The melting pot of Russia – Siberia – was being constantly stirred. From the end of the seventeenth century, some portion of the empire’s ever-increasing diversity of ethnic groups had fled or been deported to its wide-open spaces, where they mingled with the polyglot world that was already there, and left their individual or hybrid mark on the character of Siberian life.
There were, for example, unique religious communities, where Old Believers, Skoptsy, Sabbatarians, and others dwelled. The Sabbatarians were Russian by birth, but Jews by conversion and faith; the Skoptsy made up a fanatical sect that believed in sexual abstinence and self-castration (based on Matt. 19:12) as a means to Paradise. Like the Old Believers, however, they also endeavored to live devout and energetic lives (with some analogies to the Puritan ethic), prohibited stimulants of any kind, including tobacco, coffee, and tea, and proved extraordinarily industrious as farmers and craftsmen. Exiled for the most part to the province of Yakutsk, their determined industry was particularly valuable in making progress against the hard and bitter clime. Unfortunately, the built-in obsolescence of their communities could not do Siberia much lasting good. One of their settlements near Turukhansk was described as “a model village and without crime; but the inhabitants, noted a visitor, had a remarkable appearance. They were all sallow; the men were beardless, with squeaky voices; and no inhabitant was less than forty years of age.”518 There were also the bezpopovtsy, or “priestless ones”; the dukhobory, or “spirit warriors” (the so-called “Quakers” of Siberia); the molokans, or “milk drinkers,” a vegetarian cult; the khlysts, or “flagellants”; and the kamenshchiki, who sought refuge in remote mountain fastnesses to isolate themselves from the rest of the sinful world. The bezpopovtsy were almost indistinguishable from these; they believed the priesthood had been fatally corrupted and that the end of the world was at hand. Like certain radical Protestant sects in the West that subscribed to a priesthood of all believers, they administered the sacraments to one another, or in theatrical demonstrations of their direct contact with the powers above, could sometimes be seen kneeling “by the roadside or in the market for hours with their mouths wide open and turned upwards to receive the invigorating drops of spiritual blessing that they supposed distilled from the skies.”519
But whatever the schismatic cut of their convictions, all hoped to find in Siberia a freedom of worship and social expression akin to the promise that had driven European dissenters to America’s eastern shores. Their exceptionally well-organized communities generally combined a spirit of self-reliance with a belief in mutual aid, and could be found in the secluded swamps and forests of the middle Ob, in mountain hideaways along the Mongolian frontier, on the fertile prairies around Tobolsk, Tomsk, and Barnaul, and in the north toward the tundra, where their hermitages formed valiant enclaves of their faith. But of all sectarians, the most numerous by far were the Old Believers, some thirty thousand of whom had settled in the Transbaikal during the reign of Catherine the Great alone. By the 1870s they accounted for about 10 percent of the population in the Amur River Valley, where not only were their farms among the richest, but the steamboat traffic on the river was largely in their hands as well.
The Russian Orthodox Church tolerated other creeds, and both Protestant and Roman Catholic churches could also be found in all the principal cities of Siberia, alongside Russian churches and Islamic mosques. In certain areas, Jews and even moderate Raskolniks (dissenters) achieved a measure of legal recognition, with Jews making up a third of the population of Sretensk. Verkhneudinsk also had a Jewish synagogue, and the city of Kansk on the Baraba Steppe was so predominantly Jewish in the 1880s that it was known as the “Jerusalem of Siberia.”
From town to town one moved as if from world to world. On Siberia’s westernmost frontier stood Yekaterinburg (the gateway to the Kingdom), founded by Peter the Great in 1720 and named for his wife, Catherine. By the mid-1730s it had become a mining town of some importance, and began to resemble a modern European city, with regularly spaced, broad streets, and houses “nearly all built after the German fashion.”520 By the 1880s, it had tramways and electric lights, and in keeping with its cosmopolitan air, nuns painted icons while sitting at easels in an artists studio, and in their own candle manufactory, with their sleeves tucked up, gave the candles a final polish with their elbows, using the forearm as a rolling pin.
Omsk and Semipalatinsk, on the other hand, located on the fringe of the Central Asian steppes, were decidedly Muslim. Over half their population was Kirghiz and Tatar, Jews (in Omsk at least) were discriminated against and Christian churches were outnumbered by mosques. A city of thriving shops and tea gardens, Omsk was the principal fortress and headquarters of the general staff of the Siberian Fortified Line. But every day without fail at the designated hours the “wailing cries of the muezzins could be heard from the minarets,”521 while beyond the town, “wild-looking” Kirghiz boys, wearing “immense goggles of horsehair netting”522 against die sun’s glare and smoking cigars, “rode fiercely among their herds of cattle on small hardy-looking”523 steeds. In winter, long lines of camels could be seen dragging Kirghiz sledges across the snow, their legs swathed in wool and rags to protect them from the cold. Although most of the houses were colorfully painted green, red, or blue – in part to add color to the barren landscape, where the soil was unable to support trees along the unpaved streets – on the town’s outskirts the Kirghiz lived in beehive-shaped portable yurts, made partly of wood and a kind of trellis-work covered with hides and felt. There the women (shrouded in linen headdress and veil) stored kumis in goatskin bottles and plaited horsehair into ropes.
Semipalatinsk to the south was even more Mohammedan and was popularly known as “the Devil’s Sandbox” because of its hot climate and desertlike terrain. A bit more eclectic was Ulbinsk, which contained a handful of Tatar mosques, Orthodox churches with colored domes of tin, and a high quadrangular fortress surrounded by a dry moat.
At Tomsk, on the other hand, not far from the Sino-Russian frontier, “everyone received us according to good Chinese custom,” one eighteenth-century traveler recalled, “and treated us to many kinds of tea-water without milk and to Chinese confections, which consisted of preserved or candied fruits.”524 Chinese silk shirts were the fashion (because they absorbed sweat in such a way as to keep the skin dry), while throughout the Transbaikal most Russian homes had Oriental chests, Chinese porcelain, and other furnishings of similar decor. Chinese brick tea, boiled with butter and salt, was common fare, and pig-tailed Manchus, for example, made up about half the inhabitants of Sretensk (on the Shilka River), where Chinese opium dens were also to be found down many alleyways and lanes. In Irkutsk, as well, a number of summer houses were adorned with galleries in the Chinese style, and the governor there kept a Chinese jackdaw that was profusely bilingual, welcoming guests with streams of Russian and Chinese.