Moscow, who ran away from her convent in 1669 and, dressed like a man, led a unit in Razin’s army. Her fate echoes that of a more famous female soldier, Joan of Arc: she was captured, tortured, convicted of being a bandit and impersonating a man, and burned on a pyre. Practicing witchcraft did not condemn one to death by fire in Muscovy, but participating in a major uprising against the tsar did.35
In the politics of the elite during Muscovy’s warring times, women took the traditional parts of advisers, promoters of the fortunes of their menfolk, and pawns. Of the handful of women prominent enough to make it into the accounts of observers and participants, two deserve special mention, one because she was a pawn of unusual resourcefulness and the other because she was a founder of the largest schismatic movement in Russian history.
Deeply involved in politics during the Time of Troubles were three tsaritsy: Irina Godunova, wife of the Tsar Fedor and sister of Boris Godunov, the regent from 1584 to 1598 and tsar from 1598 to 1605; Maria Godunova, Boris’s wife; and Marfa, the last wife of Ivan IV. Of the three, Marfa had to be the most adroit, because her situation was the most perilous. She relied on the rooted reverence for royal women and also on her own political skills to navigate the troubled waters she first entered when, as a girl named Maria, she married Ivan the Terrible.
That marriage went better than she might have expected, given Ivan’s predilection for disposing of his wives. Maria was his seventh; he had exiled two of her predecessors and was rumored to have poisoned three. His first wife may have been poisoned by others. Maria managed to outlive her murderous husband, but when he died in 1584, he left her in an uncertain situation. Their marriage violated church law, which permitted only three marriages in a lifetime, so Maria was not legally tsaritsa in the eyes of the church, and her son Dmitri had a questionable claim to the throne. Godunov, the regent, decided to exile the problematic mother and son to Uglich, a town far from Moscow and its court politics. In 1591, Dmitri suddenly died. Godunov sent investigators to determine the cause of death; they reported back the unlikely tale that the boy had accidentally cut his own throat. When Tsaritsa Maria protested that her son had been poisoned on Godunov’s orders, the regent commanded her to become a nun. Upon taking her vows, Maria became the nun Marfa. Seven years later, Tsar Fedor died without heirs and Godunov became tsar.