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Until 1637, when a separate department was set up exclusively to administer Siberian affairs, thirty or so clerks in the Kazan Department had to manage the logistics, finance and taxation, security and defence, justice and food provision for the entire south-east as well as Siberia. Since there was insufficient money to pay all its officials, the government allowed them to deduct their reward from the revenues they collected — usually in the form of furs, which in effect became currency in Siberia. Hostile natives were another problem. The state could not spare many troops to keep order, nor much equipment, and the natives’ weaponry was not invariably Stone Age. One petition to Tsar Michael from a service outpost pleaded for 200 carbines and coats of armour, because Buriat tribesmen in the area ‘have many mounted warriors who fight in armour and helmets … whereas we, your slaves, are ill-clothed, lack armour and our musket shot cannot pierce their armour’. ¹³ Taming Siberia was a shoestring operation.

Siberia’s native peoples comprised a colourful variety of ethnological and linguistic types. They included Mongols, reindeer-herding Tungus (Evenki), Yakuts and Itelmens, in addition to smaller populations of Chukchis, Kets, seal-hunting Yugits and Eskimos, the great majority of them pagan animists. ¹⁴ If they suffered less from the colonial experience than did the peoples of Central and South America or Africa, it was largely due to very low population density. There could never have been more than a quarter of a million of them in the whole wide country in the seventeenth century. This limited the toll taken by epidemics, and increased opportunities to avoid danger, whether from Russians or from other tribes. Some clashes with the Russians were inevitable, especially since some of the first Russian venturers were desperate and violent men, but did the high profile of Russian officialdom make relations with native peoples any less bloody than they were in other empires being created at that time?

The state’s policy of demanding native tribute provoked resistance and retaliation as well as compliance. Distance from Moscow encouraged some officials to collect more than was due and pocket the difference, to demand bribes, to sell justice, and to take natives as household slaves. But the natives sometimes retaliated. In 1634 Buriat tribesmen burned down Fort Bratsk, and ten years later, angered by the Russians, they mustered over 2,000 warriors to massacre them in their scattered settlements. The government understood at an early stage that ill-treatment of natives could lead to costly campaigns of pacification. As a result, it introduced a policy that took account of native fears and past experience. In 1644, for example, the governor of Irkutsk was told that

The Sovereign Tsar … has ordered that [tribute-paying native people] always be treated with consideration, that they suffer no violence, losses, extortions or impositions, and that … they should live in peace without fear, pursuing their occupations, and serve the Sovereign Tsar … and wish him well … Servicemen are ordered to bring men of newly-discovered lands who do not yet pay tribute under the exalted arm of the Sovereign Tsar, but in a kindly, not a violent manner.

Furthermore, a governor receiving such an order was to announce the policy with formal ceremony to representatives of the natives concerned. Enforcement was sometimes difficult, but the government did take steps to enforce the rule and punish oppressive agents and officials.

Prejudice was confined to religion, but conversion was strictly a voluntary matter. Tributary people were to be baptized only ‘after careful investigation to determine that they wish it of their own free will’. ¹⁵ Once baptized, however, a native was regarded as acceptable even to enter the tsar’s service. Unlike most other colonizing peoples, the Russians were free of anti-native prejudices.