Kuchum scornfully burned a Russian settlement in reply. But “to reverse the course of history was beyond his power,”38 and in 1598, old and almost blind, he met his death at the hands of Nogay assassins to whom he had turned for help.
Upon Kuchum’s death, Moscow moved to erase any claim his heirs might make to the khanate’s throne. Settled in Russia, they were lavishly indulged as royal exiles, and adopted by the Muscovite elite as belonging to their own. Kuchum’s daughters were married to young nobles, the sons anointed with aristocratic rank. One grandson received the town of Kasimov on the Oka River, long a showcase for puppet Tatars. Kuchum’s nephew, Mametkul, was recognized as a prince and became a general in the Russian Army.
Nevertheless, Kuchum’s own unquenchable defiance endowed his memory with a powerful mystique, especially in Western Siberia (where intertribal ties were strongest), and well into the seventeenth century risings took place in his name. ‡‡
Yermak was to be posthumously canonized in both Russian and Tatar folklore, and the names of the Cossacks who had fallen in the battle for Sibir were engraved on a memorial tablet in the cathedral of Tobolsk. Legend has it that some time after Yermak’s death his body was dredged up from the Irtysh by a Tatar fisherman, who recognized it at once by the double-headed eagle emblazoned on the chain-mail hauberk. Beneath the armor, Yermak’s flesh was found to be uncorrupted,39 and “blood gushed from his mouth and nose.” Miracles were subsequently worked by his body and clothing, “the sick were healed, and mothers and babes were preserved from disease.”40 In awe, the natives buried him at the foot of a pine tree by the river, and for many years thereafter the spot was marked by a column of fire.
Endnotes
* The sixteenth-century state of Livonia roughly comprised modern Latvia and Estonia. When the Russians first invaded, the Livonians, ruled by an obsolete and degenerate order of medieval knights, didn’t put up much of a fight, but Ivan was ultimately defeated by a coalition of Baltic powers.
§ A letter to the king of Poland in 1581 mentions Yermak (both by his nickname and patronymic) as the deputy commander of a Cossack contingent on the Lithuanian frontier. Some scholars are convinced that Yermak was officially transferred to the Urals by the tsar early in 1582.
¶ 840 is the traditional figure. The Yesipov Chronicle (chapter 7) mentions that Yermak’s band numbered 540. The Stroganov Chronicle (chapter 11) adds to these 300 men recruited on the Chusovaya, making an army of 840. The New Chronicle has 600 men coming from the Volga, afterwards joined by 50. The Remezov Chronicle (chapter 6) claims an army of 5,000.
** Both the circumstantial background and conventional chronology of the campaign have recently been challenged by the formidable Soviet scholar R. G. Skrynnikov. Skrynnikov holds that “all documents compiled in the early 1580s that are preserved in the original indicate accurately and categorically that Yermak began his campaign not on 1 September 1581, but on 1 September 1582.” See “Ermak’s Siberian Expedition,” p. 12.
†† So-called not only from their pale complexion, but to distinguish them from the Mongol spectrum of fighting groups. The Mongols had assigned colors to different points of the compass and “white,” not incidentally, was the color of the West.
‡‡ In 1654, one traveler found “the whole Urals area terrorized by a confederation of tribes led by Kuchum’s grandson.”
3
TO THE EAST OF THE SUN
At the time the Siberian conquest began, Russia was already one of the largest nations on earth. Its numerous and once-separate principalities had been united by force and stealth under the rule of Moscow, and Ivan the Terrible’s subjugation of the two Tatar khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan on the Volga had expanded those dominions into a multinational state. Beginning with Ivan, its sovereign presumed to rule by “divine right,” and though most other European monarchs claimed the same benediction, the absolute, autocratic power of the Russian tsar was exceptional, for “like Nebuchadnezzar,”41 wrote a contemporary, “he slew, had beaten, elevated, or humbled whomsoever he wished.” Near the top of the growing state bureaucracy there was a royal council, or Boyar Duma (mostly men of noble birth), as well as an inner cabinet of councilors with whom the tsar might consult. But he often did so, it was said, “in the manner of Xerxes, the Persian Emperor, who assembled the Asian princes not so much to secure their advice... as to personally declare his will.”42 From the Kremlin in the heart of Moscow, the tsar ruled a population of about 13 million, mostly impoverished peasants toiling on large estates, or cultivating their gardenlike plots in tiny hamlets across the land. The old aristocracy had recently been somewhat humbled, and the service gentry had arisen to take its place. In time, however, the gentry would acquire many of the prerogatives of the class they had supplanted, including titles and inheritable estates.
There was no true middle class, no independent merchant guilds, no mercantile economy of the sort that most European countries were beginning to enjoy. Even the gosts, or “great merchants” of the realm, owed their status to appointment by the Crown. State service, in fact, was what Muscovy was all about, and under its repressive regime, travel within the country was restricted and travel abroad almost unknown – “that Russians might not learn of the free institutions that exist in foreign lands.”43 Police surveillance was widespread, but the hallmark of the system (as in any police state) was the “duty to denounce,” which obliged Muscovites of whatever rank and standing to serve as political informers against each other, and to report whatever they knew or heard about disloyal acts or thoughts. Punishments under the law were savage, and torture was routine. The condemned were variously torn to pieces with iron hooks, beheaded or impaled, branded with red-hot irons, shorn of limbs, or beaten with the knout – a short whip that had at its tapered end three thongs of hard, tanned elk hide, “which cutt like knives.”44
In the world of the average Muscovite there were few amenities to alleviate his downtrodden state. The roads were poor, there were no inns between towns to give refuge to the weary traveler, alcoholism had long been the national scourge, sodomy was epidemic (so foreigners charged), and intellectual curiosity driven underground. A simple knowledge of astronomy could bring a charge of witchcraft – the ability, for example, to foretell eclipses of the sun and moon. Over time, the habit of oppression, noted a foreign diplomat, had
set a print into the very mindes of the people. For as themselves are verie hardlie and cruellie dealte withall by their chiefe magistrates and other superiours, so are they as cruell one against an other, specially over their inferiours and such as are under them. So that the basest and wretchedest [peasant] that stoupeth and croucheth like a dog to the gentleman, and licketh up the dust that lieth at his feete, is an intolerable tyrant where he hath the advantage.45