Yakutsk with 150 men, following the Olekma River.
Over the winter of 1650, Khabarov crossed the Yablonovy Range, reaching the Amur River soon after. He ruthlessly pacified the local tribe, the Daurs. He also established a garrison on the Amur. In his reports to Yakutsk and Moscow, Khabarov advocated conquest of the Amur, both for the river’s strategic importance and the region’s economic assets: grain, fish, and fur.
In 1650 and 1651, Khabarov launched further assaults against the Daurs, expanding Russian control over the area, but with great violence. Khabarov founded Achansk, captured Albazin, and made his way down the Amur until the summer of 1651. By this point, he was encroaching on territory that China’s recently founded Manchu (Qing) Dynasty considered to be its sphere of influence. When the Daurs appealed to China for assistance, the Manchus attacked Achansk in the spring of 1652. Khabarov’s garrison was forced to withdraw, but for the moment, the Manchus did not press their advantage. Nonetheless, Russia and China would engage in many frontier struggles until the signing of the Treaty of Nerchinsk (1689).
Meanwhile, word of Khabarov’s cruel treatment of the Daurs reached Russian authorities, and he was arrested in the fall of 1653. Khabarov was put on trial, but his services were considered valuable enough to have outweighed the abuses he had committed. He was exonerated and placed in command of the Siberian fortress of Ilimsk. In 1858 Russia’s new city at the juncture of the Amur and Ussuri rivers, Khabarovsk, was given his name. See also: CHINA, RELATIONS WITH; SIBERIA
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bassin, Mark. (1999). Imperial Visions: Nationalist Imagination and Geographical Expansion in the Russian Far East, 1840-1865. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Bobrick, Benson. (1992). East of the Sun: The Epic Conquest and Tragic History of Siberia. New York: Poseidon. Lincoln, W. Bruce. (1993). Conquest of a Continent: Siberia and the Russians. New York: Random House.
The Khakass Republic or Khakassia (23,855 square miles, 61,784 square kilometers) is an autonomous republic within the Russian Federation. Located in Krasnoyarsk Krai at the far northwestern end of the Altay Range in south-central Siberia, it differs from other Siberian republics in at least two ways. First, the Khakass, while Turkic speaking, are actually Orthodox Christians, not Muslims, Buddhists, or shamanists. Second, ethnic Russians outnumber the Khakass. In 1959, 48,000 Khakass were living in Khakassia, forming 12 percent of the total population. By 1979 there were 57,300 Khakass, forming 11.4 percent of the population. Ethnic Russians now constitute the remaining 80 to 90 percent of the population of Khakassia.
The Khakass Republic extends along the left bank of the Yenisey River, upon the wooded slopes of Kuznetsk Ala-Tau and the Sayans, in the western portion of the Minusinsk depression. Lake Baikal lies 1,000 kilometers to the east. The Abakan (a tributary of the Yenisey) and Chulym rivers drain the area. The capital is Abakan and the next largest city is Chernogorsk (a coal-mining center). While the terrain in the southern and western regions is hilly, the northern and eastern parts of the region are flat, black-earth steppelands (the Abakan-Minusinsk Basin). The climate is continental, with the average temperatures between -15 and 21 degrees Celsius in January, and between 17 and 19 degrees Celsius in July.
The origin of the name Khakass is in the word hagias (hjagas), which was used by the Chinese for an ancient tribe in the Sayan Mountains. Historically, the Khakass have gone by several different names: the Tatars of Minusinsk, the Tatars of Abakan, the Turks of Abakan, the Turks of the
KHANTY
Yenisey. The Khakass themselves call themselves by their own tribal names, including sagai, khas, pel-tyr, shor, koybal, and hyzyl-kizhi.
The Khakass language belongs to the Uighur-Oguz group in the Eastern Hun branch of the Turkic languages. While the structure and the basic vocabulary of the Khakass language are of Turkic-Tatar origin, the language contains many loan words from the Chinese, Mongolian, and Russian languages.
The first Russians arrived in Khakassia in the seventeenth century. The Khakass Autonomous Region was established in 1930. In 1992 the region became an official autonomous republic in the Russian Federation. Formerly nomadic herders, the Khakass now farm, hunt, or breed livestock. The republic produces timber, copper, iron ore, barite, gold, molybdenum, and tungsten. See also: NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; SIBERIA
Berdahl, Daphne, and Matti Bunzl. (2000). Altering States: Ethnographies of Transition in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Gorenburg, Dmitry P. (2003). Minority Ethnic Mobilization in the Russian Federation. New York: Cambridge University Press. Petroff, Serge. (2000). Remembering a Forgotten War: Civil War in Eastern European Russia and Siberia, 1918-1920. New York: Columbia University Press. Raleigh, Donald J. (2001). Provincial Landscapes: Local Dimensions of Soviet Power, 1917-1953. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
JOHANNA GRANVILLE
In the late 1930s, as events pushed the world inexorably toward war, the Soviet Union and Japan clashed several times over the precise location of their borders. The most serious of these incidents, occurring from May to September of 1939, took place in Mongolia, by a river named Khalkhin-Gol. Soviet forces crossed the river to assert their sovereignty over a disputed tract of land and ran into serious resistance from the Japanese Sixth Army. The Japanese believed that the river marked the border and had just been ordered to treat any incursions with the utmost severity. They launched a series of attacks against the Mongolian and Soviet troops and eventually managed to push back the initial advance. Stalin and his advisors, already convinced that the Japanese army wanted to seize Siberia for its natural resources, decided that this was the great attack they feared. In response, they gave the commander on the scene, Georgy Kon-stantinovich Zhukov, all the tanks, aircraft, and manpower he would need to deal with the threat.
Zhukov put together a major offensive that would not only drive the Japanese from Mongolia, but also take the disputed land irrevocably for the Soviet satellite. By the time he was ready for his attack, at the end of August, his forces outnumbered the Japanese two to one, and he had far more tanks and artillery than the Japanese could muster. His strategy, which called for the envelopment and destruction of the enemy, worked as planned, and the Japanese army suffered heavy casualties. The Japanese commander, Michitaro Ko-matsubara, refused to accept the outcome of the battle, however, and had prepared a counteroffen-sive. This was canceled when a cease-fire was signed in Moscow. War had broken out in Europe, and neither country could afford to be distracted by minor clashes on their borders. The battle at Khalkhin-Gol convinced the Japanese army that a fight with the Soviets would be a long, drawn-out affair, and helped the Japanese empire make the decision to turn southward in 1941, rather than attack Siberia. See also: JAPAN, RELATIONS WITH; ZHUKOV, GEORGY KONSTANTINOVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Coox, Alvin. (1985). Nomonhan. Japan against Russia, 1939. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Zhukov, Georgy. (1971). The Memoirs of Marshal Zhukov. New York: Delacorte Press.
The Khanty people live in western Siberia from the Arctic Circle in the north to the conflux of the Irtysh and Tavda rivers in the south. The Khanty are mainly concentrated in the Khanty-Mansiysk autonomous okrug, with the administrative center Khanty-Mansiysk (population 34,300 in 1995).
The Khanty also live in the Yamal-Nenets autonomous okrug and in Tomsk oblast. According to the Soviet 1989 census, the total population of the Khanty numbered 22,521.
In the beginning of the eighteenth century, Khanty were baptized by Russian Orthodox missionaries. However, Khanty have followed their native religion until the present time. According to Khanty cosmology, there exist several layers of Heaven and Underworld and seven main gods, the most powerful of whom is Numi Torum. Shamans are mediators between gods and humans.
