We have encountered a divine marvel. . . . There are mountains, which slope down to the arm of the sea, and their height reaches to the heavens. . . . Within these mountains are heard great cries and the sound of voices and [some people] are struggling to cut their way out of this mountain. . . . Their language is unintelligible. They point at iron objects and make gestures as if to ask for them. If given a knife or an axe, they supply furs in return. (Laurentian Text 1953: 184)
These people, the Iugra, were unclean, continues the Chronicle, and with God's help Alexander the Great locked them inside this mountain in the northern Urals. They will be released when the world comes to its end; until then, they will be trading fur for iron. They are imagined as a trading machine, speechless and subhuman. They do not speak because their trade does not require language. Nothing but fur justifies the humans from Novgorod to be there, among the Iugra.
Apart from the reference to Alexander, the tale is not far from the truth. In their quest for fur, the Russians colonized a huge, exotic, and inhospitable space, called "the land of darkness" with early Arabic travelers (Slezkine 1994; Martin 2004). Combining barter with coercion, the Russians locked the peoples of the Arctic north into a trading system that led to the extermination of animals and humans. The people of Novgorod thought that these operations would continue until the end of the world as they knew it; indeed, their termination would signal the end of Novgorod. It was a straightforward case of colonization that was recognized as such by major historians, Russian and western alike. Continued by the Muscovite state, which expanded the fur trade much further to the east, this colonization led to a huge accumulation of wealth and a proportional desolation of the natives, both processes being of outstanding scale in colonial history.
The Russians arrived in small numbers and did not hunt the animals. They needed locals to do the highly skilled jobs of hunting animals and dressing furs. The natives had the skills but were not much interested in fur, which they used mainly for their own warmth. Only force or commerce could turn these fishermen or reindeer herders into full-time hunters. The state established the fur trade in several steps. First, the military teams confiscated the furs that were already stored there. Second, the invaders imposed a tribute that obliged each native man to deliver a certain number of pelts annually. Third, the servitors established customs in towns and on the roads that collected the tithe in fur, usually a tenth of every transaction. Corruption was high and uncontrollable; bribes and other illegal fees ate up a big part of the state income (Bushkovitch 1980: 117). Novgorod and, later, Moscow had to send more servitors to these vast lands, though the number of Russian men was never high. The tale of the divine marvel was prophetic: the native tribes were locked into the fur trade. As long as they provided fur, it was in the interest of the servitors to maintain their conditions rather than to christen and educate them. If baptized into the Orthodox church, natives would stop paying the tribute in fur and start paying tax in rubles. This was undesirable; later, even Christian communities had to pay tribute instead of tax if they were perceived as non-Orthodox (Znamenski 2007). Since in many cases, the partners did not share a language and were scared of one another, they developed a method of "silent trade" that was surprisingly similar to the Iugra trade of 1096:
For many years, [the Chukchi] would have no dealings with [the Russians] except at the end of a spear. They would hang a bundle of furs . . . upon a 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 is no trade. (Kennan 1870: 286)
In Siberia, as well as in North America, the fur business was different from most "cross-cultural trades" because it involved a meeting between the organized Europeans and the natives, who had been isolated for centuries. Hunting and trapping was intrinsically violent, did not entail the long-term cycles that were characteristic for agriculture, and had no need of the participation of women (Curtin 1984: 219). Trade was also violent; even when the Russians used barter, it was barely distinguishable from robbery. They exchanged furs for iron and other products of their superior civilization, such as alcohol, tobacco, beads, knives, and, later, traps and rifles. The Soviet scholars politely called this method "the non-equivalent exchange" that was characteristic for the "initial accumulation of the capital."
In their quest for fur, Russian traders explored the vast lands that stretch far to the north and east from the metropolitan centers, Novgorod and Moscow, all the way to the White Sea, across the Ural Mountains, and into Siberia. Firearms were the key to this success, even though they often worked merely as fireworks. But violence was not easy to convert into power. Technical terms that were foreign to both sides, usually of Arabic or Turkish origin, were meant to mask the rude force. Concepts and practices traveled across the land, from the Caucasus to Alaska. Yasak referred to the special regime of taxation, a tribute in fur. Judging by later evidence from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, another typical method of extracting fur from the natives was kidnapping, which was known as "taking amanats." Capturing the native women and children and holding them in captivity, Russians demonstrated them to their men in exchange for furs. If the children survived to maturity, these amanats would speak Russian; baptized, they could marry Russians and contribute to the creolization of the locals (Liapunova 1987: 59). In 1788, the Russians held as many as 500 children of the Aleuts as amanats. Russian emperors, including the enlightened Catherine the Great, authorized this method for "taming the natives" in official documents (Slezkine 1994). First recorded in the late sixteenth century in the southern steppes, "taking amanats" was practiced by all sides during the long Caucasian wars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Khodarkovsky 2002: 57). Broadly used as a method of Russian colonization of Siberia and Alaska, this institutionalized kidnapping was practically unknown in the British, French, or Spanish colonization of the Americas (Grinev n/d).
Hunting the hunters, the invaders met with formidable resistance on the part of some tribes such as the Chukchi, the Kamchadals, the Aleuts, or the Koryaks (Slezkine 1994; Iadrintsev 2003; Bockstoce 2009). When challenged, the Russians responded with increasingly violent methods, starting with public flogging and ending with indiscriminate killing. The Orthodox priest Innokentii Veniaminov, bishop of Alaska and later Metropolitan of Moscow, reported that in 1766 Ivan Soloviev with his seamen exterminated about 3,000 Aleuts, more than a half of the rebellious tribe (Veniaminov 1840: 188-90). Hundreds of the survivors were forced to resettle to another archipelago to hunt sea otters. Reportedly, natives hated Russians so much that they did not accept their superior tools, such as traps, and continued to hunt with bow and arrow, therefore losing the competition to the incomers (Pavlov 1972). Like almost all ventures of the Russian state, the fur trade was multinational. Along with the ethnic Russians, the newcomers included their allies, such as the Cossacks; their exiles, such as the Swedes and the Poles; and their merchants such as the Tartars and the Jews (Glebov 2009).
Gradually, Russian servitors learned to bring the natives "under the exalted hand of the great sovereign" by demonstrating force rather than applying it. In a ceremonial way, cannons and muskets were discharged while the native chiefs took an oath to the sovereign and the tribesmen were lined up as if they were an imperial guard (Lantzeff 1972: 93). While the sovereign understood the fur business as a kind of taxation and the natives understood it as a kind of slavery, the local servitors had to improvise a middle ground on which they could establish a relatively peaceful and profitable trade. Giving "gifts" to the chiefs of the tribes, befriending the shamans, raising or even adopting the "amanats," and arming one tribe against another were ordinary methods of bringing people to tribute. In many respects, the system of Russia's rule in northern Eurasia was comparable with the later British system in India. The rule was indirect, many tribes preserved their autonomy, and the number of colonizers in relation to the colonized territory was miniscule. However, there were many differences. Because of fur, Russian colonization was a very lucrative enterprise. Local tribes in Siberia were exterminated to an extent that would have been unthinkable in India; actually, the population losses were close to North American levels (Curtin 1984: 208). Finally, even with the depletion of the key resource, fur, the Russian Empire kept its hold in Siberia, while the Brits preferred to quit when they found maintaining the colony to be untenable.