On April 13, 1605, however, he suddenly died, either of poison or a stroke. Within a few weeks his wife and son had been murdered and the Kremlin stormed. The cycle of bloodshed revolved at a furious speed. Within a year, the False Dmitry had been toppled by Vasily Shuisky, a noble with the right pedigree but without popular support. New uprisings and foreign invasions followed, and then another pretender, backed by the Poles, advanced on Moscow in June 1607. That confrontation led to Shuisky’s deposition and the installation of a Polish tsar. The partition of Muscovy appeared imminent. At this juncture, Russian popular armies arose in the north and east, and, instilled with patriotic fervor, went forward to victory. On October 25, 1612, the Polish garrison in the Kremlin capitulated and the foreigners were driven out. Then on February 21, 1613, a national assembly elected a new tsar – the sixteen-year-old Mikhail Romanov, grand-nephew of Anastasia, Ivan the Terrible’s beloved first wife. The Time of Troubles – twelve years of unremitting misery – had come to an end.
The upheaval had thrown the Russian program of conquest into disarray. Events in the “mother country” inevitably affected its progress, since the Siberian frontiersmen – however independent, enterprising, and hardy their demanding environment required them to be – ultimately also depended on Moscow for administrative, logistical, and other support. As the nation struggled to survive, the Siberian garrisons, left more or less to themselves, were steadily depleted by disease, starvation, and death. The natives, seeing their opportunity, made several attempts at a coordinated uprising, the most powerful coming in 1608 when “a Tatar Joan of Arc” by the name of Princess Anna of Koda almost succeeded in uniting the entire native population of Western Siberia in revolt. Still another attempt was made in 1612 to reestablish the old khanate of Sibir “as it had been in the time of Kuchum.” Only at the eleventh hour was the plot betrayed and ten of its ringleaders rounded up and hanged.
Although Russian occupation of the Ob-Irtysh Basin had increased the size of Russia by more than a third, Siberia was still modestly enough understood as a geographical entity in Moscow to be used as a political bargaining chip. Boris Godunov had attempted to bribe an influential boyar into supporting him against the False Dmitry by offering him “the Kingdoms of Kazan, Astrakhan, and all Siberia,”53 and the Second False Dmitry had evidently promised to reward his brother-in-law (a powerful Polish noble) with “the whole land of Siberia” for his aid. Such geographical vagueness justly occasioned a scene in Pushkin’s drama about Godunov’s life in which Boris actually failed to recognize a map he was shown as that of his own dominions. Yet scarcely had the Ob-Irtysh Basin been secured before the Russian advance into the next great river valley, the Yenisey, began.
The Russians ascended the eastern tributaries of the first, crossed a low plateau to streams flowing into the second, and by 1619 had gained all the important river routes and portages that connected the two. At such junctures they immediately built blockhouses or forts to subject the natives to tribute and to bring them “under the tsar’s high hand.” Expeditions started from Tomsk and Ketsk in the south and Mangazeya in the north, converging on the river valley from both directions. On the lower Yenisey, the Russians met the Tungus, and on the upper portions of the river, the Buryats, whom they’d never heard of before. The latter inhabited a region rich in furs, practiced animal husbandry, and were rumored to grow crops and have access to silver – a combination certain to draw the Russians on. The Tungus tribes east of the Yenisey, and the Buryats around Lake Baikal, both fought hard to prevent the establishment of bases in their territory, only to behold with dismay the founding of Yeniseysk in 1619 (where the Angara and Yenisey unite), of Krasnoyarsk in 1627, astride magnificent cliffs of red-colored marl, and Bratsk on the Angara in 1631. On the upper Yenisey, however, the Russians also met the staunch resistance of steppe nomads (the Kirghiz and the Kalmucks) whose homelands bordered Siberia in the south, and whose unyielding hostility was not to be effectively dealt with until a solidly fortified line was eventually established (over the course of two centuries) along the southern frontier.
Meanwhile, Russian mariners had developed the sea route from Arkhangelsk to Mangazeya, and there bartered goods with the local Ostyaks and Samoyeds for furs. As this “fabulous polar city,” located a few miles above the Arctic Circle, prospered and grew, it attracted more and more traders, who braved the treacherous waters of the Kara Sea. “Hundreds of thousands of sable, ermine, silver and blue fox skins,”54 one writer tells us, “and countless tons of precious mammoth and walrus ivory” were shipped each year from Mangazeya to Europe, in an illicit trade begun during the Time of Troubles that eluded the government’s control. Silk, porcelain, and costly fabrics also found their way through middlemen to Mangazeya from Central Asia and China, turning the city into “a virtual Baghdad of Siberia, where big commercial deals were celebrated at fabulous feasts that lasted for days, and that featured the best European wines and local delicacies like sturgeon, caviar, mushrooms, berries, and venison and other game.”55 By the time stability had been restored in Moscow, reports of Siberia’s vast wealth in furs had spread far and wide, and inevitably attracted the cupidity of European powers seeking to acquire new colonies. The government began to fear that foreign agents might try to trade directly with the natives, and perhaps even attempt an armed invasion through the Taz estuary to seize the whole of northwestern Siberia as a rich colonial prize. At the same time, Mangazeya had aroused the envy of inland merchants working out of the Urals, Tyumen, and Tobolsk, who saw it siphoning off commerce that would otherwise have come their way. As a result, the government closed the sea route to Mangazeya in 1619 – forbidding its use even by Russians, lest they betray it to foreigners – and decreed that all who disobeyed were to be “put to the hardest possible death, and all their homes and families destroyed branch and root.”56 Navigational markings were torn up, surveillance posts established along the coast to intercept and kill all who attempted to get through, and a coastal fort built on the Yamal Peninsula, commanding the portage between the Ob Gulf and the Kara Sea. Maps were even falsified to depict Novaya Zemlya as a peninsula rather than an island – at some cost to later mariners who would rely upon them as nautical guides.
Mangazeya eventually declined, the rich merchants departed, and in 1643 its administrative apparatus was moved to Turukhansk – known for a time as “New Mangazeya” – founded at the mouth of the Turukhan River, a tributary of the Yenisey. In 1678, without official explanation, the city was burned to the ground. Among local Samoyed tribesmen, its ruins were known as Tagarevyhard, or “destroyed town,”57 and the very site, “swallowed up by the tundra,” was not to be rediscovered for almost three hundred years.
Perhaps more than any other settlement in the early conquest, Mangazeya lent luster to Siberia’s name, epitomizing the enormous wealth the new colony possessed. In 1632, a former military governor of the district, inspired by the bounty to which Mangazeya had given access, exhorted the tsar to press on from the Yenisey to a conquest of the Lena River Basin, “to the east of the sun.”58