Concern to secure the biggest possible tax income led it to build forts at distant trading stations and to devise settlement programmes. In 1601 the Godunov regime had mounted an expedition to a winter trading station called Mangazeia on the Yenisei river deep in the icy tundra at the very edge of the Arctic Circle. The purpose was to build a log fort and administration centre, where traders would gather and taxes could be collected. Although the dismal area was a hunting ground of the feared Samoyeds, who were reputed to eat their own children, they could be forced to pay tribute to the benefit of the state. Mangazeia was to become an important base for the penetration of Siberia as far as the Pacific.
At the same time, since all virgin land was regarded as crown property, the state was anxious to make cultivable parts of Siberia productive. It therefore encouraged peasants not already in the tax net to settle around new log forts, providing them with food and seedcorn, and sometimes much more, to get them started. 8 Such opportunities were to be announced in the market places of appropriate towns. ‘Whoever is willing to go to the Taborinsk area …’ ran one such proclamation, ‘will be given a plot of arable land and money from our Treasury for horses and farm buildings … and tax exemption for one year or more depending on the condition of the land they settle, and one ruble or two for transportation depending on the size of the family.’ 9
The river Yenisei, Russia’s eastern limit in 1601, also marked the eastern limit
The quest had originally been for furs, then salt (the foundation
The pioneers were Cossacks, boatmen, trappers and traders. Their technology was simple, and they lacked navigational instruments. They sailed Arctic seas from estuary to estuary in boats they had built themselves; they traversed permafrost landscapes, and braved their ways across 4,000 miles of uncharted taiga to Chukhotka, Kamchatka and the frontiers of China. Many died in the process. Yet these Russian explorers found their way across the vast, inclement tracts of northern Asia amazingly quickly. Often they were oblivious of their achievement. One such was the Cossack Semeon Dezhnev, who found the straits separating Asia from America in 1648, eighty years before Vitus Bering.
Dezhnev was a Siberian serviceman who had been sent into the wilderness in search of ‘new people’ from whom the government could extract tribute. He set out with twenty-four other trappers, hunters and traders, most of them working on their own account. They went by sea and land - whichever seemed more practical, given the topography and the season. Eventually they came to the river Anadyr. ‘We could catch no fish,’ he reported subsequently; ‘there was no forest, and so, because of hunger we poor men went separate ways … [Half the party] went up the Anadyr [overland] and journeyed for twenty days but saw no people, traces of reindeer sleds, or native trails,’ so they turned back.
Eventually the twelve survivors went by boat up the river, and at last came upon some Yukagirs.
We captured two of them in a fight [in which] I was badly wounded. We took tribute from them by name, recording in the tribute books what we took from each and what for the Sovereign [Tsar]’s tribute. I wanted to take more … but they said ‘We have no sables [for] we do not live in the forest. But the reindeer people visit us and when they come we shall buy sables from them and pay tribute to the Sovereign.’
The arrival of a rival tribute collector, however, sparked some violence and dried up the flow of tribute.
Dezhnev worked on in Siberia, and some fifteen years later we find him bombarding the Siberia Office with petitions:
I, your slave, supported myself on your … service on the new rivers with my own money and my own equipment, and I … received no official pay in money, grain and salt from 1642 to 1661 … because of the shortage of money and grain … I risked my head [in your service,] was severely wounded, shed my blood, suffered great cold and hunger, and all but died of starvation … I was impoverished by shipwreck, incurred heavy debts, and was finally ruined … Sovereign, have mercy, please. 10
