62
ALONG THE CASPIAN
With the signing of the Treaty of Nystad, Russia was finally at peace. Now, it seemed, the colossal energies which had been poured into military campaigns from Azov to Copenhagen could at last be turned toward Russia itself. Peter did not wish to be remembered in history as a conqueror or a warrior; he saw his place as a reformer. Yet, the celebrations in St. Petersburg hailing the Peace of Nystad were still in progress when Peter ordered his army to prepare for a new campaign. The following spring, the army would march into the Caucasus against Persia. And, once again, the army would be personally led by the Emperor.
Although its announcement came as a surprise, this march to the south was no sudden whim. For most of his life, Peter had heard stories of the East, the empire of Cathay, the wealth of the Great Mogul of India, the richness of the trade which passed over caravan routes through Siberia to China, and from India through Persia to the West. These tales had come from travelers passing through Russia who stopped long enough in the German Suburb to stir the imagination of the youthful Tsar. They came from Nicholas Witsen, Burgomaster of Amsterdam and expert on the geography of the East, who spent many hours in conversation with Peter during the Tsar’s first winter in Holland. Now, at last, Peter meant to carry out these youthful dreams.
He had already attempted to reach out toward China by extending the existing trade in tea, furs and silk and by establishing a permanent Russian mission in Peking. But the Chinese were proud and suspicious. The militant Manchu Dynasty was at the peak of its power in Peking. The great Emperor K’ang-hsi, who had come to the throne at the age of seven in 1661 and ruled until his death in 1722, had made peace with all his neighbors and embarked on a reign distinguished for its patronage of painting, poetry, porcelain and learning; dictionaries and encyclopedias published with his encouragement remained standard for generations. K’ang-hsi tolerated foreigners at his court, but Peter’s efforts to improve relations with China made slow progress. In 1715, a Russian priest, the Archimandrite Hilarion, was received at Peking and given the rank of Mandarin, Fifth Class. Finally, in 1719, Peter appointed Captain Lev Ismailov of the Preobrazhensky Guards as his envoy extraordinary to Peking and sent with him as a present for the emperor four ivory telescopes which Peter had made himself. Ismailov was received on a friendly and dignified footing at the Chinese court, but he outreached himself. He asked that all restrictions on trade between Russia and China be lifted, that permission be given for construction of a Russian church in Peking, and that Russian consulates be established in important towns in China to facilitate trade. To this, the Chinese replied loftily, “Our Emperor does not trade and has no bazaars. You value your merchants very highly. We scorn commerce. Only poor people and servants occupy themselves in that way with us, and there is no profit at all to us from your trade. We have enough of Russian goods even if your people did not bring them.” Ismailov departed, and thereafter Russian caravans were hindered more severely. K’ang-hsi died in 1722, and his son Yung Cheng was even more hostile to Christians in general; thus, the avenue to trade with China was narrowed rather than broadened in Peter’s final years.
Far to the north, along the desolate shores of the Sea of Okhotsk and the northern Pacific, there was no one to bar the Russian advance. It was under Peter that the huge Kamchatka Peninsula and the Kurile Islands were claimed by Russia. In 1724, shortly before he died, Peter summoned a Danish-born captain in his fleet, Vitus Bering, and assigned him the task of leading an expedition to the periphery of the Eurasian continent a thousand miles beyond Kamchatka, to determine whether Eurasia and North America were joined by land. Bering found the strait, fifty-three miles wide and only 144 feet deep, which subsequently was named after him.*
A year before Bering set out, Peter had dispatched two frigates to the opposite end of the earth, to carry his fraternal greetings “to the illustrious King and Owner of the glorious island of Madagascar.” The inhabitants of that gigantic island had a poor record of hospitality to Western visitors: French traders and colonists were massacred in 1674, and through most of the eighteenth century the only Westerners who set foot on the island were pirates such as Captain Kidd. Peter’s motive in sending this expedition was not really to establish a foothold in Madagascar. His ships were ordered to stop there and conclude a treaty if possible, then to sail on to their real destination, India. Peter dreamed of a trade agreement with the Great Mogul and also wanted some teakwood on which he could exercise his talent for carpentry. As it happened, the ships reached neither India nor Madagascar; they never left the Baltic. One of the frigates sprang a leak a few days after sailing, and both ships returned to Reval. Peter was disappointed, but he died before the project could be renewed.
It was not the sea route to India, in any case, but the land routes through Persia and Central Asia which attracted him. The Central Asian caravans came over the Khyber Pass from India, passed through Kabul, crossed the jagged peaks of the Hindu Kush and traversed a thousand miles of desert inhabited by Kazaks and Kalmucks before reaching Astrachan and the lower Volga. In Peter’s time, there was more turbulence than usual among these desert people. Two rival Moslem khans, the rulers of Khiva and Bokhara, were struggling for predominance, and each sometimes turned to the Russians for assistance.* Peter, because of his war with Sweden, had been unable to respond to these appeals, but his interest in the desert lands had been aroused.
Peter’s interest in all the regions to the east and south had also been stimulated by reports of gold. There were pebbles of gold in the rivers of Siberia, veins of gold along the shores of the Caspian, golden sands in the deserts of Central Asia—such stories circulated freely in St. Petersburg. In 1714, 1716 and 1719, Peter sent expeditions into Siberia and Central Asia in search of the precious metal. They ended without gain, although the first expedition, during its withdrawal, constructed a fort at the juncture of the Irtysh and Om rivers which grew into the town of Omsk.
The 1716 expedition ended in spectacular tragedy. Hearing stories of gold along the Amu Darya River, which ran through the lands of the Khan of Khiva, Peter resolved to send congratulations to the new Khan on his accession to the throne and an offer of Russian protection if he would accept the Tsar’s suzerainty. Along the way, the expedition was also to build a fort at the mouth of the Amu Darya, reconnoiter the length of the river and send merchants and engineers to the head of the river, across the mountains and down into India. Once their reports were in hand and the Khans of Bokhara and Khiva had given allegiance, Peter could begin the development of the permanent trade route which was his ultimate objective.
Unfortunately, Peter chose the wrong man to lead this expedition. Prince Alexander Bekovich Cherkassky had been born a Circassian Moslem prince named Devlet Kisden Mirza. His father’s lands in the Caucasus lay within the empire of the Shah of Persia. One day, the Shah happened to see the beautiful wife of Cherkassky’s father and ordered his vassal to send to him this exquisite piece of property. The father refused, and fled with his family to Moscow for protection. There, his son converted to Christianity, became a captain of the Guard and served as an officer in Astrachan and along the Caucasus frontier. Peter, thinking Cherkassky’s background ideally suited him for dealing with the Moslem khans, summoned him to Riga for final instructions and sent him on his way.
In the summer of 1716, Cherkassky left Astrachan with 4,000 regular soldiers and detachments of Cossacks, engineers and surveyors. He built two forts on the eastern side of the Caspian Sea, long considered the territory of the Khan of Khiva. In the spring of 1717, despite reports of the Khan’s anger at this action, he began his march toward Khiva, 300 miles across empty, waterless desert. One hundred miles from Khiva, the Khan’s army appeared and a three-day battle ensued. Cherkassky was victorious, and the Khan asked for peace, which he and his elders swore on the Koran to uphold. Then, he invited his conqueror to enter Khiva, suggesting that, for greater convenience and ease of provisioning, the Russian force divide itself into five detachments, each to be stationed in a separate town. Cherkassky foolishly agreed, and shortly thereafter the Khan’s army marched from one town to another, compelling the surrender of the Russian detachments one by one. Every officer was slaughtered and every soldier sold into slavery. Cherkassky himself was carried into the Khan’s tent, where a piece of red cloth, the sign of blood and death, was spread on the ground. Cherkassky refused to kneel on the cloth before the Khan, whereupon the Khan’s guards slashed the calves of his legs with their scimitars, pitching him involuntarily on the ground before their master. Afterward, the unfortunate Circassian-Russian was beheaded, his skin was stuffed, and, thus transformed, he was exhibited in a courtyard of the Khan’s palace.
Frustrated in his hope of reaching India through Central Asia, Peter pressed ahead with his efforts to open the land route through Persia. He was also anxious to persuade the Shah to divert the lucrative silk trade so that it should pass from Persia north into the Caucasus to Astrachan and thence along the Russian rivers to St. Petersburg, rather than following its traditional route west from Persia through Turkey to the Mediterranean. Peter did not think that this would be difficult; his relations with the incumbent Shah had always been amicable. This monarch was, according to Weber, writing in 1715, “a prince of forty years of age, of a very indolent temper, giving himself wholly up to pleasures, adjusting his difference with the Turks, Indians and other neighbors by the interposition of his governors and by dint of money; that though he called himself the Shah-in-Shah, or Emperor of Emperors, yet he dreaded the Turk … and notwithstanding the Turks have in the space of eighty years conquered from the Persians many kingdoms, viz, Media, Assyria, Babylon and Arabia, yet they [the Persians] always avoided making war against the Porte.”
To seek this agreement, Peter appointed one of his most aggressive “fledglings,” Artemius Volynsky, a young nobleman who had served as a dragoon in the army and as a diplomatic assistant to Shafirov in negotiations with the Turks. Volynsky’s assignment, written in Peter’s own hand, was to study the “true state of the Persian empire, its forces, fortresses and limits.” He was to try especially to learn “whether there is not some river from India that flows into the Caspian Sea.”
Volynsky arrived in Isfahan, the ancient capital of Persia, in March 1717 and soon found himself under house arrest. This had nothing to do with his own behavior; rather, the Shah and his vizier had learned of Cherkassky’s construction of forts on the eastern Caspian and his disastrous campaign against the Khan of Khiva. They accurately saw in Volynsky the first tentative probe against Persia by the outreaching Russian Emperor. Accordingly, to prevent him from observing the general weakness and vulnerability of Persia, Volynsky was confined to his house. But they could not prevent the envoy from making a personal assessment when he was received at court. “Here,” reported Volynsky, “there is now such a head that he is not over his subjects but the subject of his subjects, and I am sure that it is rarely one can find such a fool, even among common men, not to say crowned heads. For this reason [the Shah] never does any business himself, but puts everything on his vizier, who is stupider than any cattle, but is still such a favorite that the Shah pays attention to everything that comes out of his mouth and does whatever he bids.”
Despite the restrictions placed on his movements, Volynsky managed to conclude a commercial treaty giving Russian merchants the right to trade and buy raw silk throughout Persia. He also saw enough to report to Peter that the state of decay in Persia was so far advanced that the Shah’s Caspian provinces must be ripe for plucking. As Volynsky journeyed home, an emissary of the Prince of Georgia visited him secretly, pleading that the Tsar march south to aid the Christian people who lived on the southern side of the snow-capped Caucasian peaks.*
On his return, Volynsky was rewarded by appointment as Governor of Astrachan and Adjutant General of the Tsar. From Astrachan, Volynsky was tireless in urging that Peter seize the opportunity offered by the crumbling of the Persian empire. In addition to describing the prizes availableto even a small army, he constantly warned that the Turks were advancing, and that if the Tsar did not take the Caucasus soon, the Sultan surely would do so. Peter delayed until the war with Sweden was over. Then, at almost the moment the Treaty of Nystad was signed, an incident occurred which offered an excuse for intervention. A tribe of Caucasian mountaineers who had already proposed themselves as allies of Russia against the Persians decided not to wait and attacked the Persian trading center of Shemaha. At first, the Russian merchants in the town were unconcerned, having been promised that they and their shops and warehouses would not be touched. But the mountain tribesmen began looting indiscriminately, killing several Russians and carrying off half a million roubles’ worth of goods. Volynsky immediately wrote to Peter that here was a perfect opportunity to move, on the grounds of protecting Russian trade and assisting the Shah to restore order in his dominions. Peter’s reply answered Volynsky’s prayers:
I have received your letter in which you wrote about the affair of Daud Bek and that now is the very occasion for what you were ordered to prepare. To this opinion of yours I answer that it is very evident we should not let this occasion slip. We have ordered a considerable part of our forces on the Volga to march to winter quarters, whence they will go to Astrachan in the spring.
Volynsky also urged that this was the time to stir up the Christian princes in Georgia and elsewhere in the Caucasus against their Persian overlord. But here Peter was more cautious. He had no wish to repeat his experience of eleven years before with the Christian princes of the Ottoman provinces of Walachia and Moldavia. His objective here was the silk trade, the land route to India and the peaceful control of the western shore of the Caspian Sea to facilitate this project. Thus he declined to issue any religious proclamation or pose as a liberator before embarking on this new campaign. Instead, he wrote to Volynsky, “As to what you write about the Prince of Georgia and other Christians, if any of these should be desirable in this matter, give them hopes, but on account of the habitual fickleness of these people, begin nothing until the arrival of our troops, when we will act according to best counsel.”
While Peter waited in Moscow for the coming of spring, further reports from Persia stimulated his anxiety. The Shah had been deposed in the face of an Afghan revolt; the new ruler was the Shah’s third son, Tahmasp Mirza, who was struggling against the Afghan leader Mahmud to keep his throne. The danger was that the Turks, who had clearly evident designs on the western Caucasus, might see the collapse of authority in Persia as an opportunity to seize the eastern Caucasus as well—and these provinces along the Caspian were precisely those which Peter had it in mind to pluck.
Peter dispatched the Guards regiments from Moscow on May 3, 1722, and ten days later he followed with Catherine, Admiral Apraxin, Tolstoy and others. At Kolomna on the Oka River, they embarked in galleys, sailing down the Oka and the Volga to Astrachan. The journey, even traveling downstream and with the rivers high because of the melting snows, took a month, because of Peter’s insatiable curiosity. He stopped at every town to make an inspection, examine objects of interest, receive petitions and ask questions about local administration and revenues. Nothing escaped his notice, and every day decrees flowed from his pen on subjects from improving the cottages of peasants to changing the design of barges along the Volga. In Kazan, ancient capital of the Tatar kingdom conquered by Ivan the Terrible, Peter was the first tsar since Ivan to visit the city, and he was anxious to see not only its shipbuilding yards, churches and monasteries, but also the sections of the city still inhabited by Tatars. Inspecting a government-owned textile mill, he observed that it was languidly producing shoddy materials while, not far away, a privately owned mill was flourishing. On the spot, Peter simply gave the government mill to the private owner. At Saratov, the Emperor met Ayuk Khan, the seventy-year-old chief of the Kalmucks. On board the Imperial galley, Catherine presented the Khan’s wife with a gold watch set with diamonds. The Khan immediately responded by ordering five thousand Kalmuck horsemen to join the Emperor’s campaign.
In Astrachan, Peter spent a month making final preparations for the campaign. An army of 61,000 men was assembling: 22,000 Russian infantrymen, 9,000 cavalry and 5,000 sailors, plus auxiliary forces of 20,000 Cossacks and 5,000 Kalmucks. Meanwhile, he observed the fishing for the great eighteen-foot beluga, whose delicious gray caviar the Russians kept for themselves, and the equally large sturgeon whose slightly less tasty black caviar they exported in large quantities to Europe.
On July 18, he embarked with the Russian infantry at Astrachan and sailed 200 miles down the west coast of the Caspian Sea, while the huge mass of cavalry was sent by land across the semi-desert Terek steppe. The sea was rough and the voyage took a week, but eventually a landing was made on a small bay north of the town Derbent. Peter was the first to land on the shallow beach, although he arrived sitting on a board, carried by four sailors. Immediately, he decided that every one of his officers who had not previously bathed in the Caspian should go for a swim. Some of the older officers, unable to swim, complied with reluctance. Peter himself went happily, but, rather than swimming, he had himself let down into the water on his board.
When the Russian cavalry arrived, although both men and horses had suffered from “lack of water and bad grass” on their overland march, the advance on Derbent began. The route lay along the coast down the narrow strip between the mountains and the sea, but only once was there any armed resistance. On this occasion, a local chief horribly murdered three Cossacks (“cutting open their breasts while they were yet alive, and taking out their hearts”) sent to him with a letter from Peter. Reprisal was swift and the offending village was burned to the ground. Peter was surprised by the individual courage of these mountain people. “When they are together, they do not hold at all, but run away,” he said, “while separately each man resists so desperately that when he has thrown away his musket as if he were going to surrender, he begins to fight with his dagger.”
Elsewhere, the Russian Emperor and Empress were received as honored guests. At Tarku, the local Moslem Prince brought his wives and concubines to visit the Russian camp. The Moslem women were seated cross-legged “on cushions of crimson velvet, laid on Persian carpets” in the Empress’s tent, whereupon—reported Captain Peter Bruce—Catherine invited all the Russian officers to come into the tent in relays “to gratify their curiosity” as to “these incomparably beautiful, most lovely creatures.” Peter and Catherine attended mass at a chapel built by the Preobrazhensky Guards, after which each of them placed a stone on the site, and then every soldier in the army also placed a stone, so that a pyramid was raised to commemorate the mass said on the spot for the Emperor of Russia.
Peter’s first important objective was Derbent, a town supposedly founded by Alexander the Great. Derbent’s significance was both commercial and military: It was an important trading center, and it also occupied a strategic position on the north-south road along the shore of the Caspian. It was here that the mountains came down closest to the sea; thus, the town situated in this narrow passage controlled all movement, military or commercial, to the north or south, and was called the Eastern Iron Gates. Derbent surrendered without a fight; indeed, as Peter approached, he found the governor waiting to present him “with the golden keys to the town and the citadel on a cushion of rich Persian brocade.”
Peter’s plan, now that Derbent was occupied, was on a typically grand scale. He meant to continue down the coast and seize Baku, 150 miles to the south. Then, he intended to found a new commercial city still farther south, at the mouth of the Kura River, which would become an important center on his proposed new overland trade route between India, Persia and Russia. That done, he would move up the Kura to the Georgian capital, Tiflis, there to cement the proposed alliance with the Christian Prince Vakhtang. Finally, from Tiflis, he would recross the great Caucasus Mountains to the north, returning to Astrachan through the lands of the Terek Cossacks. “Thus, in these regions,” he wrote to the Senate, “we will have gained a foothold.”
Unfortunately, events were moving against him. The Persian governor of Baku refused to accept a Russian garrison, which meant that the city could be taken only by a major military effort. Although Peter’s army seemed sufficiently large to overcome any military opposition, he was worried about supplies. A provisioning fleet from Astrachan had encountered a disastrous storm on the Caspian and never arrived at Derbent; supplies locally available were vanishing rapidly the longer the army stayed. Further, the August heat along the coast was taking a toll of men and horses. Soldiers had been eating the fruits and melons for which the Caucasus has always been famous, but in such quantities as to become sick, and many of the regiments were decimated. To cope with the sweltering heat, Peter had his head shaved and during the day wore a wide-brimmed hat over his naked skull. In the cool of the evening, he covered himself with a wig made from his own shorn hair. The Empress copied her husband, shaving off her own hair, while at night covering her head with the cap of a grenadier. More concerned than Peter about the suffering of his troops in this oppressive heat, she even dared on one occasion to countermand his military orders. The Emperor had commanded the army to march and then retired to his tent to sleep. When he awoke, he found the soldiers still in camp. What general, he asked angrily, had dared to overrule his orders? “I did it,” said Catherine, “because your men would have died of heat and thirst.”
As he considered the situation of his army, Peter grew uneasy. He was a long way from the nearest Russian base at Astrachan, his seaborne supply line was not functioning, a number of potentially hostile tribesmen inhabited the mountains along his northern flank and there was always the danger that the Turks—who, unlike the Persians, constituted a serious military opponent—might march to protect their own interests in the Caucasus. Peter did not wish to repeat the experience on the Pruth. Thus, at a council of war, the decision was made to withdraw. A garrison was left behind at Derbent, and the main body of the army retreated north by land and water to Astrachan.
Peter reached the mouth of the Volga and Astrachan on October 4. He remained for a month, looking after the welfare of his troops, arranging for care of the sick and winter quarters for the rest. Part of this time, Peter was severely ill with an attack of strangury and stone, a disease of the urinary tract. Before leaving Astrachan, Peter made it clear that, despite the abandonment of that summer’s campaign, he was not abandoning Russian ambitions on the Caspian Sea. In November, he sent a combined naval and military expedition to capture the port of Resht, 500 miles away on the south shore of the Caspian. In July of the following summer, a Russian force captured Baku, thus securing the entire western coast of the great inland sea. Negotiations with the now helpless Shah resulted in Persia ceding Derbent to Russia along with three seaboard provinces of the eastern Caucasus. As Peter explained it to the Persian ambassador, if the Shah did not give up the provinces to Russia, which was his friend, then he would certainly lose them to Turkey, which was his enemy. The Shah was in no position to argue against this Russian logic.
The disintegration of the Persian empire and Peter’s military campaign along the Caspian Sea threatened once again to bring Russia into collision with the Ottoman Empire. The Porte had always been particularly interested in the Transcaucasus—that is, the Persian provinces of Georgia and Armenia, lying south of the mighty Caucasus mountain range. The Turks coveted them not because they were Christian, but because they were on the Turkish frontier and because they lay on the Black Sea. The Sultan was quite willing that Peter take the Persian provinces on the Caspian side of the Caucasus, but he must not approach the Black Sea, which, since Azov had been returned to Turkey, was once again the Sultan’s private lake. Eventually, the Tsar and the Sultan amicably settled the matter by dividing up the Caucasus provinces of Persia. Inconveniently, the Persians did not accept this settlement, and continued intermittently fighting with both their powerful neighbors. In 1732, Empress Anne, tired of the constant drain on her resources by these Caspian provinces (up to 15,000 Russian soldiers were dying every year of disease in the unfamiliar climate) and restored them to Persia. It was not until the reign of Catherine the Great that the northern Caucasus was designated a Russian province, and not until 1813, in the time of Catherine’s grandson Alexander I, that Persia permanently ceded to Russia the coastal territories along the Caspian through which Peter the Great had marched on his final campaign.
* In the years that followed, Russian explorers and settlers crossed the strait, and a string of Russian forts and trading posts sprang up along the Alaska coast. Eventually, these Russian settlements reached as far south as San Francisco, where, in 1806, a little over eighty years after Peter’s death, a Russian fur-trading center was established. For more than a century, Alaska—known then as Russian America—was controlled by the state-owned Russian-American Company. In 1867, the vast area which became America’s forty-ninth state was sold by Tsar Alexander II for $7,000,000. Today, the only point on the globe where the frontiers of the United States and the Soviet Union actually meet is across the fifty-three miles of the Bering Strait.
* Weber describes an unusual kind of help which the Khan of Bokhara asked of Peter. The Khan’s ambassador in Petersburg, says Weber, “begged of the Tsar a number of Swedish girls to go along with him, or to give him leave to buy some, his master having heard that the Swedes were a very warlike nation, which made him desirous to have some of their race in his dominions.” This request met with a repulse; however, he found means to get two Swedish girls, whom he carried along with him.
* The huge, volcanic mountains of the Caucasus are higher than the Alps. Mount Elbrus rises 18,481 feet, Dykh-Yau 17,054 and a number of others are over 16,000. It was to one of these mighty peaks that Prometheus was said to have been chained.