Black Dragon River by Dominic Ziegler

Author:Dominic Ziegler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-10-12T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

52°21.7' N 127°31.0' E

The narrative of the European conquest and settlement of new lands comes everywhere now with acknowledgment of guilt and open shows of contrition. Except in the Russian Far East.

The Cossack conquistadores carried only necessities into new lands, but those now hang in the fusty museums that play the part of camp followers to Russian history here. The necessities are nowhere subtle: monstrous halberds, iron broadswords, knouts and heavy manacles for chastising locals. Yet all along the old line of conquest I met—the sweetest souls—museum curators, pointing stick in hand, telling me that the Russians came in peace. They said relations with locals—the “small peoples of the north,” the term Soviet ethnographers devised for them—had always been nothing but wholly warm. Vasily Poyarkov and Yerofei Khabarov, the first openers of Amuria, true Russian heroes, were above all men of peace, and of enlightenment.

I wondered constantly at the self-deception in the Russian Far East. Insecurity lay at the root of it, perhaps. Russians have always felt their presence in the Far East to be precarious—so few Russians and so vast a space, pressed in on by a pitiless nature and by a billion Chinese to the south. A history of emphatic conquest is not enough. To convince themselves that they belonged in the Russian Far East, truly belonged, Russians had to have come in love.

And yet the stain of early conquest lies over the Russian Far East like original sin. Cossack atrocities in the 1600s were still vivid in the collective memory of native groups as late as the mid-nineteenth century. The brute racism against ethnic Chinese and Koreans in the early twentieth century; Stalin’s banishment of millions of Koreans to Central Asia; his gulag itself and a Siberian economy that was able to function only on the basis of slave labor; the Soviet destruction of the way of life of the “small peoples”; and abiding Russian notions, official and mafia, of declaring war on nature, Siberia as a site chiefly for the exploitation of its resources—lumber, gold, gas, and fish: would all this rawness have come about without that first Cossack plunder? If nothing else, it set the tone.

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