A significant increase in commerce with China had come after 1762, when Catherine the Great abolished the Crown monopoly on the fur trade and on the privilege of sending caravans to Peking. One million chests of tea a year were imported through Kyakhta, where the leaves were carefully repacked and sewn up in rawhide satchels for transport west. Silks and rhubarb (valued as an antiscorbutic) were also brought in, along with powdered sugar, paper, and great quantities of compressed or “brick” tea – a mixture of coarse leaves and stems that sometimes used ox blood as a binding agent when stamped into bricks. Russian convoys, in turn, wound their way southward to Peking with woolens, linens, leather goods, tinware, and furs.
For 150 years the fur trade had dominated the Siberian economy, and its various needs had defined the colony’s relationship to the state. In the middle of the nineteenth century, some 10 to 15 million squirrels were killed in Siberia every year, along with tens of thousands of ermines, rabbits, martens, foxes, sables, lynx, and wolverine. Along the Arctic and Pacific coasts the chief prey were walrus, seal, and polar bear.
The ivory trade had also grown. The refrigerated carcasses of hairy mammoths – second only to the African imperial elephant as the largest land animals ever hunted by man – had lain imperishably preserved in frozen Arctic crevices and riverbanks for tens of thousands of years. Long before the coming of the Russians, in fact, their recovered remains had “excited the wonder and curiosity of men, to follow in their footsteps and traffic in their bones.”492 There is evidence that such bones found their way through China in late antiquity to Khiva, Khorezm, and Greece as commodities, and early Russian settlers (identifying the mammoth with the Behemoth of the Bible exterminated during the Flood) called the ivory “Noah’s wood.” The contemporary Chinese, who valued powdered ivory as a medicinal base, believed the mammoth to be a giant Arctic rat (yin shu) whose immense subterranean stirrings were responsible for earthquakes. This notion spread to Europe, where it persisted at least until the latter part of the seventeenth century, when a learned burgomeister of Amsterdam repeated it in his own monumental book on northern Asia. Mammoths, it was thought, were always discovered half-buried simply because they expired on contact with the air. And Catherine the Great expressed the hope in a letter to Voltaire that a live mammoth might one day be found.
Under the Russians, digging up mammoths became a kind of heavy industry, and between 1650 and 1900 the tusks of an estimated 40,750 mammoths (each tusk weighing from 150 to 200 pounds) were taken out of Siberia. Between 1825 and 1831, the annual shipments exceeded 60,000 pounds as great quantities of fossil ivory were collected with each summer’s thaw from crumbling embankments along the Arctic coast, and especially from two islands in the New Siberian group, known as the “isles of bones.” On the international market, Russian ivory, as it was called, competed successfully with that from Africa, India, and Ceylon.
Mining interests also developed apace. Early in the eighteenth century, the mines of the Altai, the Transbaikal, and the eastern Urals had begun to assume importance; in 1726, copper mines were opened around Tomsk and Kuznetsk. The Altai mines led to the development of the Zmeinogorsk mines and their accompanying smelters in Kalyvansk and Barnaul – the latter founded in 1738 on the banks of the Ob. About 1745, prospectors from Chelyabinsk discovered the magnetic mountain of Eye-Derlui (near present-day Magnitogorsk), rich with iron, and two years later mining operations were begun with serfs, who dug the ore out of the side of the hill. The work continued year round, and in winter the ore was transported on sledges over the steppe to a foundry where it was smelted with charcoal in little “teapot” blast furnaces, which yielded a few tons of iron a day. Subsequently, in the late 1750s, the mine and smelting plants were sold to a metallurgical corporation controlled by stockholders in Belgium and France. Gold deposits were also found in the Urals, mines started in the Sayan Mountains (both east and west of the Yenisey), while the mica quarries along the Vitim River supplied the colony with its windowpanes. By 1740 Siberia’s mines had made the Russian Empire the foremost producer of precious metals in Europe and the world’s leader in copper production. By the end of the century, the Altai region was also yielding up to 18 tons of silver and 1,300 pounds of gold per year. In 1832, dredging for gold began on the Chulym River; gold strikes were made on the upper Zeya; and in 1863, prospectors reached the Vitim (a tributary of the Lena) and Olekma rivers, and began tapping the renowned Lena gold fields. Gold production in Siberia grew so rapidly that by the end of the century it reached 40 tons and accounted for 75 percent of the total gold output of the empire.
All this stimulated the building of cart roads and cattle-driving routes, postal relays, river commerce, and so on, and brought the first steamers to the Yenisey, Lena, Vitim, and Shilka rivers. Copper works, cast-iron foundries, and iron works sprang up, new industries emerged in the upper valleys of the Ob and Irtysh rivers, and in the vicinity of Barnaul and Semipalatinsk. The skilled workers and craftsmen they brought to the region paved the way for the growth of towns and the flourishing of trade. The town of Yeniseysk, for example, developed into a thriving center for silversmithing and related crafts.
The demand for agricultural products naturally increased, and could be met. Despite enormous stretches of forest and tundra, Siberia had about 500,000 square miles of arable land, over a third of it in Western Siberia. This bounty was only slightly less than the cultivable land found in the twelve north-central United States. In Western Siberia the predominant crop was wheat, in Eastern Siberia, rye. In the north, barley was important. The technical crops grown, mostly for local use, were flax and hemp. The region of Yeniseysk yielded considerable tobacco, and throughout southwestern Siberia, especially around Krasnoyarsk, peasants annually harvested tens of millions of bushels of grain. In their vegetable gardens, they also grew cucumbers, carrots, onions, radishes, turnips, beets, cabbages and rutabagas, potatoes (after 1840), melons and cantaloupes around Minusinsk, and fruits like apples, cherries, and pears.
Farming developed rapidly among the Buryats in the mining districts of the Transbaikal, and by the end of the eighteenth century the variety of their crops included rye, wheat, hemp, and oats. By the middle of the nineteenth many Yakuts too lived in large agricultural communities, and like the Buryats tended herds of cattle or flocks of sheep and goats.
Most of the land in Siberia was owned by the Crown, and at first peasants tilled it under the so-called “plowed land subject to the sovereign’s tithe,” paying rent in kind to the state. This system eventually gave way to a money quitrent (by the 1730s about half of the peasants in Siberia tilled land on that basis), and since the Siberian peasant was not enserfed, he was pretty much free to buy and sell his land, or rent or mortgage it as he chose. Although technically 96 percent of the land belonged to the state, in fact, most of the settlers simply worked as much land as they could occupy. In European Russia, serfdom had grown up as a means of maintaining the gentry class, which the government needed for both civil administration and military campaigns. In northern Asia, however, there was no need for such a class, especially after the Kirghiz had been pacified, and because there was practically no armed friction with China once the border was fixed. Resident Cossacks and small regular army detachments were all that Siberia required to police its conquest or as a frontier guard. So instead of gentry estates, worked by serfs, Siberia had Cossack estates, worked by free men.