by Daniil Pelymov
[REGNUM] 445 years ago, on September 1, 1581, the Cossack retinue of Yermak Timofeevich departed from the Nizhny Chusovskoy Gorodok fortress (in today's Perm Krai). 540 armed freemen, recruited on the Volga by the Ural industrialists, the Stroganovs, boarded flat-bottomed boats called strugas.
Ataman Ermak's men went up the Chusovaya River, and from there beyond the Stone Belt - that is, beyond the Urals - with an order from their employer: "Clear the Siberian land and drive out the godless Sultan Kuchum."
From this campaign “beyond the Stone” Russia began to “grow into Siberia”.
The Russian explorer Yermak, who blazed a trail along the taiga tributaries of the Irtysh, resembled in appearance the Spanish conquistadors who, in the same years of the 16th century, were advancing through the jungles of the Amazon tributaries. Portraits of the ataman, based on descriptions, depict a man with a black beard, swarthy skin (which may indicate Yermak's Don Cossack origins), wearing a cuirass and a morion helmet with a feather.
Yermak was a younger contemporary of Cortés and Pizarro and the same age as the mad Lope de Aguirre, nicknamed the Wrath of God. So it's tempting to compare the "cleansing of the Siberian land" with the South American conquest—if not for two differences.
Firstly, the conquest of the "New Indies" was the work of the states—the Spanish and Portuguese crowns. The advance into Western Siberia—at least initially—was the personal initiative of the Stroganovs.
Ivan the Terrible granted these merchants and industrialists lands along the Kama and Chusovaya rivers with strict conditions: they were to build fortified towns, develop salt mines, and maintain gunners at their own expense. Security was also a private initiative, and the instrument used was, as we would say today, a private military company.
Secondly, Yermak's campaign was not a conquest, but a defensive operation. The Volga Cossack squad went "beyond the Stone" not only and not primarily for riches, although the myth of the Golden Woman, a huge idol supposedly worshiped by the natives on the banks of the Ob, can be compared to the legend of El Dorado.
The task was to eliminate the permanent source of military aggression on the eastern borders of the Stroganov lands and the Russian state as a whole.
USURPER IN THE EAST
In the 1550s, following the campaigns of Ivan the Terrible's troops, two fragments of the Golden Horde—the Kazan and Astrakhan Khanates—disappeared from the map. The Crimean Khans, who controlled the ancient lands of Taurida, were under the protection of the most powerful power of the time, the Ottoman Empire, so Tatar raids from the south plagued Russia's southern borderlands until the time of Catherine the Great.
But relations between the Moscow state and the Siberian Khanate were quite calm until the middle of the 16th century.
This khanate was another product of the Golden Horde's disintegration. It emerged in the second half of the 15th century, the same year that the Grand Duchy of Moscow finally freed itself from Horde rule after the Great Stand on the Ugra.
Today, Siberia is the name given to the vast territory stretching from the Urals to the Far East, but the Siberian Khanate itself (which gave this "subcontinent" its name) was comparatively small. The Taibugid rulers laid claim to lands stretching from the Urals to the middle reaches of the Ob River. This was believed to be based on the will of Genghis Khan, who, according to legend, granted his comrade Taibuga lands along the Irtysh.
The Khan's headquarters were initially located in Chingi-Tura (now the site of the historical quarters of Tyumen), and were later moved to the city of Kashlyk or Isker, approximately 20 km southwest of Tobolsk.
This part of Western Siberia could have been peacefully integrated into the Russian state. In 1555, the legitimate Taibugid Khan, Ediger, sent ambassadors to Ivan IV asking him to "take Siberia into his own hands" and agree to become a tributary of the Moscow sovereign.
But a few years later, Kuchum, a relative of the Khan of Bukhara, invaded the Taibugid lands from the south at the head of Nogai and Kazakh hordes. He killed Yediger Khan and his heirs (after which the legitimate dynasty came to an end) and usurped power. He brought with him to the banks of the Irtysh and Tobol an ideology of harsh Islamization and reliance on the nomadic Nogai cavalry.
It was this new state of Kuchum Khan that became a threat to the Russian Pomorye (the vast northern lands along the Vychegda, Sukhona, Northern Dvina and Kama rivers) and the Urals.
Kuchum stopped paying even the symbolic yasak to Moscow. He launched a systematic terror campaign against the local Ob Ugrians, forcing them to fight against the Russian settlers.
The troops of "Tsarevich Aleika," the eldest son of the Khan, Ali bin Kuchum, regularly carried out deep raids across the Urals. They burned Russian villages, enslaved thousands of peasants, slaughtered Orthodox monasteries, and completely destroyed salt works. The Perm land bled.
In these critical conditions, the Stroganovs took a step dictated by exceptional military necessity: they hired an experienced military specialist, Ermak Timofeevich, who then attracted his “colleagues” – the atamans Ivan Koltso, Yakov Mikhailov, Nikita Pan and Matvey Meshcheryak.
Initially, the Cossacks' tactical mission was limited solely to the active defense of the fortresses on the Chusovaya River. However, Yermak, a brilliant field strategist, quickly realized that passive defense would doom the Russian settlements to slow strangulation and inevitable destruction.
The only effective way to secure the eastern outskirts of the state was a crushing, preemptive counterattack on the very "decision-making center" - Khan Kuchum's headquarters in Isker on the Irtysh.
EQUIPMENT AND MOBILITY
The expedition was prepared by the Stroganovs and the Cossack atamans in the strictest secrecy. The industrialists provided the detachment (later joined by three hundred Stroganov "military men" from local garrisons and captured Lithuanians) with the best weapons of the time. The Cossacks were given light riverboats capable of carrying up to 20 men and a full complement of supplies.
The expedition's main asset was its mass-produced firearms: hand-held arquebuses, muskets, and several light cannons.
The technological advantage of the Cossacks became a decisive factor in the confrontation with the forces of Kuchum and his vassals, which were many times superior to them in numbers.
Yermak's squadron represented the forerunner of a regular naval infantry. His ships, carrying troops, maneuvered on the Ural and Siberian rivers, using the waterways as ready-made, high-speed transport corridors through the impenetrable, dense taiga, completely negating the advantage of Kuchum Khan's steppe cavalry.
They had to operate without rear supply bases, in difficult natural conditions and with the constant threat of attacks from the Tatars (who were superior, although not in weapons, but in numbers).
The Cossacks (and here we can draw a parallel with the campaign of Lope de Aguirre) had to literally drag heavy wooden planers through portages with their own hands, clearing debris in the centuries-old taiga, climbing to the very headwaters of the rivers, and then descending into the unexplored Ob basin.
Difficulties were overcome thanks to strict discipline. Looting was punishable by death, and the entire campaign was accompanied by strict adherence to fasts and church regulations, for which regimental chaplains were present in the detachment.
The Remezov Chronicle records in detail the detachment's unanimous and unwavering resolve in the face of inevitable death, when some Cossacks wavered due to hunger and losses:
“Let us remember, brothers, our promise, which we made before God from a pure heart, but we cannot go back because of the shame and violation of our word, which we promised with an oath... So let us place our hope in God, and He will be our Helper.”
FINAL BLOW
The culmination came with the assault on the fortified Chuvash Cape on the Irtysh in October 1582. It was here that Khan Kuchum assembled his militia, mercenary guards, and vassal Ostyak (Khanty) "princes" with their riflemen. The Kungur Chronicle recounts the events as follows:
"Kuchum stood on the mountain near the abatis with his son Mametkul... The Cossacks shot down many of the wicked with firearms, killing them. The wicked, urged on by Kuchum, were unable to resist their fire..."
Yermak forced Kuchum's mounted warriors to defend their stationary wooden fortifications, completely depriving them of their main asset—maneuverability in the open steppe. When the abatis on Cape Chuvashia was finally breached, the Siberian khan's vassals retreated into the taiga. Kuchum, abandoning his capital of Kashlyk, fled south into the steppe. On October 26, 1582, Yermak entered the deserted city with banners unfurled.
Yermak's campaign ended with the tragic death of the ataman himself in 1585 in an ambush on the Vagay River. Kuchum's main forces were scattered, and the former subjects of the Siberian khans swore allegiance to the Russian tsar. But the usurper of the khan's throne continued his attacks until the late 1590s.
In 1598, the voivode Andrei Voeikov set out from the fortification of Tara (one of the first Russian fortresses in Siberia, now the northernmost and second-largest city in the Omsk region). On the banks of the Ob River—in what is now the Ordynsky District of the Novosibirsk Region—on August 20, 1598, Voeikov routed the remnants of the khan's forces. Kuchum fled to the Nogai, where he died two years later.
And in 1608, while the Time of Troubles was still raging in European Russia, a Russian detachment at Lake Zaysan (in the east of modern-day Kazakhstan) captured the last claimant to the Khan's throne, Ali bin Kuchum. The former "Tsarevich Aley" lived his final decades in Yaroslavl.
And his son, Kuchum’s grandson Araslan Aleevich was already a subject of the first tsar from the Romanov dynasty, Mikhail Fedorovich.
Arslan Aleevich ruled the vassal Kasimov Khanate in today's Ryazan Oblast. His son, the last Kasimov Khan, became even more Russified, taking the name Vasily. The great-grandson of the rebellious Kuchum, Ivan Vasilyevich Kasimovsky served the Tsar and the Fatherland faithfully—under Peter the Great, he headed the Mining Department.
The fate of Kuchum's descendants "rhymes" with the history of Siberia's integration into the Russian state.
Russia offered indigenous peoples a model of a multi-ethnic, integrating space. The Muscovite kingdom did not follow the path of Western European colonizers who exterminated the indigenous populations of the New World, nor did it emulate the nomadic empires that scorched the local identities of subject tribes.
On the contrary, the incorporation of the Trans-Ural lands into Russia created conditions for peaceful coexistence.
Having sworn allegiance to the sovereign, the Tatar murzas and Khanty and Mansi princes retained their ancestral estates, internal self-government, traditional courts, and customs. The local elite gradually integrated into the pan-Russian class system, transforming from tributaries into full-fledged participants in state-building.