Natasha's Dance

of the nineteenth century. Most of the tribesmen moved back east, but others settled in Russia, where they took up trades or farming, and converted to the Orthodox belief. Lenin was descended from one of these Kalmyks. His paternal grandfather, Nikolai Ulianov, was a Kalmyk son from Astrakhan. This Mongol descent was clearly visible in Lenin’s looks.

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    To commemorate the defeat of the Mongol khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan Ivan the Terrible ordered the construction of a new cathedral on Red Square in Moscow. St Basil’s, as it was to become popularly known in honour of the city’s favourite Holy Fool, was completed in 1560, just five years after its construction had begun. The cathedral was far more than a symbol of Russia’s victory over the Mongol khanates. It was a triumphant proclamation of the country’s liberation from the Tatar culture that had dominated it since the thirteenth century. With its showy colours, its playful ornament and outrageous onion domes, St Basil’s was intended as a joyful celebration of the Byzantine traditions to which Russia now returned (although, to be truthful, there was nothing so ornate in the Orthodox tradition and the mosque-like features of the cathedral were probably derived from an oriental style).

    The cathedral was originally named the Intercession of the Virgin -to mark the fact that Kazan was captured on that sacred feast day (Pokrova) in 1552. Moscow’s victory against the Tatars was conceived as a religious triumph, and the empire which that victory launched was in many ways regarded as an Orthodox crusade. The conquest of the Asiatic steppe was portrayed as a holy mission to defend the Church against the Tatar infidels. It was set out in the doctrine of Moscow as the Third Rome - a doctrine which St Basil’s cast in stone - whereby Russia came to see itself as the leader of a truly universal Christian empire built on the traditions of Byzantium. Just as the mighty Russian state was built on the need to defend its Christian settlers on the heathen steppe, so the Russian national consciousness was forged by this religious war against the East. In the Russian mind this religious boundary was always more important than any ethnic one, and the oldest terms for a foreigner (for example, inoverets) carry connotations of a different faith. It is equally telling that the word in Russian for a peasant (krestianin), which in all other European languages stems from the idea of the country or the land, is connected with the word for a Christian (khristianin).

    From the capture of Kazan in 1552 to the revolution in 1917, the

    Russian Empire grew at the fantastic rate of over 100,000 square kilometres every year. The Russians were driven east by fur, the ‘soft gold’ that accounted for one- third of the Imperial coffers at the height of the fur trade in the seventeenth century.35 Russia’s colonial expansion was a massive hunt for bears and minks, sables, ermine, foxes and otters. Close on the heels of the fur trappers came the Cossack mercenaries, such as those commanded by the Russian hero Ermak, who seized the ore-rich mines of the Urals for his patron Stroganov and finally defeated the khanate of Siberia in 1582. Then came the Tsar’s troops, who constructed fortresses and exacted tributes from the native tribes, followed shortly after by the Church’s missionaries, who set out to deprive them of their shamanistic cults. Surikov’s enormous painting Ermak’s Conquest of Siberia (1895) - a crowded battlescene between the icon-bearing, musket-firing Cossacks and the heathen bow-and-arrow tribesmen with their shamans beating drums - did more than any other work of art to fix this mythic image of the Russian empire in the national consciousness. As Surikov portrayed it, the real point of the conquest was to undermine the shamans who enjoyed a divine status in the Asiatic tribes.

    This religious conquest of the Asiatic steppe was far more fundamental to the Russian empire than the equivalent role such missions played in the overseas empires of the European states. The explanation for this is geography. There was no great ocean to divide Russia from its Asian colonies: the two were part of the same land mass. The Ural mountains, which officially divided the European steppe from the Asiatic one, were physically no more than a series of big hills with large tracts of steppeland in between, and the traveller who crossed them would have to ask his driver where these famous mountains were. So without a clear geographical divide to distinguish them from their Asian colonies, the Russians looked instead to cultural categories. This became especially important in the eighteenth century, when Russia sought to redefine itself as a European empire with a presence in the West. If Russia was to be styled as a Western state, it needed to construct a clearer cultural boundary to set itself apart from this Asiatic other’ in the Orient. Religion was the easiest of these categories. All the Tsar’s non-Christian tribes were lumped together as ‘Tartars’, whatever their origins or faith, Muslim, shamanic or Buddhist. To

    reinforce this ‘good and evil’ split, the word ‘Tartar’ was deliberately misspelled (with the extra V) to bring it into line with the Greek word for ‘hell’ (tartarus). More generally, there was a tendency to think of all of Russia’s newly conquered territories (Siberia, the Caucasus and Central Asia) as one undifferentiated ‘east’ - an ‘Aziatshchina’ - which became a byword for ‘oriental langour’ and ‘backwardness’. The image of the Caucasus was orientalized, with travellers’ tales of its wild and savage tribes. Eighteenth-century maps consigned the Caucasus to the Muslim East, though geographically it was in the south, and historically it was an ancient part of the Christian West. In Georgia and Armenia the Caucasus contained Christian civilizations which went back to the fourth century, five hundred years before the Russians converted to Christianity. They were the first states in Europe to adopt the Christian faith - before even the conversion of Constantine the Great and the foundation of the Byzantine empire.

    Nowhere were the Russians more concerned to erect cultural boundaries than in Siberia. In the eighteenth-century imagination the Urals were built up into a vast mountain range, as if shaped by God on the middle of the steppe to mark the eastern limit of the civilized world.* The Russians on the western side of these mountains were Christian in their ways, whereas the Asians on the eastern side were described by Russian travellers as ‘savages’ who needed to be tamed.36 To Asianize its image, Russian atlases in the eighteenth century deprived Siberia of its Russian name (Sibir’) and referred to it instead as the ‘Great Tatary’, a title borrowed from the Western geographic lexicon. Travel writers wrote about its Asiatic tribes, the Tungus and the Yakuts and the Buriats, without ever mentioning the settled Russian population in Siberia, even though it was already sizeable. In this way, which came to justify the whole colonial project in the east, the steppe was reconstructed in the Russian mind as a savage and exotic wilderness whose riches were untapped. It was ‘our Peru’ and ‘our India’.37

    This colonial attitude was further strengthened by the economic decline of Siberia in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As

    * The cultural importance of the Ural mountains for Russia’s European self- identification has persisted to this day - as testified by the notion of a Europe ‘from the Atlantic to the Urals’ advanced by Gorbachev.

    fashions in Europe changed and the fur trade declined in importance, and efforts by the Russian state to develop mining failed to compensate for the loss of revenues, so the promise of a virgin continent suddenly became supplanted by the bleak image of a vast wasteland. ‘Nevsky Prospekt, on its own, is worth at least five times as much as the whole of Siberia’, wrote one bureaucrat.38 Russia would be better off, another writer thought in 1841, if the ‘ocean of snow’ that was Siberia could be replaced by a real sea, which would at least enable more convenient maritime trade with the Far East.39 This pessimistic vision of Siberia was reinforced by its transformation into one vast prison camp. The term ‘Siberia’ became synonymous in colloquial expressions with penal servitude, wherever it occurred, with savage cruelty (sibirnyi) and a harsh life (sibirshchina).40In the poetic imagination the unforgiving nature of Siberia was itself a kind of tyranny:

    The gloomy nature of these lands Is always harsh and wild, The angry river roars Storms often rage, And the clouds are dark.

    Fearing the winters,

    Endless and icy,

    Nobody will visit

    This wretched country,

    This vast prison house for exiles.41

    This Siberia was a region of the mind, an imaginary land to which all the opposites of European Russia were consigned. Its boundaries were in constant flux. For the city-bound elites of the early nineteenth century, ‘Siberia’ began where their own little ‘Russia’ - St Petersburg or Moscow and the road to their estate - gave way to a world they did not know. Katenin said that Kostroma, just 300 kilometres to the north-east of Moscow, was ‘not far from Siberia’. Herzen thought that Viatka, several hundred kilometres to the west of the Urals, was in Siberia (and in a sense it was, for he was exiled there in 1835). Vigel thought that Perm -a little further east but still not within view of the

    Ural mountains - was ‘in the depths of Siberia’. Others thought that Vladimir, Voronezh or Riazan, all within a day or so’s coach ride from Moscow, were the start of the ‘Asiatic steppe’.42

    But Russian attitudes toward the East were far from being all colonial. Politically, Russia was as imperialist as any Western state. Yet culturally there was a deep ambivalence, so that in addition to the usual