To economize on the expense of expeditions, hunters often formed into cartels of anywhere from six to sixty men. Standard equipment included snowshoes, a small sled harnessed with dogs, cooking utensils, a sack of flour, a birchbark vessel containing the leavening for bread, bedding, weapons, bait, and traps. Each hunter also carried a long staff, like a ski pole, with a spadelike upper end for shoveling snow. Operating out of winter huts, they blazed their trails by making notches in the trees, prepared pit traps baited with fish or meat, and tracked their quarry in the snow with nets and dogs. Upon their return they inspected the traps, skinned whatever sables they had caught, and smoked the pelts. Sometimes they stored them in hollowed-out logs sealed with ice and buried in the snow. Only the most expert marksmen could prevent the fur from being scarred, and few could match the natives at hitting the sable with an arrow in the nose. Since sables lived either in holes in the ground or in nests built in trees, hunters also tried to catch them in their lairs. In one technique, a hole just big enough to admit the sable’s head was cut into a tree trunk, and a log was connected by a balance to the bait. When the sable rose up on its hind legs and put its head into the hole, the heavy log was released and fell, crushing the skull – “without injuring in the slightest the valuable parts of his skin.”81
The conquest of Siberia proceeded from one hunting ground to the next, as the fur resources in each gave out. This alone explains why explorers and pioneers sometimes rushed with such impetuosity to the farthest extremities of the territory, for it was there that the fur-bearing animals often abounded, and native populations resided whose skill could be utilized in the kill. Far from being alarmed at finding a large native population in a given area, the Russians rejoiced, because of the greater fur tax their subjugation would produce. Under Russian tutelage, natives began using systematic hunting techniques, while animals were routed from their accustomed habitats by advancing settlements as forest land was cleared. The uncontrolled hunting took a terrible toll. When the Russians first encountered Tungus on the Yenisey, sable were so plentiful among them that the natives even used the pelts to pad their skis. And around the mouth of the Olekma River in the Lena Basin, hunters in a single expedition could snare up to three hundred sables apiece. By midcentury, quality sables were no longer found in Western Siberia at all, and by 1627 along the lower Tunguska and Yenisey rivers they had been “hunted out.” By 1649 along the upper Lena, only a handful of sables remained, and by century’s end it was exceptional to find the animal around Yakutsk. As sables disappeared, other creatures were hunted more rapaciously – especially black and polar fox, beaver, ermine, and squirrel.
However, the Russians moved on to Eastern Siberia before the fur resources of Western Siberia were completely exhausted, with the result that parts of Western Siberia were not to be reconnoitered until long after Eastern Siberia had been crossed.
Throughout Siberia, the Russians consolidated their hold. In the army of occupation, professional soldiers made up the core, armed with muskets, swords, battleaxes, and pikes. Supplementing these were the “Litva” (literally, Lithuanians), a kind of Siberian Foreign Legion, as one scholar remarks, consisting of men of many nationalities – Germans, Swedes, Poles, Lithuanians, White Russians, and Ukrainians – by and large recruited from among prisoners of war. Ultimately more important than either were the Cossacks – not the freebooting type that belonged to Yermak’s band, but town Cossacks or frontiersmen in state service, of whom there were about one thousand in 1625, and twice that number by 1631. These irregular troops were organized “entirely at the initiative of the government”82 and were salaried members of the military servitor class. Others, called “village Cossacks,” held tax-free land as agricultural colonists but were expected to defend the ordinary peasants they lived among. Indeed, the remnants of Yermak’s own band had eventually merged with the soldiers, trappers, prisoners of war, and others enlisted to police the borders and construct forts and fortified towns. They received payment for their service in money, grain, or land, and, like gentry soldiers holding service tenure estates, had to provide their own weapons and equipment when called to arms. In civilian life, they served as local policemen, firemen, couriers, carters, postmasters, customs officials, guides, or in whatever way their Siberian service required.
Whereas the regular soldiery figured most prominently in the initial phase of the conquest, their service, under increasingly raw frontier conditions, became more like that of the Cossacks, and by the middle of the century the two could hardly be told apart. Promyshlenniks (traders and hunters) also took on state assignments, and by the very nature of their occupation became explorers and conquerors. Their reconnaissance and hunting forays (especially in Eastern Siberia) often anticipated expeditions by regular troops, and by turning up promising areas for exploitation, prepared the way for new conquests, in which they also played a part. In an effort to control the sometimes turbulent and renegade elements of the population that made their way across the Urals, and to turn their energy to positive account, the government also elicited volunteers from among runaway serfs, ex-convicts, and so on, particularly in more remote regions, where manpower was in short supply. Native auxiliaries helped fill out the ranks.
At various strategic locations the Russians established strongholds to rivet their gains. The typical citadel was located on a high riverbank or at a portage site, surrounded by a timbered stockade with sharpened stakes. It also had parapets and embrasures for marksmen, a gate and corner towers 20 to 30 feet high, was often equipped with artillery and surrounded by a moat. Enlarged into an ostrog, or fort, it served as the administrative center of a given territory, both for the collection of tribute and as a military base. There were also smaller forts (ostrozheks) that usually consisted of a simple rectangular wooden stockade; and winter blockhouses (zimoves) built in the forests, on the tundra, or on the shores of lakes as shelters for those on assignment to outlying or peripheral zones. By midcentury, a network of such outposts spanned the Siberian taiga from the Urals to the Pacific Ocean.
In the beginning, the Russians were hugely outnumbered, and around Yakutsk, for example, in 1676, there were an estimated 16,687 natives, as compared to about 670 Russians under arms. Some native groups, however, were hardly more than large family units guided by elders; others led a nomadic life, and were unable to organize a continuous defense of the lands they roamed. And all were primitively armed. Even when their guerrilla warfare tactics made masterful use of local terrain, the warriors lacked military discipline in the Western sense, seldom acted as a unit under the unquestioned command of a leader, and in battle emphasized the individual and his opportunities for personal distinction. This brought glory to their souls, but inevitable defeat at Russian hands.
The Russians, though fewer, were a generally united force, “socially and racially homogeneous,” and aided and abetted by a mighty state power. Their possession of firearms, moreover, made it possible for small bands of men (seldom numbering more than one hundred) to dominate whole districts hundreds of square miles in extent. The Russians were presumptively aware of their superiority, yet in disparaging the capacity of the natives to resist, they were really no different from the Spanish conquistadores who recognized at once the overwhelming technological advantage they enjoyed. Christopher Columbus himself had a premonition of easy triumph from the moment of his landing in the New World. Shortly after he disembarked at Hispaniola, he noted in his journal on October 14, 1492, “With fifty men [the natives] can all be subjugated and made to do what is required.”83 And he thought a fort would be superfluous.