Arctic Mirrors

Russia and the Small Peoples of the North

Yuri Slezkine

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781501703300
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia rusa

For over five hundred years the Russians wondered what kind of people their Arctic and sub-Arctic subjects were. "They have mouths between their shoulders and eyes in their chests, " reported a fifteenth-century tale. "They rove around, live of their own free will, and beat the Russian people, " complained a seventeenth-century Cossack. "Their actions are exceedingly rude. They do not take off their hats and do not bow to each other, " huffed an eighteenth-century scholar. They are "children of nature" and "guardians of ecological balance, " rhapsodized early nineteenth-century and late twentieth-century romantics. Even the Bolsheviks, who categorized the circumpolar foragers as "authentic proletarians, " were repeatedly puzzled by the "peoples from the late Neolithic period who, by virtue of their extreme backwardness, cannot keep up either economically or culturally with the furious speed of the emerging socialist society."Whether described as brutes, aliens, or endangered indigenous populations, the so-called small peoples of the north have consistently remained a point of contrast for speculations on Russian identity and a convenient testing ground for policies and images that grew out of these speculations. In Arctic Mirrors, a vividly rendered history of circumpolar peoples in the Russian empire and the Russian mind, Yuri Slezkine offers the first in-depth interpretation of this relationship. No other book in any language links the history of a colonized non-Russian people to the full sweep of Russian intellectual and cultural history. Enhancing his account with vintage prints and photographs, Slezkine reenacts the procession of Russian fur traders, missionaries, tsarist bureaucrats, radical intellectuals, professional ethnographers, and commissars who struggled to reform and conceptualize this most "alien" of their subject populations.Slezkine reconstructs from a vast range of sources the successive official policies and prevailing attitudes toward the northern peoples, interweaving the resonant narratives of Russian and indigenous contemporaries with the extravagant images of popular Russian fiction. As he examines the many ironies and ambivalences involved in successive Russian attempts to overcome northern—and hence their own—otherness, Slezkine explores the wider issues of ethnic identity, cultural change, nationalist rhetoric, and not-so European colonialism.

I

SUBJECTS OFTHE TSAR

“The delivery of iasak in Tiumen’,” from S. U. Remizov, “Sluzhebnaia chertezhnaia kniga”. Courtesy of Oregon Historical Society.

1

The Unbaptized

If on some nameless island Captain Schmidt
Sees a new animal and captures it,
And if, a little later, Captain Smith
Brings back a skin, that island is no myth.

—John Shade, Pale Fire

The Sovereign’s Profit

One of the main reasons for the emergence of the Rus principalities was the fur trade, and some of the best furs came from the northern frontier. In an entry dated 1096, the Russian Primary Chronicle recounts a Novgorodian story about peculiar people who lived beyond high mountains “far in the midnight land” and spoke an unintelligible language. The annalist identifies them as belonging to one of the unclean tribes banished by Alexander the Great, but the Novgorodian scouts were probably more impressed by the fact that the captives “made gestures asking for iron . . . and gave furs in return.”1 Novgorod’s wealth was based on the export of furs (to Bulgar, Kiev, and Byzantium, and later to the Hansa), and the most common way of obtaining them was through tribute. As the fur-bearing animals retreated, the Novgorodians moved from the Dvina to the Mezen’ to the Pechora in search of new pelts and new trappers. By the late 1200s they routinely claimed the “Ugrian lands” of the northern Urals as their own.2

In the fourteenth century Novgorod’s ascendancy along the Arctic seaboard was challenged by Moscow’s grand princes, who had become important suppliers of furs to their southern neighbors, and by Moscow’s monastic reformers, who sought solitude, “community life,” new cloisters, and new converts in the forests of the northeast.3 In 1383 Stefan, “the teacher of the Zyrian,” was appointed the first bishop of Perm'; within the next century Novgorod was ousted from the Dvina; and in 1499 the forces of Ivan III founded the town of Pustozersk near the mouth of the Pechora and mounted a large expedition “into the Ugrian land and against the Gogul.”4.

The breakthrough came in the mid-sixteenth century. The capture of Smolensk resulted in increased trade with Poland-Lithuania and Leipzig; the English discovery of a northern route to Russia led to the founding of Arkhangel'sk; and the conquests of Kazan’ (1552) and Astrakhan’ (1555) opened up the markets of Central Asia and made vulnerable the Khanate of Sibir, a small remnant of the Golden Horde on the Tobol River and an important transit center for southbound Arctic pelts. The subsequent expansion of Moscow’s trading interests coincided with the spread of fur fashions in Western Europe and at the Ottoman court. According to Giles Fletcher, “furres” were “transported out of the Countrey some yeers by the merchants of Turkie, Persia, Bougharia, Georgia, Armenia, and some other of Christendom, to the value of foure or five thousand rubbles.”5

In the last quarter of the sixteenth century, access to the “treasure of the land of darkness” was being contested by the Chingiside Khan Kuchum, who collected fur tribute from the hunters and fishermen of the lower Ob’, and the merchant family of the Stroganovs, which had the tsar’s charter to mine, trade, and tax the local trappers, as well as to make sure that “the Siberian Sultan” did not “prevent our Ostiaks and Voguls and Ugrians from sending tribute to our treasury”.6 Around 1581–1582, a Cossack army of several hundred men, hired by the Stroganovs, aided by local “volunteers,” and led by a certain Ermak Timofeevich, crossed the Urals and after a year-long campaign sacked the capital of the khanate. The power of Cossack firearms and the lack of enthusiasm on the part of Kuchum’s tribute-paying allies decided the matter, and “precious foxes, black sables, and beavers” were sent to Moscow.7 Deprived of the center that had held together the complex structure of local alliances, the Siberian khanate quickly disintegrated. The gates to northern Asia were open, and hundreds and later thousands of the tsar’s subjects rushed eastward in search of furs.

Independent trappers and traders led the way.8 Then, “jealous for the sovereign’s profit” and not forgetting their own, came soldiers, mercenaries, and Cossacks led by Moscow-appointed administrators [voevody].9 Traveling along interconnected Siberian waterways, they found “new lands,” built new forts [ostrogi], and imposed fur tribute [iasak] on the new “foreigners.” When the fur resources were exhausted or the iasak-paying population became too large to be administered from one ostrog, a new one would be built and the whole process would be repeated.10 About sixty years after Ermak’s campaign, Ivan Moskvitin reached the Sea of Okhotsk and Semen Dezhnev circled the cape that now bears his name. Farther south, Moscow’s advance into the southern Urals, the upper Enisei, and the Amur basin was blocked by the steppe pastoralists and the frontier outposts of the Manchu empire. It was the Northeast, therefore—with its thicker pelts and “smaller” peoples—that attracted most of the Europeans.11

The instructions they received from the Siberian Chancellery in Moscow were fairly consistent and unambiguous:

The serving and the trading men should be ordered to bring under the sovereign’s exalted hand the non-tribute-paying Yukagir and the Tungus and diverse foreigners of various tongues who live on those and other rivers in new and hostile lands. And the iasak for the sovereign should be taken with kindness and not with cruelty [laskoiu a ne zhestoch'iu], and the people of those lands should be placed, from now on, under the tsar’s exalted hand in direct slavery [v priamom kholopstve] as iasak people for ever and ever.12

“Kindness” (trade) was preferable to “cruelty” (war) because it seemed to assure a “steady and durable profit” for the sovereign [pribyl’ prochna i stoiatel’na]. According to one oral tradition, the Ket warriors were sapped of their courage by Russian bread.13 For two heroes of a Tungus tale, it was bread and sugar: “[One of them] chewed some bread for a while—and liked it. He said in Evenk: ‘Good.’ Then he took a cracker, ate it, and said: ‘Delicious.’ Then he ate some sugar. ‘Don’t even think about killing these good men,’ he said [to the other]. So they threw away their bows and began to eat.”14 Other popular items included knives, axes, cloth, tea, and colored beads, but it was tobacco and alcohol that enjoyed the greatest and most consistent demand. According to one Yukagir account, a small hunting band met a man with hair around his mouth and followed him to his house. There, the host offered them some food, which the Yukagir found to their liking, and some very special water, which the oldest of them, after serious deliberation, agreed to taste.

He drank it and said: “Fellows, do not have any bad thoughts at all. In all my life, I have never tasted such water anywhere.”

Then he drank some water again and put it in front of us.

Another old man drank it and said: “No. fellows. it seems that the old man has told us the truth—this water really is delicious.”

That old man drank some again and put it in front of us.

“Now, young men,” he said. “you taste it.”

We tasted it. too, and said:

“Yes, our old men have told us the truth.”

Then one of the old men said:

“I knew it right away and told you not to have any bad thoughts.”

Then we all got some more food and water. Our friends started telling us something, but we did not understand anything and pointed to our ears.

They showed us something curved and shiny. We took it. looked at it, something was cut out in the middle. They put something in there, then brought some fire. Then they put that thing to our mouths. Then everyone took that thing and started sucking on it. We sat and talked by gestures. They told us:

“Next summer come back again. We will bring you various things.”

Then we got up and started to leave. Our friends gave us some axes and knives and, in addition to that, gave us all kinds of clothes.15

If the hunters did come back the next summer. they would be asked for furs, and an attempt would be made to register them as fur suppliers “for ever and ever.” If they accepted the deal as fair, they would become, in the eyes of the Russians, the tribute-paying “iasak people” (iasachnye liudi). If they did not, the Cossacks were under strict instructions “to beat them a little bit” and, if that did not help, “to wage war and to capture their wives and children.”16

Not that they needed instructions: war was their profession, and local women the only ones around. According to a Yakut tradition.

The arriving Russians built high wooden towers . . . Marveling at that, both children and grown-ups approached the towers and started looking at them carefully. Then they saw that the Russians had scattered sweets, gingerbread cookies, and beads all around the houses. Many children, women, and men came and started picking them up. While they were pick...