29,000 in an estimated population of Russians and other European migrants of
about 200,000.
East Slavic populations in Siberia over time developed a variety of characteristics
that differentiated them from the center. Cossacks, for example, although ethnically
mixed, spoke Russian and identified with Orthodoxy, but many joined the Old
Belief when schism erupted in the Russian Orthodox church in the seventeenth
century. In addition, many Old Belief communities found refuge in Siberia,
settling in the Altais, among the Buriats east of Lake Baikal, in Iakutia, and on
the lower Ob. They developed closed communities with austere dress and
lifestyles—sobriety, quasi-monastic prayer regimes—that they modeled on an
idealized image of Muscovite Orthodoxy. Cossacks in cohesive communities“on
the lines”(a defensive strip of land at the steppe/forest edge of western Siberia
where only Cossacks could settle) maintained Cossack practices and solidarity more
than“town”Cossacks in isolated fortresses in Iakutia, Kamchatka, and other
northern outposts, where they often became culturally integrated with local popu-
lations. They, and East Slavic merchants, peasants, and exiles who took up
residence in the Siberian taiga, by necessity intermarried with native women,
often seizing them as concubines or forcibly (and superficially) converting them
for Orthodox marriage. Particularly in the north (Iakutia, Kamchatka) Russians
and other non-natives living relatively isolated from compatriots tended to“go
native,”for reasons of expediency and safety. They adopted warm native clothing
and modeled their hunting, farming, and husbandry on native practices. They took
up local culture, speaking local languages, intermarrying, adapting animist to
Orthodox practices. Among the Buriats and Iakuts, Russians even adopted the
local practice of keeping natives as slaves (iasyry).
Russia’s administrative authority over this vast land was skeletal. Moscow admin-
istered Siberia through a Siberian Chancery, spun out of the Kazan Chancery in 1637,
which lasted until Petrine reforms (1711). Governors ruled large provinces that
were in turn grouped into very large administrative districts (Berezov, Tobolsk,
Verkhotur’e, Eniseisk, Tomsk, Lena) with even more powerful governors. Corruption
was endemic. Distance, after all, as Braudel reminded us, is the“enemy of empire.”
STEPPE, SLAVES, AND NOMADS
It was one thing to move into the sparsely settled world of Siberian tribes and
substitute the tsar for a previous khan as tribute taker; it was quite another thing for
Russia to move against the armed nomadic tribes of the steppe. Lands on either side
of the Volga were home to nomads whose lives and economies followed the rhythm
of symbiosis and conflict endemic in these centuries. The more politically organ-
ized formed confederations, but such steppe“empires”were volatile, waxing and
waning in cycles. The last great steppe empire was the Mongol (mid-thirteenth to
late fourteenth centuries); between steppe empires and after the demise of Mongol
power, the steppe was a land of unpredictable alliances.Assembling Empire 65