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Peter’s preference for a Persian road to India and his preoccupation with the Swedish war had led to his neglecting Siberian affairs. In 1708 Siberia had become a province (guberniia), one of eight into which Peter divided his realm, but it was so vast and had such difficulties of communication that it had to be divided into five only slightly more manageable districts. Three years later all Siberia was put in the charge of the experienced Prince Matvei Gagarin, who had headed the central government’s Siberian Department and was now allowed to continue in that office. The arrangement left lines of responsibility unclear, and gave him far too much power. The door to corruption was left open, and Gagarin strode happily through it. In particular he defrauded the government by breaching its China trade monopoly, selling permits to merchants and his own goods to the Chinese, representing them as the state’s. So far from being exclusive, the princely title in Russia was heritable by all descendants, not only the eldest of each generation, and it did not save Gagarin from retribution. He was hanged publicly in St Petersburg in 1714, as a warning to others. The warning was repeated in the edict (ukaz) on the Preservation of Civil Rights issued eight year later: ‘Anyone … behaving like Gagarin contrary to this decree shall be put to death as a law breaker and an enemy of the state … [without being given] mercy on account of his former merits.’ ¹⁶

Meanwhile the frontier in Siberia was being pushed further out, the limits of the unknown receding. In 1696 a handful of Cossacks sent to subdue local Koriak tribesmen had found their way to the river Kamchatka and back to their base fort on the Anadyr. It took until 1711 to bring all of the great Kamchatka peninsula under control. Of its inhabitants, the Kamchadales were to be described as ‘timorous, slavish, and deceitful’, but in 1706 they had rebelled, attacked a Russian fort, and slaughtered many Cossacks. As for the Koriaks themselves, they spoke loudly ‘with a screeching tone’ and, according to Stepan Krashennikov, who was sent to study Kamchatka and its peoples later in the century, were ‘rude, passionate, resentful … cruel’ and ridden with lice, which they ate. They ‘never wash[ed] their hands nor face, nor cut their nails … [ate] out of the same dish with the dogs … [and] everything about them stinks of fish.’ ¹⁷

This was not a simple case of better-armed colonizers coming to exploit and oppress innocent but backward natives. These natives could be bellicose (they rebelled in 1710 and again in 1713), and the Kamchadales treated enemies who fell into their hands barbarously — burning them, hanging them by their feet, tearing out their entrails, lopping their limbs off while they were still alive.

In 1714 Peter sent shipwrights to Okhotsk, on the mainland coast opposite Kamchatka in order to bypass Koriak territory. If there were assets to be had there the colonizers might have found the risks posed by natives worthwhile, but in this region there were few resources except for fish and reindeer, and Russia had no shortage of either. Hence the development of Okhotsk to the north of Sakhalin, westward from Kamchatka across the Sea of Okhotsk. However, the Russian population of eastern Siberia was small (66,000 in 1710), and it grew little for some time thereafter. ¹⁸

At the time of Peter’s death it was still not certain whether Siberia was contiguous to North America or separated by the ocean, but in that year steps were taken towards finding the answer. Peter’s widow and successor, Catherine I (a former serving girl captured in Livonia), commissioned Vitus Bering, a Danish sailor in the Russian service, to go east to Okhotsk and Kamchatka, build two ships, and sail them east.

You shall endeavour to discover, by coasting with these vessels, whether the country towards the north, of which at present we have no distinct knowledge, is part of America or not.

If it joins the continent of America, you shall endeavour, if possible, to reach some colony belonging to some European power; or in case you meet with any European ship, you shall diligently enquire the name of the coasts, and such other circumstances as it is in your power to learn …

It was to take Bering two years to reach Okhotsk overland, and another year to build the boats, but at last, on 14 July 1728, he set sail in the St Gabriel with two officers and a crew of forty. On 8 August he met a Chukchi in a boat, and soon some islands, but spied no other land. ¹⁹ Thus Bering discovered the strait that was to be named after him, returning to base that same September. The islands, which we now know as the Aleutians, and the surrounding waters turned out to be rich in sea otter and other animals yielding valuable furs, but this was incidental. Russia was already feeling its way to becoming a Pacific power. ²⁰