Nowhere was the fundamental problem of empire more intractable than there. Much has been made of the memoirist Vigel’s comparison of Siberia with a remote estate of a wealthy landowner who appreciates it for the extra income it brings and the interesting objects it yields but otherwise pays it no attention. That the centre interfered so little is hardly surprising given the difficulty of communication. The furthest point on land was nearly 9,000 miles from St Petersburg. Seaborne communications were quicker, but as late as the 1840s it was to take eighteen months for a reply to a query sent from New Archangel on Sitka Island in the Gulf of Alaska to arrive from St Petersburg. 16
However, it did not seem reasonable to devolve responsibilities on to the indigenous leadership of a society which, as in Yakutia, respected shamans who worked their curative spells by hopping about to the accompaniment of a doleful chant, and ‘making the most hideous distortions of face and body’ before pretending to plunge a knife into their belly 17 And if the natives were insufficiently modern to be allowed to share in government, the local Russians, aside from the administrators, were little better - chiefly merchants who were as rapacious, ignorant, oppressive and insensitive as those portrayed by the novelist Leskov (and later by the composer Shostakovich) in his ‘Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District’.
Speranskii introduced the rule of law into Siberia with his statutes of 1822, but it did not take him long to realize that the people had ‘less of a conception of legality than elsewhere’, and that the population — many of whom were migratory by habit — could not be treated like Russians. Their officials would have to be appointed rather than elected. However some members of the Yakut and Kamchadal elite appointed to office proved to be at least as oppressive as any Russians. Speranskii decreed that, apart from criminal offences, the people were to be ruled by their own tribal laws. He recognized the rights of nomads, assigned them land, protected it from encroachment, and left it to them to decide its distribution. He even inspired the setting-up of a council for the nomads, though the new institution survived for only ten years. 18 Speranskii’s more lasting reforms were administrative and organizational rather than institutional. For the rest, he could only pray that the natives would be Russified, as for the most part the Tatars had been, and as soon as possible.
In the south, Russia continued to press forward at Persia’s expense. A war between them ended in 1828 with the annexation of Yerevan and the plains of Ararat, whereupon tens of thousands of Armenian Christians from further south flocked there seeking Tsar Nicholas’s protection, although many Muslims moved in the opposite direction. Nicholas approved the creation of a new, Armenian, province for them, though it was to be merged into a Caucasian super-province twelve years later. 19 If Armenians welcomed Russian rule, however, many Muslims of the Caucasus continued to resist it.
Not that Russian policy had been anti-Muslim in principle. On the contrary, the state had often sponsored Islamic institutions. When Russia had occupied the Crimea it had confirmed Muslim clergy in office, and it left both their spiritual authority and their control of religious education intact. It had also allowed them to retain properties that yielded untaxed revenues to support their mosques, schools and charities. It even paid their salaries. But it insisted that the civil law take priority over Islamic law, defined the clergy’s responsibilities, and, from 1834, obliged them to register births, marriages and deaths. 20 This gentle approach would not work in the Caucasus, however. Certainly the army command was sceptical about it.
The new governor-general in the south, General Yermolov, was an established war hero before he arrived in the Caucasus. A proconsul in the Tsitsianov mould, he had no doubt about Russia’s cultural superiority to the peoples with whom he now had to deal, and in his forthright way he sometimes did what he thought best, notwithstanding the Tsar’s milder views. ‘I want my name to be associated with terror,’ he declared. ‘This will protect our frontier territories more effectively than … fortresses. For the natives my word should be a law more inevitable than death.’ On another occasion he wrote that ‘Asiatics see condescension as a sign of weakness. I shall be unswervingly severe simply out of humanity — because an execution saves hundreds of Russians from destruction and thousands of Muslims from treason.’ 21
