HOW RUSSIA CAME TO CONQUER SIBERIA.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1508, 24 January 1901, Page 64

HOW RUSSIA CAME TO CONQUER SIBERIA.

Mr Henry Norman is an authority on all things Russian, and in “Scribner’s Magazine” briefly summarises the story of the man who started Russia upon her path of conquest in the East. In the sixteenth century there lived on the banks of the Volga a man named Vassiii, the son of Timothy, the son of Athanasius Alenin the carter, earning his hard bread by towing boats up the great river. lie was nicknamed “the millstone,” because he ground the corn for his comrades- —Yermak. A man of iron physique and primitive passions, the lonely boats were at bis mercy, so be became a pirate and murdered their owners and plundered their contents. At last the dreadful tales reached the ears of Ivan the Terrible, who decreed his death, and sent a force to hang him and his band of Don Cossacks. Up the highway of the Volga they fled, till on the. banks of the Khama, not far from the frot of the Ural Mountains, they came to the abode of a rich family of settlers and traders named Strcganoff, who at that very moment were casting envious eyes across the range to the land of Yugra, whence the Osfiaks hmiisdit such nrec.io.us sables,

In Yermak the StroganolFs saw the man they needed. They furnished him with money and arms, he gathered a crew of adventurers round him, and on Now Year’s Day, 1581, he started. That .was the beginning, the railway to Port Arthur is not the enu. Yermak was a fox in cunning and a fox in daring. His perils were endless, and his sufferings were terrible. One by one bis old Cossack comrades of the Volga were slain by his side, and at last be was literally caught napping by his chief enemy, the blind Tartar chief. Kuchum, in a camp on the. banks of the Irtysh River, and after cutting his way to the water, was drowned while trying, like the old boatman he was, to swim to safety. But before this he had carried the two-headed eagle of Byzantium, which Ivan the terrible had just adopted for the blazon of Muscovy, almost as far as the site of Tobolsk; he had bartered the key of a new empire for the Czar’s pardon; he was* a prince, and wore a mantle sent him by the Imperial hands • he had set Russia’s goal immutably in the East. Moreover, although. Kuchum killed him in the end, he had seized the old man’s capital two years before, and made it a centre of Asiatic trade for Russia. , This capital was. called Sibir, and it has given its name to five million square