To protect their homesteading communities, some Cossacks had banded together under elected atamans, or chieftains, into semi-military confraternities along the Volga, the Dnieper, and the Don. They raided Tatar settlements or poached on Tatar land, preyed on Muscovite river convoys, and ambushed government army patrols sent out to catch them and “hang ‘em high.” The whole Cossack story, in fact, with its rugged individualism and worship of democracy, its “badmen,” posses, cattle rustlers, and so forth, bears comparison with the folkloric picture of the American Wild West. In the simplest and most obvious configuration, the Cossack represented the American pioneer, the Tatar the Red Indian, and the Russian Army the U.S. Cavalry.
The leader of one Cossack band was Vasily (Yermak) Timofeyovich, a third-generation bandit, and the most notorious Volga River pirate of his day. He was a powerfully built man of medium height, with a flat face, black beard, and curly hair; “his associates,”25 according to the Siberian Chronicles, “called him ‘Yermak,’ after a millstone. And in his military achievements he was great.”
Regular army patrols, with gallows erected on rafts, sought to enforce the tsar’s authority along the Volga trade route, and a series of expeditions designed to crush or subdue outlaw bands culminated in 1577 in a great sweep along both sides of the river. With the tsar’s cavalry in hot pursuit, some fled downstream to the Caspian Sea, others scattered across the steppes, and a third group under Yermak (so the story goes)§ raced up the Kama River into the wilds of Perm, where they were enthusiastically welcomed into the Stroganovs’ frontier guard.
A few years later, exceeding the tsar’s commission, the Stroganovs organized an expedition to secure the Kama frontier, bring part of Siberia within their mining monopoly, and to gain access to Siberian furs.
On September 1, 1581, a Cossack army of 840 men ¶ – including 300 Livonian prisoners of war, two priests, and a runaway monk impressed into service as a cook – assembled under Yermak on the banks of the Kama River near Orel Goroduk, south of Solikamsk. The official Chronicles tell us that the men set off “singing hymns to the Trinity, to God in his Glory, and to the most immaculate Mother of God,”26 but this is unlikely. Who knows what they sang; but their secular fellowship was given muscle by a rough code of martial law. Anyone guilty of insubordination was bundled head first into a sack, with a bag of sand tied to his chest, and “tipped into the river.”27 Some twenty grumblers were “tipped in” at the start.
Whether the Stroganovs voluntarily provided full assistance to the expedition, or were coerced into supplying its needs, remains a matter of dispute. But they always drove a hard bargain, and evidently intended their aid as a loan, “secured by indentures.”28 The Cossacks, rejecting this, agreed to compensate them from their spoils or, if they failed to return, to redeem their obligations “by prayer in the next world.” In after years, this sarcastic pledge would be recast as religious fervor, since the Siberian Chronicles portrayed Yermak’s mercenary incursion as a holy crusade against the infidel. “Kuchum,” one passage assures us, “led a sinful life. He had 100 wives, and youths as well as maidens, worshipped idols, and ate unclean foods.”29
Though the army (organized into disciplined companies, each with its own leader and flag) seemed hardly adequate to conquer a khanate, the odds against surviving were not as bad as many thought. While vastly outnumbered, the men were well led, well provisioned (with rye flour, biscuit, buckwheat, roasted oats, butter, and salt pig), and armed to the teeth. Indeed, it was their military superiority through firearms that would prove decisive, as it had for Cortez in Mexico and Pizarro in Peru.
In flat-bottomed rivercraft called doshchaniks (which could be worked by oars, towed from shore, or mounted with a sail), Yermak proceeded along a network of rivers to the foothills of the Urals, portaged 18 miles from the headwaters of the Serebryanka River to the banks of the Tagil (at a site known today as Bear Rock), and there pitched his winter camp. In the spring, floating his boats over the river’s shallows by damming the water with sails, he embarked downstream, swung into the Tura River, and for some distance penetrated unmolested into the heart of Kuchum’s domain. A skirmish at the mouth of the Tobol proved costly, but it was downstream where the river surged through a ravine that the Tatars laid their trap. Hundreds of warriors hid in the trees on either side of a barrier created with ropes and logs. The first boat struck the barrier at night. The Tatars attacked, but in the enveloping darkness most of Yermak’s flotilla managed to escape upstream. At a bend in the river, the Cossacks disembarked, made manikins out of twigs and fallen branches, and propped them up in the boats, with skeleton crews at the oars. The others, half-naked, crept round to surprise the Tatars from behind. At dawn, just as the flotilla floated into view, they opened fire.
The result was a complete rout.
Infuriated, Kuchum resolved to annihilate the intruders before they could reach his capital, even as Yermak knew he had to take the town before winter or his men would perish in the cold. Though so far victorious, their provisions were dwindling, while ambush and disease had already reduced the expeditionary force by half. Still they pressed on, past the meadowlands whitening with hoar frost, and the hardening saltmarshes glazed with ice, toward the tall wooden ramparts of Isker.
The decisive confrontation came in late October, at the confluence of the Tobol and Irtysh rivers, where the Tatars had erected a palisade at the base of a hill. As the Cossacks charged, they fired their muskets into the densely massed defenders with devastating effect. Many of the Tatars, conscripted by force, at once deserted; more fled as the palisade was stormed. This gave the Cossacks a chance. In hand-to-hand combat, the battle raged till evening, 107 Cossacks falling before they prevailed.
On that fateful day, Kuchum is said to have had a vision: “The skies burst open and terrifying warriors with shining wings appeared from the four cardinal points. Descending to the earth they encircled Kuchum’s army and cried to him: ‘Depart from this land, you infidel son of the dark demon, Mahomet, because now it belongs to the Almighty.’ ”30
A few days later, when the Russians came to Isker itself, they found it deserted, with few of its fabled riches left behind. Instead (for which they were probably more grateful), the men discovered stocks of barley, flour, and dried fish.
Immediately there were scattered defections to the Russian side as Yermak began accepting tribute from former subjects of the khan. But to consolidate his position he needed reinforcements and artillery, and to obtain them he despatched Ivan Koltso (also a renowned bandit, and his second-in-command) with fifty others to Moscow. Traveling on skis and sleds drawn by reindeer, they took the fabled “wolf-path”31 shortcut over the Urals (up the Tavda River to Cherdyn) disclosed to them by a Tatar chieftain who acted as their guide.