SIBERIA AS in Spain, the government gave its general approval for the expansion of empire, but the pioneers on the frontier provided the impetus and took the crucial decisions, often turning defensive dispositions into campaigns of conquest. In the case of Siberia, a single entrepreneurial family took the initiative which brought together traders, administrators and warriors for a concerted effort of territorial and economic expansion. The Stroganovs, who for decades had enjoyed an official monopoly in the highly lucrative businesses of furs and salt-mining, engaged a Don Cossack army, under Ataman Ermak, to protect its operations against raids by the Khan of [Western] Siberia. Turning defence into attack, in 1581–2 Ermak succeeding in conquering the Khan’s capital on the lower River Irtysh.
Thereafter the way lay open, through taiga and tundra, right across Siberia. The peoples who populated this immense territory were primitive and loosely ordered, without state structures: they sometimes offered bitter resistance to the invaders from the west, but were overcome with comparative ease even when superior in numbers, since their military equipment and organization were rudimentary.
Leaving fortresses (astrogi) behind them at major river crossings to consolidate their advance, the Cossack pioneers reached the Pacific Ocean by 1639 and founded there the harbour of Okhotsk in 1648. Thereby the advancing Russians gave substance to their claim on the heritage of the Golden Horde, adding it to their existing ethnic and imperial claims in Europe. Their actual domination of the territory was, however, fragmentary. Freebooters, hunters and traders came first, drawn by the fabled wealth of the region, while the government subsequently improvised a thin web of colonization, sending soldiers, clergy, officials and a few resettled peasants. Spontaneous peasant settlement played a minor role, since the distances and dangers were sufficient to deter all but the boldest.12
The occupation of Siberia offers the first example of a characteristic feature of Russian imperialism: its tendency to forestall possible danger by expanding to fill the space it is able to dominate. This has meant that for Russians the sense of border is vague and protean, shaped by the constellation of power on its frontiers at any given moment. Expansion comes to an end only when Russia fetches up against another power capable of offering effective resistance and of affording a stable and predictable frontier, so that future relations can be conducted on a diplomatic rather than a military footing. Such frontiers Russia has normally respected, challenging them only when it appears that the power on the other side can no longer guarantee them. These tendencies have lent Russian imperialism a paradoxical air of aggression combined with caution.
In the Far East, China was both an obstacle to further advance and a stabilizing influence. After a period of indecisive conflict, the Russians signed with them the Treaty of Nerchinsk (1689), which settled the mutual border for nearly two centuries. Further north, where no such power existed to restrain and mould the forward impetus, even the Pacific did not pose an insurmountable barrier: Russian expansion continued across Alaska and down the west coast of North America. It was followed, however, by only the sparsest of settlement, and never put down firm roots.
Mindful of the vast distances and the perilous situation of the thinly scattered Russian settlers in Siberia, the Muscovite government pursued towards the natives a pragmatic policy similar to the one tried out on the Volga. Having first established undisputed control, where necessary by harsh and violent methods, it left the local peoples as far as possible to continue their traditional way of life, on condition of paying a regular tribute in furs (iasak). Voevody were exhorted to treat them ‘with leniency and benevolence, and not to levy the iasak by brute force’.13 Siberian clan and tribal leaders were confirmed in their powers, though, unlike the Tatars, none of them was assimilated into the Russian nobility, since their way of life was felt to be too alien.
In practice, such intended forbearance was difficult to sustain. Disputes often broke out between Russians and natives. Sometimes Russian officials took hostages to ensure payment of the iasak; sometimes, knowingly or not, they infringed native hunting rights, or new peasant settlements blocked traditional pastoral routes. On any of these grounds, conflict might flare up, whereupon the Russians would exploit their superior weaponry to restore order as they conceived it.14
Siberia gave Russians a reassuring sense of space. Its immense expanses formed a kind of geo-political confirmation of the notion of universal empire. At the same time its huge material resources were never properly exploited. Siberia is a prime example of the way in which the empire was run for considerations of great power status, not for economic ones. Its first and most obvious source of wealth, furs, was mercilessly exploited in the interests of traders and the exchequer, with no thought for restocking, so that by the early eighteenth century it was starting to decline from sheer misuse. The agricultural potential of the south and west lay almost completely fallow until the late nineteenth century. The mineral wealth, despite numerous geological expeditions, was grossly underexploited right into the twentieth century.
Admittedly there were major difficulties with transport, but that did not prevent the regime using Siberia as a dumping ground for the empire’s undesirables, its criminals and its persecuted, who were conveyed in their thousands over its wastes to their confinement in convict camp or administrative exile. Some of them worked in saltworks and silver mines, but ironically the more educated sometimes found employment in official posts: at that distance it was considered safe for them to serve the Tsar they were allegedly trying to undermine! Siberia thus became a means of bolstering internal security rather than a great resource for economic growth.
STEPPES OF EAST AND SOUTH The straddling of northern Eurasia left the Russians with an immensely long, indeterminate and exposed flank to the south, where the steppes were flat and vulnerable to invasion. They applied to it the techniques they had first tried out in the Volga region, building a loose line of fortifications from the southern Urals to the Altai, manned by Cossack patrols or armed peasants to protect their communications from raiders.15 In practice peasants and soldiers were hard to distinguish, since perforce they acquired each other’s characteristics in this harsh environment where the arts of war and agriculture were needed in equal measure for survival.
Given the immensely greater scale of the problem than on the Volga, security was not to be attained in this way, and eventually the Russians sought it by the only available alternative: to envelop and stifle conflict by expanding south and east across the desert to the khanates of the Central Asian oases, building loose chains of fortresses and redoubts as they went. In the course of this progress, they encountered by turn the semi-sedentary, semi-nomadic Bashkirs, then the nomadic Nogais and Kalmyks, then the Kazakhs. At each stage the Russians would begin by applying the technique which had served them well against Kazan’, exploiting feuds within tribal confederations and drawing some tribes into a vassalage which was then interpreted as long-term subjection. There would follow a campaign of retribution against violated sovereignty, after which the indigenous peoples would be drawn into the permanent service of the Tsar, sometimes as special regiments within the Russian army, just as the British did with the Gurkhas. Russia would alternately threaten them and offer them trade privileges to fix them in service.16
Russia’s most persistent and redoubtable opponents in this steppe confrontation were the Crimean Tatars in the south. They were so formidable because they had the mobility and ferocity of any nomadic host, but also a relatively high level of civilization, and the backing of a great power, the Ottoman Empire. Since the slave trade was a mainstay of their economy, they mounted frequent raids northwards towards Moscow: in 1571 they