Yet all was not obscure. The territory had been mentioned in the ancient Russian Chronicles – chronological records kept by monastics from the beginning of Russian history – and a fragment of the region (known as Yugra,20 meaning “the land of the Ostyaks,” a local tribe) had long been familiar to Russian merchants trading in furs with tribes along the Ob. In 1236, a certain itinerant Brother Julian alluded to a “land of Sibur, surrounded by the Northern Sea,”21 where natives scalped their victims; and in 1376, St. Stephen of Perm had bravely established a church in the Kama River Valley (still west of the Urals), where a former missionary had been skinned alive. As early as 1455, the state began to give the missionaries military backing, and in 1484 soldiers swept along the frontier. A number of tribal chieftains were captured and a treaty exacted from them that acknowledged Muscovite suzerainty and entailed the payment of tribute. Subsequently the Tatar khanate of western Sibir, a semi-feudal state formed just east of the Urals in the 1420s, when the Mongol Empire was breaking up, had come within the orbit of Muscovite political and military relations. Dominated by the Siberian Tatars, who were descended from one of the Mongol fighting groups (or “hordes”), the khanate included various Turkic-Moslem, Finnic, and Samoyedic tribes and vaguely encompassed a territory that extended east to the Irtysh River and south to the Ishim steppes.
In 1555, the khan acknowledged the suzerainty of Ivan the Terrible, who promptly if prematurely incorporated “Tsar of Sibir” into the tedious roll call of honorific titles appended to his name. Meanwhile, Muscovites had become familiar with the northern sea route from Arkhangelsk to the Urals at their northern end. However, it was not until after the capture of Kazan (another Mongol succession state on the middle Volga) that a route into the khanate was opened from the south. Yet no one knew that beyond the Ob, Greater Siberia comprised the whole of northern Asia between the Urals and the Pacific Ocean. This was as unimaginable to the most daring Russian explorer as the Pacific Ocean itself had been to Balboa and his men.
Although a coherent, if loosely confederated, state, bolstered by a trade that reached along ancient caravan routes from Russia to western China, the khanate of Sibir had been living on borrowed time. As the might of its Slavic neighbor grew, Sibir was also continually torn within by strife between the Mohammedan Tatars (who had converted to Islam in 1272) and other ethnic groups. These groups in turn were plagued by intertribal hostilities (chiefly between the Ostyaks and Voguls), while from the khanate’s founding there had also been a dynastic struggle among the Tatar nobility between the Sheibanids (descendants of Genghis Khan) and the Taibugids, heirs of a local prince. Nevertheless, until 1552 at least, Sibir had little to fear from the Russians because between them stood the Tatar khanate of Kazan. But in 1552, that buffer state fell to Ivan the Terrible’s armies, and three years later the ruling Taibugid prince, Yediger, prudently agreed to pay Ivan an annual tribute in furs. Partly as a result of that unpopular decision, Yediger was deposed and killed in 1563 at his capital of Isker, on the banks of the Irtysh, by Khan Kuchum, who claimed descent from Genghis Khan. Kuchum surrounded himself with a palace guard composed of Uzbeks, purged the local leadership of opponents, and with the aid of mullahs from Bukhara tried to impose Islam on the restless pagan tribes. In 1571, with Russia apparently in the throes of its own dissolution, he renounced the tribute to Moscow, and two years later sent a punitive expedition against the Ostyaks in Perm (west of the Urals) who had recognized Russian suzerainty. Emboldened by Moscow’s lack of response, in 1579 he also intercepted and killed a Muscovite envoy en route to Central Asia.
During the long Livonian War (1557-81), in which Ivan the Terrible tried to batter his way to the Baltic, the government had entrusted the defense of its eastern frontier and Urals dominions to the Stroganovs, a powerful family of industrial magnates and financiers. Descended – according to legend – from a christened Tatar by the name of Spiridon, who had introduced the abacus into Russia, their wealth was founded on salt, ore, grain, and furs (the mainstays of the economy), and their assets and properties, accumulated through shrewd dealing over the course of two centuries, extended from Ustyug and Vologda to Kaluga and Ryazan. They traded with the English and Dutch on the Kola Peninsula, established commercial links with Central Asia, and had foreign agents who traveled on their behalf as far afield as Antwerp and Paris.
Although their enterprise was originally centered on their saltworks at Solvychegodsk22 (Russia’s “Salt Lake City”), a rapid series of land grants secured the family’s absolute commercial domination of the Russian northeast. The charter of 1558 (which gave them access to much of Perm, on the Upper Kama River almost to the Urals) served as a model for the rest. In each case, in return for long-term tax-exempt status for themselves and their colonists, the Stroganovs pledged to fund and develop industries, break the soil for agriculture, train and equip a frontier guard, prospect for ore and mineral deposits, and mine whatever was found. They enjoyed jurisdiction over the local population, and had the right to protect their holdings with garrisoned stockades and forts equipped with artillery. Thus, a lengthening chain of military outposts and watchtowers soon dotted the river route to the east.
As colonization advanced to the foot of the Urals, the Stroganovs endeavored to subject to their authority a number of native tribes, such as the Voguls and the Ostyaks, who lived on both sides of the mountains. The natives fought back; destroyed crops; attacked villages, saltworks, and flour mills; and massacred settlers on the Urals’ western slopes. Soldiers were sent in to quell these uprisings, but they could not long be spared from the tsar’s beleaguered western fronts.
Daring prospectors had meanwhile located deposits of silver and iron ore east of the Urals on the Tura River, and it was supposed, not erroneously, that the same district contained sulfur, lead, and tin. Scouts had also seen the rich pastures by the Tobol River where the Tatar cattle grazed. In 1574, the Stroganovs petitioned for a new charter “to drive a wedge between the Siberian Tatars and the No-gays”23 (a tribe to the south) by means of fortified settlements along the Tobol and Tura rivers in return for license to exploit the resources of the land. Moscow, in reaction to Kuchum’s aggression, obliged; and in a singular measure (impelled by the manpower drain of the Livonian War*), the Stroganovs were also permitted to enlist runaways or outlaws in their militia, and to organize and finance a campaign, spearheaded by “hired Cossacks and artillery,”24 against Kuchum “to make him pay the tribute.” Those who volunteered for the assignment (according to the government’s unblushing recommendation) were to be promised the wives and children of natives as their concubines and slaves.
By “Cossacks” the government meant independent frontiersmen who staked out a life for themselves along the fringes of the empire. Some were solitary wanderers or half-breeds, others belonged to a turbulent border population of tramps, runaways, religious dissenters, itinerant workers, bandits, and adventurers who had been driven into the no-man’s-land of forest or steppe by taxation, famine, debt, repression, and hope of refuge from the long, strong arm of Muscovite law. In the wild country, where they mingled and clashed with the Tatars, adopted Tatar terminology and ways, and gradually displaced certain tribes, they carved out for themselves a new and independent life. In this they lived up to their name, as derived from the Turkish kazak, meaning “rebel” or “freeman.”