In their sub-Arctic colony, the Russians created a four-layer political pyramid that consisted of the distant sovereign, his Russian servitors, the native hunters, and fur animals. Violence spread down from the top to the bottom and profit grew from the bottom to the top. Formulating an entirely different experience, the philosophers Giorgio Agamben and Jacques Derrida wrote about proximity between the sovereign and the beast, both of whom are exempt from the law. In this they are like the criminals, who populated Siberia along with animals. "Beast, criminal, and sovereign have a troubling resemblance: they call on each other and recall each other . . . outside the law" (Derrida 2009: 38). This resemblance of beasts and sovereigns created a thick layer of political mythology, with Behemoths and Leviathans, the wolves of Rome and lions of Venice, and Russian sables and bears. Novgorod and Moscow based their political economy on the direct connection, economic as well as aesthetic, between the fur-clad tsars and the fur-carrying animals, with little or, ideally, no participation from those who were irrelevant to this connection.
The resource-bound economy makes the population largely superfluous. An essential part of this system is land. In its enormous northern and eastern stretches, the geographical space of Russia was largely shaped by the fur trade.
Boom and Depletion
The fur pyramid was fragile. The closer we are to the recorded history, the more we know about the rebellions of the locals, the depletion of the animals, the corruption of the servitors, and the discontent of the sovereign. The fur trade brought many tribes to the edge of extermination; in some cases the population loss went so deep and happened so quickly that it is proper to speak of genocide. In 1882, the Siberian Nikolai Iadrintsev was able to mention about a dozen ethnicities that had been fully exterminated earlier but whose names were still remembered. From the mid-eighteenth to the mid- nineteenth centuries, the Kamchadals lost about 90 percent of its population, the Vogules about 50 percent, etc. (Iadrintsev 2003: 137-9).
Replacing the natives, Russian trappers had better access to markets and courts. With their arrival, fur trade normalized, but it coincided with the depopulation of animals. Only sables provided enough profit to support a Russian trapper; squirrel, otter, and other animals remained the business of the natives. In the early seventeenth century, a good trapper could get as many as 200 sables a year; closer to the end of the century, the numbers were 15-20 sables a year, which made the trade unprofitable (Pavlov 1972: 224). Then, Russian trappers dropped the business, but native hunters stayed in the trade. Objects of desire and vanity, Siberian furs fed conspicuous consumption at the pan-European level for a longer period of time than any other class of colonial goods. Silver from Spanish colonies, spices from Dutch colonies, or tea from British colonies could have generated even more wealth and suffering; but in their symbolic value, furs were difficult to compete with. For just one of Henry IV's outfits, London skinners used 12,000 squirrel and 80 ermine skins, which were extracted from the wild tribes thousands of miles to the east (Veale 1966: 20).
The fur trade became the backbone of the Hanseatic League, which included Novgorod as its eastern member and established a trading colony there. Upon purchase, the Germans bounded the fur into bundles and packed them into barrels. In the spring, the Germans shipped the fur barrels by Russian lakes and rivers to the Neva and the Baltic. In exchange, Russian merchants received weapons, silver, cloth, salt, and sweet wine; beer, herring, and metal products also appeared on the market. The fur trade provided a significant part of hard currency that Russian principalities needed for buying weapons and mercenaries. In the late fourteenth century, about 95 percent of all furs that were imported to London were of Hanseatic origin and most of them came from Novgorod. The numbers were huge. During one year, 1391, London imported 350,960 squirrel skins (Veale 1966: 76). It was the time when the Novgorod teams had already crossed the Urals and collected tribute from the western Siberian tribes of the Khanty, Mansi, and others. It was also the time when the English language made one of its very few appropriations from Russian, the word "sable."
Though Russia was not the only source of furs, this source became increasingly important with the deforestation of Europe. Until the end of the fifteenth century, squirrels were available near Novgorod and beavers were trapped near Moscow (Pavlov 1972: 57, 67). However, London's import of fur started declining in the fifteenth century, which some authors put down to the changing fashions in England; it was also the result of the depletion of the Russian forests. The fall of revenue from the fur trade was a reason for the escalating conflict between Russian centers. The fall of Novgorod in 1478 followed after the decline of both the export volumes and the prices of grey squirrel in Europe. Instead, Europeans discovered sable. The routes to Siberia, the land of sable, went through oriental Kazan, which was taken by the Muscovite troops in 1522 in what was the turning point of Russia's history of colonization.
The burden of the resource-bound state only increased with these events. In 1557, each male inhabitant of Iugra had to give one sable a year to the sovereign of Moscow; in 1609, he was obliged to pay seven sables (Pavlov 1972: 70). In 1581, 800 men led by Ermak defeated the khan of Siberia. Carrying the Viking-style boats between Siberian rivers and rowing upstream, they reached the tribes that they could fight with. Their firearms gave them the advantage. Historians, poets, and artists have imagined these events by analogy. Let me try to do so too:
We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness. It was very quiet there. At night sometimes the roll of drums behind the curtain of trees would run up the river. . . . We were wanderers on prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet. We could have fancied ourselves the first of men taking possession of an accursed inheritance. (Conrad 1988: 37)
After two years of fighting, Ermak was killed. Meanwhile, 2,400 sable, 800 black fox, and 2,000 beaver pelts were sent to Moscow
Figure 6: Vasilii Surikov, Ermak's conquest of Siberia, 1895 (in the Russian Museum, St. Petersburg). Note the abundance of firearms on one side and furs on the other side of this battle. Source: Wikimedia Commons
(Fisher 1943: 26). According to an historian of Siberian fur, Oleg Vilkov (1999), more than seven million sables were procured in Siberia in the 70 years between 1621 and 1690. An American historian gives an estimate that is considerably lower.1 Janet Martin (2004) estimated the average price of sable at the end of the sixteenth century in Moscow to be one ruble per pelt. Using this low estimate, we arrive at a sum of 50,000-100,000 rubles a year - a healthy and long-term revenue that the state was learning to appropriate. While Russian sources estimated the proportion of the fur trade to represent a quarter of the gross income of the Muscovite state, one American historian gives the more believable figure of one-tenth (Fisher 1943: 122) and a Soviet scholar, one-fifth (Pavlov 1972). However, the fur's part in the state treasury was much higher. Another major commodity was salt, but it was traded only on the internal market; the role of grain export was minuscule until late in the eighteenth century. As a matter of comparison, in 2005-10, the share of the oil and gas industry in Russia's gross national income was about 25 percent, and represented 60-75 percent of Russian exports. Though it works nicely for the export side of the Russian trade, this comparison does not work for its import side. In its late period, the Soviet Union and, now, post-Soviet Russia have been able to exchange their raw commodities for a large proportion of their food, clothing, and other vital goods. This feat was unimaginable in Muscovite Russia. Fur was traded for luxury goods and military equipment, both of which fueled the growing structures of the state and remained unavailable to the general population.