Читать книгу Nature's Evil - Alexander Etkind - Страница 37

In the middle of the eighteenth century, fur was still the major Russian export to China, which bought every sort – even hundreds of thousands of cat pelts a year. Catherine the Great turned the state monopoly on fur into a private one, transferring the running of the fur trade from the Siberian office to her private cabinet. But the sable was almost extinct and squirrel was out of fashion. After the Seven Years’ War, Catherine sent her best sailor, the British-trained Captain Vasily Chichagov, to map the northern extremity of Siberia. He failed to find the Northern Passage to the Pacific but heard rumours about incredible animals that would make your fortune if you could catch them. In 1774 Grigory Shelikhov, a Siberian merchant, made a voyage to the North Pacific. He founded a colony on the island of Kodiak, which had abundant animals and spruce forests. The island made an excellent base for ship repairs and for mounting new expeditions to the east. The native Aleutian population were dispersed with cannon shots; hundreds were killed, but the survivors agreed to exchange pelts for beads and vodka. The Aleutians had always used their prisoners as slave labour – now the Russians put themselves at the top of this hierarchy. In 1786 Shelikhov returned with pelts of the sea otter, or sea beaver as he called it; his cargo was valued at the astronomical sum of 300,000 roubles. To develop the colony he wished to double the sum and asked for a monopoly on all Russian trade on the American coasts. Catherine refused – she had been reading Adam Smith and believed in the free market. But she dispatched four battleships to Alaska and ordered Captain Grigory Mulovsky, another British-educated seafarer, to sail them round the world. George Forster, one of Captain Cook’s companions, agreed to join the voyage as a scientist. But yet another war broke out against Sweden, and Mulovsky was killed in battle. The ambitious expedition came to naught.

English and French ships were already plying between Kamchatka and Alaska. All of Europe was reading the memoirs of the American John Ledyard, a member of Cook’s final expedition. Cook’s sailors had traded glass beads in exchange for a few sea otter pelts, which they sold in Macao for £2,000. This unusually thick fur was especially prized in China, where the pelts were used to make imperial robes. Ledyard was so enamoured of sea otters that he tried to reach Alaska overland, travelling alone from St Petersburg across Siberia. He travelled many thousand miles by sledge but was arrested in Yakutsk in 1788. The experienced Shelikhov used other tactics. The turnover of his fur business was the equivalent of a tenth of the Russian budget, and he raised more capital after registering several companies on the St Petersburg stock market. Preparing for his new voyage, he hired British sailors. He even recruited Samuel Bentham, the brother of Jeremy Bentham. Since 1783, Samuel had been in the service of the Russian government – he supervised the mines in Olonets, inspected the Ural factories of the Demidovs (see chapter 6), built ships for Prince Grigory Potemkin and even established a school in Siberia. He also had a secret plan for seizing America. In 1790, he went through Siberia with his Cossacks, intending to sail across to California and win it for his boss, Prince Potemkin. This plan was cut short by the death of the prince, and Samuel returned to Europe.²⁰ Shelikhov fared better – he reached the Pacific coast and built a frigate in Okhotsk. But English ships were already anchored in the bays of Alaska, and in 1790 they drove off the Spanish ships. That was bad news: before Shelikhov could start skinning sea otters he would have to fight the British fleet.

In 1794 a young officer from Siberia, Nikolay Rezanov, married Shelikhov’s daughter. Rezanov was one of the most remarkable people in Russian history, but his fourteen-year-old bride didn’t have any inkling of this. She died a few years after the wedding, one of the richest heiresses in the empire. Shelikhov and Rezanov now jointly controlled a great part of the Chinese-Russian trade in fur and tea.²¹ All this massive volume of trade went via Kyakhta, south of Lake Baikal. An old transit point on the Great Silk Road, this town was the only legal customs post on the Chinese-Russian border, the longest in the world. Trade was done mostly by barter; it was only in 1762 that Catherine allowed private trade in Kyakhta. More than a million chests of tea entered Siberia from China every year, as well as gunpowder, paper and silk. The Russian merchants mostly traded fur, but also hides and horses. The English were a threat to this trade: they had already taken American furs to Canton (Guangzhou).

Catherine died, and after much manoeuvring the young emperor Paul I signed a statute for the creation of the Russian-American Company. The documents were drafted by Gavriil Derzhavin, the president of the Collegium of Commerce, who is better remembered as a powerful poet. Rezanov was a student of Derzhavin’s and had served in his office. The collaboration between Derzhavin, Shelikhov and Rezanov resulted in the most ambitious global project ever known to the Russian Empire. The Russian-American Company obtained a monopoly on a huge territory to the east of Siberia and to the north of Japan, including Alaska. Rezanov’s plan encompassed the colonisation of these lands, their settlement by peasants and Cossacks, the building of ports, wharves and towns, the extraction of minerals and furs, and trade across two oceans. He intended the Russian-American Company to expand south as far as California and Sakhalin and planned a naval base at the estuary of the Amur. If his plans had been accomplished, the Pacific Ocean would have become a lake within the Russian Empire. In the meantime, Russian roads, bad as they were, ran out at Irkutsk, in the centre of Siberia. The winter route from there to the Pacific coast took seven months, and all the time in the world would not suffice to make the route possible in summer. To provision its colony in Alaska, the empire sent ships from Odessa round Africa: this journey across three oceans turned out to be quicker, cheaper and safer than the overland route through Russian territory. In 1805 a pud (16 kilograms) of flour cost 50 kopecks in Irkutsk, 10 roubles in Okhotsk, 40 roubles in Kamchatka, and even more in Alaska.

The establishment of the Russian-American Company closed a large circle in which the plans of world empires were codified according to the spirit of corporate capitalism. The Muscovy Company, which had been established by Sebastian Cabot and John Dee in 1533, was one of the first joint stock companies founded for long-distance trade (hemp and timber); then came the English East India Company (tea and opium), the Dutch East India Company (tea and spices), the Hudson Bay Company (fur), and a number of Prussian, Danish and even Latvian projects. The Russian-American Company was another institution of resource-oriented expansion based on a state–private partnership. Triangular trade in the Atlantic was bringing unheard-of wealth to the merchants and state treasuries. The Russian-American Company would create an equally massive trade in the Pacific. American-manufactured goods would be traded for Alaskan fur, fur bartered for Chinese tea, and the tea sold in the Russian Empire and the Americas.

With credit from the tsar, the Russian-American Company bought two old English frigates and hired a British crew. Rezanov was appointed the expedition’s commander and the tsar’s representative in Russian America. The captain was Ivan Krusenstern, and the rivalry between these two powerful personalities started immediately.²² When the ships reached Russian America, the expedition’s doctor, Georg Langsdorf, was horrified: ‘The Russians kill everything that moves, for the sake of an instant profit. They don’t realize that they are permanently depriving themselves of a potential source of wealth.’ Steller’s sea cow, a helpless source of meat, became extinct. Seals had no fear of people, who beat them to death with sticks. More than a million seals were killed by the company, and their rotting carcasses and skeletons littered the shoreline. The more wary, but much more valuable sea otters were killed in their thousands. In essence, this colony was a trading post which bartered fur with the Aleutians, who were able to hunt sea otters using their traditional kayaks and javelins. To motivate the Aleutians, the company banned them from their traditional fishing. They were made to buy dried fish from the company; this put them in debt, which they had to work to pay off. Russian ships very rarely took supplies on board, and only trade with American ships saved the crew from starvation. During the whole century that this Russian colony in America existed, the authorities never set up a court or built a prison. The administration used corporal punishment or exiled uncooperative natives to remote islands. Epidemics of unknown illnesses broke out among the Aleutians. Their population dwindled almost as fast as that of the sea otters: in 1805 there were ten times fewer Aleutians on Kodiak than in 1791. But monks opened a church school for the natives.

The colonists developed scurvy. The monks tried to grow watermelons and tobacco but were successful only with potatoes, radishes and barley. Living with their Aleutian wives and creole children, the colonists had no desire to return to Russia. There was no Russian currency in the colony; it was either completely banned or ersatz banknotes were printed on seal skin. There was no ownership of land; as the colony depended entirely on trading fur in exchange for provisions, land had no value. The real unit of exchange was barrels of American rum. From the naval officers to the downtrodden Aleutians, practically everyone was constantly drunk.

In 1802 skirmishes broke out between the Russian colonists and the Tlingit warrior tribe. The Tlingits traded fur with the Americans and possessed firearms: a sea otter pelt went for a musket. After two years of war the Tlingits retreated to the mountains, and the Russians captured their citadel, Sitka.²³ This now became the capital of Russian America, Novo-Arkhangelsk. The bay provided a convenient anchorage for American sailors, and they willingly exchanged provisions for fur; moreover, they could hire Aleutians and their kayaks to hunt sea otters in California. An American sea captain, John DeWolf, sold Rezanov an eight-cannon ship with a cargo of tobacco and rum; Rezanov paid with a promissory note from the Russian-American Company and 572 sea otter pelts. The bargain was kept – having sent the pelts to Canton, DeWolf crossed Siberia overland, received his money in St Petersburg, and returned to Connecticut. This Russian-speaking Yankee had an interesting nephew, the writer Herman Melville, who learnt about whales, travel and determination from him. In an official letter to the Russian-American Company, Rezanov warned that the fur trade would lead to extinction and suggested a diversification plan. From his base in Alaska, he planned to export timber, develop Sakhalin Island and oust the Spanish from California. He planned to sow wheat, which would finally solve the problem of provisioning Russian America. Following the English model, he proposed to export criminals from central Russia to Alaska and, in addition, to buy up male serfs. The women would be brought from the Aleutian population.

In 1803 President Jefferson bought Louisiana from the French at the price of 3 cents per acre; this almost doubled the territory of the United States, and Napoleon got the money for his European war. Rezanov knew that the world would be made anew, and he intended to be a part of it. In 1806 he set off for the Spanish colony of California. In San Francisco he fell in love with the daughter of the Spanish governor, and fifteen-year-old Conchita accepted his proposal. After the betrothal, his ship took on grain and the happy Rezanov started planning new projects. Russian-Spanish America would stretch from Alaska to California. Prairie farming, the timber trade and new industries would compensate for the depletion of fur. But to marry Conchita he needed to receive the blessing of the emperor and the permission of the pope.

While galloping to St Petersburg, Rezanov fell off his horse, and he died in Krasnoyarsk, in the middle of Siberia, in 1807. Conchita Argüello never married. During her long life she used to tell friends about her love for her dead Russian fiancé. The Russian-American Company paid smaller and smaller dividends. Its main investor, Alexander I of Russia, died unexpectedly in 1825. This led to the uprising of liberal-minded officers and intellectuals in St Petersburg, the so-called Decembrist Revolt. It was crushed by artillery fire, and an investigation found that officials from the Russian-American Company were implicated in the revolt. The rebels had held their meetings in the company’s mansion; they were planning to create a constitution along American lines. The new tsar withdrew his investments. Despite having killed 73,000 sea otters, about 30,000 beavers and 30,000 sables, more than a million foxes and an incalculable number of seals, the Russian-American Company was insolvent. Alaska was sold to America in 1867 at 2 cents per acre.²⁴

‘In the tender annals of political economy, the idyllic reigns from time immemorial,’ wrote Marx, explaining the primitive accumulation of European capital by the plundering of the colonies.²⁵ The sources of imperial wealth are hidden in plain view. They are the raw materials extracted by slaves or natives and sold in Europe for monopolist prices – silver and fur, sugar and opium. Empires and, later, nation-states often fail to remember these humble origins of greatness. They sing the praises of the wisdom of rulers and the labour of the people. But there were also heretics. In the mid-nineteenth century, the world learnt about the Aleutian catastrophe thanks to the testimony of the missionary Innokenty Venyaminov. The bishop of Alaska and subsequently the metropolitan of Moscow, Innokenty wrote that, in 1766, Ivan Solovyev and his crew of sailors had killed nearly 3,000 Aleutians – more than half of a tribe that had risen up in rebellion. Among Russian historians, Afanasy Shchapov described the key role of the fur trade in the development of Russia. As a Siberian, he knew all about the tragedies which occurred on the frontier of imperial expansion. Shchapov’s favourite example of ‘zoological colonisation’ was the Aleutian Islands, where the Russians had forced the local population to hunt the sea otters until all the otters and all the Aleutians had disappeared.²⁶

But, even at the end of the nineteenth century, the fur tax, collected from the Siberian peoples, made up more than 10 per cent of the revenue of the Imperial Cabinet. This money, minted from the distant lives of fur-bearing animals and northern peoples, purchased the treasures of the Hermitage and the loyalty of the court. At the beginning of the twentieth century the fur trade in Siberia was still going strong. During his Siberian exile from 1900 to 1902, the young Leon Trotsky worked for the merchant Yakov Chernykh, who traded with the Tungus people on the Upper Lena, exchanging vodka and cotton prints for fur. The illiterate Chernykh made millions of roubles and had thousands of workers. ‘He was an absolute dictator’, Trotsky wrote. These youthful impressions defined his own horizon.*

Following Voltaire’s advice, Catherine the Great justified monarchical rule in Russia by the country’s unusually large size. In fact, these lands were seized because of fur, though the empire held onto them well after the fur trade had ended. In the nineteenth century, Siberia was used as a place of exile and hard labour. In Soviet times, military-industrial sites were built there, and then enormous reserves of oil and gas were discovered. The history and geography of resource streams are full of devilish irony: the delivery routes for oil and gas, from western Siberia to the Baltic and then to Germany, follow the ancient sledge tracks along which Siberian fur travelled to European buyers.

Trade in the fur of the sea otter was banned in 1911. Their population on the Aleutian Islands did not regenerate, but these delightful animals are a common sight off the beaches of California. The beaver was considered almost extinct, but a ban on hunting in Scandinavia, Canada and Russia helped to re-establish populations. In 2020 we learnt that Denmark is farming 17 million mink – three animals for every citizen; this population was the breeding ground for a new, potentially more lethal mutation of the COVID-19 virus. Sable is also bred on farms, and auctions of sable pelts continue. The squirrel remains one of the most widely distributed mammals; but, hopefully, nobody uses squirrel pelts or cat fur any more. The price of fur has fallen on account of alternative materials made from fossil fuel and thanks to campaigns by animal rights organisations and activists. Suddenly people have started worrying about fur allergies – oddly, this was never a problem in the past. In 2018 several fashion houses – Gucci, Versace – publicly renounced the use of real fur. In England, Austria and some other European countries, fur farming has been outlawed. It is more difficult to abstain from fish and other marine products. But fish farms produce heavy pollution, and the fishing industry is one of the most corrupt sectors of global business. The number of vegetarians in the world keeps growing, and at some point we will see meat eating as an aberration on a par with wearing fur.