4
“SOFT GOLD”
In crossing the Urals, the Russians had “followed the route to empire,”68 like other European powers that crossed the seas. Instead of gold or silver, spices and other prized commodities which the Europeans wrung from their overseas colonies of India, Mexico, or Peru, it was “soft gold,” in the form of the world’s finest furs, which excited the avarice of the Russian adventurers. Indeed, like the United States and Canada, Siberia, writes one historian, “owed its opening and first exploitation... to the fur trade.”69 And its conquest was the eastern counterpart of the westward colonial march.
Furs had long been Russia’s most valuable export commodity. From the time of the first Russian settlements in ninth-century Kiev, the pursuit of fur-bearing animals had animated Russian expansion, with a progressive assumption of new hunting grounds to the north and east. Marco Polo’s thirteenth-century Travels had identified Russia as notable chiefly for possessing “the best and most beautiful” furs in the world; and from the Dnieper Basin, “the storehouse of the European trade” at that time, hunters and trappers had subsequently moved north to Novgorod, a region with a metropolitan center enjoying kontore (or commercial enclave) status in the Hanseatic League. North of Novgorod lay an enormous hinterland, extending through the basins of the Dvina and Pechora rivers to the White Sea. Trade centers developed at Kholmogory, Pustozersk, and elsewhere, and it was not uncommon for Russians and natives to meet at annual fairs. The products Russia obtained from the West in return for its pelts were to prove a powerful and continuous incentive for new exploration.
In Russia’s domestic economy, furs were also highly prized. Until the fifteenth century, they served as a currency of the realm (kuny, an early term for silver, meant “marten”), and all grand princes and tsars wore a bejeweled diadem that was sable-fringed. To the populace at large in a largely sub-Arctic clime, the value placed upon furs as an enveloping shield against the cold can only be measured by the value of life itself. Especially prized were sables “unripped, with bellies and feet,”70 but quality pelts of all kinds had been exported in such abundance by 1558 to Western Europe, as well as to Bukhara and Samarkand, that a domestic shortage resulted, with hats and coats having to be pieced together out of mangy remnants of rabbit and squirrel. The price of furs rose sharply; by the 1570s, foreign consumption (which helped finance the Livonian War) had led to the near extermination of fur-bearing animals in the North. Already a large proportion of the best pelts displayed on the Volga markets or at Solvychegodsk were obtained by barter with natives, who (as no American will be surprised to hear) proved pathetically willing to part with their precious merchandise in return for a couple of trinkets or cheap manufactured goods.
Siberia emerged as an answer to the Treasury’s prayers. For centuries, parallel to the Great Silk Road there had been another trade route – a Great Sable Road – that led through Southern Siberia and the Far East all the way to Byzantium. What Russia needed most, Siberia had, preeminently, and to take hold of it, the soldiers had first come in waves, followed by hunters and trappers in a “Fur Rush” as frantic as the Gold Rush of Alaska. With any luck a man could strike it rich in a season. A few good fox pelts alone, for example, could buy 50 acres of land, a decent cabin, five horses, ten head of cattle, and twenty sheep. Progressive exhaustion of the hunting grounds drove the hunters ever farther east, but in their wake would come farmers, and after the farmers, artisans and various state employees. The cornerstone of the conquest was the government’s imposition of a fur tribute, or yasak, on the subject tribes; and the form and early evolution of the colonial administration, its allocation of resources, military strategy and disposition of troops were all fundamentally governed by this end. Such a policy was to leave its predatory mark on Siberian society long after the fur trade had ceased to dominate its economic life.
Old Turkish in origin, the word yasak originally meant “government” or “regulation,” but came to be applied to an obligatory tribute surrendered by the conquered to their overlords in acknowledgment of their subjugation. A similar institution, the dan, had been imposed by the Mongols on the conquered Slavs, and in Siberia had been adopted before the coming of the Russians by some of the surviving Mongol-Tatar groups in their relations with weaker tribes. In the contested world of Siberia’s interracial and ethnic relations, the Russians, in a sense, represented “merely a change of masters,”71 and this facilitated the relatively swift acceptance of their rule.
As the Russians advanced from one area to the next, in the usual pattern a small, well-armed unit would descend upon some newfound community, assemble the village elders, take a couple of tribal leaders hostage and “imprison them in a rapidly built stronghold.”72 Their brethren were then invited to ransom them by paying tribute and taking an oath to become loyal, yasak-paying subjects of the tsar. Thereafter, hostages were taken regularly and kept under constant guard (sometimes in squalid conditions) to assure that annual payments were kept up. If the natives refused to deliver the furs, or produced too few, various punitive measures were tried, such as torching their settlements, confiscating livestock or reindeer, if they had any, or taking women and children as hostages, too.
In addition to yasak, the Russians exacted pominki – supposedly voluntary gifts in furs made in honor of the tsar. But like a tip automatically included in a bill, they became a part of the mandated tribute, and wherever natives (with an understandable lack of enthusiasm) failed to make the expected donations, their recalcitrance was treated as an act of incipient revolt.
The Russians did everything they could to impress upon the natives the inevitability of their authority. In what became almost a ritual of pacification and deceit, whenever a Russian commandant was posted to an occupied area, he summoned the tribal elders to his headquarters and received them in flattering yet intimidating fashion, with volleys of cannon and musketfire in salute. A feast followed, where he made a political speech celebrating the might and mercy of the Great White Tsar and promising a better regime than the one they had just endured.
Every native had to take an oath of allegiance to the tsar, and its form wherever possible was tailored to local beliefs. The supernatural powers in which the tribe believed were invoked, so that those who broke the oath could expect a terrible fate. The Ostyaks, for example, swore before a bear skin on which a piece of bread, a knife, and an ax had been placed. Whoever reneged could expect to choke to death on food, be cut to pieces in a fight, or be dismembered by a bear. Since, in the life of an Ostyak, these were common enough ways to die, evidence confirming the oath’s ineluctable power was not hard to find.
The Yakuts, with even less pleasant expectations, had to walk between the quartered parts of the carcass of a dog.
The manner and amount of the yasak varied, but in general it was set as high as the traffic would bear. Sometimes it was levied as an annual tax on individuals, sometimes upon a district as a whole. At the beginning of the century it ranged from five to twenty-two sables per man, but by the mid-1600s, the quota in Western Siberia had dropped to about three – reflecting the decimation of the sable population. All men from eighteen to fifty years of age were subject to the tax, and occasionally (though at a lesser rate) even dependents and adolescents. Regulations exempted “the old, the crippled, the blind, and the dead,”73 but attempts were made to tax even these by levies upon their “estates.” Sables were the prime pelt, but occasionally natives were allowed to substitute other valuable furs, according to a relative scale of value, in which so many fox, ermine, or squirrel were counted as equal to the number of sables required. Ivory or other items might also take their place.