15. In the expanses of Eurasia, Rus 2 Russia
In the relations between Russia and Ukraine such a quality of the Russian man as tolerance to the manners and customs of other peoples was brightly manifested.
Into the depths of Ulus Dzhuchiev
Our great fellow countryman F.M. Dostoevsky was right when he noted that if the French have pride and love of elegance, the Spanish have jealousy, the English have honesty and accuracy, the Germans have accuracy, then the Russians have the ability to understand and accept all other nations. And indeed, Russians understand Europeans much better than they understand Russians. Our ancestors were well aware of the unique lifestyles of the peoples they encountered, and therefore the ethnic diversity of Russia has continued to increase.
Simultaneously with the struggles in Ukraine, the process of moving the Russian super-ethnos eastward, which began in the sixteenth century, was in full swing. With the capture of the Volga frontier (Kazan and Astrakhan khanates), Russia reached the Siberian forest-steppe expanse of Dzhuchiev ulus. The border of the Moscow Empire was lost in the Pre-Urals, divided by the Kama River into northern (forest) and southern (steppe) zones. Two peoples, the Bashkirs and the Nogai, roamed in the southern steppes. In the north, at a safe distance from the steppes, in the second half of the 16th century, commercial and industrial settlements - trading stations - began to grow. It was here that the Stroganov family showed its energy.
As we remember, the Dzhuchiy ulus in the XIII century was divided into three parts: the Golden (on the Volga), the White (on the Irtysh) and the Blue Horde. On the vast expanses of the Blue Horde, stretching from Tyumen to Mangyshlak, Sheibani Khan and his descendants tried to preserve the dying traditions of the Mongol ulus. But in the XVI century they had to face the opposition of local princes. For example, during the time of Ivan the Terrible, one of such tribal chiefs, Yediger, fought with the sheibani Khan Kuchum for the right to head the Siberian ulus. Yediger's attempt to rely on the forces of Moscow in this struggle proved unsuccessful. Bound by the Livonian War, Ivan the Terrible had no extra forces for a Siberian expedition in support of Yediger. In 1563 Kuchum won and became the "tsar" of Siberia, and attacks by his warriors became a constant threat to the "towns" of the Stroganovs.
Emblem of Siberia.
But having started this struggle, Kuchum overestimated his own strength. As early as the end of the 15th century, the Blue Horde experienced an enormous outflow of passionarity. Its ruler, Sheibani-khan, invaded Central Asia, conquering the possessions of the Timurids. He managed, reaching the Amu Darya, to seize a vast territory with a rich and cultural population. Together with Sheibani, the most active and combat-ready part of the population of the Blue Horde left for Central Asia, which had a negative impact on the fate of the Kuchum kingdom decades later.
By the seventies of the 16th century the Stroganovs' clashes with the Tatars had escalated into open warfare. To protect their possessions, the industrialists recruited detachments of Cossacks and other "okhotskih" people. In 1581 the Stroganovs hired and led by the ataman Ermak a detachment which went to Siberia to fight the Kuchum Khan. The composition of the detachment was heterogeneous: along with Velikorosses and Cossacks there were other "warriors": Tatars, Lithuanians, and even volunteers from among the German prisoners. As for the number of the detachment, the forces of Ermak looked modest: the Cossacks numbered a little more than 500 men, and "warriors" - 300.
As we can see, from the very beginning of the development of Siberia, the Cossacks did not go to the east alone. At the end of the 16th and beginning of the 17th century, the population of the Russian North, primarily the inhabitants of Veliky Ustyug, who wanted to try their luck beyond the Stone Belt, the mountains, also actively went to Siberia. Usually each detachment (horde) that went to Siberia consisted of the main nucleus, the Cossacks, and Ustyugans who joined them. All of them were called "pathfinders”. The Cossacks and Velikorosses advanced together through the wilderness, dragged boats across the rapids, fought shoulder to shoulder and always remembered who was a Cossack and who was a Russian - an Ustyuzhan. Judging by the materials of such an authoritative researcher of the Northeast of Siberia, as was V.G. Bogoraz (Tan), the difference between the descendants of the Cossacks and the Great Russians was preserved there until the beginning of the 20th century.
The Yermak expedition of 1581 was very successful, despite the small number of his detachment. The pioneers seized Isker, the capital of Kuchum. The Stroganovs sent a letter to Moscow informing of the "enlargement" of the Russian state by vast Siberian lands. To arrange the new territories Tsar voivodes Prince Bolkhovsky and Glukhov, who joined the Cossacks in 1583, were sent immediately. The war with Kuchum took a long time and was fought with varying success. In 1584 Kuchum managed to inflict a sensitive defeat on the Cossacks - Yermak himself was killed at the time - and Kuchum reoccuped his capital. Later, however, the Russian advance to the east became irreversible: Kuchum retreated to the Barabinsk steppe and from there only raided the Russian possessions. In 1591, Prince Koltsov-Mosalsky finally defeated the last Siberian Khan, and Kuchum was forced to appeal to the tsar with a tearful request to return the ulus he had seized, promising total submission. The history of the Blue Horde came to an end.
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Development of Siberia and the Far East in the 17th century.
Kamchadal. Drawing from the book "The Journeys of Eades the Chosen One".
Sledding and skiing in Russia. From the "Notes" by S. Herberstein. 1556 г.
Russian ship in the Arctic Ocean. Dutch engraving of 1598.
А. D. Kivshenko. The Conquest of Siberia by Yermak: The Battle of Chuvash Mountain in 1582.
The question may arise: why were the mighty steppe peoples: the Oirats (Western Mongols) and the Kazakhs so passive? Neither of them actively participated in Kuchum's fight against the Russian pioneers and voivods. This could be explained by the fact that the forces of the Oirat, who were Buddhists, and the Muslim Kazakhs were constrained by their own internecine struggle and by the fact that the Russians, advancing through the forests of Siberia, posed no threat to the steppe peoples. The peoples of northern Siberia - the Ostyaks (Khanty), the Voguls (Mansi), the Tungus (Evenki), and the Samoyeds (Nenets) - also did not fight the Russians. Apparently, none of the sides gave cause for conflict.
Coats of arms of Verkhoturye, Turinsk, Tomsk (from left to right
Yermak's ambassadors present gifts to Ivan IV from the conqueror of Siberia
View of Turukhansk.
At the end of the 16th century, Russian cities began to appear in Siberia. Already in 1585 voivode Mansurov founded a town at the mouth of the Irtysh. Soon Tyumen, Tobolsk, Pelym, Berezov, Surgut, Tara, and Narym appeared.
"Meet the Sun."
When the Time of Troubles was over, the advance of the Russians eastward resumed with renewed vigor, and by 1621 a Tobolsk orthodox diocese had to be created.
Two routes led from Western Siberia to the Far East. The Ustyuzhans mostly moved through Mangazeya to the northeast, while the Cossacks headed mostly to Transbaikalia. After 1625, the Cossacks encountered "fraternal people" - the Buryats, and in the thirties of the 17th century, the Russian Vikings settled in the Lena basin. It was pioneers in the first half of the XVII century who founded Tomsk, Yeniseisk, Yakutsk, Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk. And it is known that the best indicator of the intensity of the development of new territories is the emergence of cities and ostrozhkas. The next decade brought Russians to the borders of Eurasia. As a result of a three-year expedition, V. D. Poyarkov, descended the Amur River and reached the Sea of Okhotsk (1645). In 1648-1649 the expedition of Yerofey Khabarov passed the middle course of the Amur.
On the whole gigantic path "against the sun" the explorers met almost no serious organized resistance. The only exception was the collision of the Cossacks with the Manchus (Jurchens) on the border of China in the 1780s. The Manchus, about whom we told in connection with the history of the Mongolian ulus, from the 17th to the early 20th century, dominated China, still maintaining enough passionarity.
The Manchus, a courageous and noble people, stopped the Cossacks. They, trying to fortify themselves, built a fortress on the Amur River Albazin (1686), but the Manchus demanded to clear the fortress. The governor Tolbuzin refused, and the war with the Manchus resumed. The garrison of Albazin had a few hundred men, against which the Manchus put more than a thousand. The besieged were forced to surrender and leave the fortress. Albazin was destroyed, but the stubborn Cossacks and "sovereign's people" already in the next 1688 cut down a new fortress in the same place. The Manchus did not manage to take the fortress again, but Albazin was left by the Russians under the Nerchinskiy peace treaty (1689).
Practically in one century, from the campaign of Yermak Timofeyevich (1581-1583) to the wars with the Manchus on the Amur (1687-1689), pioneers overcame the distance from the Urals to the Pacific Ocean, and Russia quickly and easily gained a foothold in this vast space. Let's try to answer the question: why did it happen? First, Russian pioneers were very passionate people - violent, enterprising, and persistent, and therefore often ran into trouble with the authorities of that time - the voivods. Siberia beckoned the "exuberant heads" with their will, and they were not afraid of the Siberian natives, frost and vastness. But, as we have seen in the example of Ermak, the voivodes followed the pioneers on their heels, trying to stop their unauthorized cruelties, and forced them to go farther and farther. The actions of the administrators were quite logical and understandable: they defended with all their might the foreigners, who were paying fur-taxes to the treasury. The attempts of governors to restore order are justified in a moral sense. After all, the peoples of Siberia in the 17th century were in a phase of ethnic homeostasis - equilibrium with the natural environment. They simply did not have enough strength to defend themselves against the oppression of Russian passionaries.
Irkutsk. Panoramic view of the city. 1850 г
В. Rayev. Party on Fox Mountain. View of the city of Nizhny Tagil. 1837 г.
Secondly, having advanced into Siberia, our ancestors did not go beyond their usual feeding landscape - river valleys. Just as the Russian people lived along the banks of the Dnieper, Oka, and Volga, they began to live along the banks of the Ob, Yenisei, Angara, and many other Siberian rivers.
But most important, in terms of ethnogenesis, is the third circumstance. Russian settlers and administration in their bulk easily established fruitful contacts with the peoples of Siberia and the Far East. It is not without reason that opposition to Russian migration was so negligible. Conflicts with Russians, if they did arise at first, for instance among Buryats or Yakuts, were quickly settled and had no grievous consequences in the form of ethnic discord. The only practical consequence of the Russian presence for the natives was the yasak (payment of one or two sables per year), which was understood by the foreigners as a gift, a tribute of politeness to the "white tsar". Given Siberia's vast fur resources, the tribute was negligible; at the same time, once on the list of "yasashnye" foreigners, a local resident received from the central government a firm guarantee of protection of life and property. No voivode had the right to execute a "yasashny" alien: for any crime, the case was sent for consideration to Moscow, and Moscow never approved death sentences for the natives. A typical case is known: a certain Buryat Lama, who attempted to revolt in order to expel all Russians and transfer Transbaikalia to the Manchus, was sent as a "yasashny" foreigner to Moscow, where he was simply pardoned
Е. Gelenkovsky. Yakutsk. View of the Ostrog and part of the city. 1844 г.
View of the city of Yakutsk. Engraving from the seventeenth century.
In general, with the establishment of the power of the Moscow Tsar, the way of life of the local population of Siberia has not changed in any way, because no one tried to break it and make the natives into Russians. On the contrary. Thus, in the Yakuts the Russians encountered people whose sedentary way of life was close to them. The Russians, having learned the Yakut language and assimilated local customs and skills, were closer to the Yakuts than the Yakuts were to them. If locals wanted to observe pagan rituals, there were no obstacles to do so. Certainly, Christianity was preached to them, sometimes successfully, more often not, but the results of this preaching were of interest only to the priests. The Ostyaks, Voguls, and Tunguses served as guides for Russian troops, hunted, chased reindeer, shamanized, and were quite sure of their fate. Since the Russians did not seek to retrain people unlike them and preferred to find a common language with the locals, they firmly established themselves in Siberia, where they live to this day. So once again the benefits of respect for the right of others to live their own way were reaffirmed.
Fishing. An engraving from the beginning of the 17th century.
Let us summarize. In a matter of decades, the Russian people have mastered the colossal, albeit sparsely populated, expanses of eastern Eurasia, while deterring Western aggression. The incorporation of vast territories into the Muscovite kingdom was accomplished not through the extermination of the annexed peoples or violence over the traditions and faith of the natives, but through complementary contacts between Russians and the aborigines or the voluntary passage of peoples under the hand of the Muscovite tsar. Thus, the colonization of Siberia by the Russians was not like the extermination of North American Indians by the Anglo-Saxons, nor like the slave trade carried on by French and Portuguese adventurers, nor like the exploitation of the Javanese by Dutch merchants. And yet at the time of these "deeds," the Anglo-Saxons, French, Portuguese, and Dutch had already lived through the Enlightenment and prided themselves on being "civilized.
. (Short Chapter, about 100 pages until the end.)