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A few years later the Kalmyks were back in force. Led by their new chief tay- ishi, Daichin, the Kalmyks ravaged the Kazan' and Ufa provinces, routed the Crimean troops, and demanded the return of the remains of Daichin's father and brothers killed in 1644. When a Russian envoy approached Daichin with demands to confirm the Kalmyks' allegiance and submit hostages, Daichin called him a liar for making such grotesque claims. A realisation that the Kalmyks' arrival in the Caspian steppe was irreversible prompted the Russian authorities to drop some of their customary demands and to adopt a more conciliatory tone. To enlist the Kalmyks as a counterforce to the Crimeans, Moscow returned the remains of Daichin's father and brothers, offered Kalmyks payments and rewards for their military campaigns, and trade privileges in the frontier towns. In i654, after Moscow annexed parts of Ukraine, the rival alliances took shape: Poland and Crimea were facing Russia and its new ally, the Kalmyks.

Similar to Moscow's relationship with other nomadic peoples, Russia's alliance with the Kalmyks remained precarious. While the written treaties (shert') prepared in Moscow and written in Russian were inevitably phrased as the Kalmyks' oath of allegiance, they were, in fact, peace treaties with mutual obligations by both parties to maintain peace, trade and military co-operation. Insisting that the Kalmyks were the subjects ofthe tsar, Moscow objected to the Kalmyks' independent relations with the Crimea, Ottomans or other powers potentially hostile to Moscow, suspecting, and correctly so, that the Kalmyks' allegiances could be easily bought and sold. The Kalmyks, however, believed that Moscow often failed to live up to its commitments when the Russian officials did not deliver payments, demanded custom duties and bribes, did not protect Kalmyks from the raids of Russia's purported subjects, cossacks and Bashkirs, and above all, converted to Christianity fugitive or captured Kalmyks.

Throughout the seventeenth century, the Kalmyks' relationship with Russia continued to alternate between that of a military alliance against the Crimea and openly hostile acts against Russia. By the end of the century, a more pragmatic attitude prevailed in Moscow. In July 1697, a Kalmyk khan, Ayuki, and the high-ranking Russian envoy, the boyar Prince B. A. Golitsyn, signed a treaty which was strikingly different from the previous ones. This time it was the Russian side which undertook commitments to assist the Kalmyks, to put a stop to the Bashkir and cossack raids, not to dictate the boundaries of Kalmyks' pastures, and neither give refuge, nor convert the runaway Kalmyks.[85]

With the Russian conquest of the Ottoman fort of Azov in 1696, the Kalmyks realised that, for the time being, their fortunes lay with Russia.

Map 22.1. Russian expansion in Siberia to 1689

At the same time, Moscow also concluded that it would gain more by mollifying the Kalmyks than confronting them. In addressing the Kalmyk grievances and putting down in writing its own obligations, the govern­ment was ready to admit that assuring the co-operation of the Kalmyks and achieving a modicum of peace along the frontier required more than emphasising the Kalmyks' submissive status and their obligations. Rather, it required a clearly articulated recognition that such a relationship was a two- way street with mutual obligations and commitments. Such an understanding of their relationship would last for the next two decades, when the newly confident Russian authorities would once again impose a new set of restric­tions on the Kalmyks and insist on their explicit submission to the Russian emperor.

Siberia

By the beginning of the seventeenth century, Moscow was well established in western Siberia and reached the banks of the Enisei River. Russia's further expansion in Siberia skirted a careful line between the northern boundaries of the steppe and the southern boundaries of the Siberian forest, thus avoiding the inhospitable terrain of the permafrost wilderness in the north and the open arid steppe in the south. Russia had to wait for another hundred years before undertaking an incremental expansion into the steppe lands (presently northern Kazakhstan), dominated by two powerful nomadic confederations, the Kazakhs and the Oirats.

In the meantime, the Russians moved south-east reaching the Ili River where in 1630 they founded Fort Ilimsk. From here, Russia's first colonists took two different paths. One route of colonisation took the Russians down the Lena River into central Siberia, the other moved south down the Ilim river towards Lake Baikal and the Amur River. In the first instance, the Russians met little resistance and advanced speedily to the shores of the Pacific Ocean. In two years, the Russian colonists sailed down the Lena River across the lands populated by the Evenk (Tungus) and Sakha (Iakut) to found Fort Iakutsk in 1632. In 1647, the Russians reached the Pacific coast and founded Fort Okhotsk in 1649. In the second half of the century, Russian forts and settlements emerged in the lands populated by the Even (Lamut), Yukagir, Chukchi and Koriak of north-eastern Siberia. By the end of the century several Russian forts dotted the landscape of the Kamchatka peninsula (see Map 22.1).

Russia's expansion along this northern route was no different from other parts of Siberia where the native population could offer sporadic but ultimately ineffective resistance, the local elites could be easily co-opted, divided and manipulated and the furs would be collected either in form of a tribute or trade. The native peoples were to become 'the iasak-paying subjects eternally' and the only choice they had was to 'enter the sublime protection of the Grand Sovereign, the Tsar' voluntarily or to be reduced into submission by Russian

arms.[86]

The second route of Russia's expansion into Siberia took the Russians into the lands of the Buriats and Evenk around Lake Baikal and the Daurs of the Amur River. Then Russia's advance had quickly come to a halt. Here, the Russians encountered another sovereign state and empire, whose ruler too claimed suzerainty over numerous native residents of the area. The Russians approached the imperial boundaries of Ch'ing China.

It was not uncommon for both sides to claim suzerainty and the right to collect iasak from the same native people and for the natives to pay trib­ute to both Russians and Chinese. Russia's encroachment into the Chinese sphere of influence and the numerous arguments and disputes over the loy­alty and tributary payments of the native peoples were annoying enough for the Manchu rulers of China. But when the rebellious Russian cossacks arrived to found Fort Albazin on the Amur River in 1665 and Russian set­tlers, attracted by the stories of the Amur region's fabulous riches, began to arrive in larger numbers, Beijing realised that negotiations alone would not resolve the contentious issues. Chinese armies marched towards the Russian forts of Albazin and Nerchinsk, eventually forcing the Russians to raze most of their forts and settlements and to abandon any further expansion in the region. The Treaty of Nerchinsk signed in 1689 established a boundary between the Russian and Chinese empires along the Argun and Shilka rivers and the Stanovoi mountain range, effectively denying Russia any access to the Amur region. The Russians had to wait for over 150 years before annexing the Amur region and turning it into the far-eastern corner of the Russian Empire.[87]

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85

Michael Khodarkovsky, Where Two Worlds Met: The Russian State and the Kalmyk Nomads, 1600-1771 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992), pp. 105-33.

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86

AI, 5 vols. (St Petersburg: various publishers, 1841-2), vol. iv (Tipografiia II Otdeleniia Sobstvennoi E. I. V Kantseliarii, 1842), no. 219, pp. 473-4.

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87

George Lantzeff and Richard Pierce, Eastward to Empire: Exploration and Conquest on the Russian Open Frontier, to 1750 (Montreaclass="underline" McGill-Queen's University Press, 1973), pp. 127­83; James Forsyth, A History of the Peoples of Siberia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 48-109; Mark Bassin, Imperial Visions, Nationalist Imagination and Geo­graphical Expansion in the Russian Far East, 1840-1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 19-24.