form of furs, but nothing was off limits: when Manchus got wind of a
Cossack advance, their first response was to evacuate all the women.
After Russia lost the Crimean War in 1856, the Far East was the only
direction it had left to turn with its imperial ambitions, and it was the
Cossacks who established settlements on the Amur River in direct
violation of a two-hundred-year-old treaty with China. From these
forward bases, or ostrogs, Russia launched its formal annexation of
Primorye. By the turn of the last century, Cossack soldiers had gone on to
occupy most of northern Manchuria. “They are semi-savages, black-eyed,
fierce-browed, the finest horsemen in the world, caring little for your life,
little for their own,” wrote Sir John Foster Fraser, a British correspondent
who spent time among the Cossacks in 1901, en route to Harbin, a
Russian-built city two hundred miles inside Chinese Manchuria.^7 Fraser
came away as moved by the soldiers’ hospitality as he was impressed by
their headlong courage. “For a [cavalry] charge there are no troops that
could equal them.... And who that has heard a Slav song, crooning,
pathetic, weird, sung by a Cossack at night in the middle of a plain silent
as death, can forget it?”
Some Cossack leaders, so far removed from any law or consequence,
degenerated into piratical warlords who would have given Cortés or Kurtz
a run for his money. Even after something approximating the rule of law
had been established in Primorye, extortion, shakedowns, cross-border
banditry, and racially motivated murder remained common into the
twentieth century (since perestroika, all of these problems have
resurged).
The few Russians who journey to Primorye voluntarily, or who stay and
embrace it as Arseniev, Trush, and Markov did, tend to possess an
adventurous curiosity that borders on the romantic. They feel their
surroundings intensely and one reason they choose to live in Primorye is
that, in Russia, there is no other natural environment that is so complex,