The Russian Road to China

An ancient way leads across northern Asia to the Chinese borderland. The steel of the great Siberian Railroad harnesses now the stretch which mounts the Urals, pierces the steppes, winds through the Altai foothills, and by cyclopean cuts and tunnels girdles Lake Baikal. From Verhneudinsk southward, it has remained as an ancient post-road leading through the Trans-Baikal highlands to the frontier garrison town of Kiahta. Over the Mongolian border at Maimachen, it has narrowed into a camel-trail threading the barren hills to the encampment of the Tatar hordes at holy Urga. Thence it strikes across the sandy wastes of Gobi, and passes the ramparts of the Great Wall of China, on its way toward Peking and the Pacific.

Through five centuries this road has been building. Cossacks blazed its way; musketoon-armed Strelitz, adventuring traders, convicts condemned for sins or sincerity, land-seeking peasants, exiled dissenters, voyaging officials—all have trampled it. Hiving workmen under far-brought engineers have pushed the rails onward, bridging the chasms and heaping the defiles. Following it eastward, unpeopled wastes have been sown to homesteads, hamlets have grown into cities. To the very gateway of China it has led the Muscovite. It is the path of Slavic advance.

The way scarcely passed Novgorod in the early sixteenth century when the great family of the Stroganovs, a “kindred in Moscovie called the sonnes of Anika living neare the Castle of Saint Michael the Archangel,” began the fur-trade with the Samoied tribesmen from Siberia, who paddled down the Wichida River to barter peltries with the Russians. The prudent merchant Anika, looking to a more permanent source for those valued furs than the irregular visits of the aborigines, planned to anticipate his brother traders in their purchases. He sent east with a band of returning Samoieds some of his own henchmen carrying, for traffic with the inhabitants, “divers base merchandise, as small bels, and other like Dutch small wares.” The agents returned to report what impressed them most. There were no cities. The Samoieds were “lothsome in feeding,”—even a Russian frontiersman might shrink from the cud of a reindeer’s stomach as food,—and knew neither corn nor bread. They were cunning archers, whose arrows were headed with sharpened stones and fishbones. They were clad in skins, wearing in summer the furry side outward and in winter inward. They willingly gave sable-skins for Dutch bells.

A series of trading expeditions began, which made the Stroganovs so enormously wealthy that “the kindred of Anika knew no ends of their goods.” Indeed, they gained so much by this exploitation that they began to fear the application by the Czar’s agent of a monetary test of patriotism. So, by a stroke of finance not unknown in modern days, there was arranged the Russian equivalent for carrying five thousand shares of Metropolitan. A block of small wares for the account of the Czar’s brother-in-law, Boris, was added to the stock in an especially important expedition among the Samoieds and Ostiaks. The adventurers got far inland. They saw men riding on elks, and sledges drawn by dogs. They returned with wonderful tales of marksmanship, and, more important, brought back enough furs to give Boris a dividend, in gratitude for which he secured to the Stroganovs the grant of an enormous tract of land along the Kama River and a monopoly of the trade with the aborigines.

The Stroganovs grew and thrived. They scattered trading-posts and factories along the river-highways and sent many parties into the interior to barter. In the half-century following old Anika’s expedition, they had carried the Slavic way to the Urals.

In the summer of 1578, when Maxim Stroganov was ruling over the family estates along the Kama, one Yermak, heading a fugitive band of Cossacks, tattered and spent, with dented armor and drooping ponies, straggled into camp and offered service. With great delicacy Maxim forbore pressing too closely his inquiry into their antecedents. It might have wounded Yermak’s susceptibilities to avow that his chief lieutenant, Ivan Koltso, was under sentence of death for capturing and sacking a town of the Nogoy, and that the immediate cause of his advent was an army of Imperial Strelitz, which had driven his band from the Volga District for piracy and highway robbery.

The situation on the far side of the Urals, where the skin-hunting tribes had been conquered by a roving horde of Tatars under Kutchum Khan, was at this time interfering sadly with the Stroganovs’ fur business. Eight hundred Cossacks, furthermore, of shady character and urgent needs were undesirable neighbors. So the prudent Maxim, not particularly solicitous as to which of the two might be eliminated, offered Yermak a supply of new muskets if he would go away and fight the Tatars. They were not pleasant people for the Cossacks to meet, these former masters of Moscow. But behind were the soldiers of Ivan the Terrible. With a possible conquest before, and the Strelitz behind, Yermak gladly chose to invade the Tatar territory, which is now western Siberia.