(4 of 7)
Almost unnoticed during this extended Time of Troubles was an event immensely important to the growth of the Russian Empire, the gradual takeover of Siberia. This remarkable process started back in the 14th century, and it was spearheaded not by the government but by the church. From the Holy Trinity-St. Sergius Monastery just north of Moscow, dozens of monks set forth into the forests to establish new monasteries where they could pray in isolation. In their footsteps came hunters and trappers, fortune hunters and hard-bitten frontiersmen known as cossacks. The remnants of the Mongol Empire were powerless to stop them.
A cossack pirate named Yermak Timofeyevich, in the employ of the Stroganovs (later famous for their beef stew), led a band of 840 musket-armed men through the Urals and defeated the lancers of the Khan of Sibir in 1572. He offered this doorway to Siberia to the Czar, who happily accepted. More cossacks came pouring in, for the profits were enormous. Two sable skins could buy a house, yet nearly 7,000 sables were trapped in one year. The conquest of this frozen wilderness took only 80 years. By 1647 the cossacks had established one of their ostrogs (forts) on the Sea of Okhotsk. Pressing southward to the Amur valley, they encountered the soldiers of China's Manchu Empire, who halted the cossacks' advance at the northern frontier of Manchuria.
What lay to the east of Kamchatka Peninsula remained a mystery, so Czar Peter the Great assigned a Danish shipmaker, Vitus Bering, to find out. It took him eight years to work his way across Siberia, then build a ship and sail across the strait that now bears his name. On July 18, 1741, he spotted the snow-covered mountains of Alaska. Cruising offshore for several months, he finally ran aground on a desolate island, and there Bering and many of his men died. But in his wake, more fur trappers peacefully took possession of Alaska and established forts as far south as California.
The Czar who sent Bering to death and fame had larger projects on his mind. A giant of 6 ft. 7 in., reputedly strong enough to roll up a silver plate like a parchment scroll, Peter was determined to wrestle his nation into the modern world of the West. Defeated by a smaller Swedish force at Narva in 1700, he rebuilt, retrained and rearmed his entire military, then routed Sweden's King Charles XII at Poltava in 1709. His victory eventually gave the Russians control of the Baltic states of Estonia and Latvia, and thus a large window to the West. In the swamps at the mouth of the Neva River, he had already begun building himself a modern capital. He dragooned tens of thousands of soldiers, peasants and prisoners into laboring under such appalling conditions that the city was said to be built on bones. But in ten years he laid the foundations for one of the wonders of the world, the parks and canals and esplanades of St. Petersburg, now Leningrad.