John Ledyard's Journey through Russia and Siberia, 1787–1788: The Journal and Selected Letters

3. Siberia in the Eighteenth Century

3 SmERIA IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY As BACKGROUND for following Ledyard's journey through Siberia , I shall here briefly summarize general developments and conditions throughout this vast subcontinent during the eighteenth century, focusing principally on eastern Siberia, where Ledyard spent six months of his stay in the Russian Empire, and on the decade of the 1780's. Only a half century before Ledyard's time did the Russian government first dispatch scientific expeditions to study the resources, peoples, wildlife, and geography of this enormous region and to explore its farthest limits. By his day the knowledge of Siberia's boundaries had been well established, the existence of the Bering Strait proven, and Russian exploration and colonization were proceeding into northwest America. It is not hard to gather material on the achievements of exploration and scientific research in Siberia during the eighteenth century. More difficult is to determine conditions of daily life and migratory travel among the common people. Moreover, material on the natives is often easier to come by than on the Russian inhabitants. In general, information is readily available for three chief periods of Siberia's past. Historians, both Russian and foreign, have frequently dwelt on the faScinating epoch of Mus- INTRODUCTION covite expansion into Siberia and to the Pacific in the seventeenth century. Numbers of travelers, exiles, scientists, and explorers have left a large body of literature that contributes to a comprehensive description of Siberia in the nineteenth century. And Soviet historians and memoir writers have recently turned their attention to Siberia at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution and the Civil War. In spite of information on various aspects of Siberia gathered by eminent explorers and scholars in the eighteenth century, there remains a relative dearth of astute observers and chroniclers of daily life.1 Among the native Siberian population in the eighteenth century five major Uralian and Altaic ethnic groups stood out: those of Samoyed and Finno-Ugrian stock and those of Turkic, Mongolian , and Tungusic origin, respectively. The Samoyed tribes and those of Finno-Ugrian descent such as the Ostyaks and Voguls inhabited the northwestern parts of Siberia. Tribes of Turkic origin generally populated the southwestern borderlands, with the notable exception of the Yakuts, who lived primarily in the middle region of the Lena River valley. The Kalmyks and Buryats were the most numerous among the Mongol peoples. Largely through Tibetan Buddhist and Chinese influences the Buryats, who inhabited the region around Lake Baikal, possessed the most advanced customs, laws, and social life of all the native peoples of Siberia. The Tungus, a relatively numerous and varied people, who were also quite culturally advanced, inhabited a wide region extending from the uplands of the Tunguska tributaries of the Yenisei to the Pacific. Scattered ethnic groups of ancient Siberian origin (Paleoasiatics) inhabited the most distant fringes of the subcontinent. Chukchi and Yukagirs dwelt in northeastern Siberia; Koryaks and Kamchadals lived in northern 1. Walther Kirchner has described the problem thus: "Characteristically our sources for the seventeenth century are more productive than for the eighteenth century. . . . Siberia in the eighteenth century had developed into a giant organism, constantly growing and getting more complicated, for the understanding of which we have needed far more numerous and varied statements. Firsthand accounts, more continuous and richly Howing, are just not available in proportion to the growing significance of Siberia" (Elne Reise dutch Sibirien, p. 9). KALMYKS q 0 l S o 250 500 , M i:.' ' Eighteenth-century Siberia, Showing Important Towns and Native Peoples 56 INTRODUCTION and southern Kamchatka, respectively; and Ainus (Kurilians) inhabited the Kurile Islands.2 As early as the twelfth century Russians from the commercial city of Novgorod had traded with western Siberian natives, and by the late 1400'S the lands of Novgorod extended as far north and east as the lower Ob basin. The initial thrust of Muscovite Russia into Siberia began over two hundred years before Ledyard 's journey, when the Cossack freebooter Yermak, with the aid of firearms and 800 men, conquered Sibir, capital of the Siberian Tartar khanate, in 1581.3 With this conquest the ice was broken, and soon afterwards a rash of eastward expansion ensued , in which Russian entrepreneurs, searching for valuable furs, pressed onward from one river valley to the next, finally reaching the Pacific. The first Russian town in Siberia, Tyumen, 2. The census of 1782 (the Fourth Reviziia) gives the breakdown by peoples which is...