Abstract
When the Russians arrived in Siberia in the late sixteenth century 230,000 indigenes were there speaking 120 distinct languages. This population declined by as much as 15 per cent over the next century due to the disease and alcohol introduced by Europeans, but rose steadily after 1700. The so-called small peoples of the north fall into two major linguistic groups: the Uralic (Finno-Ugric and Samoedic) and Altaic (Turkic and Tungusic). The Tungus (modern-day Evens and Evenks) were native to almost all of eastern Siberia with the exception of the far northeast, where the Chukchi and Iukagirs, among others, lived. Their neighbors, the yurt-dwelling Iakuts, proliferated throughout what is today the enormous Sakha Republic. Besides the Tungus and Iakuts the Buriats, situated around Lake Baikal, and the Oroks, Giliaks and Ainu, all on Sakhalin, are those ‘small peoples’ who figure most prominently in the history of Siberian exile.’
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Notes
James Forsyth, A History of the Peoples of Siberia: Russia’s North Asian Colony, 1581–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 10;
Donald W. Treadgold, The Great Siberian Migration: Government and Peasant Resettlement from Emancipation to the First World War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), table 1, p. 32;
Victor L. Mote, Siberia: Worlds Apart (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998), 39;
Yuri Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 2 and maps, pp. xv, xvi.
Treadgold, Migration, 16–17. The difference between iasak and dan’, also translatable as ‘tribute’, is that, at least initially, the former specified a payment in furs whereas dan’ did not dictate the type of tribute to be handed over. Moreover, under the Russians there were two types of iasak: okladnoi, which required a fixed number of pelts, usually between five and ten per male native, and neokladnoi, which allowed the collector to extort or cajole from natives as many pelts as possible. Iasak was designated as tribute and not a tax; but later, when the Russians did begin taxing indigenes, they allowed iasak to be paid in cash rather than in pelts, thus blurring the distinction between tribute and taxes. In some areas of Siberia iasak (so called) persisted until 1917. Terence Armstrong, Russian Settlement in the North (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 196–7;
George V. Lantzeff, Siberia in the Seventeenth Century: A Study of the Colonial Administration (New York: Octagon Books, 1972), 123–32.
G. F. Miller [Müller], Istoriia Sibiri, 5 vols., ed. E. P. Bat’ianova et al. (Moskva: Vostochnaia literatura, 1999–2005) 1: 204–5; Forsyth, History, 26;
G. Patrick March, Eastern Destiny: Russia in Asia and the North Pacific (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996), 27–8.
M. G. Levin and L. P. Potapov, eds., The Peoples of Siberia (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1964), passim. (This is a translation of Narody Sibiri [Moskva: AN SSSR, 1956].) Slezkine gives a narrower definition for ‘Iugriians’. Cf. Slezkine, Arctic, index. On Russians’ early views of Iugriians and other indigenes,
see Andrei I. Pliguzov, ‘Skazanie “O chelovetsekh neznaemykh v vostochnei strane”’ Ruccian History 19 nos. 1–4 (1992): 401–32.
Treadgold, Migration, 17. See also Armstrong, Russian, 13–14, 46; Terence Armstrong, ed., Yermak’s Campaign in Siberia (London: Haklyut Society, 1975), 1; Mote, Siberia, 39–40;
Janet Martin, Treasure of the Land of Darkness: The Fur Trade and its Significance for Medieval Russia (New York: Cambridge University Press 1986) 95ff.
Quoted in Janet Martin, ‘The Fur Trade and the Conquest of Sibir’, in Sibérie II: Questions sibériennes, ed. Boris Chichlo (Paris: Insitut d’études slaves, 1999), 69. See also idem, Treasure, passim; Slezkine, Arctic, 11, 12.
Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 154 et passim;
Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974), 302–3, 315–19 etpassim;
Thomas R. Shannon, An Introduction to the World-System Perspective, 2nd edn. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996), 62 et passim..
Giles Fletcher, Of the Russe Commonwealth by Giles Fletcher, 1591: Facsimile Edition with Variants, intro. Richard Pipes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), 40–1v.
Robert J. Kerner, The Urge to the Sea. The Course of Russian History. The Role of Rivers, Portages, Ostrogs, Monasteries, and Furs (New York: Russell & Russell, 1970), 86.
See also W. Bruce Lincoln, The Conquest of a Continent: Siberia and the Russians (New York: Random House, 1994), 43; Martin, Treasure, 163–6;
P. N. Pavlov, ‘Vyvoz pushniny iz Sibiri v XVII v.’, in Sibir’ perioda feodalizma, vypusk 1, ed. V. I. Shunkov et al. (Novosibirsk: Izdatel’stvo Sibirskogo otdeleniia AN SSSR. 1962). 121–38: Lantzeff. Siberia. 153–4.
The 1558 and 1568 charters are reproduced in Miller, Istoriia 1: 325–31. See his commentary in ibid., 206. On the Nogai, see Michael Khodarkovsky, Russia’s Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500–1800 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002), 120–4. See also Armstrong, Yermak’s Campaign 3ff.
(This Orël is not to be confused with today’s Orël in western Russia.) Armstrong, Yermak’s Campaign, 5–6, 13; Miller, Istoriia 1: 207–10. Sources disagree as to the size of Ermak’s host at this time. Müller makes a convincing argument that the figures given in the Remezov Chronicle are the most accurate. As for Ermak’s origins, they are extremely vague. For an entertaining discussion, see Valentin Rasputin, Siberia, Siberia, trans. and intro. Margaret Winchell and Gerald Mikkelson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 37ff et passim..
Instruction reproduced in Miller, Istoriia 1: 335–6; and translated in Basil Dmytryshyn et al., eds., Russia’s Conquest of Siberia, 1558–1700: A Documentary Record, vol. 1 (Portland, OR: Oregon Historical Society Press, 1985), doc. no. 6.
Isabel de Madariaga, Ivan the Terrible: First Tsar of Russia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 335.
Sources sometimes refer to strel’tsy as ‘musketeers’. However, these soldiers were initially armed with arquebuses. See Thomas Esper, ‘Military Self-Sufficiency and Weapons Technology in Muscovite Russia’, Slavic Review 28, no. 2 (1969): 185–208 [here, p. 193];
Michael C. Paul, ‘The Military Revolution in Russia, 1550–1682’, The Journal of Military History 68, no. 1 (2004): 9–45 [here, p. 20].
Ivan V. Shcheglov, Khronologicheskii perechen’ vazhneishikh dannykh iz istorii Sibiri: 1032–1882 gg. (1883; rpt. Surgut: Severnyi dom, 1993), 44; Kerner, Urge, 185–90 et passim..
Document quoted in Richard Hellie, Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 134.
Eva-Maria Stolberg, ‘The Genre of Frontiers and Borderlands: Siberia as a Case Study’, in The Siberian Saga: A History of Russia’s Wild East, ed. Stolberg ABC (Frankfurt-am-Main: Lang, 2005), 14.
See the distinction made in Jerome Blum, Lord and Peasant in Russia: From the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), 6–9, 93, 419, 475–7.
Dmytryshyn, Russia’s Conquest, doc. no. 37; A. P. Okladnikov et al., eds., Istoriia Sibiri s drevneishikh vremen do nashikh dnei, 5 vols. (Leningrad: Nauka, 1968–9) 2: 66; M. M. Gromyko, ‘Tserkovnye votchiny Zapadnoi Sibiri nakanune sekuliarizatsii’, in Sibir’ perioda feodalizma, vypusk 1, table, p. 162; idem, Zapadnaia Sibir’v XVIII veke: Russkoe naselenie i zemledel’cheskoe osvoenie (Novosibirsk: Nauka, 1965), 224; Kerner, Urge, 182–4 et passim. On the powerful Troitskii Monastery in Turukhansk,
see K. I. Protopopov, ‘Eniseiskaia politicheskaia ssylka ot dekabristov do 1917 goda’, in Eniseiskaia ssylka: Sbornik eniseiskogo zemliachestva, ed. V. N. Sokolov (Moskva: Politkatorzhan, 1934), 5–16.
Miller, Istoriia 2: 104; Okladnikov, Istoriia Sibiri 2: 125; Lantzeff, Siberia, 6; Dmytryshyn, ‘Introduction’, Russia’s Conquest, xlv; V. O. Kliuchevskii, Sochineniia, 8 vols. (Moskva: Izd-vo. sotsial’no-ekonomicheskoi literatury, 1956–9) 3: 46, 60–2, 72–3, 77, 131, 225, 322, 325–36; 4: 19, 41, 149, 154, 166, 181, 386. Streshnev was originally an okol’nichii (second in rank to a boyar) but was promoted to boyar in 1676. See Lantzeff. Siberia. 6 n. 20.
Robert O. Crummey, Aristocrats and Servitors: The Boyar Elite in Russia, 1613–1689 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 51.
J. Michael Hittle, The Service City: State and Townsmen in Russia, 1600–1800 (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press 1979) 52.
Ibid., 19–24, 32, 54, 61; Dmytryshyn, Siberica: 10; idem, ‘Introduction’, Russia’s Conquest, xlviii; G. S. Fel’dstein, Ssylka: eia genezisa, znacheniia, istorii i sovremennogo sostoianiia (Moskva: T-vo skoropechatni A. A. Levenson, 1893), 150; Forsyth History 34.
F. G. Safronov, Russkie krest’iane v Iakutii (XVII — nachalo XX vv.) (Iakutsk: Knizhnoe izd-vo, 1961), 384.
Borivoj Plavsic, ‘Seventeenth-Century Chanceries and their Staffs’, in Russian Officialdom: The Bureaucratization of Russian Society from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century, ed. Walter McKenzie Pintner and Don Karl Rowney (London: Macmillan, 1980), 19–45. See also Lantzeff, Siberia, 13, 205.
Cf. Stephen Kotkin, ‘Introduction: Rediscovering Russia in Asia’, in Rediscovering Russia in Asia: Siberia and the Russian Far East, ed. Kotkin ABC and David Wolff (Armonk. NY: M. E. Shame. 1995). 3.
Shcheglov, Khronologicheskii perechen’, 46, 70. Shcheglov’s use of the word devka also implies ‘tart’ or ‘whore’, but there is no indication that these women were being punished for prostitution or similar behavior. (See also Forsyth, History, 67.) Vologda, Sol’vychegodsk, Tot’ma, and Zheleznyi Ustiug were early on associated with industry and trade. Vologda is one of Russia’s oldest cities, founded in 1147, 500 km northwest of Moscow. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it developed into a major center of industry and trade. In 1565 its inhabitants began constructing a stone fortification, but this remained uncompleted, and in 1612 it suffered grievously at the hands of Swedish and Polish forces. Sol’vychegodsk, 830 km southeast of Arkhangel’ on the Vychegda River, was (as already noted) the base of the Stroganov empire. The Stroganovs ‘contributed significant means to the cultural life of the city, built a church, a collection of rare books and icons, and founded an arts industry’ so that by the late seventeenth century it was a ‘major center of Russian artistry’. Tot’ma, 217 km southwest of Vologda, had like Sol’vychegodsk begun as a salt works (albeit under the ownership of Feodosii Sumorin), producing by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries 50–170 poods of salt per annum, more even than the Stroganov salt works. It became a major trade center along the route to the White Sea, and ‘[b]y 1623, there were 199 homes, 20 cathedrals, and 8 salt works in Tot’ma’. The ancient city of Zheleznyi Ustiug (today called Ustiuzhna) is located 491 km south of Vologda. By the second half of the 1500s it was a vast trade center. False Dmitrii II laid siege to it in 1609, but it rebounded soon afterwards to become a metallurgical center and home to Russia’s second largest armory after that in Tula. G. M. Lappo, ed., Goroda Rossii (Moskva: Nauchnoe izdatel’stvo, 1994), 87, 432, 475, 497.
N. N. Pokrovskii, ed., Pervoe stoletie sibiriskikh gorodov. XVII vek (Novosibirsk: Sibirskii khronograf, 1996), doc. no. 26. XI, D. 84.
Officials at first tried to make the conquered indigenes serve as food producers but they proved stubbornly nomadic, and then smallpox and alcoholism began reducing their numbers. James Forsyth, ‘Native Peoples before and after the Russian Conquest’, in The History of Siberia: From Russian Conquest to Revolution, ed. Alan Wood (London: Routledge, 1991), 82–3; idem, History, 161 et passim; Slezkine, Arctic, 26–7.
V. I. Shunkov, Ocherki po istorii kolonizatsii Sibiri v XVII-nachale XVIII vekov (Moskva: AN SSSR, 1946), 14.
F. G. Safronov, Ssylka v vostochnuiu Sibir’ v XVII veke (Iakutsk: Iakutskoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo. 1967). 38.
Ssylka v Sibir’: ocherk eia istorii i sovremennago polozheniia (S.-Peterburg: Tipografiia S.-Peterburgskoi Tiur’my, 1900), 1; A. D. Margolis, Tiur’ma i ssylka v imperatorskoi Rossii: issledovaniia i arkhivnye nakhodki (Moskva: Lanterna, 1995), 7; Safronov, Ssylka, 6, 10.
Ivan nevertheless had Vorotynskii executed in 1573. Safronov, Ssylka, 10— 11, 17–18; Roy R. Robson, Solovki: The Story of Russia Told Through Its Most Remarkable Islands (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 42–3; Kliuchevskii, Sochineniia 2: 188;
Andrei Pavlov and Maureen Perrie, Ivan the Terrible (London: Pearson Longman, 2003), 98–101.
Maureen Perrie, Pretenders and Popular Monarchism in Early Modern Russia: The False Tsars of the Time of Trubles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 17–20;
S. F. Platonov, Boris Godunov: Tsar of Russia, trans. L. Rex Pyles (Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press, 1973), 125–52; Shcheglov, Khronologicheskii perechen ; 47; Safronov, Ssylka, 12, 19;
N. M. Iadrintsev, Sibir’ kak koloniia v geograficheskom, etnograficheskom i dopolnennoe (S.-Peterburg: Tip. I. M. Sibiriakova, 1892), 245 n. 2. Some sources mistakenly attribute the Uglichians with founding Pelym, which was in fact established by Prince Petr Gorchakov in 1592. See gramota dated December 1592, reproduced in Miller, Istoriia 1: 339 (also see p. 271). Lantzeff and Pierce write ‘that the builders of the fort had instructions to bring to Pelym the first Russian exiles to Siberia, the family of Ignatii Khripunove from Rzhev’. They cite Müller as their source. However, all other accounts (including the Müller edition used here) reference Pelym’s exiles as originating in Uglich.
Cf. George V. Lantzeff, and Richard A. Pierce, Eastward to Empire: Exploration and Conquest on the Russian Open Frontier, to 1750 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1973), 120.
P. A. Slovtsov, Istoricheskoe obozrenie Sibiri. Stikhotvoreniia. Propovedi, ed. and intro. V. A. Kreshchik (Novosibirsk: Ven-mir, 1995), 149.
Shcheglov, Khronologicheskii perechen’, 51; Safronov, Ssylka, 24; Miller, Istoriia Sibiri 2: 18, 22; V. I. Shunkov, Ocherki po istorii zemledeliia Sibiri (XVII vek) (Moskva: AN SSSR, 1956), 64.
P. L. Kazarian, Iakutiia v sisteme politicheskoi ssylki Rossii, 1826–1917 gg. (Iakutsk: GP NIPK ‘Sakhapoligrafizdat,’ 1998), 113.
P. L. Kazarian, ‘Zadachi rossiiskoi i pol’skoi istoricheskoi nauki v izuchenii ssylka Poliakov v Iakutiiu’, in Rossiia i Polsha: Istoriko-kul’turnye kontakty (Sibirskii fenomen), ed. V. N. Ivanov et al. (Novosibirsk: Nauka, 2001), 43.
I. R. Sokolovskii, Sluzhilye ‘inozemtsy’ v Sibiri XVII veka (Tomsk, Eniseisk, Krasnoiarsk) (Novosibirsk: ‘Sova’ 2004) 86ff.
V. A. Aleksandrov and N. N. Pokrovskii, ‘Mirskie organizatsii i administrativnaia vlast’ v Sibiri v XVII veke’, Istoriia SSSR 1 (1986): 47–68 [here, p. 53.
S. V. Maksimov, Sibir’ i katorga, 3rd edn. (S.-Peterburg: Izdanie V. I. Gubinskago, 1900), 326–7.
Cf. John J. Stephan, The Russian Far East: A History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 29–31. Stephan contradicts the claim that rebels aid iasak to Nerchinsk.
Shcheglov, Khronologicheskii perechen’, 55; Paul Avrich, Russian Rebels 1600–1800 (1972; rpt. New York: W. W. Norton, 1976), 37–8; Shunkov, Ocherki (1956), 116, 216–17, table, p. 115.
Paul Bushkovitch, Religion and Society in Russia: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New York: Oxford University Press. 1992). 135.
N. N. Pokrovskii and E. K. Romodanovskaia, eds., Tobol’skii arkhiereiskii dom v XVII veke (Novosibirsk: Sibirskii khronograf, 1994), doc. no. 60, p. 189.
Valerie A. Kivelson, email to author, 18 August 2003; idem, ‘Through the Prism of Witchcraft: Gender and Social Change in Seventeenth-Century Muscovy’, in Russia’s Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation, ed. Barbara Evan Clements et al. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991), 74–94; idem, ‘Patrolling the Boundaries: Witchcraft Accusations and Household Strife in Seventeenth-Century Muscovy’, Harvard Ukrainian Studies 19 (1995): 302–23; Evgenii Anisimov, Dyba i knut: politicheskii sysk i russkoe obshchestvo v XVIII veke (Moskva: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 1999), 25–9;
Christine D. Worobec, Possessed: Women, Witches, and Demons in Imperial Russia (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001), 24–9 et passim;
Georg Bernhard Michels, At War with the Church: Religious Dissent in Seventeenth-Century Russia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 149. 180.
Ibid., passim; Michels, At War, 99–100; idem, ‘The Violent Old Belief: An Examination of Religious Dissent on the Karelian Frontier’, Russian History 19, nos. 1–4 (1992): 203–29; Bushkovitch, Religion and Society, 66. The conditions for prisoners at Pustozersk nearly defy comprehension. See Sergei Zen’kovskii, Russkoe staroobriadchestvo: Dukhovnye dvizheniia semnadtsatogo veka (Moskva: Tserkov’, 1995), 280, 313.
See Michels, At War, passim; Alan Wood, ‘Avvakum’s Siberian Exile, 1653— 64’, in The Development of Siberia: People and Resources, ed. Wood and R. A. French (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), 11–34; Bruce T. Holl, ‘Avvakum and the Genesis of Siberian Literature’, in Between Heaven and Hell: The Myth of Siberia in Russian Culture, ed. Galya Diment and Yuri Slezkine (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), 33–46.
Basil Dmytryshyn, ‘The Confinement of Juraj Krizanic in and his Thoughts on Siberia, 1661–1676’, in Sibérie77, 184–5, 188; Shcheglov, Khronologicheskii perechen’, 84 and n.; Paul Kevin Meagher et al., eds., Encyclopedic Dictionary of Religion, vol. F—N (Washington, DC: Corpus Publications, 1979), 2007.
Valerie A. Kivelson, Autocracy in the Provinces: The Muscovite Gentry and Political Culture in the Seventeenth Century (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 220, 229. On the 1648 uprising, see idem, ‘The Devil Stole His Mind: The Tsar and the 1648 Moscow Uprising’, American Historical Review 98, no. 3 (1993): 733–56.
Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977. ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 94–5.
K. A. Sofronenko, ed., Sobornoe ulozhenie tsaria Alekseia Mikhailovicha, 1649 goda (Moskva: Iuridicheskaia literatura, 1957).
Weickhardt writes that the Ulozhenie reflected Western influences insofar as it ‘provided for adversarial procedure in civil litigation’ and substantiated what he argues was the recently introduced use of torture as an inquisitorial method. Both might safely be termed ‘modernistic’ without contradicting what I have written above, since inquisitorial torture served a different function from retributive corporal punishment. See George G. Weickhardt, ‘Probable Western Origins of Muscovite Criminal Procedure’, Russian Review 66 (January 2007): 55–72.
Ibid., 14, 15, 17, 24; Ssylka v Sibir’, 4–5 n. 2; Fel’dstein, Ssylka, 130–1; Shcheglov, Khronologicheskii perechen ; 85, 90, 96; N. D. Sergeevskii, Rech’ v godovom SPB luridicheskago Obshchestva, 8 Marta 1887 goda, O ssylke v drevnei Rossii (S.-Peterburg: Tipografiia Ministerstva putei soobshcheniia [A. Benke], 1887), 3–8;
N. M. Iadrintsev, Russkaia obshchina v tiur’me i ssylke (S.-Peterburg: Tipografiia A. Morigerovskago, 1872), 504–5;
F. G. Safronov, ‘Ssylka v vostochnuiu Sibir’ v pervoi polovine XVIII v.’, in Ssylka i katorga v Sibiri (XVIII-nachalo XX v.), ed. L. M. Goriushkin et al. (Novosibirsk: Nauka, 1975), 15.
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Gentes, A.A. (2008). ‘To where the Sovereign Chooses…’. In: Exile to Siberia, 1590–1822. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230583894_2
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