pushing north and east, following sables and other luxury furs. In addition, Peter
I commissioned exploration into Kamchatka, along the coast and to Alaska. In
1725 Vitus Bering sailed to Alaska, but made no landfall; in 1741 he returned and
claimed it for Russia, inaugurating a ruthless process of subjugating Aleut tribes and
decimating the otter, seal, and other sea mammal populations. Peter I and his
successors also intensified exploitation in Siberia proper, particularly once luxury
furs were greatly depleted by the end of the seventeenth century. Settlement for
agriculture, securing trade routes with China, and metallurgy became new focuses.
Peter I sent the German scientist Daniel Messerschmidt to explore for minerals
across Siberia. Productive mining began with iron and copper mines in the Urals,
where hundreds of serfs were transported to work in horrible conditions. As with
the sixteenth-century Stroganovs, initially monopolies were granted to private
entrepreneurs, here the Demidov family, who turned the southeastflank of the
Urals into the most important mining and metallurgy center in the empire by
the 1730s. Around Nerchinsk silver was mined from about 1704 and copper from
the 1730s, worked by exile labor, while the Demidovs were given monopolies to
Altai mines from the 1720s that yielded iron, copper, zinc, lead, silver, and gold.
The state claimed direct control of the Altai mines in 1744, the Nerchinsk silver
mines somewhat later. Trade relations with China were regulated (Russian state
caravans were permitted to Beijing once every three years) and borders affirmed in
the Treaty of Kiakhta, 1727.
Across Siberia there were a line of major fortresses, protected by Cossacks and
native units (Figure 4.1). Irkutsk was guarded by locally recruited Irkutsk Cossacks;
in the 1720s, similarly, Tunguz and Buriat regiments of Cossacks were formed for
eastern Siberia, led by Buriat elites and by the 1760s recruited by a system of
Figure 4.1The Tal’tsy Architectural-Ethnographic Museum at Lake Baikal preserves the
Spasskaia tower (1667) of the Russian fort at Ilimsk. Photo: Jack Kollmann.
Eighteenth-Century Expansion: Siberia and Steppe 85