Interest has grown in recent years in the history of Russian Siberia. Concerning foreign historians, this may be explained by easier access to Siberia and its archives after 1991, as well as developing interests in frontier and post-colonial studies.^[1] These same interests appear to be influencing present-day Russian historians as well. Despite admirable studies by L. M. Goriushkin and his acolytes at the University of Novosibirsk that began in the 1970s,^[2] Soviet-era works tend to portray Siberia’s development alongside and in relation to that of Russia’s, rather than to stress its unique and frequently divergent path. All the same, when pinpointing Siberia (if such an enormous landmass can be said to be pinpointable), historians of the period between Ermak’s 1582 invasion and M. M. Speranskii’s 1822 Siberian Reforms face what is even by the standards of early Russia studies a dearth of sources.
Sokolovskii’s study of seventeenth-century Siberia’s foreign servitors is therefore commendable for both its discussion of this historio-methodological problem and devising means to surmount it. Other scholars such as V. I. Shunkov, Basil Dmytryshyn, George V. Lantzeff, and P. L. Kazarian have discussed Siberia’s “serving people” (sluzhilye liudi) within the context of more general studies; and N. I. Nikitin has written to my knowledge the most detailed account of this group so far.^[3] But Sokolovskii’s monograph differs from these by, on the one hand, narrowing the focus to just those foreign elements within this soslovie, and on the other, including foreign servitors assigned to eastern as well as western Siberia. These differences are significant because, as my own work demonstrates, most Siberian exiles prior to the 1649 Ulozhenie were prisoners of war enrolled in the servitor estate.^[4] Moreover, these foreigners sometimes accounted for half or more of certain groups of servitors, though on average throughout the seventeenth century made up perhaps one-quarter of them. This is a cohort that deserves specific attention because it formed part of Siberia’s unique (and distinct from European Russia’s) population.
In addition to lack of documentation, records that do exist on Siberia’s servitors are often vague or confusing. For example, in many cases it is simply impossible to tell if a particular person or group of persons were exiled prisoners of war, free mercenaries, or simply tsarist subjects with non-Russian names. Moreover, as Sokolovskii points out, names themselves are proximate at best in determining these persons’ nationality, in large part because present-day national designators are anachronistic to the period under discussion.
Sokolovskii discusses this and other problems in the first half of his book, which is an extended analysis of the historiography on Siberian servitors, with special attention given to the ways historians have either ignored or instrumentally highlighted foreign servitors. For example, beginning in 1982 R. F. Leshchanka (Leshchenko) and others advanced what might called the “Belorussian argument,”^[5] emphasizing the autocracy’s reliance upon a number of supposed Belorussians and perhaps exaggerating their significance. As with other sensitive claims, Sokolovskii treats this one judiciously, but notes that it and similar ones about Poles and Lithuanians ultimately turn on philological rather than phenomenological questions. Despite this first section being extremely erudite and historiographically informative, it is nonetheless too long and detailed for what Sokolovskii seems to intend here, which is to demonstrate his familiarity with sources and their epistemological problems. Moreover, his digressive explications of their arguments introduce much that is simply repeated in the second half of his book.
This second half is entitled “Poles and ‘Litva’ in Siberia.” Litva was a catch-all term tsarist officials used to refer to all prisoners of war (often including Poles) and, more confusingly, comprised a branch of servitors who seem for the most part to have been virtually indistinguishable from mounted cossacks. Under the Muscovite system, following deportation and (usually in the case of criminals) corporal punishment (which included knouting, slitting nostrils, branding, severing noses, ears, hands), nearly every exile save dangerous political or religious heretics was incorporated into a soslovie and thereafter enjoyed the same rights and privileges as non-exiles (though they could not return home). Despite a separate pay-scale having been designated for Litva, which we know about thanks to the salary records Nikitin and now Sokolovskii have analyzed, officials paid them roughly equally to “cossacks” (itself a category bearing no relationship to a specific ethnic group, hence my use of the lowercase) and granted them the same opportunities for promotion and other emoluments. Hence, at least some Litva were in Siberia of their own free will, and a minority similarly stayed even after receiving permission to leave. Some arrived with families; others married and raised families in Siberia. Despite what was generally a thankless existence as a “slave” (kholop) of the tsar, a reasonable number of foreign servitors decided it was better to make do with what they had than to return home.
Soklovskii’s data come from the administrations of Tomsk, Eniseisk, and Krasnoiarsk – with the exception of Tobol’sk, Siberia’s three most populous cities (goroda) during the seventeenth century. Each started out as a fort (ostrog) consisting of a wooden palisade and battlements surrounding a small suburb (posad), crude kremlin, and one or more churches. Until well into the eighteenth century their principal functions were to serve as centers of fur collection (the tribute known as iasak having been taken over from the erstwhile Sibir’ Khanate) and for the suppression of uprisings among natives, who sometimes acted in concert with disgruntled cossacks, exiles, and peasants. With the exception of the peasants, who of course lived in the countryside, servitors comprised the largest soslovie in Siberia at the time. In addition to collecting iasak and battling natives, they served as explorers, and some of those who accompanied Vladimir Atlasov, Erofei Khabarov, or other major figures would have been foreigners, though it is noteworthy that Sokolovskii finds no evidence of foreign engineers among Siberian servitors.
Although many of his sources are archival, Sokolovskii is restricted to the same types used by others. For example, the payroll records both he and Nikitin analyze say more or less the same thing about foreign servitors. However, one of Sokolovskii’s most interesting insights is that servitors originating from Poland and other points west of Moscow introduced to Siberia those more rational precepts associated with Europe. This has profound implications, since it helps explain why Muscovite Siberia’s administration, regardless of the officially-condoned system of graft known as kormlenie (“feeding”), was remarkably efficient at surveying almost the entire landmass in a little over a century, and extracting so large a number of furs that several species were practically extinct by 1700. At the very time that Tsar Alexis’ other Kremlinites’ xenophobia was peaking, Siberia appears to have been the beneficiary of those who, had they been embraced earlier by a tsar other than Peter, may have pointed Russia in a direction different from the one it eventually followed. Indeed, all historians agree that Siberia’s seventeenth-century administrations were far superior to the despotic ones characterizing the eighteenth century.
Sokolovskii’s empirically-driven account however pays little attention to this or other speculations. Had he broken away more often from his fascination with detail, this study might have introduced other related themes which would render it more accessible to non-specialists. Nonetheless, it stands alongside the best empirical scholarship on early Russian Siberia, and will prove useful to scholars in this area.