The Orthodox enthusiasm for icons was also emulated by the half-converted natives in a worship of graven images of any kind. In one hut near Anadyrsk, for example, a portrait cut from Harper’s Weekly was posted up in a corner and adored as a Russian saint. “A gilded candle was burning before his smoky features,” writes Kennan, “and every night and morning a dozen natives said their prayers to a major-general in the United States Army.”510 In another hut he found the walls transformed into a kind of secular iconostasis with cut-outs from the Illustrated London News.
The natives were also introduced to high finance. Because famines were common throughout the Siberian northeast, where widely scattered settlements seldom husbanded supplies against an unlucky year, the government established a sort of “Fish Savings Bank,” where 100,000 dried fish were initially deposited as the capital stock. To maintain and increase its surplus funds, each year every male inhabitant had to pay into this bank one tenth of all the fish he caught, which entitled him to a loan in time of need. By 1867, this bank (which proved a great success) had 3 million dried fish in reserve.
If the natives took readily to icon worship and banking, they were utterly defeated by the mystery of canned foods. On one occasion, Kennan revenged himself upon some unruly Koryak drivers by indulging their curiosity about a pickle, which he miraculously produced from a tin.
Knowing well what the result would be, I gave the whole cucumber to the dirtiest, worst-looking vagabond in the party, and motioned to him to take a good bite. As he put it to his lips his comrades watched him with breathless curiosity to see how he liked it. For a moment his face wore an expression of blended surprise, wonder, and disgust which was irresistibly ludicrous, and he seemed disposed to spit the disagreeable morsel out; but with a strong effort he controlled himself, forced his features into a ghastly imitation of satisfaction, smacked his lips, declared it was “akhmel nemelkhin” – very good, and handed the pickle to his neighbor. The latter was equally astonished and disgusted with its unexpected sourness, but, rather than admit his disappointment and be laughed at by the others, he also pretended that it was delicious, and passed it along. Six men in succession went through with this transparent farce with the greatest solemnity; but when they had all tasted it, and all been victimized, they burst out into a simultaneous “ty-e-e-e” of astonishment, and gave free expression to their long-suppressed emotions of disgust. The vehement spitting, coughing, and washing out of mouths with snow, which succeeded this outburst, proved that the taste for pickles is an acquired one, and that man in his aboriginal state does not possess it.511
Kennan’s drivers belonged to the sedentary or Coastal Koryaks who, like the Kamchadals, had been thoroughly debased by the coastal trade. It was said without praise of the Kamchadals that they would “suffer and endure any amount of abuse and ill-treatment” yet remain “as faithful and forgiving as a dog. If you treat them well, your slightest wish will be their law.”512
The Wandering Koryaks, on the other hand, were still wild and independent, and roamed with their vast reindeer herds in solitary bands along the great desolate steppes to the north. Although they acknowledged the sovereignty of “the Great White Chief,” as they sometimes called the tsar, they were not overawed by earthly rank per se, as one American major in an exploration party found out. Endeavoring to impress a local elder with his own “general importance in the world,” the officer summoned the Koryak to his tent,
and proceeded to tell him through an interpreter, how rich he was; what immense resources, in the way of rewards and punishments, he possessed; what high rank he held; how important a place he filled in Russia, and how becoming it was that an individual of such exalted attributes should be treated by poor wandering heathen with filial reverence and veneration. The old Koryak, squatting upon his heels on the ground, listened quietly to the enumeration of all our leader’s admirable qualities and perfections without moving a muscle of his face; but finally, when the interpreter had finished, he rose slowly, walked up to the Major with imperturbable gravity, and with the most benignant and patronizing condescension, patted him softly on the head.513
By the sheer inaccessibility of their homeland these natives had, to some degree, been spared intrusion by the whites. Civilization and its full array of discontents lay over the horizon, but in the late nineteenth century at least, much of their world remained unchanged. And a timeless picture of the Koryak reindeer herdsman still squatting through the night under a little brushwood hovel, watching for wolves, could still be drawn.
Alone and almost unsheltered on a great ocean of snow, each man... patiently endures cold which freezes mercury into solid lumps, and storms which sweep away his frail shelter like chaff in a mist of flying snow. Nothing discourages him; nothing frightens him into seeking the shelter of the tents. I have seen him watching deer at night, with nose and cheeks frozen so that they had mortified and turned black; and have come upon him early cold winter mornings, squatting under three or four bushes with his face buried in his fur coat, as if he were dead.514
The even more independent Chukchi (who had reluctantly agreed to become Russian subjects only in 1789) had staunchly resisted Russification, and about all one renowned ethnographer could identify as Russian about them was that they had adopted a few Slavic sayings and the Russian chimney in their huts. Of course, they had grown used to ironware and guns, colored beads, and so forth; but on the whole (as late as the 1860s) when they occasionally showed up at trading posts and annual fairs, they preferred to deal with Russians only at the end of a spear. As Kennan describes this commerce (which was similar to how some natives had dealt with one another of old),
A Chukchi would hang a bundle of furs or a choice walrus tooth upon the sharp polished blade of a long Chukchi lance, and if a Russian trader chose to take it off and suspend in its place a fair equivalent in the shape of tobacco, well and good; if not, there was no trade. This plan guaranteed absolute security against fraud, for there was not a Russian in all Siberia who dared to cheat one of these fierce savages, with the blade of a long lance ten inches from his breast bone.515
Even after years of Russian rule, during which a number of their other skills decayed, it was still possible to find Ostyaks, for example, who could “mark an arrow in the middle with a piece of charcoal and discharge it in the air, while a second man, before it reached the ground, shot at the descending shaft and struck it on the mark.”516
Among settled natives, perhaps the Buryats maintained the strongest ties to their heritage and roots. Russian clerics had been unable to convert them, and in 1814 the London Missionary Society, founded “to spread the knowledge of Christ among the Heathen and other unenlightened Nations,” decided to send its own missionaries among them to evangelize.517 Rather grandly, these Protestants secretly hoped to extend their efforts into Outer Mongolia, and eventually to make a spiritual conquest of China itself.
Most Buryats were devotees of Lamaism, a form of Buddhism with Tibetan roots, and although the majority of Siberia’s non-Muslim peoples had superficially converted to Christianity, the Buryats were swept during the eighteenth century by a Buddhist revival generated by missionaries from Mongolia and Tibet. The monastic temples of the lamas (or priests) were known as datsans, or lamaseries, where the sacred white elephant was worshipped, as in contemporaneous Siam. In the early nineteenth century, the great lamasery at Goose Lake, with its Sino-Tibetan architecture, lama orchestra, images, and so on, was an exotic tourist attraction. Located near Selenginsk (a garrison town founded in 1666 on the far side of Lake Baikal), it had an impressively large library of sacred books, and was the residence of the Grand Lama of Eastern Siberia. In 1885, when Kennan visited the town, he respectfully sought him out, but the lama’s pretended lack of sagacity left him somewhat miffed: among other things, the Grand Lama adamantly insisted that the earth was flat, and claimed never to have heard of the United States.