What Was the Yermak Siberian Campaign?
The Yermak Siberian Campaign of 1581-1585 was the first Russian military expedition across the Urals. It was led by Yermak Timofeyevich, a Don Cossack ataman, against the Sibir Khanate of the Tatar prince Kuchum, whose capital of Isker stood on the Irtysh. The campaign ended in the destruction of the khanate and the death of Yermak, but it set in motion the Russian colonisation of Siberia that would, by the end of the seventeenth century, reach the Pacific (see Forsyth, A History of the Peoples of Siberia, 1992).
The setting
The Russo-Kazak frontier in the late sixteenth century ran through the middle Urals. The Stroganovs — the merchant family of Anika and his sons Yakov and Grigory — held extensive salt and fur grants along the Kama and the upper Pechora, granted by Tsar Ivan IV from 1558, and they had been quietly absorbing the surrounding Tatar and Finno-Ugric principalities for two decades. Kuchum, the last of the Sibir khans, had responded to this pressure with raids into Stroganov territory; in 1581 the Stroganovs decided to settle the matter by hiring a Cossack force to invade the khanate. The candidate was Yermak, a Don ataman who had been leading a Cossack band on the Volga and was then in trouble with the tsar’s government (Baron, Stroganovs, 2003).
The campaign
Yermak crossed the Urals in September 1581 with a force usually given as about 840 men, mostly Cossacks with a few Russian volunteers. The first fighting was on the Tura River, where the Russians defeated a Tatar army. Over the following months Yermak moved down the Tura and the Tobol, taking Kuchum’s outlying strongholds and extracting tribute from the smaller Tatar and Mansi principalities. The decisive engagement was the Battle of Chuvash Cape in June 1582, on the Irtysh below Isker, in which Yermak’s small force defeated Kuchum’s much larger army by concentrating its arquebus fire on the khan’s own retinue.
The fall of Isker in October 1582 opened the way to the Ob, and Yermak spent the winter of 1582-1583 working through the frozen rivers. By the summer of 1583, however, the situation had turned against him. The Cossacks were heavily outnumbered, their supplies were inadequate, and the surviving Tatar princes regrouped. On 5/6 August 1585, Yermak was killed in an ambush on the Irtysh, set by the Karachay chief Karach. His body was recovered and buried in a Muslim cemetery at Kulany; in 1847 the Russian Orthodox Church, by then in charge of the region, listed him as a “strannik” — a pious wanderer (Forsyth, 1992).
The colonisation that followed
Yermak’s expedition was a small military action with very large consequences. The Stroganovs, who had hoped for a profitable pacification of their eastern frontier, found themselves at the centre of a Russian state enterprise: Tsar Feodor I, having absorbed the Yermak claim to the territory, sent a force of 300 musketeers to Tobolsk in 1585 and a further 500 the following year. Tobolsk, founded in 1587, became the seat of the Russian administration of Siberia; by 1604, the Russians had reached the Yenisei; by 1628, the Lena; by 1639, the Sea of Okhotsk. The conquest of Siberia was carried out in less time than it took to complete the conquest of the Volga — and with far fewer troops (Baron, 2003).
The memory of Yermak
Yermak’s reputation grew with the empire. Peter the Great ordered a memorial obelisk to be erected in Tobolsk in 1722, on the centenary of his own accession. Catherine the Great commissioned a state portrait. The painter Vasily Surikov finished The Conquest of Siberia by Yermak in 1895, presenting the Cossack as a Russian folk hero; the painting now hangs in the Russian Museum. The Soviet historian A. I. Klibanov gave the campaign its definitive twentieth-century reading; the post-Soviet historiography has increasingly complicated the picture by paying attention to the indigenous peoples (the Mansis, the Khanty, the Tatars) on whom the Russian advance was made (Baron, 2003; Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors, 1994).