A Note on Names and Dates
PART ONE
1. The Sleeping Land
2. Crossing the Divide
3. To The East of the Sun
4. “Soft Gold”
5. The Black Dragon River
6. “The Yermak of Kamchatka”
7. Administration
8. A Vanishing World
PART TWO
9. Mapping the Mind of a Tsar
10. The Great Northern Expedition
11. Russian America
PART THREE
12. “The Bottom of the Sack”
13. The New Frontier
14. The Iron Road to War
PART FOUR
15. The Red and The White
16. The Devil’s Workshop
17. Horizons
Source Notes
Bibliography
About the Author
CHRONOLOGY
1581
Yermak crosses the Urals
1582
Capture of Isker, capital of Sibir
1585
Founding of the first Russian town in Siberia
1591
First exiles arrive in Siberia
1639
Russians reach the Pacific Invasion of the Amur River Valley begins Semyon Dezhnev rounds the northeastern cape of Asia
1682
Peter the Great crowned (as co-tsar with half-brother, Ivan)
1689
Treaty of Nerchinsk
1697
Conquest of Kamchatka
1716
First crossing of the Sea of Okhotsk
1725
Vitus Bering’s First Expedition
1733
Bering’s Second Expedition
July 1741
Discovery of Alaska
1743
Conquest of Aleutian Islands begins
1783
First Russian colony founded on Kodiak Island, Alaska
1799
Russian-American Company receives its charter
1803
Alexander Baranov sets sail for Alaska
1803
Russia’s first around-the-world voyage
1804
Russia’s first mission to Japan
1812
Founding of Ross Colony, north of San Francisco
1815
Hawaiian Islands claimed for the tsar
1823
Monroe Doctrine proclaimed
1825
Decembrist revolt
1847
Nikolai Muravyov appointed governor-general of Siberia
1849
The navigability of the lower Amur discovered; Sakhalin found to be an island
1853
Outbreak of the Crimean War
1856
Muravyev claims the Amur for the tsar
1858
Treaty of Aigun
1860
Treaty of Peking and the founding of Vladivostok
1867
Russia sells Alaska to the United States
1891
Trans-Siberian Railway begun
1896
Chinese Eastern Railway begun
1898
Russia leases Port Arthur Exile system
1899
Exile system declared abolished
1904-5
Russo-Japanese War
Jan. 9, 1905
“Bloody Sunday”
1905
Treaty of Portsmouth
1908
Amur Railway begun
1914
Outbreak of World War I
Feb-Mar 1917
Fall of Nicholas II
Oct. 25, 1917
Bolsheviks seize power in Petrograd
March 1918
Treaty of Brest-Litovsk
April 1918
Beginning of the Allied Intervention and the Russian Civil War
May 1918
Uprising of the Czechoslovak Corps
June 1918
Beginning of “War Communism”
Nov. 1918
Alexander Kolchak proclaimed “Supreme Ruler of Russia”
Winter 1919-20
Defeat of Kolchak and other White armies
April 1920
Founding of Far Eastern Republic
March 1921
Adoption of New Economic Policy, or NEP
April 2, 1922
Joseph Stalin elected Party General Secretary
Oct. 1922
Japanese withdraw from Vladivostok
Oct. 1928
Inauguration of the First Five-Year Plan
Dec. 1929
End of NEP; beginning of collectivization
1930
Beginning of the Soviet concentration camp system, or Gulag
Dec. 1, 1934
Assassination of Sergey Kirov
1937-38
“Great Terror”
June 1941
Germany attacks Soviet Union
Aug. 8, 1945
Soviet Union declares war on Japan
Jan. 1953
“Doctors’ Plot”
March 5, 1953
Death of Stalin
Sep. 1953
Khrushchev elected Party First Secretary
1954
Construction begins on Bratsk Dam
Feb. 1956
Khrushchev’s secret report on Stalin’s crimes
Feb. 1958
Collective farm machine and tractor stations abolished
Nov. 1962
Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich published by Novy mir
Nov. 1963
Plans completed for a “Unified Energy System” for Siberia
Oct. 14, 1964
Khrushchev ousted; replaced by Brezhnev
Sep. 1966
Penal Code revised to facilitate a crackdown on dissidents
March 1969
Fighting on the Sino-Soviet frontier
Feb. 1974
Solzhenitsyn expelled from the Soviet Union after the Paris publication of his Gulag Archipelago
1974
Baikal-Amur Mainline, or BAM, revived
Nov. 1982
Death of Brezhnev; succeeded by Andropov
Feb. 1984
Death of Andropov; succeeded by Chernenko
March 1985
Death of Chernenko; succeeded by Gorbachev
Summer 1985
Perestroika and Glasnost launched
1991
Dissolution of the Soviet Union
A NOTE ON NAMES AND DATES
There are currently in use a variety of standard systems for the transliteration of Russian names into English. Nevertheless, each one seems to require its own exceptions. In this book the soft sign, usually represented by an apostrophe, has been omitted, and anglicized (if not always English) forms have been used for ease of recognition and pronunciation. The names of rulers, however, following a sensible convention, are always given in their English form – for example, Catherine (not Katerina) the Great.
Dates throughout (until the last few chapters) are given according to the Julian calendar in use in Western Europe until 1582, but in Russia from 1700 until January 26, 1918. In the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries that calendar was, respectively, ten, eleven, and twelve days behind the Gregorian calendar adopted by the West. (In Russian America, however, the lag was thirteen days until the delineation of the International Date Line in 1869.)
This desert soil
Wants not her hidden lustre, gems and gold.
– John Milton, Paradise Lost
If you would understand Russia, and interpret and forecast aright the march of great events, never forget that, for her, eastward the march of empire takes its way; that as the sap rises, as the sparks fly upward, as the tides follow the moon, so Russia goes to the snrise.