Nature's Evil

The Russians were only present in small groups and they rarely hunted themselves. They relied on the indigenous population to catch the animals, skin them and cure the pelts. The natives traditionally used fur for warm clothing and as insulation for their dwellings. However, they had no interest in the large-scale hunting of fur-bearing animals, just as they had no conception about fair prices or profit and accumulation. Fishermen and reindeer herders could be turned into trappers and hunters only by the use of force. The fur tribute was officially known as the yasak , a Turkish word, and was imposed only on non-Russian and non-Orthodox peoples. The yasak furs were taken to Tobolsk, a city in south-western Siberia that featured its own Kremlin – a fortified storehouse for furs and supplies. There pelts were graded, priced and sent to the Moscow Kremlin by winter road, in a convoy of sledges. The yasak went directly to the state, but private trade also flourished and was taxed at a tenth. When officials were returning from Siberia to Moscow, their sledges were searched carefully, and extra furs were confiscated. In Moscow, the Siberian office controlled the trade, and the best pelts remained in the Treasury. In exchange for fur, the Russians supplied Siberia with metal handicrafts, alcohol and tobacco, which rapidly became a habit for the northern tribes. At the beginning of the fifteenth century, the Muscovite monk Epiphany Premudry recorded the words of a shaman from the Urals: ‘You Christian people have one God, but we have many gods … so they give us squirrels, sables, martens and lynx … Aren’t your princes and boyars and grandees getting rich on what we catch? … Isn’t it our catch that you send to Orda [the Tatars], and … even to Tsargrad [Constantinopole] and to the Germans and the Lithuanians?’ 13

In 1557 every Yugra man had to hand over one sable pelt per year, but by 1609 this demand had already risen to seven. More than 7 million sables were trapped between 1621 and 1690. 14 Russian sources put the revenue from the fur trade as one-quarter of the gross revenue of the Muscovy state. For the medieval economy, with its subsistence farming, gross revenue doesn’t mean much. What mattered for the state was its disposable income, and the fur trade was a major contributor to that. When there was a shortage of silver, pelts played the role of currency for Muscovy. There were times when Kremlin officials, mercenaries and doctors were paid part of their fees in furs.

The conquerors encountered opposition from many tribes, including the Chukchi, the Kamchadals and the Koryaks. When they met with resistance, the Russians retaliated with ever more cruel methods, from public floggings to mass killings. A common method of extracting pelts from the locals was to take hostages (amanat ). * The Russians held local women and children hostage until yasak was paid by the men. If the kidnapped children lived to grow up they learnt to speak Russian; if christened, they could marry Russians and played their part in the creolisation of the local population. In 1788, for example, the Cossacks held 500 children from the Aleut tribe in the Northern Pacific as hostages. The Russian rulers, including the enlightened Catherine II, sanctioned this method; official documents described it as the right way to ‘pacify the natives’ and collect yasak . In 1882, the Siberian historian Nikolay Yadrintsev counted up the number of Siberian peoples that had already been exterminated but who had existed within living memory. The Kamchadals lost 90 per cent of their population; the Voguls, 50 per cent; and so on. 15 The sables disappeared as well. At the beginning of the seventeenth century a good trapper could get 200 sables per year, but, by the end of the century, no more than fifteen or twenty.

Gradually the Cossacks and the traders learnt how to bring the indigenous people ‘under the high hand of the great tsar’. The leaders of local tribes swore an oath to serve the Russian tsar under a ceremonial salute from muskets and cannons. The tribespeople were lined up as if they were members of the Russian Imperial Guard. In many respects, the Russian possessions in North Eurasia were comparable to other areas colonised by Europeans. Rule was indirect and the number of colonists was tiny. But the local tribes were exterminated on a massive scale that wasn’t possible in India. The loss of the indigenous peoples was more analogous to what happened in North America.