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Muscovy's Expansion Into Western Siberia, 1581-1649

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Muscovy's Expansion Into Western Siberia, 1581-1649 FOREIGNERS, FURS and FAITH: MUSCOVY'S EXPANSION INTO WESTERN SIBERIA, 1581-1649 Peter C.B. Armstrong Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Dalhousie University Halifax, Nova Scotia August, 1997 @ Copyright by Peter C.B. Armstrong, 1997 National Library Bibliothique nationale 1*1 ,Canada du Canada Acquisitions and Acquisitions et Bibliographie Services semecesbibliographiques 395 Wellington Street 395, rue Wellington OttawaON KlAOiU4 Ottawa ON K1A ON4 Canada Canada The author has granted a non- L'auteur a accordé une licence non exclusive licence allowïng the exclusive permettant à la National Librw of Canada to Bibliothèque nationale du Canada de reproduce, loan, distribute or seli reproduire, prêter, distribuer ou copies of this thesis in microfoq vendre des copies de cette thèse sous paper or electronic formats. la forme de microfiche/nlm, de reproduction sur papier ou sur format électronique. The author retains ownership of the L'auteur conserve la propriété du copyright in this thesis. Neither the droit d'auteur qui protège cette thèse. thesis nor substantid extracts fiom it Ni la thèse ni des extraits substantiels may be printed or otherwise de celle-ci ne doivent être imprimés reproduced without the author's ou autrement reproduits sans son permission. autoisation. For Emily and Jeremy, who helped me see that there is more to a student's life than books and a computer screen. Ma~s Western Siberian Plain........................................................................ 23 Novgorod & Surrounding Territory. c . 1 380 .......................................... -28 Yermak's Route Across the Urals ........................................................54 Native Distribution in Western Siberia. Early 1 Yth Century ............ .... ..... -70 Administrative Subdivision of Western Siberia by Uezd.......................... 175 Illustrations "The Subjugation of Siberia" by V.I. Surikov (1895) ................................ 57 Ostiaks in Traditional Winter Dress ................. ... .............................. 81 One of the defining features of sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe was the expansion of states beyond borders hitherto demarcated on the bases of ethnic andior linguistic criteria. The primary motivation for any state engaged in the exploration and acquisition of new territories, the establishment of colonies and the gradua1 building of empire was economic. However, the colonial nations of the early modern period did not rely soleiy on their businessrnen and merchants to conduct and manage, in al1 their complexities, the affairs of empire. Each of the colonial nations had at its disposal various state and civilian institutions, the skills and resources of which could be directed toward managing and exploiting the colonies as the governing authority in the mother country saw fit. The role any given institution would play in a colonial context varied from nation to nation and was dependent as much on the tirne, place and circumstances under which the organization was expected to fulfill its role, as it was on the goals and ambitions of the individual states and institutions. An institution that frequently participated in the colonial expansion of European states was the Church. One of the most cornmon and useful functions that the Church of a colonizer could perform was the reconciliation of native peoples to the rule of the conqueror - generally through attempts to convert the former to the faith of the latter. Though not always viewed as a colonial state, Muscovy was no exception to this general paradigm. While much has been written about Muscovy's goals in Siberia and the administration of the territory and its inhabitants, there is little information concerning the missionary - or most other - activity of the Russian Orthodox Church on Muscovy's frontier in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The aim of the present study, therefore, is to examine the motivations for embarking on the conquest of Siberia, the methods used by the Muscovite state to achieve its goals in western Siberia, and to attempt to draw some conclusions regarding the role of the Russian Orthodox Church in the first decades of Muscovite colonization in the region. especially as it pertained to the indigenous peoples. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My thanks to Mary and Tina for al1 of their patient help over the last few years. Special thanks to Phil Zachernuk and Daniel Woolf for agreeing to sit at my thesis defence on such short notice and for pointing out flaws that may otherwise have gone unnnoticed. To Elizabeth Haigh and John Barnstead for their encouragement, support and critical expertise, both before and during my work on this thesis. Finally, I wish to thank Norman Pereira for al1 of his support, encouragement and guidance - scholarly and otherwise - during my labours. viii Churches, ikons [sic], crosses, bells, Painted whores and garlic smells, Vice and vodka everyplace - This is Moscow's daily face. To loiter in the market air, To bathe in cornmon, bodies bare, To sleep by day and gorge by night, To belch and fart is their delight. Thieving, murdering, fornication Are so common in this nation, No one thinks a brow to raise - Such are Moscow's sordid days.' These lines convey some commonly held Western European perceptions of the state of Russian society and culture in the seventeenth century. Yet, whatever the "backward" habits of the Russians, they had, like their West European conternporaries, state and military organizations that were sufficiently well developed to allow them to participate in the colonial expansion of European States that was already well under way by the mid-sixteenth century. Indeed, in time, it was the Russians who would forge, if not the longest lived, certainly the largest empire the world has seen. It hardly needs mentioning that when a polity is accumulating large amounts of territory, it will inevitably encounter other political and cultural entities. The questions such a situation calls to mind are many. When two '~heseverses were composed by a member of the 1636 embassy from Holstein to Russia. an account of which was published by one of the participants, Adam Olearius. in 1647. Cited in Samuel H. Baron (trans. & ed.), TA(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967). p. 163. 3 cultures rneet for the first time, must it be a violent corning together? If one of them is territorially expansionist, is it necessary that the non-expanionist entity be subjugated? If sot are there any institutional pressures which are almost universally brought to bear upon the subjugated people in an attempt to ease the transition to subject status and facilitate the acceptance of their colonial masters? To a greater or lesser degree the answer to ail these questions, with respect to the colonial expansion of European States, is yes. This being said, one must recognize the caveat that dominance by one party by no rneans represents either the physical or cultural destruction of the other. In fact, a great deai of cross-cultural borrowing can occur during and after the conquest of one people by another, from the meanest elements of material culture up through what is usually referred to as high culture - art, literature and religious thought. In some instances conquerors, while over tirne imposing their political and military rule on a people, have corne to adopt the conquered's language and religionr2thus assuming the customs of the subject people and in al1 outward appearances being assirnilated by them rather than the other way around. Like other contemporary empire-builders (England, France, Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands), the Russians encountered rnany peoples who were indigenous to the territories Muscovy was exploring and claiming as her own. '~omeof the best examples of this phenornenon can be found in the Mongol conquests of various Turkic peoples (especially those that had been Islamicized) in the Siberian steppe and Central Asia in the thir- teenth and fourteenth centuries. 4 And like the groups with which these contemporaries came into contact, the Russians encountered peoples who varied widely in their political, economic and social development and structures from srnall, loosely affiliated clan and tribal units (especially in the north of Siberia) to larger, more organized and cohesive systems such as the Khanate of Sibir. The degree of economic development and political sophistication of any particular group, of course, influenced its members' responses to the Russian presence in their territories and the effectiveness of the responses. In some measure, it also dictated how the Russians treated the respective populations. Without exception, however, no group was as advanced politically, administratively and militarily as Muscovy. Perhaps the greatest single advantage enjoyed by the Russians in their conquest of Siberia was technological - their possession of firearms. While not always considered in such a context, Muscovy was clearly a participant in the colonial expansion of European States of the early modern period. But did the Russians embark on their colonial adventure unaware of the costs in men and materiel that would be involved and utterly unfamiliar with the administration of lands sparsely settled by srnail groups of often nomadic peoples? The answer is, of course, no. There are precedents for expansionist activity frorn deeper in the Russian past. For several centuries prior to crossing the Ural mountains, the principalities of Rus
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