Introduction

In 1581, the Russian raider Yermak Timofeev crossed the Ural Mountains, plundering and claiming for the tsar the land called Sibir (Siberia) by its Tatar inhabitants. Within fifty-odd years another adventurer, Ivan Moskvitin, reached the Sea of Okhotsk by overland route, advancing Russia’s claims (and the coverage of the term Siberia) well beyond the Tatar boundaries to a distance of almost 6,000 miles from Moscow. In the interval, Russians built a series of forts in these newly “discovered” eastern territories, subjugating or decimating scores of native peoples along the way. By the 1720s, when Peter the Great commissioned the Dane Vitus Bering to explore the straits leading to yet another continent, Russia was on the Pacific to stay. ¹