In 1867, the company was liquidated and the imperial domains in North America were sold to the US.
Venus in Furs
Beginning from the seventeenth century, European thinkers formulated "the four stages theory" which stated that the original mode of human economy was hunting and fishing, which gave way to pasturage, which was replaced by agriculture, and, finally, by commerce. This narrative was based mainly on what was happening in the recently colonized America, where the four stages had followed one after the other (Meek 1976). But the Russian fur trade demonstrated a coexistence of distant stages, such as hunting and commerce. Those European thinkers who were closer to Russia, such as Pufendorf, did not agree with the four-stage theory but believed that various modes had in fact coexisted from biblical times. In his version of European history that was translated into Russian in 1718, Pufendorf talked about the Russian Empire as "vastly extensive" though "barren and uninhabited." However, the Emperor's revenue was "very considerable" and "the Trade in Sables which is entirely in his own Hands is a vast Addition thereto" (1764: 2/347-8). Pufendorf knew that although the whole world could, at the beginning, have been like America, at its next stages it had become like Russia, mixed and twisted.
Though the fruits of the Russian north, fur pelts, had been familiar to the Europeans, only in the eighteenth century did the literate world learn about these lands. Then, a mixed group of German academics, Orthodox missionaries, and political exiles found themselves in Siberia and were able to write back to Europe. Exiled to Siberia in 1790, Nikolai Radishchev was the first to explain the takeover of Siberia as colonization and its motive as fur. In his Concise History of the Acquisition of Siberia, he wrote that the tsars gave rights to the Siberian pioneers "over the lands that did not belong to Russia" and that they were exempted from taxes in exchange for supplying furs to Moscow (1941: 2/148). Writing in the 1830s, another Siberian historian, Piotr Slovtsov (1886), described in detail how, in their search for beaver and sable, the first Siberian pioneers ignored everything else, including the metals that were discovered later on the same lands. When the merchant family of Stroganovs, the oligarchs of west Siberia who financed Russian tsars, obtained their coat of arms in the eighteenth century, they chose sables as their emblem.
Figure 7: Coat of Arms of the Stroganovse, 1753. Two sables hold the shield picturing another creature. Stroganov's motto said, "Ferras, opes patriae, sibi nomen" ("Will give wealth to the fatherland and name to myself"). Source: Wikimedia Commons
A traveler, who visited Moscow in 1716, reported the local interpretation of the Greek myth of the Argonauts: the Golden Fleece was understood as the Siberian sable and the Argonauts as fur traders (Pogosian 2001: 282). The peak of this fur-clad myth-making was the famous novel by the Austrian writer Leopold Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs (1870), which featured a Slavic beauty who gave and received pleasure from playing with Russian sables and the knout. But Peter the Great rejected the ancient symbol of Russian power, Monomakh's Cap with its sable trimming, for the imperial crown made of gold and diamonds.
In his Capital, Marx compared primitive accumulation with original sin, which European empires committed in their colonies. "In the tender annals of Political Economy, the idyllic reigns from time immemorial" (Marx 1990: 354): the origins of the imperial capitals in the bloody commodities such as silver, fur, or ivory elude memory. On a more scholarly note, it was Afanasii Shchapov who in the mid- nineteenth century understood the crucial role of the fur trade in terms of history, geography, ethnology, and ecology (he did not know the latter word). A Siberian, Shchapov realized the historical meaning of the depletion of the fur trade. He knew about the tragedies that developed at the frontlines of this hunting colonization, where the Cossacks were exterminating the hunting tribes in order to force them to exterminate the fur animals. One such example, which Shchapov used extensively, was the colonization of the Aleut Islands, where Russians forced the locals to hunt sea otter until almost all of them, otters and humans, had perished (1906: 2/291). Victims were illiterate, the perpetrators complicit, and historians mute about these early catastrophes. In this situation Shchapov developed his anachronistic method, imagining the past by analogy with the present.
Immensely influential among Russian radicals (see Chapter 11), Shchapov's ideas can be traced far into the twentieth century. During his Siberian exile in 1900-2, the young Lev Trotsky worked for the Siberian merchant Yakov Chernykh, who bartered fur with the local tribe of the Tungusy in exchange for vodka and cloth. Illiterate, Chernykh had a revenue of millions and many thousands of people in his employ, and he operated on land that spanned from the Lena to the Volga. This Chernykh was the "indisputable dictator" of the whole district, wrote Trotsky (1922), who knew the meaning of the word "dictator."
Trotsky made this view public while debating Russian history with the leading Marxist historian, Mikhail Pokrovsky, in 1922. They both agreed that Russia featured an "uneven development," a phrase that Trotsky made famous. But Pokrovsky attacked Trotsky for producing too static a picture of this unevenness. What created these extreme differences? He cited the final chapters of Marx's Capital, which narrated how, after the Middle Ages, "the colonial system" played the "preponderant role" in Europe and how the "strange God" of colonialism "perched himself on the altar, cheek by jowl with the old Gods of Europe" (Marx 1990: 374). A student of Kliuchevsky, Pokrovsky easily applied these colonial idioms to the rewriting of Russian history (1920, 2001). Trotsky's work for a Siberian fur oligarch gave Pokrovsky just another example: Chernykh was a new version of the Stroganovs, wrote the historian. As a result, Pokrovsky revealed a belief that he ironically called one of his "heresies" - namely, that Russia had developed "according to the colonial type." Trotsky misunderstood this primary cause for Russia's "combined and uneven development." Pokrovsky asked Trotsky:
Is the concept of the colonial system applicable only to the countries with hot climates and colored populations, or could one imagine it also in the Siberian forest or in the Northern Russian marshes? Does it require ostriches and rhinoceroses, or are foxes, sables, and martins enough for the colonial system? (Pokrovsky 1922)
On the other side of the ocean, an American scholar, Frank A. Golder, gave a boost to the scholarly studies of Russian colonial trade. Born in Odessa, Golder started his career with teaching English in Alaska in 1899. Alaska was still a land where the natives preferred Russian to English; Golder even had to give his Fourth of July speech in Russian. After this experience, he studied Russian history at Harvard and in 1921 took part in the American Relief Administration (ARA), trying to help the victims of famine on the Volga. He wrote a magisterial book on the Russian expansion in the Pacific (1914). Fed by his personal experience, his interest was in demythologizing the fur trade and traders, who were still perceived as like the Argonauts: