Back in Moscow, however, the expedition was in disgrace. No one yet knew of Yermak’s achievement, but they knew that in retaliation for his invasion, the Voguls had been rampaging through the Upper Kama Valley, burning Russian settlements to the ground. Evidently on the very same day ** Yermak set out, Cherdyn was attacked and neighboring villages burned. This had prompted the military governor of Perm to accuse the Stroganovs of leaving the frontier undefended, since in putting their expeditionary force together they had apparently stripped the frontier guard. And in a letter dated November 16, 1582, the tsar bitterly reproved the industrialists for “disobedience amounting to treason.”32 Moreover, in the west, as Ivan’s Livonian War was drawing to its humiliating close, Narva had just fallen to the Swedes and the Poles were tightening their blockade on Pskov. This was the situation when Koltso arrived to cheer the gloomy capital with his sensational news. Prostrating himself before the tsar, who had planned to hang him, Koltso announced Yermak’s capture of Isker and proclaimed Ivan lord of the khanate. To a stunned court he displayed his convincing spoils, including three captive Tatar nobles and a sledload of pelts (comprising 2,400 sables, 800 black foxes, and 2,000 beaver) equal to five times the annual tribute the khan had paid. Ivan pardoned Koltso on the spot and Yermak in absentia, promised reinforcements, and sent Yermak a magnificent suit of armor embossed with the imperial coat of arms.
At the Kremlin, Koltso kissed the cross in obedience; back in Siberia, Yermak struggled to extend his authority up the Irtysh, as natives were made to swear allegiance by kissing a bloody sword. Those who resisted were hanged upside down by one foot, which meant an agonizing death. Yet in his own way Yermak tried to Christianize the tribes.
In one contest of power, a local wizard ripped open his own stomach with a knife, then miraculously healed the wound by smearing it with grass; Yermak simply tossed the local wooden totems on the fire.
By the end of the summer of 1584, his jurisdiction extended almost to the Ob River. In one daring sortie, he had managed to surprise and capture Kuchum’s nephew, Mametkul (in effect, the khan’s Minister of War), but meanwhile the Tatar raiders who had attacked Cherdyn and other Russian settlements returned, and by attrition the strength of Yermak’s band declined. In November, five hundred long-awaited reinforcements tramped into Isker on snowshoes, but having brought no provisions of their own, rapidly consumed Yermak’s reserves. During the long winter, part of the garrison starved, and some “were forced to eat the bodies of their own dead companions.”33 Aware of Yermak’s dire circumstances, Kuchum’s adherents stepped up attacks on foraging parties in the spring. In two grievous blows to the garrison’s hopes for survival, twenty Cossacks were killed as they dozed by a lake, while Koltso and forty others were lured to a friendship banquet and massacred.
In early August 1585, a trap was baited for Yermak himself. Informed that an unescorted caravan from Bukhara was nearing the Irtysh, he hastened with a company of Cossacks to meet it, but finding the report untrue, that night was obliged to bivouac on an island in midstream. A wild storm arose and drove the watchmen into their tents. A party of natives disembarked unobserved, attacked, and killed the Cossacks almost to a man. Yermak managed to struggle into his armor and fight his way to the embankment, but the boat “floated out of his reach,”34 and as he plunged into the water after it, his armor bore him down beneath the waves.
Out of the 1,340 men who had thus advanced into Siberia, no more than 90 remained; this hard-pressed remnant rapidly retreated to the Urals, where as they made their way through a mountain pass, they met a hundred streltsy (musketeers) equipped with cannon moving east.
Yermak, of course (whatever the Stroganovs’ long-term aims), had not set out to conquer Siberia but had executed a typical Cossack raid for spoils. In attacking Isker, he had probably not meant to hold it, but merely to sack it and withdraw before deep snow and ice prevented his escape upstream. But the way had been shown. His foray had dealt an irreversible blow to the khanate, and it was never to be reassembled from its shattered parts. Within two decades of his death, the “colorless hordes,” †† as the natives called the Russians, would have much of Western Siberia in their grasp. An armistice with Poland and Sweden in the west allowed the Russians to plot an organized reconquest, and with river highways facilitating their advance, Isker was immediately retaken and destroyed; Tyumen was founded in 1586 to consolidate Russia’s position on the Tura River; and after the founding of Tobolsk at the confluence of the Tobol and Irtysh rivers in 1587, about 12 miles northwest of where Isker once stood, no tribe could doubt that the Russians were there to stay.
By 1591 they had extended their sway southward to the Barabinsk Steppes, founding Ufa between Tyumen and Kazan to secure a new trans-Urals route for the movement of troops and supplies. Thereafter, over the next decade and a half, the march of Russian outposts eastward occurred with such regularity that its chronological tempo, in enumeration, seems almost to mark time with a rhythmic beat. Pelym and Berezov were both founded in 1593, to control the Ostyak and Samoyed population in the north, and Surgut, Obdorsk, and Narym by 1596 to strengthen the Russians’ hold. In 1598, Verkhoturye – established on the Tura – became the gateway to Siberia, and two years later ground was broken for Turinsk. In 1600, a hundred Cossacks from Tobolsk sailed down the Ob in four small ships to the Arctic coast, and then northeast toward Taz Bay. Despite shipwreck and a subsequent ambush by a party of Samoyeds that reduced their company by half, the voyagers found a spot near the Taz estuary suitable for the construction of a fort, which they called Mangazeya. Thus by 1600 Moscow had a fortified route into Siberia over which Verkhoturye, Turinsk, and Tyumen stood guard; had secured the Lower Ob River Basin with Berezov, Obdorsk, and Mangazeya, and its middle and upper courses with Surgut, Narym, and (after 1602) Ketsk. Meanwhile, south of Tobolsk, the largest expedition ever sent to found a new fort in Siberia – comprising 1,200 cavalry soldiers and 350 on foot, including Tatar auxiliaries and Polish and Lithuanian prisoners of war – had broken ground for Tara in 1594 between the Ishim and Barabinsk steppes. All these forts served as headquarters for the army of occupation and as bases for further expansion. “In Siberia,” wrote Giles Fletcher, the English ambassador to Russia at the time “[the tsar] hath divers castles and garisons ... and sendeth many new supplies thither, to plant and to inhabite as he winneth ground.”35 Russian authority was swiftly established over a thousand miles of territory. After the major outpost of Tomsk was established in 1604 to guard the Ob Basin from Central Asian nomads raiding across the borders from the south, “the cornerstone of the Russian Asiatic empire had been laid.”36
The Stroganovs got less out of the early conquest than they had hoped. Although additional trading privileges were bestowed upon them, and new grants of land west of the Urals in which their empire of mines, mills, and trading posts could grow, they were denied the lands into which Yermak had advanced, for once the government realized what a great opportunity had opened up, the reoccupation of Sibir became a state venture, with a “planned domination of rivers and portages by the building of blockhouses and forts.”37
To some extent, the Russians accelerated native recognition of their own legitimacy by selecting sites for their outposts that had formerly been used by Tatar princelings to wield their own authority. They also exploited local enmities. The local Ostyaks cooperated with the Russians in the subjugation of the Voguls, for example, in the neighborhood of Pelym, and (despite a considerable uprising of their own in 1595) on the whole remained consistent allies. But most of the natives didn’t sit easily under the Russian yoke. And the Tatars least of all. Khan Kuchum had escaped to the southern steppes before the Russians retook his capital, and from that unconquered refuge continued to harass them for another fourteen years. A wily strategist, he became a kind of Tatar Sitting Bull, time and again eluding the Russians’ grasp. Campaigns against him were undertaken in 1591, 1595, and 1598. Although most of his adherents and family were eventually captured or killed, he refused to concede defeat, but continued to fight a futile rear-guard action, with attacks on isolated Russian companies or posts. At one point, he offered to negotiate a just peace that would have allowed his followers to live as they pleased, according to their ancient tribal ways, in the valley of the Irtysh. The Russians sought to tempt him instead with money, property, and recognition of his royal rank.