Did you know that the Russians once had an empire (of sorts) in the Pacific North West of America? No, neither did Sam Leith. He has reviewed ‘a blindly good story extremely well told’ about this forgotten history (Glorious Misadventures: Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of Russian America by Owen Matthews) in this week’s edition of The Spectator. Here’s a passage to whet your appetite:
‘Like most if not all imperial adventures, the civilising mission (ho ho) followed the money. Ever since the first Cossack pirate found a way through the Bering Strait, fur, or ‘soft gold’, was what they were all after. The discovery that in Chinese entrepot towns the pelt of a single sea-otter would fetch the equivalent of two years’ salary for an ordinary seaman was all anyone needed to know. Fur, tea and American manufactures were the basis of a Pacific triangle trade. The Brits took an interest, and so did the Spanish — who then held bits of the West Coast up to San Francisco.
Anyone with the faintest familiarity with Russian history will be used to the idea that whatever the rest of the world can show in endurance, suffering, bloodthirst or cruelty the Russians will generally trump it without turning a hair. (‘Only a Russian could write of Alaska,’ Matthews remarks drily, that it is ‘very seldom cold here’.) The story of Russia’s Wild East does nothing to change that view. And — as you might expect from an unimaginably enormous empire governed from a weird little pimple on its Western edge — 11 time zones and thousands of miles of frozen tundra east of head office, the local contractors tended to improvise a little when it came to ethics and deportment. The genius of the lawless Siberian fur trade, and our man’s first father-in-law, Grigory Shelikhov, was a murderous Del-Boy who nevertheless turned over three million roubles at a time when the entire Russian state budget was 40 million roubles.’
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