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Circumnavigation, Empire, Modernity, Race: The Impact of Round-the-World Voyages on Russia's Imperial Consciousness*
Ilya Vinkovetsky
Department of History
University of California, Berkeley
Go from your country and your kindred
and your father's house... (Genesis 12:1)
Advances in communications, connections - examples include
the introduction of the telegraph, the telephone, the airplane,
and the internet - can radically change the way bureaucracies
see and run societies. My hypothesis is that the initiation
of voyages from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean via the
Southern Hemisphere had far-reaching implications for the
mental and cultural geography of the Russian Empire as it
was seen from official St. Petersburg. Previous studies have
blurred the line between those voyagers, colonists, and observers
who came to Russian America (present-day Alaska) and the
Russian Far East via Siberia and those who got there by sailing
around the world. The present article aspires to demonstrate
the relevance of the differences between the two groups.
The implications of these differences will shed light on
broader discussions of modernization, colonialism and the
multiethnic empire.
Beginning in 1803-1806, Russians1 traveled from
St. Petersburg to the Pacific coast of the Russian Empire
by two different routes - a marine round-the-world route
around the southern tips of Africa and South America was
added to the land route across the territory of Eurasia.
With the introduction of Russia's round-the-world voyages
came a shift, largely overlooked in historical literature,
in the way that the Russians understood and operated their
Empire.2 Twenty-five such circumnavigation voyages
were initiated while Alexander I was emperor (1801-1825).3 Given
their relative regularity, these voyages became a more or
less stable feature of the Russian imperial order.4 Instantaneously,
the ports of Russian America and Eurasia's Pacific Coast,
which had been previously thought of as part of the Russian
Empire's remotest frontier, came to be re-conceptualized
in the eyes of the country's thinkers and bureaucrats as
places with better access to St. Petersburg than the continental
towns of Siberia and much of the rest of interior Russia. "In
normal everyday life it is safe to say that Sitka [Novo-Arkhangel'sk]
seems nearer to Peterburg than the great majority of our
provincial cities," wrote an observer who visited the administrative
capital of Russian America in the early 1840s.5 As
the sense of mental distance between these sites and the
Empire's capital in Europe diminished, Russia's imperial
and commercial elites began to project bolder plans for colonial
expansion around the Pacific Rim. Within a few years, the
Russians fortified their position in the Tlingit Indian territory
of southeast Alaska, established the Ross settlement as a
prelude to greater designs on Spanish California, and even
made a bungled attempt to expand to the Hawaiian Islands.6 Such
expansionary moves would have been inconceivable without
the circumnavigation voyages that preceded them. The round-the-world
voyages left an imprint on Russian imperial imagination and
consciousness that would influence future projects for decades
to come and reshape the way that the Russians perceived their
multiethnic empire and its diverse inhabitants.
Early circumnavigation voyages were explicitly meant to
expand Russia's imperial and commercial influence. Specifically,
the Russians, and especially the Russian-American Company,7 hoped
to gain direct access for Russian ships to Chinese and Japanese
ports. The Russian Empire's prestige as well as commercial
advantage was put on the line. The Russian Imperial Navy
assigned its best officers to command the ships;8 the
Imperial Academy of Sciences sent some of its brightest scholars;
the Academy of Arts assigned artists to document the ships'
passage.9 Emperor Alexander I, along with various
ministers and other notables, visited the ships as they departed
from and arrived at the port of Kronshtadt.10 It
was especially the first of the voyages that stirred the
imperial imagination of Russia's educated public of the time.11
The round-the-world voyages were by far the most extensive
voyages undertaken by the Russian navy up to that point.
Until the first round-the-world voyage (by the Neva and
the Nadezhda, 1803-1806), no Russian ship had crossed
the equator. As the participants in the round-the-world voyages
visited British, Portuguese, and Spanish colonies, and encountered
various indigenous populations around the globe, they made
extensive observations on the relationships between the colonizers
and the colonized to which they were not exposed on Russia's
own vast territory. When, in the course of their voyages
around the world, they encountered the Russian Empire's own
subject peoples on the Pacific coast, these circumnavigators
did not see them through the same eyes as did their predecessors
who had come across Siberia. The circumnavigators readily
compared the Itelmens, Yakuts, Chukchis, Tlingits, and Aleuts
to Polynesians, South American Indians, and other peoples
around the globe. The circumnavigators also aspired to apply
within the Russian Empire some of the colonialist techniques
that they saw in other European colonies. These observations
by influential people had resonance; they were published
in leading journals, reviewed by officials of different ministries,
and permeated the discourse of official St. Petersburg. In
this way, the circumnavigation voyages altered the frame
of reference of Russians in St. Petersburg for viewing the
Empire's multiethnic population. The implications of this
alteration extended far beyond the northern Pacific Rim.
Just as the round-the-world voyages created a new communications
and provisionment route between the two ends of the Empire,
one that was far more efficient than the previous continental
route across the Eurasian landmass, they also tipped the
scales toward more west European-oriented and modernized
models for Russian elites to perceive and act upon the Empire's
various peoples. It is not surprising participants in round-the-world
voyages went on to play leading roles in shaping Russia's
imperial discourse. A hint of their influence is presented
in Nathaniel Knight's 1994 dissertation, which examines the
formation of the Russian Geographical Society and its Ethnographic
Division in the 1840s12; what stands out is that
the Society's most influential founding members (Ferdinand
Petrovich Vrangel', Fedor Petrovich Litke) were important
circumnavigators. Their views on ethnography were shaped
by far-flung travels and exposure to various (non-Eurasian)
peoples that they encountered on their travels around the
globe.13 The Ethnographic Division was at the
center of the impassioned debates about the meaning of nationality
and ethnography.14 It is fair to say that these
debates impacted Russian imperial thinking far and wide for
decades to come, affecting Russian approach to places from
Siberia to the Caucasus to Central Asia to Manchuria.
Times were different before the round-the-world voyages
were introduced, when Russian colonizers came to North America
only through Asia, or, to be more precise, by way of Siberia,
Kamchatka and the long Aleutian Island chain. To get from
the Russian forests of eastern Europe to the shores of North
America, they had to cross no fewer than eleven time zones
through rivers, swamps, plains, forests, mountains, and travel
over the sea. The land crossing from metropolitan Russia
to its isolated outpost on Asia's Pacific coast, a small
port town called Okhotsk (later replaced by an almost equally
unsuitable port of Aian), required extensive river and portage
travel as well as traversing a challenging mountain overpass.
To appreciate fully the difficulty of this geographical obstacle
course, we must recall that to get to the Pacific Ocean these
Russians had to cross the steep mountains east of the Lena
River basin because the Amur River valley was closed to Russia
until the 1850s. Experienced Yakut (Native Siberian) guides
and porters assisted the Russians in crossing these mountains,
between Yakutsk and Okhotsk.
Indeed, the Russian crossings of Siberia were greatly assisted
by the indigenous Siberians who lived along the way. The
diversity among indigenous Siberian cultures is impressive,
but what is particularly salient is that some of these cultures,
particularly in eastern Siberia, bore striking similarities
to the indigenous cultures that the Russians would find on
the North American side of the Pacific. Drawing on their
Siberian frame of reference when they encountered American
Natives, Russians venturing to the Aleutian Islands and on
to the North American continent saw commonalities between
the indigenous populations of Siberia and North America.15 From
earliest contact on, these Russian observers identified the
people of the Aleutian Islands as Asians rather than Americans,
and perceived the Aleutian Islands (like the Kuriles) as
a kind of a cut-off extension of the Siberian Kamchatka peninsula.16 In
a very real sense, in the eighteenth century, for the sibiriaki (the
Russians of Siberia) the line between the so-called Old World
and New World remained blurred and fuzzy.
Depending on the region and the circumstances, the Russians
who settled in Siberia lived side by side with many of the
Siberian Natives, and Russian men routinely cohabited with
and sometimes married indigenous Siberian women. Thus, many
Siberian Russians had close relatives in the Siberian Native
population. The point to be made here is that, unlike, say,
the British in India, the Russians in Siberia, known as sibiriaki,
and especially those of peasant, common tradesman and cossack
background who lived in frontier settings, readily adopted
indigenous ways. In some cases, entire settlements of Russians
in Siberia became "nativized," adopting indigenous languages
and forgetting their own native tongue.17 The
bulk of the Russians who ended up on the Northern Pacific
Rim and in Alaska in the eighteenth century, although they
continued to speak the Russian language and practice Orthodox
(sometimes Old Believer) Christianity, resembled the Siberian
Natives in their manners and dress to the point that outsiders
sometimes had trouble distinguishing the Russians from the
Natives. These sibiriaki were probably the group of
Russians who were most isolated from West European influence.
Their cultural background and frame of reference - incorporating
contemporary Native Siberian influence and vestiges of Mongol
and Tatar order - can be described as primarily Eurasian
rather than European.
In contrast to the travelers who came overland, the voyagers
who came to the Russian Pacific Rim by the high seas from
the Russian Empire's "window to Europe" (St. Petersburg)
bypassed the legacy of the centuries of Siberian experience.
Instead, they traveled from European Russia by way of various
European ports, and then invariably made stops in European-run
colonies around the world. Space on the circumnavigating
ships was limited, and the ambitions of the voyages were
lofty. Russia's most able and best connected officers and
scientists competed to be selected for these prestigious
assignments. Consequently, a good number of the people aboard
were highly trained and educated in the most advanced European
traditions of the day.
These were people who considered themselves to be engaged
in active dialogue with general European culture.18 The
very training of Russia's naval profession, which the future
naval officers received as cadets in Kronshtadt, was borrowed
wholesale from established European models. In the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries, the most promising naval
students from Russia were sent at state expense to train
in the British navy. The Russian navy actively recruited
European specialists, especially the British, to serve on
its ships and as teachers in Kronshtadt.19 The
naval officers sailing on the circumnavigation voyages, selected
from among the best the Empire had to offer, were joined
aboard their ships by some of Russia's most promising scientists.
Both the scientists and the officers (and the line between
them was often blurred) were well-versed in the sizable European
- and particularly French, English, and German - travel literature
of the day, and aspired to contribute to it.20 They
read avidly the accounts of the most famous discoverers,
available to them in original languages or in popular Russian
translations.21 We can also surmise that, as children,
they often read the stories of adventure and discovery of
popular German writer Joachim Heinrich Campe (1746-1818),
available in Russian versions since the 1780s. The scientists
who traveled aboard circumnavigating ships on various assignments
from St. Petersburg's Imperial Academy of Sciences sought
to build on the achievements of their fellow European colleagues.
Aspiring to fame and professing devotion to the advancement
of universal science and culture, the participants of the
Russian round-the-world voyages modeled their travel journals
on the journals of previous European voyagers.22 This
was the pattern from the beginning; Ivan Kruzenshtern (1770-1846),
the commander of the first Russian circumnavigation, modeled
his journal on James Cook's, and looked on the famous Englishman
as a role model to follow in dealing with South Pacific islanders.23
As they read the accounts of past voyages and encounters
with indigenous peoples throughout the globe, Russian circumnavigators
inevitably absorbed the images embodied in that literature.
Setting the pattern for future Russian voyages, Kruzenshtern's
ship Nadezhda had "a selective but large library" of
travel accounts. The scientists and the officers aboard spent
many hours debating and verifying ethnographic observations
of previous (non-Russian) voyagers.24 Along with
their superiors in St. Petersburg, these circumnavigators
were gripped by the images presented in the works of Rousseau,
Voltaire, and other eminent European writers.25 During
their years of apprenticeship abroad, the Russian sailors
who had served in the British navy sailed on lengthy voyages
on British ships and absorbed some of the attitudes that
the British held toward their subject peoples. As they sailed
the world's oceans to and from the Russian Far East and Russian
America, the Russian circumnavigators often encountered peoples
whom they considered "exotic" and whose cultures differed
greatly from those found either in northern North America
or Eurasia.26 (That is, those cultures that were
encountered by the Russians who traveled to Alaska and the
Russian Far East via Siberia.) Their encounters with "exotic" far-away
peoples, in the course of which Russia's circumnavigators
were able to compare the published accounts of previous travelers
of various European ethnicities and allegiances to their
own observations, gave them a frame of reference that the
Siberian Russians of the Far East and Russian America - in
their majority semi-literate and illiterate fur hunters -
could not and did not have.
Given their background, it is hardly surprising that the
Russians who came to the Pacific Rim from Europe via the
south seas were far more conscious than the sibiriaki of
social and ethnic identities and distinctions. The circumnavigators
perceived a wide cultural chasm between them selves and both
the sibiriaki, about whom they had mostly negative
things to say, and the Natives, whom they saw as children
in need of guidance. The image of the Natives that these
circumnavigators presented in their writings could have different
sides - but it invariably bore the mark of condescending
paternalism. The Native could be a Noble Savage (emphasis
on Noble), an underdeveloped human being, or both. Either
way, the Native required being taken care of in a modern
society. Given this outlook, the gruff Russian sibiriak commoner
had to be watched carefully lest he abuse the simple Native;
the merchant could not be entrusted with such oversight because
he is prone to value profit over honor.27 Only
an enlightened naval officer - a member of the nobility social
estate (soslovie) - could be entrusted by the enlightened
Russian Crown to make responsible decisions on its behalf.
Such was the rationale behind the push of the navy for influence
in Russia's overseas colony (Russian America); the modernized
nobleman had a duty to look after the naïve Noble Savage
and to temper the impulses of the sibiriak.
All in all, the Russian naval officers who arrived on the
round-the-world voyages expressed benevolent intentions toward
the indigenous peoples of Kamchatka and Russian America.
They voiced sympathy for the Natives, provided that the Natives
knew and kept their place. They expressed respect for the
various so-called "natural" adaptations and skills of the
indigenous population - such as Aleut expertise in sea otter
hunting and Tlingit skill and bravery in warfare. But the
point is that they also saw the Natives as a special, distinct "exotic" category
of people to be carefully and responsibly integrated into
the Russian sphere of influence - and in the process to be
studied, pacified, Christianized and, to the extent possible,
civilized.28 To be sure, these Russian naval officers
did not create an elaborate racialist ideology of the likes
of some other European colonizers.29 Yet these
naval officers from European Russia were sensitive to racial
distinctions in ways that the sibiriaki were not.
Consider the attitudes of the two groups to miscegenation.
The sibiriaki of both the eighteenth and the nineteenth
centuries readily co-habited with Native women, married them
and had children with them. These unions suited the Russian-American
Company, which encouraged them, because they improved its
chances of retaining the Russian workforce in America; after
living with Native women for a period of years, Russian men
working in Alaska often did not want to leave their wives
and children to go back to Eurasia.30 There is
no evidence that the older Siberian fur hunters thought in
racial terms at all.31 Their relationships with
the Native women of North America continued a centuries-old
pattern of ethnic intermixing throughout Eurasia. Often themselves
children of liasons between Siberian Native mothers and Russian
fathers, they saw nothing out of the ordinary in taking American
Native women as concubines and wives. Adapting to local conditions
and freely borrowing from the Native way of life, these men
were not particularly concerned with the mission to civilize
the Natives. While the sibiriaki had their half-Native
children baptized as Orthodox Christians, they just as often
consulted Siberian and North American shamans about their
health. Unselfconscious cultural syncretism characterized
their way of life and attitude to the Other.
It was only after the initiation of the circumnavigation
voyages that the children produced by the unions between
Russians and North American Natives came to be labeled as
a separate group; this new social category came to be known
as kreoly (Creoles). A leading participant of the
first round-the-world voyage, Nikolai Rezanov (1764-1807),
Emperor Alexander I's emissary to Japan and the highest ranking
official ever to visit Russian America, is the first on record
(in 1805) to use the term kreol, albeit informally.32 The
second charter of the Russian-American Company, enacted in
1821 but negotiated throughout the second half of the 1810s,
made the Creoles into a de facto separate social estate and
formalized their status as members of a distinct group of
people who were neither fully Russian nor fully Native.33 The
creation of the Creole category was a local colonial adaptation;
it had no precedent elsewhere in the Russian Empire. In Siberia
legitimate children of mixed Russian and indigenous parentage
were classified as Russians, provided their mothers (the
Siberian indigenous population in these marital unions was
almost invariably represented by the female) converted to
Orthodoxy and the children were baptized.34 The
exact rationale behind the formal introduction of the Creole
category in Russian America (and there only) remains a mystery,
but it is easy to see that it served a myriad of colonial
interests: among them was keeping Russian workers from leaving
the colony and producing a naturally growing colonial population
with loyalties to the Russian colonizers and kin connections
to the indigenous people.35
Why was the word kreol, a fresh introduction into
the Russian language, chosen to describe and label this group?
The origin of this choice is not documented, although the
word itself almost certainly entered the colonial Russian
vocabulary from the Spanish [criollo] or, less plausibly,
the Portuguese. Prior to 1805, Russian ships did not travel
from Alaska to Spanish or Portuguese colonies. The two ships
of the first circumnavigation voyage stopped in the Canary
Islands and Brazil en route to the Pacific; Rezanov also
made an eventful side trip to California. Contacts between
California and Russian America began in 1805 - after the
first round-the-world voyage reached America - and increased
after 1812, when the Russians established Fort Ross in northern
California. The ships involved in later circumnavigation
voyages also made frequent stops in various ports of Portuguese
and Spanish America (as well as the Philippines, Africa,
Australia and elsewhere). Russian scholars and naval officers
who went ashore routinely engaged in all kinds of observations
and ethnographic descriptions. They sought out the company
and writings of other Europeans to compare notes with them.36 They
encountered the term "Creole" over and over. The term had
different meanings in different settings; in the Russian
American context it acquired a meaning that was close but
not identical to the meaning it had in the practice of Spanish
California. What is salient is that the adoption of the term kreol in
nineteenth-century Russian America, and the invention of
the social category for which it stood, signaled a more self-conscious
awareness on the part of the Russians of the difference between
themselves and the Natives.
Once the category was defined, it was commented upon. Russian
elites passed various judgments on the Creoles as a group,
both in a social and a racial sense. Although there were
some exceptions,37 on the whole, predictably from
the point of view of the discourse on the mixing of the races
then prevalent in European thought, the Russian circumnavigators
saw the emergence of this group as regrettable, if perhaps
unavoidable.38 These Russians roundly lamented
the decline of the "pure" Native population. They saw the
Natives as better hunters and in general as more suitable
inhabitants of Russian America than the Creoles. These attitudes
toward the Creoles persisted and even increased despite the
fact that some of them achieved relatively high social status
within Russian America and beyond. A few Creoles even became
naval cadets, went to train in Kronshtadt, and came back
to Russian America to serve on Russian-American Company ships.
Be that as it may, as a group the Creoles, along with the
Natives, were perceived by Europeanized Russians through
a racialized prism. More and more stereotypes were attached
to the Creoles as the century went on. In their urge to define
and organize, the circumnavigators created the Creole group,
only to lament its existence later.39
It is of course true that European models of viewing the
indigenous population had been important from before the
time before the Russian incursion into Kamchatka, the Aleutian
Islands, and Alaska. Throughout the eighteenth century, a
number of scientists and naval officers sent across Siberia
from St. Petersburg took part in several expeditions, government-sponsored
and private, to Alaska from the Siberian coast.40 Their
voices were recorded and heard. But they were far outnumbered
by the sibiriaki. For well over half a century, between
the Bering-Chirikov voyages and the first round-the-world
voyages, the few Europe-oriented Russians who made it to
the Northern Pacific Rim were primarily observers; it was
the Siberian merchants and fur hunters who were the actors.
The tide turned in the nineteenth century.
In Russia's overseas North American "laboratory," the sibiriaki declined
in real numbers as well as influence. The opening of the
trans-oceanic maritime route between St. Petersburg and the
Russian Pacific Rim marked a shift in how Russia's colony
in North America was populated. Their service with the Russian-American
Company limited by imperial policy to a fixed number of years,
a sizable proportion of Russian men - and there were virtually
no Russian women - who were hired by the Russian-American
Company to work in America circulated back to Eurasia within
a period of several years. Because of this policy, the general
inaccessibility of the region, and other factors, the Russian
population of Alaska remained small; at no time prior to
the sale of Alaska to the United States did it exceed seven
hundred people. The opening of the circumnavigation route,
coupled with reforms in the Russian-American Company's pay
structure that prompted the sibiriaki to seek their
fortunes in other areas, meant that more and more of the
workforce from Eurasia would come to Alaska directly from
European Russia. It should be added that the term "Russian
population" in the records of the Russian-American Company
was never limited to ethnic Russians; rossiiane (inhabitants
of Russia) rather than russkie (ethnic Russians) was the
more accurate term used to apply to these people.41 The
Russian Empire was multiethnic, and that diversity was reflected
in the ethnic composition of the workforce recruited by the
Russian-American Company. By the 1830s, the Finns, along
with a lesser, but no less influential, number of Baltic
Germans, would form a substantial minority in Russian America
- up to a third of the "Russian" population according to
one estimate - prompting the Russian-American Company to
invest in the building of a Lutheran Church in Novo-Arkhangel'sk.
These Finns, Baltic Germans and European ethnic Russians
recruited on the shores of the Baltic were in effect gradually
replacing thesibiriaki, many of whom were leaving
Alaska to return to Siberia, and indigenous Siberian Natives,
who had been involved particularly in the earlier voyages
to the Aleutian Islands.42
Just as the sibiriaki were being replaced on the
ground in Alaska, merchants were losing influence in the
headquarters of the Russian-American Company.43 The
moving of the Company's headquarters from Irkutsk to St.
Petersburg in 1800 had more than symbolic significance. In
1802, prominent St. Petersburg nobles, including Emperor
Alexander I and his immediate family, began to buy shares
in the Russian-American Company, eroding merchant influence
within it, and enhancing that of the nobility.44 This
was the climate in which the Russian navy could stake its
claim for increased influence in America. The status-conscious
officers of the navy, who belonged to the nobility social
estate, felt resentful that members of a less prestigious
merchant estate were permitted to run Russia's sole overseas
colony. As an overseas colony, and especially one that was
initially "discovered" and claimed for Russia by officers
of the navy, mainly by Vitus Bering and Aleksei Il'ich Chirikov
in 1741, Alaska appeared to these men to be within the natural
domain of their institution. The fact that the British (Cook,
Vancouver) and the French (La Perouse) succeeded in sailing
to the North Pacific from Europe long before the Russians
could not but wound the Russian naval officers' institutional
pride. Appealing to the need to uphold Russia's prestige,
they were determined to make their mark in the Pacific. Their
vigorous behind-the-scenes campaign in St. Petersburg produced
results in the late 1810s, as they won a major concession
that became part of the second charter granted to the Russian-American
Company by the emperor.45 From 1818 on, after
the forced retirement of merchant-estate member Aleksandr
Andreevich Baranov,46 every single "chief manager" (glavnyi
pravitel', in effect governor)47 of Russian America
was to be an officer of Russia's Imperial Navy appointed
directly from St. Petersburg. This meant that from that time
until the sale of Alaska to the United States in 1867, the
highest-ranking official in Alaska would always be a nobleman
with Europeanized education and naval training.
However, Russian America did not prove to be the coveted
prize that the Russian navy imagined it would be. Only a
small share for the dashed hopes can be ascribed to the general
conservatism of Nicholas I's government and its marked lack
of enthusiasm for expensive and potentially daring naval
initiatives in the Pacific, and that only after 1825. The
pressures from the United States, fortified by the adoption
of the Monroe Doctrine, and the formidable and seemingly
omnipresent British Empire formed a more important factor
in the disappointment. But some of the responsibility rests
squarely with the Russian navy itself. The St. Petersburg
Admiralty had overreached and miscalculated. It would have
had difficulties with fulfilling a mission that its more
ambitious boosters had in mind for it on the Pacific even
under the best circumstances - and circumstances were nowhere
near optimal. The lengthy trans-oceanic voyages from St.
Petersburg to Novo-Arkhangel'sk were risky and expensive;
economically, it made more sense for the Russians in Alaska
to buy provisions and supplies from British and American
traders.48 Episodes of political instability in
Europe and beyond exposed Russian ships to potential detention
and confiscation. The prohibition on trading with foreigners,
advocated by naval interests and enforced in Russian American
waters in the early 1820s, proved an unmitigated disaster
for the colony, which was exposed to hunger, privation, and
a growing threat from local Indians, who were incensed at
the Russians for taking away their opportunity to trade with
British and the American ships.49 To make matters
worse for the navy, the fur trade of Alaska was in general
decline.
Even more to the point, for the navy, and for official
St. Petersburg in general, the lure of Alaska in the first
place was as a base for trading with other countries, especially
China and Japan. The desire to increase and augment Russian
trade with the Far East, and to take it out of the hands
of foreign traders, motivated the vision of Captain Kruzenshtern
when he drew up the project for Russia's first circumnavigation.50 But
the Chinese and the Japanese remained firmly opposed to opening
up their ports to Russian ships.51 The Russian
navy was hardly a match for the British navy with which the
Admiralty's boosters were setting it up to compete. Geographically,
Russia simply lacked the access to the open sea that a strong
navy required. Kruzenshtern, for one, realized the Russian
navy's shortcomings and proposed the creation of an ambitious
merchant marine, but his project was not adopted.52 With
feeble and isolated presence on the Pacific coast of Eurasia
- the woefully inadequate ports of Okhotsk and Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskii,
closed for much of the year by ice floes - the Russian navy
did not have the resources to enforce Russia's imperial will.
All in all, the navy found its victory for control of Russian
America a mixed blessing at best. The exaggerated early nineteenth-century
visions of turning the Pacific Ocean into a Russian "lake" administered
by Russia's navy proved a mirage.
Nevertheless, Russian America under naval rule represents
an important conceptual step for Russian imperialism and
colonialism. Russia's naval officers began to reshape Alaska
in the image of a colony on the Western model (as opposed
to viewing and treating it as just an extension of the Siberian
frontier). This reshaping - or re-conceptualization of the
image of Russian America - was initiated shortly before the
first circumnavigation voyage left St. Petersburg (and in
anticipation of that voyage and later ones to come), when
in 1799 the Russian-American Company was formed to run the
fur trade of Russian America and, it was hoped by Russian
officials, conduct widespread maritime trade with China and
Japan for the benefit of Russia. Tellingly, the charter of
the Russian-American Company was modeled on the charters
of Britain's East India Company and Hudson's Bay Company.53 Even
the name "Russian-American Company" (Rossiisko-Amerikanskaia
kompaniia) betrayed the intent of the founders to emulate
a British example. Like Britain's far larger East India Company,
the Russian-American Company was designed to play a "double
role" as business enterprise and state organization.54 Organized
with economic efficiency in mind to exploit the resources
and the population of an overseas colony, it was one of the
most modern apparatuses in the Russian Empire.
In contrast to frontier Siberia, Russian state presence
on the shores of North America after 1818 was not represented
by the voevody and the cossacks, but by naval officers and
professional sailors. It is undeniable that conducting round-the-world
voyages required an impressive degree of scientific and organizational
expertise. Consequently, in contrast to the Siberian voevody
of earlier centuries, the naval officers, who were to preside
over Russian affairs in Alaska from 1818, represented elements
of the most modernized (and modernizing) elite of the Russian
Empire. In further contrast, all indications are that the
naval officers who served as governors of Russian America
could not be faulted for the kind of corruption that made
the voevody infamous. Naval officers ardently sought to make
life in the colony more orderly. (One of them even wanted
to require all the residents of Novo-Arkhangel'sk to wear
military uniforms.)55 Their quest for order and
precision led them to study the Natives in detail. They sought
to treat the Natives - and the newly-defined Creoles - more
carefully, humanely, and efficiently than did their merchant
and fur trader predecessors, and in the process developed
a more humanitarian - and a more paternalistic - regime.
The initiation of round-the-world voyages sped up the modernization
of Russian American administration, and brought a more differentiated
structure to the social relations to the colony. It was only
after the round-the-world voyages that Alaska became a true "laboratory" where
Russian imperial planners could experiment with Western-style
colonial approaches.56 Russian America of the
early nineteenth century stands as the one part of the Russian
Empire where, because of the Russian-American Company's active
imitation of colonial techniques employed in other European
colonies, theoretical models based on common European colonial
experience can yield unexpectedly insightful comparative
results.57 But the impact of Russia's round-the-world
voyages was far broader. Wide exposure to European ideas
about the Other and visits to European-run colonies in South
America, Africa, Australia and elsewhere around the globe
made a pronounced impression on Russian circumnavigators.
As the Russian viewers of the Natives changed, so did the
views. The implications of these changes for the evolution
of the imperial consciousness of Russian elites give scholars
many avenues for future exploration.
* I am indebted to Diane Clemens, Sergei Kan, Kerwin Klein,
Michael Khodarkovsky, Arthur Mason, Sonja Lührmann,
Jan Plamper, Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, Yuri Slezkine, Dov
Yaroshevski, Reggie Zelnik, and Andrei Znamenski for constructive
criticism and suggestions.
1 "Russians" as used here refers to all subjects
of the multiethnic Russian Empire (rossiiane rather than
russkie); as will be elaborated further down in this article,
many of the people participating in the round-the-world voyages
did not identify themselves as ethnic Russians.
2 Some of the reasons for this oversight are
examined in my dissertation: Ilya Vinkovetsky, Native
Americans and the Russian Empire, PhD dissertation, UC
Berkeley, 2001. Soviet scholars emphasized almost exclusively
the strictly scientific contributions of the voyages. Western
scholarship either followed suit or neglected Russia's round-the-world
voyages altogether.
3 About sixty-five Russian voyages took place
between the Baltic and the Northern Pacific Rim up to 1867:
James R. Gibson, Imperial Russia in Frontier America:
The Changing Geography of Supply of Russian America (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1976), pp. 78-81.
4 The vistas opened up for Russian imperialism
by the opening of a trans-oceanic route between the two ends
of the Russian Empire have remained largely unexamined in
scholarship. In contrast, much has been written on the practical
impact of changing sea routes on the operation of the British
Empire. See: Daniel R. Headrick, The Tools of Empire:
Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1981), especially pp. 129-213
(Part Three: "The Communications Revolution"). It should
also be said that the network of contacts that the Russian
navy established in various ports as its ships sailed around
the world added up to a kind of marine "road of empire," analogous
to the more extensive "roads of empire" that served the British
navy. I am grateful to Dov Yaroshevski for leading me toward
this insight. Osterhammel refers to a similar phenomenon
when he speaks about the construction of "naval networks" (Juergen
Osterhammel, Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview,
trans. by Shelley L. Frisch [Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers,
1997], pp. 9-10).
5Lieutenant Zagoskin's Travels in Russian
America, 1842-1844: The First Ethnographic and Geographic
Investigations in the Yukon and Kuskokwim Valleys of Alaska,
ed. by Henry N. Michael; trans. by Penelope Rainey (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1967), p. 71.
6 For recent treatments of the Russian penetration
of Tlingit territory, see: Sergei Kan, Memory Eternal
and Russian Orthodox Christianity through Two Centuries (Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 1999) and Andrei Grinev, "Bitvy
za Sitkhu i padenie Iakutata," in Istoriia Russkoi Ameriki,
ed. by N. N. Bolkhovitinov (Moscow: "Mezhdunarozhnye otnosheniia," 1999),
vol. 2, pp. 53-83. On Russians in California, see: A. A.
Istomin, "Osnovanie kreposti Ross v Kalifornii v 1812 g.
i otnosheniia s Ispaniei," in Istoriia Russkoi Ameriki,
vol. 2, pp. 190-274. On the Hawaiian Islands see: N. N. Bolkhovitinov, "Russkie
na Gavaiakh (1804-1825)," in Istoriia Russkoi Ameriki,
vol. 2, pp. 275-302, and Richard A. Pierce, Russia's Hawaiian
Adventure, 1815-1817 (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1965).
7 A joint-stock company founded in 1799, the
Russian-American Company went on to run Russian America (and
its fur trade) until the sale of Alaska to the United States
in 1867.
8 The list of names of junior and senior naval
officers who participated in the early circumnavigation voyages
includes many men who went on to hold leading positions in
the coming decades.
9 The remarkable artists enlisted for the round-the-world
voyages included Louis Choris and Mikhail Thikhanov, among
others. See: Louis Choris, Voyage pittoresque autour du
monde, avec des portraits de sauvages d'Amerique, d'Asie,
d'Afrique, et des iles du Grand ocean; des paysages, des
vues maritimes, et plusieurs objets d'histoire naturelle;
accompagne de descriptions par m. le baron Cuvier, et m.
A. de Chamisso, et d'observations sur les cranes humains,
par m. le docteur Gall (Paris: Impr. de Firmin Didot,
1822); Diliara Safaralieva, "M. T. Tikhanov (1789-1862),
Artist-Traveler," in Barbara Sweetland Smith and Redmond
J. Barnett, eds., Russian America: The Forgotten Frontier (Tacoma,
Wash.: Washington State Historical Society, 1990), pp. 33-39.
10 The pageantry surrounding these voyages is
a subject unto itself. It is a pity that Richard Wortman
does not discuss Emperor Alexander I's visits aboard the
vessels in his Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in
Russian Monarchy, vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1995).
11 On imperial imagination, see: Mark Bassin, Imperial
Visions: Nationalist Imagination and Geographical Expansion
in the Russian Far East, 1840-1865 (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1999).
12 Nathaniel Knight, Constructing the Science
of Nationality: Ethnography in Mid-Nineteenth Century Russia. PhD
dissertation, Columbia University, 1994; incidentally,
Knight reports that the charter of the Royal Geographical
Society in London was used by Litke as a model for the
charter of the Russian Geographical Society.
13 See also Nathaniel Knight, "Science, Empire,
and Nationality: Ethnography in the Russian Geographical
Society, 1845-1855," in Imperial Russia: New Histories
for the Empire, ed. by Jane Burbank and David L. Ransel
(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press,
1998), pp. 108-41.
14 Yuri Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors: Russia
and the Small Peoples of the North (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1994), p. 75.
15 It should be noted that the one thing that
Siberian background did not prepare them well for was open-ocean
travel. Nonetheless, the Russians who ventured to the Aleutian
Islands and Alaska from the Siberian coast had to build vessels
right on the coast; the iron nails were carried from as far
away as Irkutsk. There was a maverick quality to their island-hoping
mode of ocean travel; in that regard, at least, Russian penetration
of the Aleutian Islands and North America was anything but
a mere extension of the old Siberian frontier.
16 I. Veniaminov, Zapiski ob ostrovakh Unalashkinskago
otdela. 3 vols. (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Imperatorskoi
Rossiiskoi Akademii, 1840), vol. 1, pp. 109-13.
17 Willard Sunderland, "Russians into Iakuts?
'Going Native' and Problems of Russian National Identity
in the Siberian North, 1870s -1914," in Slavic Review,
55, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 806-25.
18 See F. P. Litke, "Dnevnik, vedennyi vo vremia
krugosvetnogo plavaniia na shliiupe 'Kamchatka'," in L. A.
Shur, ed., K beregam Novogo Sveta: Iz neopublikovannykh
zapisok russkikh puteshestvennikov nachala XIX veka (Moscow: "Nauka," 1989),
p. 89.
19 For a contemporary British perspective on
Russian naval service see A Voyage to St. Petersburg in
1814, with remarks on the Imperial Russian Navy, by a
surgeon in the British Navy (London: Sir Richard Phillips
and Co., 1822).
20For a discussion of the importance of the
travel book as a genre in early nineteenth-century Europe,
see Victoria Joan Moessner, "Translator's Introduction," in
Georg Heinrich von Langsdorff, Remarks and Observations
on a Voyage around the World from 1803 to 1807, ed. by
Richard A. Pierce. 2 vols. (Kingston, Ontario: Limestone
Press, 1993), vol. 1, pp. xi-xxx.
21 Glynn Barratt, Russia and the South Pacific,
3 vols. (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press,
1988), vol. 1, pp. 20-24.
22Their desire for fame and glory is beyond
dispute; for example, see F. P. Litke, "Dnevnik, vedennyi
vo vremia krugosvetnogo plavaniia na shliiupe 'Kamchatka'," p.
89; see also G. I. Davydov, Two Voyages to Russian America,
ed. by Richard A. Pierce, trans. by Colin Bearne (Kingston
Ontario: The Limestone Press, 1977), pp. 22-23.
23 Glynn Barratt, Russia in Pacific Waters,
1715-1825: A Survey of the Origins of Russia's Naval Presence
in the North and South Pacific (Vancouver: University
of British Columbia Press, 1981), p. 119.
24 Langsdorff, Remarks and Observations on
a Voyage around the World, vol. 1, pp. 4, 17.
25See Iu. M. Lotman, "Russo i russkaia kul'tura
XVIII veka," in Epokha Prosveshcheniia: Iz istorii mezhdunarodnykh
sviazei russkoi literatury, ed. by M. P. Alekseev (Leningrad: "Nauka," 1967),
pp. 208-81.
26 A particularly illustrative example of an "exotic" Native
who fascinated the circumnavigators is provided by the Pacific
Islander named Kadu, who befriended the captain of a Russian
ship and spent some time sailing on his ship around the Pacific:
Otto von Kotzebue, A Voyage of Discovery into the South
Sea and Beering's Straits, for the Purpose of Exploring a
North-East Passage, Undertaken in the Years 1815-1818, at
the Expense of His Highness the Chancellor of the Empire,
Count Romanzoff, in the Ship Rurick, Under the Command of
the Lieutenant in the Russian Imperial Navy, Otto von Kotzebue.
3 vols. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1821),
vol. 2, pp. 121-31, 142, 143, 151-55, 161-63, 166, 173, 176,
211, 213. See also Adelbert von Chamisso, A Voyage Around
the World with the Romanzov Expedition in the Years 1815-1818
in the Brig Rurik, Captain Otto von Kotzebue, trans.
and ed. by Henry Kratz (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press,
1986).
27On the naval officers' views of the Siberian
promyshlenniki (fur hunters), see Iu. Davydov, Golovnin (Moscow:
Molodaia Gvardiia, 1968), p. 89, and G. I. Davydov, Two
Voyages, pp. 88-91.
28 On the naval officers' sense of duty to civilize,
see V. A. Bil'basov's introduction to Arkhiv grafov Mordvinovykh (St.
Petersburg: Tipografiia I. N. Skorokhodova, 1902), vol. 5,
p. ix.
39Bassin, Imperial Visions, p. 53.
30 Richard A. Pierce, "Russian and Soviet Eskimo
and Indian Policies," in Handbook of North American Indians (Washington:
Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988), vol. 4, p. 122.
31On the attitude of Russians in Siberia to
race, see John J. Stephan, The Russian Far East: A History (Stanford,
California: Stanford University Press, 1994), p. 25.
32 AVPRI, fond 341, opis' 888, delo 277, ll.
1-3.
33 In terms of social standing, rights and obligations,
the estate (soslovie) in the Russian Empire that most closely
resembled the Creole estate in Russian America was the meshchanstvo.
Broadly defined, the meshchanstvo estate consisted of relatively
poor town dwellers who did not qualify for membership in
other estates.
34 Sergei A. Kostlivtsov, Otchet po obozreniiu
Rossiisko-Amerikanskikh kolonii, proizvedennomu po rasporiazheniiu
Gospodina Ministra Finansov (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia
departamenta vneshnei torgovli, 1861), pp. 22-23.
35 Russian-American Company rules prohibited
the removal of Creole children from Russian America to Eurasia
by the fathers.
36The German-born naturalist Georg Heinrich
von Langsdorff (Grigorii Ivanovich Langsdorf), a participant
in the first voyage who became Russia's consul in Brazil,
routinely welcomed the Russian circumnavigators at his Brazilian
estate, where they socialized with European scientists, local
notables, and foreign dignitaries. When Ferdinand Petrovich
Vrangel' (an officer in the Russian navy and former governor
of Russian America who was also known by his Baltic German
title and name Baron Ferdinand von Wrangell) went on an official
negotiating mission to Mexico, he consulted German and English
literary sources, and drew especially on the advice of German
diplomats and other members of the "German colony" in Mexico
(L. A. Shur, ed., K beregam Novogo Sveta, p. 183).
37 Fedor P. Litke, A Voyage around the World
1826-1829, trans. by Renee Marshall (Kingston, Ontario:
Limestone Press, 1987), pp. 74-75.
38The Canadian ethnohistorian Jennifer S. H.
Brown notes a similar pattern of differentiation and stereotyping
by the officials of Hudson's Bay Company of its metis (half-white/half-Native
American) workforce: Jennifer S. H. Brown, Strangers in
Blood: Fur Trade Company Families in Indian Country (Vancouver:
University of British Columbia Press, 1980), 206-07.
39 See Pavel N. Golovin, Civil and Savage
Encounters: The Worldly Travel Letters of an Imperial Russian
Navy Officer, 1860-1861, trans. by Basil Dmytryshyn
and E. A. P. Crownhart-Vaughan (Portland: Oregon Historical
Society, 1983), pp. 115-17.
40Aside from Bering and Chirikov's expeditions
(1725-1730; 1733-1741), the government sponsored two other
large-scale voyages to the region: the first (1764-1769)
was led by Petr Krenitsyn and Mikhail Levashev; the second
(1785-1792) by Joseph Billings and Gavriil Sarychev.
41 Veniaminov, Zapiski ob ostrovakh Unalashkinskago
otdela, vol. 1. p. vii.
42 Svetlana Grigor'evna Fedorova's Russkoe
naselenie Aliaski i Kalifornii (Moscow: "Nauka," 1971)
is the most comprehensive study of the Russian population
of Alaska. See also Svetlana G. Fedorova, Ethnic Processes
in Russian America (Anchorage: Anchorage Historical
and Fine Arts Museum, 1975).
43 On the inability of the merchant estate of
the Russian Empire to defend its interests, see Alfred J.
Rieber, Merchants and Entrepreneurs in Imperial Russia (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), pp. xxii,
23-24.
44 Among those purchasing shares in the spring
of 1802 were Emperor Alexander I, Dowager Empress Mariia
Fedorovna, and statesmen N. P. Rumiantsev, N. S. Mordvinov,
and I. A. Vedemeier (Nikolai N. Bolkhovitinov, The Beginnings
of Russian-American Relations, 1775-1815, trans. Elena
Levin [Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1975],
p.169).
45 On the ambitions of the navy to gain influence
in running Russia's American colony, see Vasilii M. Golovnin, Materialy
dlia istorii russkikh zaselenii po beregam Vostochnago okeana,
Prilozhenie k Morskomu Sborniku, No. 1 (St. Petersburg:
Tipografiia Morskogo ministerstva, 1861); M. S. Al'perovich, Rossiia
i Novyi Svet (posledniaia chast' XVIII veka) (Moscow: "Nauka," 1993),
and Glynn Barratt, Russia in Pacific Waters, 1715-1825,
p. 186.
46 Aleksandr Andreevich Baranov (1746-1819)
was the first and longest-serving glavnyi pravitel' of
the Russian-American Company (1799-1818). He was born in
the town of Kargopol' in north European Russia, but had extensive
experience in Siberia from 1780 on, prior to setting off
for America from the Siberian port of Okhotsk in 1790. Between
1790 and 1799, he served as the chief manager of the Shelikhov-Golikov
Company, which had been the main commercial predecessor of
the Russian-American Company.
47 The chief manager of the Russian-American
Company was the highest-ranking official and de facto governor
of Russian America. He was subservient to the Company's headquarters
located in St. Petersburg. From its founding, the Russian-American
Company was placed under the protection (pokrovitel'stvo)
of the Emperor.
48 See Gibson, Imperial Russia in Frontier
America, pp. 153-73, 199-211.
49 A. V. Grinev, Indeitsy tlinkity v period
Russkoi Ameriki (Novosibirsk: "Nauka," Sibirskoe otdelenie,
1991), pp. 143-44.
50 A. J. Krusenstern, Voyage round the world,
in the years 1803, 1804, 1805, & 1806, by order of His
Imperial Majesty Alexander the First, on board the ships
Nadezhda and Neva, under the command of Captain A. J. von
Krusenstern, 2 vols. (London: C. Roworth for J. Murray,
1813), vol. 1, pp. xx-xxix; V.M. Nasetskii, Ivan Fedorovich
Kruzenshtern (Moscow: Nauka, 1974), pp. 17, 24.
51The Russians of course also traded with the
Chinese at the border post market in Kiakhta. But the restrictions
imposed on that trade by Chinese officials irked the Russians
and made them pine for an opening of Chinese ports to Russian
ships. Access to Chinese ports was denied to Russian ships
until after the Opium Wars; Russian-American Company ships
could then become involved in the port trade on a limited
basis.
52 Nasetskii, Kruzenshtern, pp. 22-23.
53Fedorova, Russkoe naselenie Aliaski i Kalifornii,
p. 123.
54 On the East India Company's "double role" see:
Osterhammel, Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview,
p. 32.
55 V. M. Golovnin, Around the World on the
Kamchatka, 1817-1819, trans., with an Introduction
and Notes, by Ella Lury Wiswell; foreword by John J. Stephan
(Honolulu: The University Press of Hawaii, 1979), pp. 130-31.
56For use of the term "imperial laboratory" see
S. Frederick Starr, "Tsarist Government: The Imperial Dimension," in Soviet
Nationality Policies and Practices, ed. by Jeremy R.
Azrael (Praeger, 1978), p. 30.
57 On the general inapplicability of Western
theoretical models to the Russian Empire proper, see Andreas
Kappeler, Rossiia-mnogonatsional'naia imperiia: Vozniknovenie,
istoriia, raspad (Moscow: "Progress-Traditsiia," 1997),
p. 12. For a recent attempt to theorize on Russian America,
see A. V. Grinev, "Tuzemtsy Aliaski, russkie promyshlenniki
i Rossiisko-Amerikanskaia kompaniia: Sistema ekonomicheskikh
otnoshenii," in Etnograficheskoe obozrenie, 2000 (3):
74-88.
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