Colonization by East Slavs into Siberia reached large numbers only in the nineteenth century; the trappers, Cossacks, and officials who came in Muscovite times followed the furs and were never numerous. Most Russian in-migration brought agricultural peasants needed to feed officials. Initially grain had been shipped in from the north (Pomor'e) and the Perm and Viatka lands to support Russian officials (Cossacks, governors, bureaucrats) who were paid in land and grain; by the 1590s Moscow was forcibly settling peasants from the upper Kama into western Siberia to farm sturdy crops (rye, barley, oats, peas, hemp, and wheat where possible). Western Siberia became self-sufficient in grain by the 1680s, but was then required to provision points east. In the 1630s-50s and again in the 1680s forcible settlement occurred at Russian outposts in the upper Lena and upper Angara valleys and forts at Irkutsk and Eniseisk, which was as far north as peasant agriculture was reliable. Voluntary peasant migrants preferred the more fertile southern edge of western Siberia. From about 70,000 in 1660 the population of Russians across Siberia rose to about 230,000 in 1709.
In the seventeenth century exiles provided a small stream of new settlers. A large group of Ukrainian prisoners of war were settled around the Lena River in 1645 and by the 1660s a few thousand exiles had been settled along the Yenisei, Angara, and Lena Rivers and in the Lake Baikal area. These were common criminals and political criminals, as well as prisoners of war as diverse as Ukrainian Cossacks, Poles, Swedes, and Germans. They staffed forts at Tobolsk, Tomsk, Eniseisk, Irkutsk, Krasnoiarsk, Ilimsk, and as far north as Iakutsk and Mangazeia. As a rule, exiles were sent to settle and serve (only the most notorious religious or political criminals were kept in jails); most blended into their communities as artisans, peasants, and Cossacks, musketeers, or other garrison guards. Where possible exiles farmed to support themselves, but primarily they exploited the forest and engaged in trade for a living, alongside other required duties. To keep exiles in place, Russia counted primarily on distance and the rigors of travel; for capital criminals, they also used physical marking. In the seventeenth century, this took the form of branding (tattooing) with letters indicative of the crime, and cutting off fingers or ears; in the early eighteenth century less debilitating forms such as slashing of nostrils were introduced, along with branding. Any person so marked who fled exile and showed up in the center could be summarily executed, by law, since their branding and mutilations proved they were exiled capital criminals. The number of exiles in Siberia by the early eighteenth century was not great, about 29,000 in an estimated population of Russians and other European migrants of about 200,000.
East Slavic populations in Siberia over time developed a variety ofcharacteristics that differentiated them from the center. Cossacks, for example, although ethnically mixed, spoke Russian and identified with Orthodoxy, but many joined the Old Belief when schism erupted in the Russian Orthodox church in the seventeenth century. In addition, many Old Belief communities found refuge in Siberia, settling in the Altais, among the Buriats east of Lake Baikal, in Iakutia, and on the lower Ob. They developed closed communities with austere dress and lifestyles—sobriety, quasi-monastic prayer regimes—that they modeled on an idealized image of Muscovite Orthodoxy. Cossacks in cohesive communities "on the lines" (a defensive strip of land at the steppe/forest edge of western Siberia where only Cossacks could settle) maintained Cossack practices and solidarity more than "town" Cossacks in isolated fortresses in Iakutia, Kamchatka, and other northern outposts, where they often became culturally integrated with local populations. They, and East Slavic merchants, peasants, and exiles who took up residence in the Siberian taiga, by necessity intermarried with native women, often seizing them as concubines or forcibly (and superficially) converting them for Orthodox marriage. Particularly in the north (Iakutia, Kamchatka) Russians and other non-natives living relatively isolated from compatriots tended to "go native," for reasons of expediency and safety. They adopted warm native clothing and modeled their hunting, farming, and husbandry on native practices. They took up local culture, speaking local languages, intermarrying, adapting animist to Orthodox practices. Among the Buriats and Iakuts, Russians even adopted the local practice of keeping natives as slaves (iasyry).
Russia's administrative authority over this vast land was skeletal. Moscow administered Siberia through a Siberian Chancery, spun out of the Kazan Chancery in 1637, which lasted until Petrine reforms (1711). Governors ruled large provinces that were in turn grouped into very large administrative districts (Berezov, Tobolsk, Verkhotur'e, Eniseisk, Tomsk, Lena) with even more powerful governors. Corruption was endemic. Distance, after all, as Braudel reminded us, is the "enemy of empire."
STEPPE, SLAVES, AND NOMADS
It was one thing to move into the sparsely settled world of Siberian tribes and substitute the tsar for a previous khan as tribute taker; it was quite another thing for Russia to move against the armed nomadic tribes ofthe steppe. Lands on either side ofthe Volga were home to nomads whose lives and economies followed the rhythm of symbiosis and conflict endemic in these centuries. The more politically organized formed confederations, but such steppe "empires" were volatile, waxing and waning in cycles. The last great steppe empire was the Mongol (mid-thirteenth to late fourteenth centuries); between steppe empires and after the demise of Mongol power, the steppe was a land of unpredictable alliances.
A word here should be said about nomads, as they play an important role in Russian history, whether as conquered subjects or rivals for control of the steppe. Pastoralists or hunters, people who practiced a nomadic economy do not "wander": they have adapted to settings oflimited resources (water, grass, game) by developing practices offood preservation and transport in harmony with their environments. If need be, such communities consciously kept the size oftheir populations and herds limited to match available resources. Nomads understand whose grazing lands are where and when, and they move in parallel circuits. Women do most of the domestic work; children herd; men were free for raiding and warfare.
Yuriy Malikov has provided a robust description of Kazakh nomadic patterns. The Kazakhs, whom Russia encountered in the eighteenth century, were organized in tribes of about 100 communities (called auls) that farmed mixed herds of sheep and goats; they kept horses for cartage and warfare, and took up cattle grazing in areas of Russian influence and only where sufficient grass existed. Sheep and goats were the quintessential steppe domesticates, as they ate any kind of grass, in smaller quantities than cattle; their milk, meat, and hide supplied the Kazakhs with a self- sufficient household economy. Kazakhs traversed grazing circuits with portable iurts made of sturdy felt from animal fur; balls of dried mare's milk called kumys provided lightweight protein; hides provided clothing, containers, and rope. A tribe of Kazakhs lived sedentarily at their winter encampments for about four or five months of the year. As spring came, it gathered for a slow migration to summer pastures, following grass as it emerged from under melting snow. During their moves, runners scouted out water and grass and kept the group on track. The tribe camped every few days and grazed, moving on until they reached summer pasture by May or June. Then the auls separated into smaller areas for efficient grazing; the whole tribe might slowly shift its site several times, tracking water and grass supplies, until August or September. Then they reassembled for a more rapid autumn migration back to their traditional winter site. The distances they traveled varied depending upon resources (from 200 to 300 km in southern Kazakhstan to as many as 1,000 km in western and central, averaging there about 700 km). Migratory paths were not fixed, but geographical zones claimed by neighboring tribes were known and respected.