Map 3. Russian conquest of Siberia in the seventeenth century. Modeled on a map from Allen F. Chew, An Atlas of Russian History: Eleven Centuries of Changing Borders, rev. edn. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), map 34.
were possible, in-migration of Slavic colonists increased, and several of the northern fort towns (Berezov, Mangazeia, Obdorsk) fell into disrepair. The future for Russia was along the southern edge of Siberia.
Following that imperative forces working in the name of the tsar moved astonishingly quickly across the continent, founding Eniseisk in 1619, Krasnoiarsk 1628, Iakutsk in 1632, and more forts approaching Lake Baikal. Russians reached the Pacific by 1649 (when Okhotsk was founded) and established Irkutsk on Lake Baikal in 1652. In all, Russia traversed 5,000 km in seventy years. It was tremendously profitable for Moscow: in 1605, Siberian furs already constituted 11 percent of annual state income, and estimates of their eventual proportion of the state budget in the seventeenth century range from a tenth to a fifth to a quarter. It is also thought that far more furs were taken by private entrepreneurs than as state tribute. At the same time, Moscow pushed expansion across Siberia in order to secure direct trade relations with China. As early as 1608 Moscow sent delegations to negotiate with eastern Siberian rulers for safe passage to China; by 1618/19 a Russian delegation reached Beijing, as did an embassy led by Nikolai Spafarii in 1675/6, but no deal was negotiated until the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689. Caravans between Beijing and Russia began (accompanied by vast illegal trade that stimulated Russian trapping activities in northeast Siberia), although Beijing tightly controlled Russian access to the Qing capital; between 1689 and 1727 only eleven Russian state caravans had been permitted.
Russia's expanse across Siberia was fast because it was ruthless. The goal was to collect tribute in furs, and in the process, governors and petty officials, Cossacks and private merchants extorted furs for themselves. Cossack "iasak gangs" raced across Siberia, throwing together log fortresses, killing and enslaving natives who resisted, extorting tribute, fighting among themselves over turf, and moving on when supplies of sables, ermine, black fox, and marten dwindled. Cossack gunpowder decimated natives armed with bows and arrows; indigenous tribes were too small and too scattered to mount effective resistance. Forging a middle ground, Russians recruited willing native elites into their service and played upon local rivalries, using, for instance, regiments of "service Komi-Zyriane" from Berezov and Tobolsk against other tribes.
Independent bands with no overarching political organization, Cossack communities had already been in place on the upper Kama and Iaik Rivers and in western Siberia when the Russian state moved in. They accepted service to the tsar in return for privileges and profit—self-governing traditions, military autonomy, booty from raiding and trade, grain provisions or landholdings, and people to work them. But their loyalty to the tsar was often tenuous; Christoph Witzenrath argues that Siberian Cossacks acted in their own interest, reined in with difficulty by Muscovite governors. Cossack Ermak's fateful encounter with Khan Kuchum started out as a private Stroganov foray on which Moscow capitalized; at the end of the seventeenth century, renegade Cossacks claimed tribute and land in the Amur Valley in the name of the tsar, prompting a military response from China, which led to the Treaty of Nerchinsk (1689). Cossack revolts against Muscovite officials or Cossacks going out on their own were not rare, including an uprising of
Transbaikal Cossacks that galvanized Buriats and local Russian settlers against the Irkutsk governor from 1695 to 1697.
Taking Siberia was extremely brutal. Natives resisted by fleeing, south into Manchu-ruled territories or north away from Russian control. They also fought violently. Buryat resistance to Russian expansion around Lake Baikal broke into full-scale warfare in 1644-6, while across the Iakut lands to the north natives attacked Russian fortresses at Krasnoiarsk and Iakutsk in the early 1640s; in the 1650s Russia fought back Manchu army attacks and put down an uprising of Lamuts who burned the fort at Okhotsk. A decade later, in 1666, Evenki attacked the rebuilt fortress at Okhotsk. Russians reacted harshly. They took elite hostages to guarantee loyalty (amanat); they seized women as concubines; they killed indiscriminately. Human losses were devastating: in addition to deaths in war, the native population died from smallpox and other epidemics imported by the newcomers; many fell into poverty from extortionate tribute taking; many found their traditional patterns of life disrupted by Russian seizure of land for farming. The toll is evident in population statistics: there were an estimated 227,000 native Siberians in the seventeenth century, while by 1795 their numbers had risen only to about 360,000, a modest increase in a century of tremendous demographic growth elsewhere.
Siberian natives adapted to Russian presence as in all such colonial settings. Those in the deep taiga and Arctic north where few Russians settled found little changed in their lives. Siberian tribes were accustomed to paying iasak to overlords; Moscow was the next in a long line, and its colonial policy was as pragmatic as elsewhere. Russia forbade natives to own weaponry, but tolerated clan and tribal units. Moscow pursued a "divide and conquer" policy, luring one tribe with gifts so they would join Muscovite forces against rival tribes: Iakut princes even served as governors in 1724 and in the late eighteenth century, the Iakut native elite was so cohesive that it requested (unsuccessfully) status as Russian nobility. Russia did not force conversion; even when most ofthe Buriats converted to Lamaist Buddhism in the early eighteenth century, Moscow did not protest. Russia did not actively force nomads to settle down, but many communities were pushed into it by Russian seizure of grazing lands. As a rule, in Siberia enserfment did not follow the Russian flag, neither for native peoples nor for Russian settlers (some Russian monasteries tried to enforce serfdom), although slavery continued in various communities. As in the Middle Volga, Siberian iasak payers were treated as state peasants, but they paid tribute and service obligations different than East Slavic peasants in the center (they did not, for example, pay the poll tax or suffer military recruitment in the eighteenth century).
Siberian populations are tremendously diverse in language, custom, and political economies. Here lived Turkic, Finno-Ugric, Manchu, Tungusic, and Mongol language groups, as well as many communities speaking paleo-Asiatic languages unique to them. Most Siberian natives were animist with a shamanist culture, except for Islamic Tatars in western Siberia and Buriat Buddhists surrounding Lake Baikal. On the Arctic and Pacific coasts lived sedentary communities of fishermen and seal and walrus hunters; there and just inland in the taiga lived nomadic reindeer herdsmen: from west to east, Samoyedic-speaking peoples, Tunguz (Man- chu) and paleo-Asiatic speakers Chukchi, Kamchadals, and Koriaks. Deeper into the taiga, tribes were generally nomadic hunters and fishermen; in western and central Siberia, these included Samoeds, Ostiaks (Finno-Ugric, also called Khanty), Tunguz, Iakuts (Turkic), and paleo-Asiatic Iukagir. Those living further south in the forested steppe could add nomadic pastoralism and farming to hunting and fishing: in western Siberia these included Siberian Tatars (Turkic) and Finno- Ugric-speaking Voguly (also called Mansi). The largest groups of nomadic pastor- alists were the Mongol-speaking Buriats and Turkic-speaking Iakuts in fertile valleys of the middle Lena River.