The Russian Empire: historical and descriptive

Front matter

THE Russian Empire: historical attb Jcsmptibc. By JOHN G ED DIE, F.R.G.S., Author of "Lake Regions of Central Africa" J2fcnticn : T. NELSON AND SONS, PATERNOSTER ROW. EDINBURGH ; AND NEW YORK. 1882. ~J&> x c f a c c. F there is a country that bears its history impressed on its surface and on the character of its people, that country is Russia. To the traveller from the west, Russian scenery, aw-ay from the great towns, has a forlorn, half-savage aspect, as of a land that is only being reclaimed from a state of nature. To understand why this is so, he must keep in mind not alone the harshness of the climate and the sparseness of the population, but also the fact that the tillers of the soil, as a class, are more poor and ignorant and superstitious than the peasantry of the other Chris tian countries of Europe ; that till a few years ago they were serfs, bought and sold with the land ; and that even to-day they have scarcely begun to enjoy or ap preciate the blessings of true liberty.

To know why the bulk of the Russian people are so far in the wake of civilization, one must clip a little into the national history. It has been thought well, therefore, in an account of the Russian Empire, to embody a sketch of its historical development. Instead of seeking to describe the vari ous provinces in any geographical order, it has been attempted roughly to follow the process of grow-th by which, from small beginnings, the dominions of the Czar have reached their present vast proportions. The plant ing of the germs of power in the forests of Novgorod,

Preface

. VI the quarrels of rival principalities on the Dnieper, the conquests of the half-Tartar czarate on the Volga, the ambitious strivings of the modern state which Peter established on the Neva, and the restless ao-p-ressioris and annexations that have marked her more recent history, may be seen to have each had its several influ ence in producing that wonderful social and political phenomenon — the Russia of to-day. In giving some popular idea of that phenomenon there may probably be found, notwithstanding the care taken to avoid them, errors in the grouping, in proportion, and in conception and presentation of facts ; and for excuse, reference can only be made to the vast dimensions of the subject and the extreme multiplicity of the details. But the past of Russia, besides explaining its present, is of the highest importance in interpreting its future — a subject which recent events have helped to make matter of painful conjecture.

It is clear that this great country has reached a crisis in its fate. The three chief powers to be reckoned with, it would seem, are a corrupt military bureaucracy, that has almost said its last word — that is clearly moving towards bankruptcy and ruin ; a people still almost dumb and blind, and only half con scious that they have rights and grievances ; and a party of wild political dreamers, strong as yet only by reason of desperation, that seek, as the sole panacea for the ills of society, the total destruction of order and law. What will be the issue of the struggle for Russia it is impossible almost to guess ; before it, as a French writer has said, there rises " an immense note of interrogation." dgsfltttcnts. I. THE GROWTH OF TWO CENTURIES, ... ... ... ... 9 H. GREAT NOVGOROD AND ITS NEIGHBOURS, ... ... ... 25 HI.

LITTLE RUSSIA AND KIEV, ... ... ... ... ... 50 TV. POLAND AND LITHUANIA, ... ... ... ... ... 77 V. THE VOLGA, ... ... ... ... ... ... Ill VI. MOSCOW, ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 134 vn. HISTORIC SITES IN GREAT RUSSIA, ... ... ... ... 159 Vm. NISHNI-NOVGOROD — RUSSIAN INDUSTRY AND TOWN LIFE, ... 172 IS. PEASANT LIFE IN GREAT RUSSIA, ... ... ... ... 196 X. ASTRAKHAN AND ORENBURG, ... ... ... ... 215 XI. THE URALIAN PROVINCES, ... ... ... ... ... 231 XII. NORTHERN RUSSIA, ... ... ... ... ... 253 XIII. ST. PETERSBURG, ... ... ... ... ... ... 285 XIV. THE BALTIC PROVINCES, ... ... ... ... ... 316 XV. RUSSIA ON THE BLACK SEA — THE CRIMEA, ... ... ... 331 XVI. NEW RUSSIA AND ITS PORTS, ... ... ... ... 355 XVII. THE CAUCASUS AND TRANSCAUCASIA, ... ... ... 372 XVIII. RUSSIA IN ASIA, ... ... ... ... ... ... 399 XIX.

THE CONQUEST AND DISCOVERT OF SIBERIA, ... ... 407 XX. THE CHINESE FRONTIER, ... ... ... ... ... 428 XXI. LIFE IN THE TUNDRA AND THE FOREST, ... ... ... 443 XXII. THE PACIFIC SHORES, ... ... ■■• ■•• •■• 471 XXIII. RUSSIAN TURKESTAN, ... ... ... ■■• ■■• 488 XXIV. LATEST CONQUESTS IN CENTRAL ASIA, ... ... ... THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE.

Chapter I. The Growth Of Two Centuries

F the courteous reader were to turn to some old map of the world, say of two hundred years ago, and compare it with the earth as we know it to-day, perhaps the change of all others which would strike him as most marvellous would be the enormous development of the Russian Empire. The face of Europe has been metamorphosed. Powerful states have disappeared, and others whose names two centuries ago were scarcely known have risen into prominent rank among the Great Powers. The vast colonial empire of Britain was then only beingfounded ; and England had yet barely a foothold in India. The great North American Republic had yet a century to wait before its time came to step forth on the stage of history. The coast of Australia had been merely sighted ; the Mississippi still rolled its waters from their source to the sea through an almost unexplored wilderness; California was believed to be an island.

But incon- RUSSIA TWO CENTURIES AGO. 10 ceivably great as have been the changes which these facts reveal, the most " portentous birth " of latter times, at least in its imposing magnitude, must be pronounced to be the Empire of the White Czar. When this country was achieving its " Revolution," and laying down on firm lines the foundations of its national progress and its constitutional liberty, Russia — Muscovy, as our forefathers would have called it — was a semi-Asiatic state, still thickly crusted with the rust of barbarism. Few dreamed of its future destiny, though its progress had already been rapid and continuous. It counted for little more in the European *' balance of power " than the Empire of Morocco does to-day, and was indeed scarcely classed among the European family of nations.

It was still to all intents and purposes an inland state, with no commerce save what was carried through the territories of its neighbours. The Kingdom of Poland had not only a sea-board on the Baltic, but ports on the Black Sea. The Mohammedan Khanate of Crim-Tartary interposed between the southern margin of Muscovy and the Euxine. Fierce, independent Cir cassian and Tartar tribes held the country between the Don and the Caucasus. Sweden possessed not Finland alone, but Livonia, Esthonia, and the site of the modern capital of the Czars. Towards the north, on the shores of the White Sea, the rulers of Moscow had indeed an outlet to the ocean ; but this, and all the channels leading J ' O to it, were closed during the long months of the Arctic winter. To the eastward the limits of the empire were less well defined.

The Czars held as much as they were able of the ground roamed over by the nomad tribes of THE GROWTH OF AN EMPIRE. 11 the Siberian steppes, and lost no opportunity of tight ening their grasp on these loose possessions, and pushing their frontier to the east and the south. The ruler of Moscow was content at first to govern these wild peoples with a slack rein, and exact a very light tribute, if they were but willing to make nominal ac knowledgment of his suzerainty. And so the empire enlarged itself almost insensibly, or at least almost un observed, until Cossack conquest and discovery had, in the course of a few generations, carried the boundary of the Czars' dominions eastward to the shores of Behring Strait and southward to the Altai chain and the river Amoor. Before Peter the Great's clays, however, it is doubtful whether even the Russians themselves knew much of the region beyond the present limits of Europe..

Not much more than a century had elapsed since they had shaken themselves clear, after a desperate struggle prolonged through three hundred years, from the yoke of the Tartars of the Golden Horde. It was not till the overthrow of the Mongol Khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan by Ivan the Terrible, in the second half of the sixteenth century, that the Russian dominions were carried as far as the Volga and the Caspian Sea, and the princes of Muscovy thought themselves entitled to assume the name of " Czar." Their knoAvledge of the regions beyond the Ural chain and to the east of the Caspian must have been vague, and their interest in them probably not very keen. But to the peoples of Western Europe — even to the learned among them — Siberia and the countries of Central Asia were still almost a terra incognita ASIAN MYTHS AND CHIMERAS. 12 two hundred years back.

As in the days of the Greek and Roman geographers, these remote regions were the abodes of myths and chimeras. The few ascertained facts were distorted by fear and prejudice and by the mists of uncertain distance. The fabulous races with which the old world writers had peopled Inner Scythia had indeed disappeared from the maps. No one now had faith in the existence of the war-loving Amazons ; of tribes that once a year were transformed into were-wolves, and roamed through the gloom of the northern forests with the lust of blood and slaughter glowing in their red eyes ; of races that were bald-headed from birth to old age, or who devoured their parents to save the expense of burying them. The man-eaters by the Arctic Seas, the one-eyed Ai'imaspian who contended with the winged griffon for the possession of the Mines of Gold, the dog-headed people, or that still stranger headless race with a single eye planted in the middle of the breast who inhabited the innermost recesses of the desert, had been relegated to the realm of poetry and fable.

Only a few enthusiastic imaginations still cherished the idea of the Riphæan Mountains, with their impenetrable wall of snow, behind which, " at the back of the north wind," dwelt the venerable Hyperboreans in the practice of all the virtues and in the enjoyment of eternal calm, in a region where the feathery snow-flakes fell continually, and day succeeded night at intervals of six months. The names and something of the character and habitat of several of the more important of the tribes of Northern Asia were known ; but concerning their geo graphical and political relations and their race affinities TARTARY AND ITS TRIBES. 13 only the vaguest notions were afloat. A comparatively short time had elapsed since these fierce barbarians had precipitated themselves on Europe and laid it waste up to the walls of Liegnitz ; and the flood of Tartar invasion had barely ebbed back within the limits of Asia when Czar Peter began to reign.

The natural tendency was to make an exaggerated estimate of their numbers and their destructive power; and so the picture that stamped itself upon the popular fancy regarding the northern and central parts of Asia, and which has con tinued to be more or less distinctly impressed there down to the present day, is that of an illimitable waste, grim, hungry, and forbidding, and yet, in spite of its barren ness, holding within its savage girdle of mountains myriads of outlandish races with high cheek-bones and obliquely -set eyes, who are continually engaged in furious strife with each other, but who might at any moment unite their forces and pour in a resistless torrent over Europe or India. Marco Polo's famous account of his journey across Asia to the court of the great Kublai Khan at Pekin, and through the length and breadth of the Middle Kingdom, was still the chief repository of facts relating to this part of the world ; and so vague was the information possessed even by the learned two centuries ago, that we find the whole region north of the Oxus and east of the Ural Mountains, comprehending modern Siberia and Turkestan, slumped together as " Grand Tartary."

So inadequate was the conception of the enormous extension of Asia to the northward and eastward, that the Dutch and English navigators who strove for more than a century — from 1553 to 1G7G — THE NORTH-EAST PASSAGE. 14 to discover a " north-east passage " to China and India by coasting the Arctic shores of Russia, imagined that if they could only round the cape to the south of Vaygatz Strait, opposite Novaya Zemlia, and on the frontier of Europe and Asia, they might then turn their vessel's head to the south-east and sail directly to Cathay and the Islands of Spice, and thus completely outdistance their Spanish and Portuguese rivals in the Eastern Seas, who had to make the long voyage by the Cape of Good Hope or Cape Horn. That this ignorance of the actual outline of the Russian Empire continued down to our own day was proved by Nordenskiold, who in his memorable exploit of threading the long-sought-for North-East Passage, and circumnavigating for the first time the continents of the Old World, sailed over tracts of sea which were laid clown in the maps as dry land, and found a bold and high coast where he had been led to expect a navigable ocean.

But the knowledge possessed by the rest of Europe regarding the true kinship and character of the Russian people themselves, and of the nature and strength of the power wielded by the Czar of Muscovy, was scarcely less ill defined than that as to the vast supplementary empire that was growing up in Asia. The early glories of Novgorod and Kiev, when the Grand Princes espoused daughters of the Emperors of the East, and were united by marriage with half the crowned heads of Europe, had been obscured or forgotten in the long night of Tartar domination that followed the invasion of the Golden Horde. It is true that, having at length thrown off the yoke of its barbarian masters, the young Muscovite power bounded along the course marked out for it with A LONG LEEWAY. 15 gigantic strides. But it had a long leeway to make up.

It had to work " overtime," as it were, to bring itself into the same field with its more favoured western com petitors. While it was struggling almost despairingly for national existence, they had been passing through rapid changes in their political, social, and intellectual development. Paganism and Mohammedanism were round it on three sides, and in its midst. The race, like the land, was in the primitive stages of cultivation. The intelligence of the people was obscured by the grossest superstitions. The necessity of constantly watching and encountering their terrible Mongol foes turned their faces towards the dark east instead of westward, where the new light was rising. Their political relations were with Asia rather than with Europe. Other countries had long ago received, and more or less successfully ab sorbed, all the constituent elements of their nationalities.

Celts, Teutons, and Slavs had already taken up their appointed places, and were busy adjusting questions of precedence. Russia, however, was still within the flood-mark of barbarism. The exodus of the nations from Central Asia — the process that had been going on from the earliest beginnings of history, when we see Cimmerians pushed forward by Scythians, Issedones treacling on the heels of Massagetæ, and political convulsions within the Wall of China sweeping away the decaying barriers of the Roman Empire, and pouring hosts of Goths, Huns, and Vandals into Europe — was still in active operation there. As had been the case for centuries, these Eastern Slavs had to bear the first shock of the charge of the Asiatic hosts. No sooner was one tribe overthrown OBSTACLES TO PROGRESS. than the way was left open for another and still stronger that came on in its turn, to be in turn absorbed or ex terminated.

Russia was therefore constantly acquiring from without, by the westward movement of population and the eastward extension of her frontiers, vast addi tions to her stock of inhabitants. And these were no longer, as in the earlier immigrations, Aryan peoples of her own kin, but races of Turanian or semi-Turanian origin, half-savage Finnish, Mongol, and Turkish tribes, hard of assimilation into a stable and well-governed state. She managed to incorporate them. The Russians have a great natural talent in that direction. Their stage of progress was not so far removed from that of the peoples whom they absorbed as to prevent them from mingling with them easily and on equal terms. The process of the " Russification" of these alien nations has been a rapid and effectual one, and has no parallel in the history of British colonization; but it has, as a matter of course, considerably impeded the social progress of the Russian people.

On the other hand, while Russia's political outlook had been towards Asia, her culture and religion, such as they were, had been derived from Constantinople. This fact has had a most powerful influence on the national life and character, and has formed a main part of the great wall of division separating Russia from the know ledge and sympathy of the rest of Europe. Not only were there the antagonism of race and religion, and the O o ' difficulties of an unknown language, and even alphabet, to overcome, but Russia had adopted another type of civilization, a different standard of taste and morals from A " WINDOW TOWARDS EUROPE." 17 her neighbours in the west. Peter the Great was the first who thoroughly understood the great loss that his country suffered from this isolation, or at least he was the first who had the far-seeing sagacity and boldness to set himself with all his might to break down the bar riers.

Russia had still no foothold on the Baltic. The site of the great capital, which is the most magnificent and enduring memorial of Peter's superb ambition, was a lonely marsh, which had still to be won from the Swede, and that Swede no other than Charles the Twelfth. He chose this spot for the seat of his court and the centre of his power, and he called it " the window " by which Russia would see into Europe, and learn the lesson of progress. It has been in scarcely a less degree a window by which Europe has peered into the interior gloom of Russia, and with a half-sympathetic, half-apprehensive feeling has watched its wonderful brightening. If the heart of Russia still beat at Moscow, her eye and brain, her per ceptive and intellectual faculties, were removed to St. Petersburg. She had become at length a European power ; and she attracted to herself more and more of the curiosity and wonder of the world, as she strode on from conquest to conquest, while the solid develop ment of her internal strength and the progressive enlightenment of her people almost kept pace with her vast aggrandizements to north, south, east, and west.

We have learned much regarding the Russian land and people since we have been thus brought face to face with them. Scores of observers have noted the pecu liarities of the government, religion, and social life. Tourists may now travel with ease from one end to the other of the European possessions of the Czar ; while (718) DIVERSITY OF RACE AND RELIGION. 18 enterprising explorers have penetrated into the remotest corners of his vast Asiatic domains. More important than all, a national literature has arisen, in which we can read more clearly than in a thousand descriptions what are the aspirations and the mental characteristics of the race. Yet it cannot be said that we know Russia and its people thoroughly, or even well. It is so colossal and so complicated a phenomenon that is presented to us, that it is not easy to fix an adequate picture of it in the mind.

From the Danube to Behring Strait, from Arch angel to Samarcand, what a " multitude of all peoples and tongues and nations that no man can number " are comprised within the bounds of the Russian Empire ! Within are found representatives of all the northern and eastern and of many of the southern and western races of the Old World. Every phase of civilization, from the highest to the most primitive, and nearly every variety of religion — Christian, Jewish, Mohammedan, Buddhist, and pagan — are represented. Dr. Latham, as the result of his ethnological studies, which he admits to be imper fect, has reckoned up no fewer than forty-seven " non- Russian " races dwelling within the bounds of Russia proper. In Asia, and in the Polish, Circassian, and other alien European provinces, there are at least as many more.

And in customs, costumes, and languages there is almost as much variety as in race and religion. The empire of the White Czar is the bond of union between two great continents, which are otherwise sharply opposed to each other in every physical and mental feature. It leans on one side against the great Wall of China, and neighbours on the other side with Germany ; and it RUSSIAN SCENERY. 19 shades away so insensibly from Western progress and culture to Oriental immobility, that it is impossible to put clown the finger anywhere, and say, "Here Asia begins." Not less striking is the diversity of scenery comprehended within the Russian Empire.

Busy sea-ports on the Baltic and Euxine, with quays lined with steamers and crowded with merchandise, and trackless Mongolian wastes, where the solitary traveller may ride for many days without encountering a human habitation ; garish new cities, where streets and boulevards and the costumes of the people smack of the latest Parisian taste, and decaying seats of Tartar and Uzbeg power, whose ancient magnificence is crumbling into dust ; waving corn-fields stretching for hundreds of square leagues over the " Black Lands " of the Dnieper and Boug, and dreary tracts by the Arctic Sea, where it is impossible to tell where the frozen plain ends and the ice-field begins ; white winter landscapes, where the ringing sledge speeds along under the keen stars and the snow-covered branches of the pines, and the soft steady tramp of the wolves is heard in the distance, and Khivan deserts, where the blazing sun shines down on the fainting camel-drivers, as they toil through the hot sands ; squat Laplanders and Samoyedes driving their reindeer to the pasture ; Kamschadales putting out to sea in their frail kajaks, in chase of the walrus and the seal ; hardy lumbermen descending the northern rivers in their huge rafts of larch and fir trees ; Yakut fur trappers following the tracks of silver fox and marten across the snow ; sturgeon-fishers landing their mighty prize on the shores of the Volga and the Don ; Turco- CONTRAST AND UNIFORMITY. mans and Kipchaks riding forth on marauding and kidnapping expeditions; Kalmuk and Kirghiz shepherds watching their flocks on the steppe, with their guns con veniently at hand ; Caucasian mountaineers leaping from crag to crag in chase of ibex and chamois; uncouth Mant churian merchants brin«ino; their bales of silk and brick- O O tea to the Russian markets ; Cossack colonists on disturbed and distant frontiers, where the settler has to till the ground with arms in his hand; dark and mysterious scenes of suffering endured by exiles in the Siberian mines ; peaceful log-built villages in Central Russia, where the vastest social and political revolutions produce scarcely a ripple on the even current of peasant life ; court splendours and great military displays ; the interior of Christian churches, Mohammedan mosques, and Buddhist temples ; mighty rivers, interminable marshes, and great salt and fresh water lakes ; deserts of salt and shingle and sand and snow; vast forests, boundless grassy plains, and lonely Alpine peaks ; — these and a hundred other pictures equally startling in their contrast rise before the mind when the name of Russia is mentioned.

But, after all, considering the stupendous area it covers, it is not diversity, but rather uniformity, even monot ony, that is the distinguishing characteristic of the em pire of Russia. Bulky though it is — stretching through one hundred and sixty degrees of longitude, and from far within the Arctic Circle to semi-tropical lands — it is one great whole, not only having continuity of extent, but uniformity of natural features. Compared with Western Europe, and even Southern Asia, it is a solid mass of land, indented to only a small extent by arms of the sea, and less dependent upon or connected with the PLAINS AND RIVERS. ■21 ocean than any other territory of similar extent. M. Rambaud, in his " History of Russia," has on this account described the region west of the Ural Mountains as the " Continental Europe," as distinguished from " Maritime Europe."

Another physical peculiarity has suggested the name of " Europe of the Plains," as contrasted with " Europe of the Mountains," applied to the countries to the westward. Unlike its neighbours, Russia has a mountain girdle, but no mountain system. The Caucasus, the Urals, the Carpathians, the plateau of Finland, have been termed its frame — its limits, as laid down by nature ; but within these bounds, and that of the seas that wash its shores, there is scarcely an eminence worthy of the name of a hill. The rivers draining to the Black Sea and the Caspian, and those flowing to the Baltic and the Arctic Ocean, take their rise at an elevation of a few hundred feet above sea-level. In a large measure the still more extensive territory of Siberia is a counterpart of European Russia. Except in its eastern parts, its great ranges of mountains are on its frontiers ; but there is this important difference, that the drainage of the rivers and the slope of the country are towards the north and the Frozen Ocean.

If Russia, however, has not mountains to break up her unity and form natural barriers between her peoples, she has abundance of mighty streams. Few countries are so well favoured in regard to deep and navigable rivers. The Obi, the Yenisei, the Lena, the Volga, the Don, and the Dnieper are all rivers of the first rank, whose courses from source to mouth are within her borders. Many of their tributaries are great rivers over a thousand miles in length ; while a score of inde- THE RUSSIAN NATION. pendent streams could be mentioned that excel in size any of the rivers of Western Europe. Besides these, Russia has frontier rivers of historic note — the Dan ube, the Amoor, and the Oxus — scarcely inferior in volume to those that have been mentioned. But in the winter the Russian land is " one and indivisible."

An Arctic climate reigns from Lapland to the Kirghiz Steppe, and from St. Petersburg to Kamschatka. The temperature rushes from one extreme to another. The Polar air-currents and the hot winds from the sandy deserts east of the Caspian have alike an uninterrupted sweep across the level plains. Archangel has its broiling sun and its clouds of mosquitoes during its short summer ; while at Odessa and Astrakhan the mercury ranges many degrees below zero in the winter months. The rivers are then all ice-bound, and the inequalities of the land are smoothed over by the universal covering of snow. These common conditions of climate and surroundings have had an incalculable influence on the spread of the Russian nation, and in welding out of many materials one massive whole. For as with the land, so -with the people : while there are endless varieties and contrasts, there is a wonderful agreement in the general type.

The quaint and curious diversities that are presented by Georgian and Sart, Kalmuk and Eskimo, are only, as it were, the gay party-coloured fringing that surrounds the sober-hued web of the Russian nationality. As the rod of Aaron swallowed up the rods of the magicians of Egypt, so the Slav stock has absorbed Ugfian aborigines and Turk and Tartar immigrants, and seems little changed, except in bulk, by the process. The surroundings of the race have fostered their colonizing spirit. There has been THE RUSSIAN GOVERNMENT. 23 little to fasten them to their homes, and they have gona on and on in search of further conquest and happier for tunes. Their pioneers, so long as they saw no bounds to their horizon, have pushed steadily forward, hewing out for themselves new heritages in the forests of the north, and spreading their name and their creed over the steppe lands of the south.

It is computed that sixty million of the inhabitants of the Russian Empire are of the Russian race. If their blood is not unmixed with foreign infusions, there can be no question of the force and purity of their national sympathies. At least, as large a pro portion speak the Russian tongue and profess the national religion. Here is a broad and solid basis for an empire's greatness to rest upon ; capable, one would fancy, of sustaining almost any shock from without or from within. But the autocratic power that guides the destinies of Russia has not been content to retain it within its natural frontier. Military ambition and an unwise passion for aggrandizement have carried it into regions where, so far as can be seen, it can reap no permanent benefit, and where its presence arouses the suspicions of its neighbours.