This system of colonizing Southern Siberia had begun under Peter the Great. In 1716, a fortified line on Siberia’s southwestern frontier had been established as a protection from the raids of nomads, and by 1800 it consisted of about 124 fortresses, redoubts, and outposts manned by several thousand Cossacks, most of whom had been enlisted from Western Siberian towns. Ten cavalry regiments and two companies of artillery were added in 1808, and in the 1820s all their members received substantial allotments of land along the frontier. New land grants as well as other privileges followed in 1846, and by midcentury the Cossack Host’s military complement (including men on active service and in the reserve) had risen above 12,000 men. The protected territory behind the fortified line attracted more peasants, and in this way Southern Siberia was colonized.
After the treaties of Aigun and Peking, military villages were also established along the Amur and Ussuri rivers, on the Manchurian border, and in the Transbaikal. In such areas, the Cossacks emerged as a privileged caste, since they were awarded the richest land, in larger allotments (typically, 100 acres) than the 20 to 40 acres regular settlers received.
There were also agricultural communes, whose members lived in compact villages rather than on individual farms, and took their cattle to a common pasture, instead of to fenced-in fields. Although the village commune enjoyed what the land produced, without legal title it could not dispose of it nor reduce any part of it to individual ownership, but, instead, periodically divided it up among its members into individual plots. This system of rotation discouraged development – the building of barns, farmhouses, and so on – since each peasant eventually had to abandon whatever improvements he made.
Nevertheless, Siberian peasants overall were the most prosperous in the empire. Indeed, most migrants ended up with more land in Siberia than they had abandoned, and those who stayed outnumbered those who could not adapt by ten to one. Free settlers, in any case, always outnumbered those officially resettled or exiled, and their proportion increased after 1822, when Alexander I allowed all state peasants (as opposed to serfs on private estates) so inclined to migrate to Siberia. Careful surveys of tillable land were begun in 1837, and about 40 acres offered to every adult male. Beginning in 1843, migrant families received up to 95 acres apiece, together with monetary aid and freedom from all obligations, including military service. Perhaps 350,000 peasants took advantage of this beneficence over the course of the next twenty years. Irregularly, other colonists kept coming too, until the abolition of serfdom in 1861 opened the gates. The possibility of securing unlimited land by emigration to Siberia was comparable to the opening of the Great West in the United States. “The migration,” writes one historian,
became elemental. The government issued decrees and regulations uselessly and, so to speak, after the event. Belatedly it tried to introduce some order into the “human rush” and, if possible, to foresee its effect upon the land problem, living conditions, and political development. It worked to direct a flood it could not dam up, by encouraging settlement into the Far Eastern regions, along the Amur, and in the Altai and Kirghiz country... Because people of all nationalities and races poured in from European Russia, and because in Siberia they lived among many others, Siberia became the melting pot of Russia.493
As long as Siberia could be regarded as a single fur colony economically, it had made a kind of sense to govern it as a single unit politically. But in 1719 (in recognition of its evolving character), the territory had been subdivided into five regions. During the reign of Catherine the Great, a new idea of Siberia took shape: not as dependent on the homeland, but as “a colonial realm capable of supporting itself as well as rendering tribute” – a sort of “India to Russia’s England.”494 The territory was split administratively into Western and Eastern Siberia, with their capitals at Tobolsk and Irkutsk, and in 1802 Alexander I established a governor-generalship for the whole region.
Nevertheless, the government long failed to formulate a coherent Siberian policy. No monarch (or even heir) bothered to cross the Urals to take a look for himself, and Siberia remained an administrative backwater where powerful officials did as they pleased. When Anton Devier succeeded Skornyakov-Pisarev as commandant of Okhotsk in 1740, he found only 12 rubles 22 kopeks in the treasury and 108 pounds of provisions in the magazine. Ivan Koch, commandant of Okhotsk from 1789 through 1794, was even more presumptive and arbitrary in his rule, and the time-honored proverb, “God is high up and the Tsar far off,” was popularly revised to “God is in Heaven and Koch is in Okhotsk.”495 Siberia’s first governor, Prince Matvey Gagarin, tried to create an independent kingdom for himself beyond the Urals, and eventually it was discovered that he was siphoning off into his own treasury a considerable portion of the China trade. After a decade of amassing an illegal fortune with impunity (including a diamond-studded icon of the Virgin worth 130,000 rubles that hung over his bed), he was arrested, confessed, and appealed for clemency, but Peter the Great decided to make a public example of him and had him hanged in March 1721. Yet few of his successors (or their lesser appointees) quailed, perhaps because it had taken so long for Peter to bring his satrap to account. One dissolute noble in charge of the mines at Nerchinsk, for example, unable to persuade a local merchant to give him a loan, surrounded the man’s house with artillery, and was about to give the order to fire when the merchant suddenly appeared on the porch with money on a silver plate.
The appointment in 1802 of a governor-general for Siberia was a first step toward acknowledging the colony’s neglect. But the first man designated to fill the office – Ivan Pestel, father of the future Decembrist leader – was not the happiest choice. Together with his devoted assistant, Nikolai Treskin, civil governor at Irkutsk, he imposed his will upon the population without regard to legal restraints, and tried to make up in energy what he lacked in administrative tact. Yet the policies he enacted reflected the tsar’s clear mandate for change. Committed to the development of Siberian agriculture, he guaranteed peasants a greater return on their crops through generous state purchases of grain, settled new areas, and with land grants, loans, and other kinds of assistance encouraged the Buryats to take up farming. As an example of the industriousness Pestel hoped to foster (among Russians and Buryats alike), he pointed to the success of the Old Believers, whose thriving farms were the mainstay of the Verkhneudinsk and Nerchinsk districts. At the same time, as a cushion against famine, he expanded the system of state granaries. To promote competition and free trade, Pestel also abolished internal customs and tariffs, refused to acknowledge the exclusive monopoly privileges prominent local merchants had long enjoyed, and liberalized the grain trade with China by lowering export requirements. Beyond that, he built new roads, improved navigation on the rivers, and demolished and rebuilt whole sections of towns.
Although the aims were progressive, the methods used to attain them were despotic, and gave both Pestel and Treskin an evil name. Merchants who resisted their schemes were severely punished by fines, lawsuits, and exile to remote areas, and the sweep of their persecutions reached such a scale that eventually Alexander I (prodded by the Ministry of Finance, which objected to the substitution of state monopolies for commercial ones) had to rein them in.
Pestel himself, not incidentally, acted almost entirely through Treskin, while luxuriating throughout most of his tenure amidst the splendors of St. Petersburg. In this, as one writer remarks, he was rather like the old Roman proconsuls who eschewed the boredom of the provinces they governed for the pleasures of imperial Rome. Pestel, however, was also known to have an intricate network of spies. One evening he happened to be dining with Tsar Alexander I, when the tsar pointed out the window and asked, “Look there, what is that black speck on the cathedral tower?” I can’t make it out, your majesty,” one of the other guests replied, “but you might ask Pestel. He has amazing eyes and can see from here all the way into Siberia.”496