In the thirteenth century, the Mongol cavalry of Genghis Khan (the legendary warrior who united scattered Mongol tribes under his mighty rule) charged into the Transbaikal and swept westward across Siberia, pillaging the local tribes and wreaking havoc on their way of life. Within a short time, the dominion of the Mongols had been extended over much of Asia, including parts of China and India, and over all of Siberia (except the extreme north). Continuing their conquest westward, the Mongols passed the southern spur of the Altai Mountains to the plains of Central Asia and drove down into “the Land of the Seven Rivers and the Thousand Springs.”14 Overrunning Russia (at the time made up of a number of feudal principalities), their immediate legacy was one of horror and blood. After the capture of Ryazan, one contemporary wrote: “The prince, with his mother, wife, sons, the boyars, and the inhabitants, without regard to age or sex, were slaughtered with savage cruelty; some were impaled, some shot at with arrows for sport, some were flayed or had nails or splinters of wood driven under their nails. Priests were roasted alive, and nuns and maidens ravished in the churches before their relatives. No eye remained open to weep for the dead.”15 In 1240, advancing toward Europe, the Mongols captured Kiev, razed the city to the ground, and subjected the people to indiscriminate massacre. Only the death of Ogdai, Genghis Khan’s successor, brought the onslaught to an end. In the administrative division of the Mongol Empire, Western Siberia and Russia both belonged to the Golden Horde; but its imperium was too decentralized to last. Russia eventually freed itself from the Mongol yoke in 1480, and the Horde’s succession states were born.
At the time the Russians prepared to cross the Urals – the long if attenuated divide between Europe and northern Asia – 140-odd native peoples had already made Siberia their home. Pastoral nomads roamed the southwestern steppes with their herds of cattle and sheep; forest nomads hunted and fished in the taiga; and in the northern tundra, reindeer nomads drove their great herds along fixed routes. Only the most elementary agriculture was practiced (in the Amur River Valley), while in the extreme northeast were primitive tribes who hunted wild reindeer or lived off whales, walruses, and seals along the shores of the Bering and Okhotsk seas. Some of the tribes roaming the steppes and forests had emerged from the Iron Age and developed links with China and Central Asia, while the inhabitants of the tundra and Arctic regions belonged to Stone Age tribes. Most of the natives (numbering altogether about a quarter of a million people) belonged to five broad ethnic, linguistic groups: Turkic, Manchu-Tungus, Finno-Ugrian, Mongol, and the so-called “Paleosiberian,” of predominantly Mongoloid stock. The Paleosiberians (the descendants of the prehistoric inhabitants) were principally the Chukchi, Yukaghir, Koryak, Asiatic Eskimo, and Kamchadal in the northeast; the “Yenisey Ostyak,” or Ket, on the lower Yenisey; the Gilyak (or Nivkh) on the Amur and Sakhalin; and the mysteriously Caucasian, “hairy” Ainu in southern Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands.
Most Paleosiberians tended to be short and compact, with broad, flat, beardless faces, prominent cheekbones, small, rather sunken eyes, and nasal cavities that were exceptionally narrow, apparently to protect their lungs from large draughts of freezing air. The physical, cultural, and anthropological links between these people and Native Americans are regarded by anthropologists as incontrovertible, and it is believed that perhaps 25,000 years ago Siberians crossed over from Asia to America by way of an isthmus connecting the two continents across the Bering Sea.
From the third century on, Neosiberian tribes began to join the aboriginal inhabitants – the Finno-Ugrian Voguls, Ostyaks, and Samoyeds; Turkic tribes (like the Yakuts and Tatars); the Manchu-Tungus; and the Mongol-Buryats. The semi-nomadic Ostyaks and Voguls inhabited the forests and marshes of the Ob-Irtysh Basin; the reindeer-herding Samoyed roamed the Yamal and Taimyr peninsulas and the tundra west of the Yenisey; the Yakuts inhabited the Lena Valley, with settlements along the headwaters of the Yana, Indigirka, and Kolyma rivers; and the Tungus were found from the Yenisey Valley east to the Pacific Ocean. Cousin to the Tungus were the Lamuts on the shores of the Sea of Okhotsk, and the Goldi and the Daurs in the Amur River Valley. Finally, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the Buryats had established themselves in areas of steppeland around the southern end of Lake Baikal.
Aside from the Moslem Tatars, all the peoples of Siberia were pagans, and belonged to clans or other pretribal kinship groups, or to tribes linked by reciprocal marriage relations. The Buryats and Yakuts (both descendants of Central Asian pastoral nomads) were easily the most advanced; they kept cattle and horses, and had clan chiefs. But the reindeer-herding peoples had no institutionalized hierarchy and congregated regularly, as small family bands, only for councils and seasonal rituals, or to share the fruits of their hunt. Yet it often happened that “all the efforts of man were not enough to wrench from raw nature the necessary bit of food.”16 In the far north, the domestication of the reindeer compelled a wandering life, as the Samoyeds, Koryaks, Chukchi, and other tundra nomads followed their great herds from place to place, pausing only for so long as it took the animals to paw up the snow for moss around their encampment. None led lives more lonely than the Koryak of northern Kamchatka, who roamed over the great moss-covered steppes, as one observer put it, “high up among extinct volcanic peaks, 4,000 feet above the sea, enveloped half the time in drifting clouds, and swept by frequent storms of rain and snow.”17
Endnotes
* To compound the mysteries of this lake (where chronology, in a sense, has been reversed), in 1991 it was discovered that it was actually an ocean in the making, with hydrothermal vents, like those in mid-ocean ridges, along its floor.
† The southern Kuriles are still disputed territory, of course, and may or may not be considered part of Siberia; eventually, they will probably be ceded to Japan.
2
CROSSING THE DIVIDE
Although by the end of the sixteenth century, because of explorations east and west, a large part of the world had been intelligibly mapped, Siberia had escaped the broad sphere of Renaissance discoveries because the ice-laden seas along its northern coast had proved impassable to marintaimyrers searching for China, or “Cathay.” Contemporary maps labeled northern Asia as “Great Tatary,” but gave it perfunctory dimensions without geographical detail, so that it lingered as a cartographical convention from the ancient division of the landmass of the world into the three distinct continents of Europe, Africa, and Asia. The Ob River (thought to have its source in the Aral Sea) represented the eastern limit of the known world as discovered from the west, and whatever Great Tatary held in store was imaginatively (if decoratively) depicted by mapmakers according to the stories or legends they had heard. Their arbitrary typography was filled in with images of Asiatic nomads amid camels and tents, or showed them worshipping sundry heathen idols or pillars of stone. Accompanying inscriptions occasionally identified them as cannibals, or such as “doe eate serpentes, wormes, and other filth,”18 though other, less shocking customs ascribed to them were simply borrowed from what was already known of certain Central Asian tribes. Plausible conjecture, however, indiscriminately mingled with abiding notions of an other-worldly, strange, and mythological land that extended even to the sunrise – “to the east of the sun, to the most-high mountain Karkaraur, where dwell the one-armed, one-footed folk.”19