The Russian Empire 1450–1801

(Marvins-Underground-K-12) #1

Transbaikal Cossacks that galvanized Buriats and local Russian settlers against the
Irkutsk governor from 1695 to 1697.
Taking Siberia was extremely brutal. Natives resisted byfleeing, south into
Manchu-ruled territories or north away from Russian control. They also fought
violently. Buryat resistance to Russian expansion around Lake Baikal broke into
full-scale warfare in 1644–6, while across the Iakut lands to the north natives
attacked Russian fortresses at Krasnoiarsk and Iakutsk in the early 1640s; in the
1650s Russia fought back Manchu army attacks and put down an uprising of
Lamuts who burned the fort at Okhotsk. A decade later, in 1666, Evenki attacked
the rebuilt fortress at Okhotsk. Russians reacted harshly. They took elite hostages to
guarantee loyalty (amanat); they seized women as concubines; they killed indis-
criminately. Human losses were devastating: in addition to deaths in war, the native
population died from smallpox and other epidemics imported by the newcomers;
many fell into poverty from extortionate tribute taking; many found their trad-
itional patterns of life disrupted by Russian seizure of land for farming. The toll is
evident in population statistics: there were an estimated 227,000 native Siberians in
the seventeenth century, while by 1795 their numbers had risen only to about
360,000, a modest increase in a century of tremendous demographic growth
elsewhere.
Siberian natives adapted to Russian presence as in all such colonial settings.
Those in the deep taiga and Arctic north where few Russians settled found little
changed in their lives. Siberian tribes were accustomed to payingiasakto overlords;
Moscow was the next in a long line, and its colonial policy was as pragmatic as
elsewhere. Russia forbade natives to own weaponry, but tolerated clan and tribal
units. Moscow pursued a“divide and conquer”policy, luring one tribe with gifts so
they would join Muscovite forces against rival tribes: Iakut princes even served as
governors in 1724 and in the late eighteenth century, the Iakut native elite was so
cohesive that it requested (unsuccessfully) status as Russian nobility. Russia did not
force conversion; even when most of the Buriats converted to Lamaist Buddhism in
the early eighteenth century, Moscow did not protest. Russia did not actively force
nomads to settle down, but many communities were pushed into it by Russian
seizure of grazing lands. As a rule, in Siberia enserfment did not follow the Russian
flag, neither for native peoples nor for Russian settlers (some Russian monasteries
tried to enforce serfdom), although slavery continued in various communities. As in
the Middle Volga, Siberianiasakpayers were treated as state peasants, but they
paid tribute and service obligations different than East Slavic peasants in the center
(they did not, for example, pay the poll tax or suffer military recruitment in the
eighteenth century).
Siberian populations are tremendously diverse in language, custom, and political
economies. Here lived Turkic, Finno-Ugric, Manchu, Tungusic, and Mongol
language groups, as well as many communities speaking paleo-Asiatic languages
unique to them. Most Siberian natives were animist with a shamanist culture,
except for Islamic Tatars in western Siberia and Buriat Buddhists surrounding Lake
Baikal. On the Arctic and Pacific coasts lived sedentary communities offishermen
and seal and walrus hunters; there and just inland in the taiga lived nomadic


Assembling Empire 63
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