In the first several decades after Yermak's conquest of the Khanate of Sibir
(1582), Moscow extended its political influence over a vast area of Western
Siberia. Russians soon began arriving east of the Urals in significant numbers.
At first this process was largely government motivated and controlled. Moscow
sent in voyevodas (military governors), mostly the children of noble
families (deti boyarskie) who didn't have gainful positions in European
Russia. The voyevodas supervized the building of forts (ostrogi) and
trading places (posady). At first these were manned mostly by paid cossack
musketeers (streltsy) and other government employees (sluzhilye liudi),
a few of whom brought their families. The purpose of these settlements was to
extend the fur gathering network to include more and more taiga tribes. Winter
camps (zimovya) would be set up in the forest as a place where furs could
be brought by natives. As the fur-gathering natives became more dependent on
such Russian trade goods as iron implements, grain and vodka (the production
of which the Russians had recently learned from the Kazan Tatars); and as smallpox
and other European diseases took their toll on native populations, the taiga
tribes quickly fell under more firm Muscovite control, and the exchange became
even more one sided. They tribes nearest the Russian outposts became yasak
(fur tribute) payers. Sometimes were hired by Russians to help subdue
hostile tribes who had not yet accepted the trade and tribute system.
Originally, the collection of fur tribute as well as profits from trade were
controlled from Moscow. It was unlawful to exterminate or abuse the pacified
"unbaptized" tribes, as they were useful fur producers. The voyevodas
were instructed to collect a certain amount of furs and send most of it back
to Moscow, where even a few sable or ermine pelts were worth a small fortune
on the European market. Soon, however, greedy voyevodas began to extort more
furs from the natives than was the proper government quota; the extra was kept
and smuggled into Europe to be traded at a handsome profit. Voyevodas fought
over the right to take extra tribute from the natives. They also accepted bribes
from ambitious cossacks and other service men who also wanted a share in the
illegal fur collection. Natives who rebelled against this arbitrary treatment
were treated harshly; sometimes members from the family of a tribal chief were
taken to the Russian fort as hostages (amanat) to insure that the furs
demanded would be brought in every season. These hostages were often subjected
to all sorts of abuses, as were the native women in general. Many cossacks took
native women from their villages back to the fort as common law wives. This
economic exploitation of the hunters and sexual exploitation of the women caused
many native tribes to beceme destitute.
A major breakdown in Russian central authority occurred at the beginning of
the 17th century and further contributed to the lawlessness and destructive
depletion of both the fur bearing animals and the native peoples.
In 1598 the last ruler of the Riurik line who had ruled Russia since the coming
of the vikings in the 9th century died and left no child. For two decades Russia
was rocked by civil war, foreign invasions, peasant rebellions, famines and
particularly severe epidemics of smallpox and bubonic plague. This period, known
as the Time of Troubles, ended in 1613 with the installment of a new line of
Tsars, the Romanovs (who ruled the Russian Empire until 1917).
During the Time of Troubles and the early years of Romanov rule, the movement
of Russian peasants and cossacks into southwestern Siberia became an uncontrollable
stream. Peasants fleeing enserfment, famine and war found rich soil and a reasonably
wet and warm (in summer) climate for farming in the forest steppe zone of southwestern
Siberian. Much of this territory became populated by Russian farmers during
the next several decades, and today the original Turkic and Samoyedic speaking
inhabitants have all but vanished. Along with these first Russian farmers (called
starozhily, or old settlers by later immigrants to Siberia), came
free cossacks who were not in the government's employ but simply wanted
to trade for or extort as many furs as possible.
So two, actually three, frontiers developed in the process of Russian expansion
into Siberia. The first was the free, out of control cossacks who explored
ever farther into Siberia in search of furs. The second, slower advancing
frontier was formed by the government servitors and paid cossacks who established
forts and trading posts, with voyevodas regulating the yasak-paying natives.
These came behind the first wave of cossacks--sometimes directly, sometimes
with a lag of many decades. The third frontier, that of the farmers and settlers,
was slower moving still, and never penetrated very far north; the protection
of government troops and the availability of land suitable for farming (particularly
in southwestern Siberia), brought peasants, priests, and others settlers who
wanted a better life than European Russian could provide. This third frontier
often cleared the forest or ploughed up the steppleland, resulting in the wholesale
eviction or disolution of the native tribes (just as happened in most of present-day
United States). At first, this third frontier advanced only through southwestern
Siberia.
As the new Romanov government began to re-establish control after 1613, renewed
attempts were made to regulate the settlement of Siberia and insure the proper
collection of furs for the state treasury. To protect the fur supply, peasants
were forbidden to cut down forests in large areas; damage to a fur-producing
area could bring severe punishment. Also, laws were enacted to prevent the cossacks
and voyevodas from extorting extra furs and smuggling them to European Russia
in defiance of the state monopoly. A few particularly notorious violators were
punished and even executed, but Siberia was too large, its population too lawless,
and Moscow too far away for effective government control of all of the abuses.
Certain government policies, in fact, directly added to these problems. Early
on, Moscow began sending prisoners of war to build the forts and establish
settlements; soon convicts and exiles were being dumped into the seemingly
boundless taiga. Later in the 17th century, religious dissenters called Old
Believers came in droves; these were fleeing from government authority and
settled in remote areas, displacing the natives and sending little back to Moscow
by way of taxes or furs. By 1620, within a few decades of Yermak, Russian Siberia
had already taken on many of the features for which it has become famous, or
infamous, throughout the world.
Although the Russians, especially the cossacks, seemed to advance with little
permanent hindrance across Siberia in the decades after Yermak, formidable human
obstacles still stood in their way. In the north, the nomadic Tundra Nenets
proved difficult to control, and many forts were burned and cossack yasak-gangs
met their deaths in this inhospitable environment. And in the steppes of Southern
Siberia, many of the tribes already paid fur tribute to either the Kirgiz
Turks (the ancestors of the modern Kazakhs) or to the powerful Oirats
(the Western Mongols some of whom were soon to emigrate to Europe to become
the Kalmyks). These states, although not located in Siberia proper, extended
their influence across the steppes and into the southern taiga, making it difficult
for the Russians to assimilate this area for many decades. Settlers were in
constant danger of attack from the nomads, and forts could easily be besieged
and destroyed. For this reason, the conquest of Siberia after 1582 proceeded
through the central and northern taiga, skirting the southern steppes. Even
though the natural conditions in the south were more hospitable to the Russian
invaders, the human obstacles in this direction were the more formidable. Therefore,
the southern steppes were not subdued until long after the first cossacks reached
Asia's Pacific shores. Russia only conquered Central Asia during the 1800's.