Glorious Misadventures: Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of a Russian America Read online

  The betrothal of Rezanov and Conchita Arguello on the shores of the Pacific marked the closing of a circle. The Spanish and the Russian empires had been working their way towards each other since the late fifteenth century. Spain had sent its conquistadors west to the New World of the Americas; Russia had dispatched Cossack adventurers east into the wildernesses of north Asia. The Spaniard Vasco Núñez de Balboa was the first Westerner to set eyes on the Pacific Ocean, crossing the Isthmus of Panama in 1513. One hundred and twenty years later the Russian fur trapper Ivan Moskvitin crested the ridge of the Okhotsk Mountains and gazed eastwards at the same ocean. American gold fuelled a century of Spain’s European wars and the glory of the court of Madrid, while Siberia’s ‘soft gold’ – fur – paid for campaigns against the Swedes, Turks and Tatars as the Russians carved themselves an empire and a place on the European stage. And now the two empires had finally met, with the hungry Russians regarding the fat and ill-defended Spanish lands of California with greedy eyes.

  Of the two fledgling European colonies on America’s northern Pacific coast at the dawn of the nineteenth century, it was New Archangel, not San Francisco, which was the more populous and better defended. Ships were built on New Archangel’s slipways and Boston traders regularly stopped in for news and supplies.4 Spanish San Francisco, in comparison, had a garrison of just forty soldiers and no docks when Rezanov visited in 1806. The Spanish governor of Nueva California told Rezanov that ‘the Spanish Court feared Russia above all the other powers’.5

  For Rezanov, not to seize the territory would be a crime against posterity. ‘If we allow it to slip through our fingers, what will succeeding generations say?’ he wrote. ‘I, at least, shall not be arraigned before them in judgement.’6

  Any historian who sets out to search for a hero will almost inevitably uncover something of the scoundrel. Heroism, it seems, is visible only through a long lens. And so it was with Rezanov. I followed the man’s shade from the boulevards and palaces of St Petersburg to the squat rain-dripping counting houses of Pskov, where he passed a dreary provincial apprenticeship. Travelling by train, coal truck and bouncing Lada, I tracked him from the Siberian city of Irkutsk, once the capital of Russia’s wild east, into the land of the Buryats and to the borders of China. I crunched along the black sand beaches of Petropavlovsk in Kamchatka and the black sand beaches of Kodiak Island, Alaska, at opposite ends of the Pacific. I stood in the remains of the presidio where Rezanov had danced with Conchita and shivered in the rain on the windy outcrop known as Castle Rock in Sitka, once the citadel of New Archangel, where he had spent the cold, hungry winter of 1805–6. And I spent hours – many hours, since Rezanov was a bureaucrat, a courtier and an ambassador who wrote something almost every day of his life – in the company of the reports, diaries and letters in which Rezanov described his ideas and circumstances voluminously, but his feelings only barely. It is only in the last three years of his life, far from home and viciously bullied by the officers of the round-the-world voyage he believed he was commanding, that the man himself begins to emerge from the officialese, indignant and in pain.

  The far side of the world was where Rezanov found both humiliation and, perhaps, love. Either – or both – seem to have liberated his spirit. But the privations he suffered and the power he wielded in those remote provinces of the Russian Empire also drove him a little mad. Rezanov was a great imperial visionary, but he could also be a liar and a schemer. He had moments of great bravery and sacrifice, but he was capable of shameless acts of buck-passing cowardice. Rezanov was a courtier and politician of genius, but he also dispensed summary justice and launched a private war against Japan for reasons of personal revenge. He probably loved Conchita, but in his official reports did everything to portray the relationship with the poor girl as a cynical political game. He was morbidly conscious of his own status to a degree that seems absurd to us today, yet during his embassy to Japan and his visit to California front and bluster were really all he had to offer, and they took him remarkably far.

  So Rezanov was perhaps not a hero. But certainly he was a man whose life spanned worlds. The two worlds in which he moved – the court and the wilderness – were separated by a social and geographical distance almost too vast to be grasped by a modern mind. Rezanov spoke to tsars and numbered the Russian Empire’s greatest men as his friends and enemies. His plans for Russian America were the subject of lively correspondence between Napoleon and Tsar Paul as they laid their plans for world domination. Yet Rezanov spent much of the last years of his life scrabbling for food and squabbling with illiterate mutinous frontiersmen.

  Nikolai Rezanov wanted to make his country a match for the upstart France with only a gang of Cossacks, criminals and the renegades of the frontier at his command. He wanted to plant a new, better Russia in the New World just as old England had created a vigorous new version of herself in the Thirteen Colonies which had recently formed themselves into the United States. Russian America would not be a republic, of course, but a well ordered company-run empire under the Tsar’s protection. That was his imperial vision – a dream of which almost nothing remains today. And yet in his lifetime it seemed, for a few tantalizing years, that Russia could successfully colonize America, with incalculable consequences for both.

  1

  Man and Nature

  There, by the billows desolate,

  He stood, with mighty thoughts elate,

  And gazed . . .

  Alexander Pushkin, The Bronze Horseman, 1833

  Our Russian land can bring forth her own Platos,

  And her own quick-witted Newtons . . .

  Mikhail Lomonosov, The Delight of Earthly Kings and Kingdoms, 1741

  No childhood could be more calculated to instil in a growing boy a sense of the supremacy of man over nature than growing up in St Petersburg as that great city rose from the marshes. In 1703 Peter the Great had ordered the construction of the first building on a sandy island on the northern bank of the Neva River, among mosquito-infested bogs criss-crossed by sluggish streams. A yearly levy of between thirty and forty thousand serfs – one conscript for every nine households in the empire – was brought on foot and under military escort to dig embankments and haul stone for the new palaces. Within two decades this slave army had transformed Peter’s plan into a great city of elegant houses and paved streets.

  By the time Nikolai Petrovich Rezanov was born on 28 March 1763 in the modest Rezanov family house near the Admiralty, St Petersburg was already a European metropolis. ‘The city could be called a wonder of the world,’ wrote the awestruck Hanoverian ambassador, ‘was it only in consideration for the few years that have been employed in the raising of it.’1 St Petersburg boasted an academy of sciences, a university, an academic gymnasium and a fine neoclassical cathedral, and its grid of streets had been laid out according to the latest principles of town planning by the finest architects of Europe.

  The city was defined by its artificiality. Its genesis and continued existence were wholly dependent on the person of the Tsar. St Petersburg was the ultimate Residenzstadt – a city built around an imperial court and financed by the state and, less willingly, the nobility. ‘St Petersburg is just a court, a confused mass of palaces and hovels, of grands seigneurs surrounded by peasants and purveyors,’ wrote the French encyclopedist Denis Diderot in 1774 after visiting at the Empress Catherine the Great’s invitation.2 As Rezanov was growing up in the 1770s only three of the city’s grand streets – Millionaya, Lugovaya and the English Line, later known as the English Embankment – had been fully completed. Behind these streets were rows of ‘wooden barracks as unpleasant as it is possible to imagine’, as the Empress herself noted,3 interspersed with the wooden houses of the lesser nobility, forced by decree to maintain residences in the capital.

  Sophia Fridericke von Anhalt-Zerbst, called Ekaterina Alexeyevna by her adopted countrymen, had taken the Russian throne as the Empress Catherine II six months before Rezanov’s birth in a coup against her sad lit
tle husband, Tsar Peter III. Catherine, with her characteristic energy, saw the half-built city as a challenge. ‘I found St Petersburg almost entirely of wood and will leave it covered with marble,’ she wrote to a friend in July 1770.4 In the meantime the city was a strange mixture of the grand and the ramshackle. ‘The [palaces’] walls are all cracked, quite out of perpendicular, and ready to fall,’ wrote Francesco Algarotti, a Venetian visitor, who attributed the poor quality of the buildings to the fact that they were constructed ‘of obedience rather than choice’. In Italy ‘ruins generally form themselves’, quipped the Italian, ‘but in St Petersburg they are built from scratch’.5

  Thus the Petersburg of Rezanov’s childhood was a vast building site. As a boy he would doubtless have joined the crowds of gentlemen in English-cut coats and the blinking Finnish fishermen who watched the great four- and five-ton blocks of granite manhandled from barges to create the new embankments along the Neva, an effort that began in 1763 and continued sporadically well into the next century. In 1781 Elizabeth, wife of Thomas Dimsdale, the English doctor who had been invited to inoculate Catherine and her children against smallpox, wondered if the titanic embankments would ever be finished. ‘The Russians are with great truth remarked to begin things with great spirit,’ Mrs Dimsdale observed. ‘And for a little time to go on very rapidly – then leave for some other object.’6

  As a young gentleman Rezanov would have attended plays in French at Russia’s First State Artistic Theatre near the Admiralty. We know he learned German and French – most probably from foreign tutors, members of the thriving colony of Western European dancing masters, tailors, teachers, soldiers, sea captains and adventurers who had flocked to the new Russian capital following the powerful scent of money.

  One of them was the French sculptor Étienne Maurice Falconet, who arrived in St Petersburg in 1766 at the Empress’s invitation. He spent twelve years creating his masterpiece, the equestrian statue of Peter the Great known as the Bronze Horseman (in Russian the Copper Horseman), a monument not only to Peter the Great but also to Catherine’s claim to be heir to Peter’s greatness. The pedestal on which the statue stands is a 1,200-ton piece of Karelian granite known as the Thunder Stone, which was dragged bodily by 400 workers across four miles of forest before being placed on a barge stabilized by two warships before being hauled again by hand to its current position on Senate Square.7 The progress of the awesome stone and the repeated unsuccessful attempts to cast the statue itself at the state foundries on Liteiny Prospekt were an ongoing drama in the life of the city, the subject of gossip and incredulity throughout the young Rezanov’s boyhood.

  The final ensemble was finally unveiled in 1782, and it is likely that the eighteen-year-old Rezanov was among the thousands of citizens and soldiers who turned out to witness the event. It was the kind of elaborate pyrotechnic ceremony Catherine loved. A giant pine box decorated with bunting, which had hidden the statue from public view, was collapsed with charges of gunpowder, accompanied by fireworks and massed drum rolls.8 In this Age of Enlightenment there could be no more dramatic proof that the vast powers of the Russian empress could bend land and sea to her will, and remake rude nature in the image of reason and order.

  Half finished as it was, the St Petersburg in which Rezanov grew up was already very distant from the rest of Russia. ‘A capital at the edge of an empire is like an animal with its heart in the tip of its finger,’ observed Catherine’s confidant Lev Naryshkin.9 But that was the point: Peter wanted a Russia as it could be, not as it was. St Petersburg was a maritime city in a largely landlocked country. It was a European capital for a nation which just a century before had resembled a Tatar khanate more than any European principality.

  The fortunes of the Rezanov family had closely mirrored those of Muscovy itself. Like many within the Russian nobility, the Rezanovs were not in fact Russians at all but descendants of Tatar nobles who had pledged allegiance to Russian princes. ‘Scratch a Russian and you find a Tatar,’ Joseph de Maistre, Savoy’s ambassador to St Petersburg, quipped to Napoleon.10 But for up to a quarter of the Russian aristocracy, it was literally true.

  The principalities of Kiev, Muscovy, Tver, Novgorod and Pskov had been under Mongol-Tatar suzerainty from 1237 until 1480, when the Muscovite Prince Ivan III finally defied the Golden Horde and ended the payment of tribute. His grandson Ivan IV Grozny – the Terrible, or more accurately the Stern – took the Tatar capital of Kazan in 1552. Ivan’s musketeers annexed Astrakhan, the capital of the Tatars of the lower Volga, in 1556. That year a Tatar beg or lord, Murat Demir Reza – later Russified to Rezanov11 – swore fealty to the Muscovite tsar and was rewarded with noble status.

  Unlike the feudal nobility of Western Europe, who held land in their own right, Russian noblemen were first and foremost personal servants of the tsar. They were called namestniki, literally ‘placed men’ and given lands and vassals to support them and their families, but their lands remained the property of the tsar. In this, as well as in its court dress, arms and armour and diplomatic customs,12 the Muscovite court closely resembled the khanates it had deposed. Murat Demir Reza’s switch from Tatar lord to Muscovite nobleman was an easy one. The Rezanovs, Russianized and baptized into Orthodoxy within a generation, became loyal and energetic servants of the tsars.

  In 1697 Tsar Peter I – later known as the Great – embarked on an eighteen-month incognito expedition to Holland and England during which he personally learned many useful skills, including tooth-pulling, shipbuilding and woodturning. The twenty-five-year-old tsar also discovered many wonders of Western technology. One was the wheelbarrow, in which, when drunk, Peter and his companions used to push each other into the prize holly hedges of Sayes Court, the Deptford house they rented from the diarist John Evelyn. (After the royal party had left the King’s Surveyor Sir Christopher Wren was called in to repair the damage to the gardens, while Charles II picked up the £350 bill for his Russian guests’ rampages.13) More importantly, Peter’s new interest in all things modern, from fire hoses and lepidoptery to city planning and astrology, inspired him to unleash a cultural revolution on his backward homeland.

  On his return Peter began his reforms with the nobility, banning arranged marriages, Tatar-style kaftans and tall hats and imposing a tax on those boyars who refused to shave their beards in the Western manner. Peter’s modern ideas, however, did not extend to political reform. He saw the nobility as servants of the state and agents of his royal will. In the final years of his reign Peter codified the strata of the Russian bureaucracy, army and court in a unified table of ranks. The idea was to create an educated class of noble bureaucrats, with each of the fourteen ranks corresponding to an order of nobility. Thus up-and-coming men – not to mention flocks of ambitious foreigners – could join the nobility by virtue of their service to the state. Some of the hereditary nobility, primarily from old Muscovite families allied with Peter’s estranged first wife, attempted to resist and were soon marginalized. Newer, more opportunistic families like the Rezanovs quickly saw that they had much to gain from Peter’s revolution, and remade themselves in the image of the new age.

  Gavriil Andreyevich Rezanov, grandfather to Nikolai, was born in 1699 and brought up as the ideal Petrine man. War, engineering and shipping were the growth industries of Peter’s Russia, and the young Gavriil mastered geometry, mathematics, engineering and shipbuilding and was one of the early residents of Peter’s new city on the Neva. By 1723 Gavriil Rezanov was working as an engineer on one of the Tsar’s pet projects, a seventy-two-mile canal intended to ease navigation between the Volga to the Baltic by bypassing the stormy Lake Ladoga.

  The Ladoga Canal was a classic Petrine project: faddishly scientific and technically ambitious, with its double locks and reinforced banks. But despite its Western and progressive conception the plan was executed by the slave labour of thousands of conscript soldiers and state-owned peasants. The canal was also – not unlike St Petersburg itself – more about vanity than utility, since its one-me
tre depth allowed only shallow-draught barges to pass along it. Within a generation it was abandoned in favour of a deeper parallel canal, and today the old waterway survives only as a picturesque weed-filled ditch cutting through the dacha-lands on the lake’s southern shore.

  Gavriil Rezanov’s superior on the Ladoga project was Burkhard Christoph von Münnich, a Danish-born soldier and engineer. Like many of the foreign military adventurers who came to Peter’s court, Münnich spent Russian lives freely in pursuit of his own ambitions. Nonetheless, Gavriil Rezanov thrived under this martinet, and by the time the canal was finally completed in 1730 Rezanov was Münnich’s deputy in charge of construction. The Dane was to be a useful patron. On Peter the Great’s death in 1725, his widow – crowned Empress Catherine I – appointed Münnich général en chef, the highest rank in the Russian army. The Dane went on to open Russia’s first engineering school and formally founded the Izmailovsky Life Guard Regiment. When the Empress Anna – Peter the Great’s niece and the second of the four empresses who ruled Russia in the eighteenth century – came to the throne in 1730, it was General Münnich who was instrumental in fulfilling her ambition to push Russian power deep into Europe.14

  Münnich’s campaigns were a rehearsal in miniature for the Russian Empire’s even greater conquests under Catherine the Great. He besieged the East Prussian port of Danzig, allowing Russia to install the first of several puppet kings of Poland in 1736. Then he took his new Izmailovsky Guards south for the first of a series of campaigns against the Tatar Khanate of Crimea, the final outpost of the Golden Horde. Major Gavriil Rezanov was one of many aristocratic officers of Tatar origin to march with him against his former kinsmen. A fellow officer was Baron Hieronymus von Münchhausen, whose tall tales of the siege of the Turkish fortress of Özi and other ‘Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia’ became a comedy classic when written up by an anonymous parodist and published in 1781 as The Surprising Adventures of Baron Münchhausen.