Russia (22 page)

Some time was to pass before Moscow appreciated all this, however. Ironically, this generation of Russia’s empire-builders found great difficulty in comprehending the geography of its possessions. In 1627 Tsar Michael did order a book to be compiled which described all the more significant settlements in his dominions and explained their accessibility to each other. The result was a great atlas in words, which was to be in almost constant use in the decades that followed, providing practical guidance for the tsar’s messengers, who would take copies of the relevant sections before they set out on a mission.
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The information was updated as new and better routes were reported, but the first conventional map of Siberia produced in Russia dates from 1667, and finding one’s way to Siberia’s extremities continued to depend very largely on directions given by old Siberia hands.

If geography was one problem, administration was another. The great distances involved (it took two years for a convoy to reach Moscow from Yakutsk), the very low density of population, and the harsh climate made supply, especially to remote outposts, a nightmare. The Russians in central and eastern Siberia needed regular supplies of rye flour and salt, besides fishing line, canvas, tools, clothing and other necessities, and beads and buttons for the natives. Merchants who provided such services risked life and limb as well as privation, though the rewards could be commensurate. The
government often used them in fulfilling many of the state’s functions. It had to enforce tribute and tax collection, and protect consignments of valuable furs and ivory from robbers; it was ultimately responsible for supply, especially of food, and for maintaining order and administering justice. All this had to be done with scarce resources. The officials who ran Siberia enjoyed greater freedom than most, but their responsibilities could be awesome.

Until 1637, when a separate department was set up exclusively to administer Siberian affairs, thirty or so clerks in the Kazan Department had to manage the logistics, finance and taxation, security and defence, justice and food provision for the entire south-east as well as Siberia. Since there was insufficient money to pay all its officials, the government allowed them to deduct their reward from the revenues they collected — usually in the form of furs, which in effect became currency in Siberia. Hostile natives were another problem. The state could not spare many troops to keep order, nor much equipment, and the natives’ weaponry was not invariably Stone Age. One petition to Tsar Michael from a service outpost pleaded for 200 carbines and coats of armour, because Buriat tribesmen in the area ‘have many mounted warriors who fight in armour and helmets … whereas we, your slaves, are ill-clothed, lack armour and our musket shot cannot pierce their armour’.
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Taming Siberia was a shoestring operation.

Siberia’s native peoples comprised a colourful variety of ethnological and linguistic types. They included Mongols, reindeer-herding Tungus (Evenki), Yakuts and Itelmens, in addition to smaller populations of Chukchis, Kets, seal-hunting Yugits and Eskimos, the great majority of them pagan animists.
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If they suffered less from the colonial experience than did the peoples of Central and South America or Africa, it was largely due to very low population density. There could never have been more than a quarter of a million of them in the whole wide country in the seventeenth century. This limited the toll taken by epidemics, and increased opportunities to avoid danger, whether from Russians or from other tribes. Some clashes with the Russians were inevitable, especially since some of the first Russian venturers were desperate and violent men, but did the high profile of Russian officialdom make relations with native peoples any less bloody than they were in other empires being created at that time?

The state’s policy of demanding native tribute provoked resistance and retaliation as well as compliance. Distance from Moscow encouraged some officials to collect more than was due and pocket the difference, to demand bribes, to sell justice, and to take natives as household slaves. But the natives sometimes retaliated. In 1634 Buriat tribesmen burned down Fort Bratsk,
and ten years later, angered by the Russians, they mustered over 2,000 warriors to massacre them in their scattered settlements. The government understood at an early stage that ill-treatment of natives could lead to costly campaigns of pacification. As a result, it introduced a policy that took account of native fears and past experience. In 1644, for example, the governor of Irkutsk was told that

The Sovereign Tsar … has ordered that [tribute-paying native people] always be treated with consideration, that they suffer no violence, losses, extortions or impositions, and that … they should live in peace without fear, pursuing their occupations, and serve the Sovereign Tsar … and wish him well … Servicemen are ordered to bring men of newly-discovered lands who do not yet pay tribute under the exalted arm of the Sovereign Tsar, but in a kindly, not a violent manner.

Furthermore, a governor receiving such an order was to announce the policy with formal ceremony to representatives of the natives concerned. Enforcement was sometimes difficult, but the government did take steps to enforce the rule and punish oppressive agents and officials.

Prejudice was confined to religion, but conversion was strictly a voluntary matter. Tributary people were to be baptized only ‘after careful investigation to determine that they wish it of their own free will’.
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Once baptized, however, a native was regarded as acceptable even to enter the tsar’s service. Unlike most other colonizing peoples, the Russians were free of anti-native prejudices.

Two portraits of seventeenth-century Russian tsars reflect a massive change in vision and attitude that took place within a few decades. The first is of Michael, the first Romanov tsar, who was depicted in formal, almost symbolic, style as a passive, callow youth, albeit with crown and sceptre - a potential ‘sufferer for Christ’s sake’. The second, by a Dutch artist, portrays his son and successor, Alexis, realistically as a majestic and vigorous man of this world. The contrast is partially explained by caution. The new dynasty was vulnerable under Michael in the 1620s and ‘30s. It was therefore careful, acting well within the confines of tradition. By the 1660s, however, the dynasty was more strongly established. True, Alexis took care to claim descent from Ivan IV and, through him, the Roman emperors, but this was as much to justify an imperial role as to reinforce his legitimacy as a ruler. Although Alexis played the pious tsar as assiduously as Michael had done, in his reign Russia began to taste success again after a long interval. And,
as confidence returned, the regime became more outward-looking, more open to the modern world.

Russia’s first attempt, under Michael, to regain lost ground in the west proved premature. A two-year war with Poland ended in ignominious defeat in 1634. An even more shaming moment came a few years later. In 1637 the Cossacks of the Don stormed the Turkish citadel of Azov. Thanks to material aid from Moscow, they held it until 1641, when, after being bombarded by over a hundred heavy guns which the Turks had brought up to help them retake the place, they asked the Tsar to take it over. But this would have meant war with the Sultan. Could Russia afford it? The question was put to an Assembly of the Land. The answer, in effect, was ‘No’. The chance of a break-through to the Black Sea was rejected.

At that juncture the security of the Volga—Caspian route was a greater priority. Robber bands up to 3,000 strong infested the lower reaches, and the Dagestan coast of the Caspian was the base of some of the most notorious robbers in the world in the 1630s.
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A strong garrison had to be maintained at Astrakhan in order to protect the trade with Persia and beyond, and even then the city was occupied by robber Cossacks for a time in the later 1660s. The chief impediment to expansion in the south and west was no longer economic or demographic but lack of up-to-date military expertise and technology. It had long been Russian practice to engage foreign military advisers on an individual basis, but now, following the general European practice of the time, Moscow began to engage entire units of professional soldiers on the open market, and to use entrepreneurs to provide whatever military services and expertise it needed.

The Muscovite equivalent of the Habsburg Emperor’s Wallenstein was a Scottish soldier of fortune, Alexander Leslie. Leslie’s speciality, modern siege warfare, was particularly relevant now that Russia’s military efforts had to be focused against Europeans and the Ottoman Turks rather than against Tatars. Expertise in steppe warfare was not enough to win wars on other fronts. The siege of Smolensk, at which Leslie served, demonstrated that. Well-drilled infantry units and improved artillery were the new priorities. At the beginning
of
the 1630s Leslie had been sent to western Europe to help raise ten infantry regiments trained on the Dutch and German model.
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They fought in the Smolensk campaign, but were disbanded once it was over because of the expense. It was only under Alexis (r. 1645—76) that there was a sustained effort to modernize the army’s weaponry and training.

One of the first signs was the publication by the state press in Moscow in the summer of 1647 of a translation into Russian of
The Art of Infantry
Warfare,
by Johann von Wallhausen. The book was generously illustrated with engravings
of
the tactics and drill described in the text,
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which embodied the best European military practice. Its appearance suggests that the government intended to instruct Russian officers in how to modernize at least parts of its army. But when Russia next went to war with Poland, in 1654, the practice of engaging foreign troops was revived.

The scene is a tavern near the market place of Riga seven years later. Three Scots mercenary officers — Alexander Daniels, Walter Ert and Patrick Gordon — are sitting at a table, sharing a flagon of wine and discussing their employment prospects. Gordon, who recorded the scene, has quit the King of Poland’s service. He has been contemplating a move to the service of the Habsburg Emperor, who might be engaging people for war against the Turks, but is also toying with the idea of Russia. His companions have served in the King of Sweden’s army, but the King has run out of money and they have been paid off. The focus of the conversation moves to Russia. The Tsar is in the seventh year of a war with Poland, and they have heard that his agents are recruiting experienced officers like them. The pay is not much, but at least it is paid reasonably promptly, people say. Besides, there are good prospects
of
quick promotion to high rank in Russian service — and
of
good company to boot.

For Gordon the conversation was decisive. He signed up with Russia as a service officer, and his decision proved sound: he was to rise to the rank of general.
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Many others had preceded him, and, since this tsar made a practice of inviting foreigners he had engaged to special levees at the Kremlin or at his summer palace at Kolomenskoe, many of their names are recorded in the court diaries. In June 1657, for example, a colonel of dragoons called Junkmann was graciously received by His Imperial Majesty, along with lieutenant-colonels Skyger, Serwin, van Strobel and Trauernich and many other officers. In October 1661 (to cite one of several other examples) the Austrian Colonel Gottlieb von Schalk was received, along with the thirty-seven officers, NCOs and trumpeters he had engaged for the Tsar’s service, as was Colonel Henryk van Egerat, who had brought a contingent of 150 soldiers from Denmark. Most were sent to fight on the western front, but some went south to train the musketeer regiment at Astrakhan,
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and from then on the policy priority was to train Russian conscripts in the new way, in ‘regiments of new formation’ under Russian officers.

At the same time, special military equipment (like trench telescopes) was imported, and efforts were made to modernize weaponry and expand
Russian arms production. The tax register for the long-established small-arms manufacturing centre of Tula, south of Moscow, which was to become the Russian Birmingham or Sheffield, shows that in 1625 the town boasted only 250 households liable to tax, besides 34 others and 21 empty workshops. Its inhabitants already included foreigners - presumably technical experts, musketeers and gunners to advise on and test-fire the guns produced.
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But in 1632 the government commissioned a Dutchman, Andrew Vinius, to build a foundry using hydraulic power. Dozens of craftsmen were recruited abroad to teach Russians how to make guns, locks and swords to modern designs, and by the early eighteenth century Tula was to boast well over 1,000 gunsmiths producing 15,000 muskets a year as well as other weaponry. Nor was Tula the only arms-manufacturing centre, even in the mid seventeenth century. In 1648 a state musket factory was established near Moscow, and by 1653 26,000 flintlock muskets had been produced there, as well as numbers of the less efficient matchlocks. Even so, arms orders had to be placed abroad to bring Russia’s small-arms stocks to a level for war.
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At the same time mineral-prospecting was encouraged, and specialist metallurgists were hired from abroad. Strategic materials like iron were also imported in increased quantities, for, although successful efforts were made to find and exploit deposits of copper, good-quality iron was not to be found west of the Urals, and the deposits in the Urals were too difficult of access. Even so it could be said that the origins of Russia’s modern metallurgical industry as well as its arms industry date from this time. And the development of both the army and the arms industry was further stimulated by the Thirteen Years War, in which Russia at last gained the upper hand against its rival Poland.

The war was precipitated by developments in Ukraine. The Orthodox population there had long been resentful of the Catholic Church’s campaign to drive them into the Catholic fold. Their discontent had reached new heights early in the century when Moscow, their only possible protector, had been preoccupied with its own troubles. The Ukrainian Orthodox were unable to combat the pressure on their own. They lacked organization and, though the merchant community formed confraternities and maintained some schools as well as churches, they could not compete with the Catholics in educational provision. They also lacked armed power - a resource commonly used to resolve spiritual differences in that era. The situation changed, however, when the Cossacks of Ukraine became restive, not only over the religious question, but also over land
rights and registration for military service. Polish landlords had been intruding into the region, trying to establish great estates and introduce serfdom. This threatened the free farmer-warriors of the frontier zone. Furthermore, many of them were denied inclusion on the register of paid-service Cossacks, and this implied loss of their liberties as Cossacks. The coalescing of these different streams of discontent eventually triggered a huge rebellion against the Polish government. It began early in 1648.
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