Feeding the Russian Fur Trade: Provisionment of the Okhotsk Seaboard and the Kamchatka Peninsula, 1639–1856

1 Historical Background: Occupation and Exploitation of the Russian Far East

1 HISTORICAL BACKGROUND: OCCUPATION AND EXPLOITATION OF THE RUSSIAN FAR EAST "The Russians sought in Siberia first sables and then Kamchatka beavers [sea otters]. These animals were the reason for the opening and conquest of Siberia, just as gold and silver were for America." K. F. German, "Statisticheskiya svedeniya," pp. 82-83. Russian Expansion across Siberia It is sometimes forgotten that European colonial expansion proceeded overland to the east as well as overseas to the west. While the maritime nations of Western Europe were advancing westward across the Atlantic Ocean to the New World, continental Russia of Eastern Europe was seeking its own new world by moving eastward across the Great Russian Plain. This expansion, whereby Muscovy grew from a principality of several hundred square miles into an empire spanning three continents and encompassing one-sixth of the earth, is certainly one of the cardinal features of modem history. In the words of a seventeenth -century Russian tale, "What man ever divined that Moscow would become a kingdom? What man ever guessed that Moscow would be accounted an empire? Once by the Moskva there stood only the goodly hamlets of a noble."l Russian expansion to the east dates from the very dawn of Russian history. As LantzefI has remarked, "in the beginning of Russian history, two Russian principalities, Novgorod and Rostov-Suzdal, were engaged in exploring, conquering, exploiting, and colonizing the area west of the Ural Mountains."2 Bands of Novgorodian ushkuiniks (river brigands) raided "the country beyond the portage" (i.e., the basin of the Northern Dvina River) from the eleventh century, even crossing the 3 4 PERSPECTIVE AND CONTEXT "Iron Gate" or "Stony Belt" (Urals). The Chronicle of Novgorod mentions its citizens traveling "beyond the portage" as early as 1079.3 Novgorodians also ventured to Pomorye, the "summer [southern] coast" of the "Cold [White] Sea," in search of fish, salt, and furs.4 Their booty, which also included honey and wax, silver and copper, river pearls and walrus tusks, was readily marketed in the Hanseatic trade of Novgorod the Great. Muscovy, in annexing Novgorod Land in the 1470's, fell heir to the Novgorodian policy of commercial expansion to the northeast. This legacy, coupled with Muscovy's own aggressive policy of "the gathering of the Russian lands" in order to consolidate the absolute rule of the Grand Prince of Moscow, resulted in the intensification and extension of Russian eastward expansion, especially after Ivan the Terrible's conquest in the 1550's of the roadblocks of the Tatar khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan astride, respectively, the middle and the lower Volga. These victories secured the direct central route to Siberia, which the chronicles first mention in 1407. Novgorod's river pirates were succeeded by the soldiers and Cossacks* of Moscow. Their policy of periodic raiding to punish marauders and to exact tribute was climaxed in 1583 by the capture of Kuchum Khan's capital of Sibir (Isker), near the junction of the Tobol and Irtysh rivers, by Yermak, a renegade Cossack in the hire of the mercantile Stroganov family. This conquest of the Siberian Khanate removed the last serious obstacle to Russian expansion across Siberia. Thereafter the policy of sporadic raids was replaced by the "planned domination of rivers and portages through the building of ostrogs [forts]."5 Bands of Cossacks and promyshlenniks, on their own initiative but with official sufferance, horsed, boated, skied, and trudged farther and farther east of the Urals from one river basin to the next, subjugating and taxing the natives. In this manner Western Siberia was * Cossacks, whose name is probably derived from a Turkish word meaning "adventurers," were pastoral frontiersmen originating from fugitives and refugees who fled to the steppes of southern European Russia in the late fifteenth and the early sixteenth centuries. Here they established military villages (stanitsas) with elected officers and herded, traded, and raided. Eventually they were employed by Moscow as frontier guards in return for certain privileges (e.g., tax exemption). They were largely responsible for the conquest of Siberia, which contained some 2,000 Cossacks by 1631 (George V. Lantzeff, Siberia in the Seventeenth Century, "University of California Publications in History," vol. 30 [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1943], p. 69). HISTORICAL BACKGROUND 5 conquered by Tobolsk Cossacks, Eastern Siberia by Yeniseisk Cossacks, and the Russian Far East by Yakutsk Cossacks.* Following the interlocking river systems of the Ob, Yenisey, and Lena...