Albazinsky jail - random photo sketches. How, thanks to the Cossack expansion, the Amur region became Russian Albazin Fortress on the Amur
October 5th, 2017
"Traveler, bring the message to our citizens in Lakodaemon that, having fulfilled the covenant of Sparta, here we have perished with our bones." These proud words are carved on a huge stone placed on a hill at the entrance to the Thermopylae Gorge in Greece. Here in September 480 BC. e. there was a famous battle of three hundred Spartans under the command of King Leonidas with the Persian army of Xerxes. The heroes died every single one, but they provided much-needed time to unite the detachments of the Greek city-states into a single army.
The Cossacks in the Far East also have their own Thermopylae. This is the Albazinsky prison, the defense of which in 1685 and 1686 will forever remain one of the most heroic pages in the history of Russia. Just like the Spartans of Leonid, the Cossacks managed, at the cost of incredible efforts and sacrifices, to keep their most important strategic line on the Amur. And, like the Spartans, they were betrayed.
"According to the Cossack painting, like Kromy, erected ..."
As already mentioned in the article "", immediately after returning to Albazin, Ataman Alexei Tolbuzin began to restore the Albazin prison with all his energy. The new structure was based not on the old Moscow or Siberian experience of fortification, based on the use of wooden structures, but on the Cossack, Don one. In the official “fairy tale” sent to Moscow, the Nerchinsk voivode Ivan Vlasov wrote: “The Albazinsky prison will be made good, it will be erected according to the Cossack painting, like Kromy ...” In the mouth of the Muscovite voivode, the mention that Albazin was built ”sounds like a verdict of guaranteed impregnability of the new fortress: in 1685, the serving “sovereign serfs” remembered, of course, the inglorious siege of the Krom fortress for the Moscow rati in Time of Troubles, which was successfully defended by the Don ataman Andrey Korela for half a year.
Cossack fortresses differed not in the height of the walls, but in the wide use of land for the purposes of fortification - this feature of the Cossack fortification directly copied the experience of ancient Roman military camps. The Cossacks dug deep ditches, the earth from which spilled out onto wide lattice log cabins from large tree trunks, as a result, a relatively low shaft with a wide upper platform was obtained, along which even small cannons could be moved. This design of the Cossack fortresses made it possible to quickly move the available forces of the defenders (of which the Cossacks never had an abundance) to the most threatened, fraught with a breakthrough direction of the assault. In addition, the cores easily stuck in the ground, and the land thrown out by the explosion of a land mine had practically no damaging effect.
The new Albazin fortress became, apparently, the most powerful fortification in the upper reaches of the Amur, even Aigun, the main Chinese outpost in the region, was inferior to Albazin. However, Albazin also had his "Achilles' heel" - the lack of artillery: there were only eight old copper cannons and three light squeaks in the fortress, which somehow "survived" in Nerchinsk from the time of Yerofei Khabarov. In the desperate hustle and bustle of preparing for the invasion, the Chinese were dragged to Albazin and a heavy mortar that fired pood cannonballs. This cannon, throwing cannonballs along a high parabola, would be invaluable for the attackers, but completely useless in defense. In addition, with its huge caliber, the mortar literally “ate” scarce gunpowder.
Cossack German
The main defensive resource of Albazin was, no doubt, people. Simple people- Don, Tobolsk and Transbaikal Cossacks - quite consciously and without any administrative coercion returned to Albazin after their courageous and decisive ataman Tolbuzin. “Father Lexiy” himself did not know, he seemed to be tired. There was a feeling that he appeared everywhere at the same time: on the pier under construction, on the observation tower, in deep powder magazines specially dug at the base of the shafts, near artillery crews.
Another very valuable figure in the coming strategic battle between Muscovy and China was the German Athanasius Beyton, the brilliant military genius of Albazin. Being a Prussian officer, Bayton entered the Russian army in 1654 and immediately took part in the outbreak of the Russian-Polish war of 1654-1667. Even before graduation, he was transferred to serve in Tomsk, where, among other foreign officers, he trained Great Russian reiters for the emerging regiments of the "new order".
In Tomsk in 1665, Bayton married a Cossack woman and, like any German who has lived in Russia for a long time, became quite sincerely Russified. He converted to the Cossacks, converted to Orthodoxy and, for his merits, was transferred to Moscow for promotion to "boyar children." However, in the musty semi-Byzantine palaces of what was then Moscow, the “Cossack German” Athanasius seemed incredibly sad, and he filed a petition for a transfer to Yeniseisk - an unprecedented case for the Great Russian nobility proper.
In Siberia, Bayton had to participate in many Cossack raids against the Dzungars and the Yenisei Kirghiz, and in all campaigns the German proved to be an excellent commander and an excellent comrade. Small in stature, with a mustache drooping in the Zaporozhian manner, in a blue Cossack chekman and a shaggy hat, the German Beyton practically did not differ in appearance from the Cossacks around him. This difference was visible and audible only in battle: instead of a Cossack saber, the German preferred a heavy Prussian broadsword, and instead of a wolf howl, familiar to attacking Cossacks, he fiercely shouted "Mein Gott!" Friendly relations were established between the voivode Tolbuzin and Beyton. For both, the main motive for their activities was not personal ambition or enrichment, but military success in the fight against China.
Cossacks and Chinese: a struggle of will
The revival of Albazin happened so quickly that at the headquarters of the Aigun grouping of the Chinese army, at first they did not want to believe the testimonies of the scouts. Then irritation came: the Cossacks were accused of treachery. The irritation of the Chinese military leaders was all the stronger because the Kangxi Emperor had already been informed of the complete victory over the "mi-hou" [ literal translation from Chinese: "people with monkey-like faces." - N. L.].
The hatred of the Chinese for the Cossacks of Albazin also increased from the fact that, unlike in previous years, the Cossacks under the command of Beiton were clearly trying to seize the military initiative. On October 2, 1685, on the distant approaches to Albazin (on the so-called Levkaev meadow, in the area of modern Blagoveshchensk), a Cossack hundred killed a Chinese border patrol of 27 people. In response, on October 14, the Manchurian Kangxi cavalry attacked and burned Pokrovskaya Sloboda, partly killing and partly capturing the Russian settler peasants. Beiton's Cossacks gave chase, but the Manchus managed to escape to the right bank of the Amur, which the Cossacks were prevented from crossing by the ice drift. However, already in early November, on the first ice, Beyton crossed the Amur and destroyed the Chinese siding at the site of the village of Monastyrshchina burned by the Manchus. In early December, the Cossacks successfully attacked the Manchurian village of Esuli on the Chinese bank of the Amur, burned it, and, taking prisoners, safely left for Albazin.
In response, the Chinese made a daring raid right in the heart of Albazin: just 10 miles from the fortress, they completely burned the Russian village of Bolshaya Zaimka. This audacity inflamed the Cossacks, and they decided to respond in such a way as to forever discourage the Chinese from “doing searches” for Albazin. It was decided to strike directly at the strategic deployment center of the Aigun group of Kangxi troops at the Huma military camp, which served as the main base for raids by Chinese troops up the Amur.
In the early morning of February 24, a regular Manchu patrol went outside the walls of Huma to build. Before the Manchus had time to mount their horses, a coordinated aimed salvo was heard from the slope of the nearest hill: eight cavalrymen were killed on the spot. Following this, from a side hollow adjacent to the fortress, with a furious wolf howl, the Cossack "special forces" rushed to Khuma: on foot, specially selected scouts armed with daggers and pistols. The Manchus tried to escape through the gates of the fortress, but no such luck: the horses, frightened by the howl of wolves, broke off their bridles, rushed to freedom, trampled the fallen riders. Not even a few minutes had passed, and the gates of Huma were already wide open by the scouts who had captured them. The Manchurian garrison inside the fortress tried to recapture the gates, but it was too late - two hundred Beiton Cossacks flew into them on frosty horses. The felling has gone. Its result was forty Manchu corpses, a dozen prisoners, and Huma burned to the ground. Bayton lost seven men.
New battle for Albazin
The burning of Huma shocked the cabinet of Emperor Kangxi: it became clear that a new large-scale military expedition against Albazin was indispensable. The experienced strategist Kangxi decided not to rush, but then solve the problem once and for all: the Cossacks had to be driven out not only from the Amur, but from Transbaikalia in general. secret office The emperor, having received this instruction, soon prepared a detailed military-strategic report: a kind of Chinese plan "Barbarossa".
According to this plan, the Chinese army was to hit Albazin with all its might. At the same time, the Mongols allied with China, acting along the eastern tip of Lake Baikal, were supposed to cut off all Russian communications leading to Nerchinsk, the main military base of the Muscovites in Transbaikalia. Then, with concentric attacks by the Chinese from the east, and the Mongols from the west, Nerchinsk was to be captured and destroyed along with the surrounding Russian population. The strategic outcome of the campaign was to be a complete cleansing of Transbaikalia from the Russians - the combined Mongol-Chinese army, according to the plans of Kangxi, went to Baikal, where a powerful military fort was to be built.
Langtan, the commander-in-chief of the expeditionary corps, having entered into personal submission to the Kangxi Emperor, began hostilities on June 11, 1686. The forces of the Chinese army were considerable: 3,000 selected Manchurian cavalry and 4,500 Chinese infantrymen with 40 guns and 150 warships and cargo ships.
On July 9, 1686, the Chinese army approached Albazin. The Cossacks were already waiting for her: all Russian population the surrounding villages were hidden behind the walls in time, and the fields that were already earing were burned.
Slowly dispersing, Langtan's army gradually surrounded the fortress. They approached the new, perfectly cut down pier Chinese ships. Lantan, satisfactorily surveying his military armada from his horse, did not suspect resistance. How later he regretted his carelessness!
The gates of Albazin suddenly burst open, and out of them, down the steep slope of the Amur coast, rushed five hundred "Cossack people" armed to the teeth. Their blow was terrible: the Chinese infantrymen, who did not have time to reorganize from marching to siege order, were crushed, panic began. Drenched from head to toe in the blood of others and their own, tirelessly smashing the crazed enemy with daggers, the Cossacks stubbornly broke through to the shore - to where Chinese ships with weapons and provisions were moored. Another onslaught, and they broke into the pier - the neighbors Chinese ships blazed - exactly those on which there was food for the Chinese army. It seemed that the defeat of Lantan's army was close: only one strike by three or four hundred Cossacks on the flank of the actually overturned Chinese army could solve the whole thing. Alas, voivode Tolbuzin did not even have one reserve hundred - hello to the courtiers of Muscovy - decades of mediocre resettlement policy once again fully demonstrated their fruits.
A flank attack by the Cossacks could not have taken place, but the Manchurian cavalry managed to inflict it, having approached the battlefield in time. To the credit of the Cossack German Beyton, he was waiting for this blow: the rapidly reorganized flank hundred hit the Manchus and ensured that the Cossacks retreated to the fortress in full order.
Langtan was terribly annoyed by what had happened, moreover, he immediately faced the problem of food supply for the army. In a rage, the commander Kangxi ordered the execution of the commanders of those Chinese formations that fled. However, in the future, the practice of the “punishing sword” had to be abandoned: on July 13, Beyton repeated the sortie from Albazin with almost the same result: the Chinese ran again, the Manchus again managed to stop the advancing Cossacks with a flank attack. Lantanyu became completely clear major weakness Albazin: lack of the required number of defenders. Realizing this, the commander Kangxi proceeded to a methodical siege of the fortress.
Trial of Pale Death
Initially, the Chinese commander ordered a massive bombardment of the fortress from all the barrels of "cart artillery". There was a lot of shooting, but the fortress, built according to Cossack technology, withstood all the shelling. True, after two months of methodical shelling, the Albazin garrison suffered a really heavy loss: on September 13, the Chinese core tore off the leg above the knee of the governor Alexei Tolbuzin. The Tobolsk chieftain died four days later from pain shock and great blood loss. The "Cossack German" Bayton was very sad about the loss of a comrade. Later, he sincerely writes in his report: “We drank the same bloody cup with the deceased, with Alexei Larionovich, and he chose heavenly joy for himself, and left us in sorrow.”
Having burned enough on Albazin, Lantan in the 20th of September 1686 decided to persuade the garrison to surrender. The command of the fortress with the released Russian prisoner Fedorov was handed a letter: “You don’t make big forces angry, rather surrender ... And if this doesn’t happen, we won’t part for good.” Beiton answered with a firm refusal and mockingly released three captured Manchus behind the walls of the fortress: they say, for one Russian, I will give three of your “Bogdoists”.
Lantan took the hint and immediately sent troops to storm Albazin. The assault went on continuously with all the forces of the Chinese army for five days (!) And did not give the attackers any results. Then, until the beginning of October, the commander Kangxi twice more raised his troops to storm the Cossack Thermopylae - and again to no avail. Moreover, in response to the assaults, the Cossacks switched to sorties. As a result of the most effective of them, the fifth in a row, artillery depots were blown up and the food grain delivered from the lower reaches of the Amur burned again.
As a result, by mid-October, the position of the Lantan expeditionary army became very complicated. Only irretrievable losses in manpower amounted to more than 1,500 people, ammunition was running out, food rations per soldier were reduced four times. The resistance of the Cossacks in Albazin was so stunningly effective that the personal office of Emperor Kangxi was forced to issue a special circular for foreign ambassadors explaining the failures on the Amur. The “explanation” was drawn up, of course, taking into account the Chinese mentality: “The Russians in Albazin stand to the death, because they have no choice. All of them are criminals sentenced to death and unable to return to their homeland.”
In early November 1686, Lantan ordered the cessation of all active operations against Albazin and the beginning of a "silent" siege. The Chinese commander would not have taken this rash decision, perhaps, if he knew that out of 826 defenders of the fortress, only 150 people survived, and the entire central square of the fortress was turned into a cemetery. Scurvy was rampant in Albazin - the Cossacks suffered all the main losses not from the bullets of the Chinese, but from the “pale death” and related diseases. Bayton himself, due to swollen, ulcerated legs, could hardly move on crutches.
However, in the Chinese military camp, the situation was little better. Already in December, as a result of Cossack raids, Langtan practically ran out of food - the Chinese army began to look like a crowd of emaciated people who could hardly hold weapons. Lantan also could not retreat from Albazin: the ships of the Chinese flotilla froze into the Amur, and the Manchurian horses were either eaten or died from lack of fodder. In severe frosts, the march of extremely exhausted people, more than 500 km long, to the Esuli fort burned by the Cossacks could become a death sentence for the entire Chinese army.
In the current situation, if the Muscovite administration in Transbaikalia had at least some available military forces, one strike by a military detachment of 200-300 people would be enough to put an end to the entire Chinese expeditionary force once and for all.
Military results of the Cossack Thermopylae
Information about the military embarrassment of the Chinese expeditionary army in the Amur region has finally become the property of the diplomatic circles of Asian and European countries. The Qing Empire, in order to maintain political prestige, refused to withdraw its troops from the Amur, although an epidemic covered the exhausted soldiers of the expeditionary force: in January-February 1687, the Chinese lost more than a thousand soldiers from diseases alone. Nevertheless, Lantan, having not received an order to retreat, clenched his teeth, continued the "deaf" siege of Albazin. However, at the beginning of 1687, the Cossack fortress was probably defended not by people, but by the unbroken spirit of the heroes who died here: only 66 defenders remained in Albazin, of which only nineteen Cossacks could hold weapons.
Order about complete withdrawal Langtan received a siege only at the beginning of May 1687. A discordant crowd of human shadows, in which one could hardly recognize the furious Manchu warriors, slowly stretched down the Amur. Far from Albazin, this army could not retreat: already after ten miles the Chinese set up a camp in which the Kangxi soldiers put themselves in order until the end of August. Only on August 30, the miserable remnants of Lantan's corps set sail on ships towards Aigun. The invasion ended in disaster.
As a result of the Albazin Thermopylae, the influence of the Qing Empire in the Amur basin became illusory. Success near Albazin was not the only one. The Cossacks of the Yakutsk Voivodeship severely suppressed the Tungus uprising, inspired by Chinese emissaries. Pursuing the Tungus, the Cossacks found a large Chinese detachment in the area of the Tungir portage and completely destroyed it. The Cossacks of Nerchinsk utterly defeated the Mungal khans - allies of Kangxi. Having lost several thousand horsemen, the Mungals (Mongols) unconditionally withdrew from the war, and now there was no question of any concentric attack on Nerchinsk from two sides. In Yeniseisk, a 4,000-strong Cossack-Russian army was prepared to be sent to the Amur. It seemed that Muscovite Russia forever came into the possession of the richest lands by Amur. Alas, it only seemed...
Tough negotiations
On July 20, 1689, Russian-Chinese peace negotiations began in Nerchinsk. From the side of the Muscovites they were led by Fyodor Golovin, later a well-known figure in the "Petrov's nest". Golovin was the most typical representative of the Moscow elite of the pre-Petrine era, the era of the destruction of the Great Russian national identity as a result of the destructive reforms of Patriarch Nikon. Sharp mind, but unprincipled, monstrously resourceful, but strong-willed, easily "stepping over the heads" for his personal career, Fedor Golovin could successfully fulfill his diplomatic mission in Nerchinsk if the ax of unconditional royal will hung over him. Alas, this will was not felt in Nerchinsk: in Moscow, the final act of the struggle between Tsarina Sofya Alekseevna and young Peter I for power was unfolding. Golovin was left, essentially, to his own devices, and disposed of this position with obvious benefit to himself.
From the Chinese side, the diplomatic mission was headed by the commander of the imperial guard, Prince Songgotu. The delegation included Lantan, already known to us, as well as two Jesuit translators: the Spaniard Thomas Pereira and the Frenchman Jean-Francois Gerbillon.
The negotiations were not easy. The main stumbling block was, of course, Albazin. The Chinese demanded the unconditional destruction of these Cossack Thermopylae. Fedor Golovin was ready to recognize China's sovereignty over the lower reaches of the Amur, but on the condition that the border between Russia and China along Albazin be maintained. The instruction received by Golovin in Embassy order Muscovy, clearly demanded the preservation of Albazin as the eastern military outpost of Russia. There was a moment when Prince Songgotu tried to "turn chessboard": he began to threaten immediate war - fortunately, the Qing ambassadors arrived in Nerchinsk, accompanied by an army of 15 thousand people and special regiment artillery. Golovin, who did not bother to bring military forces to Nerchinsk in advance, could rely only on a consolidated corps of Russian archers, Cossacks and Tungus, with a total number of no more than three thousand people. Nevertheless, in this case, Golovin showed determination: he announced to Songgot his agreement to break off negotiations and began defiantly fortifying the walls of Nerchinsk.
Songgotu, seeing the determination of the Russians to fight, returned to the negotiations. The Chinese prince simply could not do otherwise, because on the eve he received a clear instruction from the emperor himself, where Kangxi ordered to significantly moderate territorial claims against the Russians. “If Nerchinsk is made a border, then the Russian envoys,” Kangxi wrote, “will have nowhere to stop, and this will make communication difficult ... Aigun can be made a border.”
The Chinese fort Aigun was located more than 500 km east of Albazin, which means that the Chinese were ready not only to put up with the existence of Albazin, but even to transfer a huge strip of land to the east of the fortress to the Muscovites.
Such pliability of Kangxi was, of course, not accidental. Albazin was not taken, the walls of the fortress were strengthened. It became very restless on the Mongolian-Chinese border: yesterday's allies were clearly preparing for a war with China. However, the most disturbing development was the powerful invasion of the Dzungars into the western provinces of the Qing. The Supreme Khan of the Dzungars, Galdan, persistently offered Moscow Russia a joint military intervention in China. Kangxi had no illusions about whether Fyodor Golovin knew about these initiatives of the Dzungar Khan. Golovin, of course, knew about this. I knew ... - and surrendered Albazin!
Betrayed and forgotten
How this happened is still not clear to any historian in the world. How could one agree to the total destruction of a fortress that was not occupied by the enemy, while at the same time transferring over 1 million square kilometers to him free of charge? With the painting by Fyodor Golovin on the Nerchinsk Treaty, Muscovite Russia lost almost the entire Amur basin, conquered by the Cossacks, up to the Pacific coast. The strategically important heights of the Greater and Lesser Khingan were lost. And with the loss of the fertile lands of the Middle Amur plains, Russia automatically lost the grain (that is, food) self-sufficiency of Transbaikalia and Eastern Siberia. Now every kilogram of grain had to be transported to Nerchinsk or Yakutsk not from a distance of 700-800 km, but from the Urals and Western Siberia, that is, at a distance of 3.5-4 thousand kilometers!
When Fyodor Golovin returned to Moscow, he did not try to explain to Tsar Peter I how it was possible, in exceptionally favorable foreign policy conditions, to lose at the negotiating table what was reliably protected by Cossack steadfastness in a bloody struggle. The complete liquidation of the large gold treasury, which was issued to him in the Ambassadorial order for the needs of bribing foreign ambassadors, as well as "less thieves and charming people", Golovin explained by the need ... to bribe Jesuit translators. It was only thanks to this generous bribe that the damned Catholics agreed to help the Muscovite, finally, to persuade the hard-nosed, absolutely unbending “Bogdoists”.
The famous Russian proverb that if you are not caught, then you are not a thief, was born, no doubt, in the gloomy corridors of Muscovy's orders. Fedor Golovin was not caught by the hand. The first of the great Russian boyars, having cut off his beard and lit a smelly pipe, he made a brilliant career under Peter I. To whom the bribe for the surrender and destruction of Albazin was paid - Golovin or the Jesuits of the Songgotu mission - will forever remain a mystery. However, common sense cannot remain beyond the bounds of time: why pay, when, according to the instructions of Emperor Kangxi, the Songgotu mission was to transfer not only Albazin, but almost the entire middle Amur to the possession of Russia ?!
There is an old Cossack legend about how Yesaul Beyton said goodbye to Albazin. Having received a monstrous order from Fyodor Golovin, which ordered "... to destroy the city of Albazin, and to dig out the shaft without a trace, and to bring the service people with their wives and children and with all their bellies to Nerchinsk," Bayton gathered the Cossacks on the banks of the Amur. He convinced them for a long time that it was necessary to leave, that no real forces had come from Muscovy all the time after the siege, that the Chinese would return anyway and there would be cutting again, there would be blood. The Cossacks stubbornly argued, refused to leave. Then Bayton, in a rage, pulled out his heavy broadsword from the scabbard and with the words: “We should not be in Albazin - how can this broadsword not float up!” - threw the weapon at Cupid. And here, oh wonder! The broadsword, supported by a powerful whirlpool, suddenly floated up with the handle up - as if in the form of a cross - and, sparkling with a gilded stripe in the sun, slowly, very slowly sank to the bottom ...
After the departure of the Cossacks from Albazin, the Russian people were able to re-enter the high banks of the Amur only two hundred years later - in the second half of the 19th century.
In the Thermopylae Gorge, already 60 years after the death of three hundred Spartans, a stern, beautiful in its courageous simplicity monument was erected. In the small village of Albazino, Amur Region, which is slowly dying away like thousands of other villages in Russia, there is still no monument to the fallen Cossacks.
Albazin (Russian-Chinese border conflict, 1683-1689). Russian defense of Albazin in 1685-1687. This town on the Amur was founded in 1651 by the Cossacks headed by E.P. Khabarov. In 1683, the rulers of China, seeking to oust the Russians from the Amur region, began military operations against them in the area of the Zeya and Sungari rivers. In 1685, a 2,000-strong Chinese detachment approached Albazin, whose garrison, headed by the governor A. Tolbuzin, after a short resistance, surrendered on the condition of a free exit. The Chinese destroyed this stronghold of the Russian presence on the Amur, and then left the area. Then Tolbuzin, on the orders of the Nerchinsk governor Vlasov, returned with his people to the place of the destroyed prison and laid a new one in its place.By the summer of 1686, Albazin was rebuilt, and in July of the same year, a 5,000-strong Chinese army with 40 guns approached the fortress. The number of defenders of the fortress did not exceed 1 thousand people. This time the Russians defended themselves staunchly and beat off all the attacks. During one of them, governor Tolbuzin was mortally wounded by a cannonball. However, the death of the commander did not bring confusion to the ranks of the defenders of the fortress, and they continued the defense. In the meantime, news came to Beijing about the imminent arrival of a Russian mission in Nerchinsk, headed by the devious F.A. Golovin. Upon learning of this, the Chinese Emperor Kangxi ordered to stop active fighting near Albazin. The very same siege of the fortress continued, and the Albazin garrison courageously withstood the harsh winter sitting.
In the spring of 1687, the Chinese, fearing the approach of F.A. Golovin with the army, lifted the siege of Albazin, and in August they finally left the area. The battle for Albazin was the culmination of the Russian-Chinese border conflict (1683-1689). Under the terms of the Nerchinsk Treaty (1689), Golovin's mission, surrounded by the Chinese army in Nerchinsk, ceded Albazin and part of the land north of the Amur to China.
Used materials of the book: Nikolai Shefov. Russian battles. Military History Library. M., 2002.
ALBAZIN - Russian. fortress on the river Amur. In 1648, E. Khabarov with a hundred Cossacks went down the Amur, conquered 5 cities in Dauria, collected yasak, exchanged various goods from the natives and returned to Yakutsk. In 1650, having again gathered the brave men, he went to Dauria, took the city of A., and in 1651 established himself in the Komarsky prison, downstream of the Amur. Other eager people followed in his footsteps, and on Wednesdays. the course of the river formed a number of Russian. Ostrozhkov. The conquest of the Amur led to clashes with the Chinese, since the Qing imp. Kangxi considered these lands his own. His subjects, in order to force the Russians to leave, ordered local residents leave the shores of the Amur, believing that the Russians, left without a means of subsistence, will themselves leave here. However, the Russians held on to the Amur for a long time. Whale. troops attacked them, ruining the prisons, but they appeared again and again, and a little later arable land began to appear next to the prisons. The tribes living on the Amur - Natki and Gilyaks - paid yasak already in Russian. to the tsar, but, incited by the Chinese, they refused to pay tribute and began to fight with the Cossacks. By 1685, only the Amur fortress remained intact on the Amur, the garrison of which was commanded by the tsar. governor A. L. Tolbuzin. The Qing government demanded that he release A., but the governor refused to comply with the ultimatum. The garrison of the prison then consisted of 450 people, armed with 3 cannons and 4 cannonballs. Resist the Qing. troops arrived on a hundred ships, each of which had 30-50 infantrymen, and thousands of cavalry soldiers who approached by land, the Albazins could not. They were forced to leave the city and go to Nerchinsk "barefoot, naked and hungry, eating grass and roots." The Manchus razed Azerbaijan to the ground. But a year later, Tolbuzin returned and put up a new A. In July 1686, the fortress was again attacked, but its 10-month-old. the siege (until May 1687) did not bring success to the Chinese. True, Tolbuzin was killed. His place was taken by a Cossack regiment. Bayton, who was going to defend the last Russian outpost in Dauria to the end, but the Chinese suddenly stopped hostilities. It turned out that the “great” ambassador of the tsars Ivan and Peter Alekseevich, the roundabout F. A. Golovin, was traveling to the emperor, who was accompanied by a huge retinue - approx. 2 thousand people, and most of it was made up of soldiers. The emperor also sent his embassy to Nerchinsk, in which there were even more people - approx. 15 thousand people, also mostly military. Very important role it was assigned to 2 persons - dressed in a whale. clothing for the Jesuits - the Spaniard Pereira and the Frenchman Gerbillon. Finally, on 9 Aug. 1689 in a picturesque area near Nerchinsk, negotiations began in tents. By the way, these tents were pitched by a former Ukrainian. hetman (now an exiled boyar son) D. Mnogogreshny. Negotiations were conducted in lat. lang. through the Jesuits. Golovin tried with all his might to bargain with the Chinese as much land as possible, but the Chinese began to anger the surrounding population (Buryats and Onkots) against the Russians, openly demonstrated the power of their military detachment, even laid siege to Nerchinsk and threatened a new war. This forced Moscow. ambassador to make concessions. The Russians then had to leave the Amur along the entire course. The border was defined by the river. Gorbitsa, flowing into the river. Shilka, r. Argun from source to mouth and Yablonovy Ridge to the Sea of Okhotsk. Beyton, who was awaiting the results of negotiations in Azerbaijan, on Golovin's orders, ravaged the fortress and took away the entire garrison and the Russians. settlers in Nerchinsk.
The Great Russian resettlement to the Far East (as well as the Ukrainian one, by the way) followed exclusively in the footsteps and notches of the Cossacks. Why it happened in this way is easy to understand: there are no empty territories on Earth, and in order to “master” something, it was necessary to “conquer” it initially.
In the era of the transformation of the kingdom of Muscovy, a provincial by European standards, into the largest European power, the Russian autocracy had neither the skills nor the mechanisms for the total mobilization of the Russian population of the central regions of the country to achieve any major foreign policy tasks. The complete absence in the Russian ruling environment, up to the era of Peter I, habits and mechanisms for general mobilization own people was soon convincingly proved by the long-term, lost Livonian War in the final and the subsequent hard times of the Time of Troubles. Meanwhile, the territorial expansion of Muscovite Rus, starting from the 16th century, proceeded at a high pace.
Only between the middle of the 16th century and the end of the 17th century did Muscovite Russia, on average, annually (150 years in a row!) acquire land equal in area to modern Holland. By the beginning of the 16th century, the Muscovite state was equal in area to the rest of Europe, and Western Siberia, annexed by Ataman Yermak, was twice the size of Europe. By the middle of the 17th century, Muscovy - without political paroxysms and the monstrous military efforts of Peter I, in fact without any special financial and material investments - became the largest state in the world.
Who, then, produced this colossal in extent, never, after Genghis Khan and Timur, a territorial increment that was no longer repeated in the world?
Campaign of Perfiliev and Khabarov
In 1946, in the old Cossack village of Maksimikha Barguzinsky aimag of the Buryat ASSR, Soviet ethnographers recorded the following from the words of an old-timer Fyodor Gorbunov: “Perfiliev comes from Cossacks and was a Cossack himself. All the early centurions, Pentecostals, governors and atamans came from the Don. Before they came to Siberia, they first walked along the Don, the Volga and the Urals. Then, when they heard that it was possible to go to Siberia, they went from the Urals through the Ob to the Yenisei. On the Yenisei they had their main stop, here was the largest stockade.<...>The governor lived in the prison - the most important of the Cossacks, whom the tsar himself appointed to this post. The governor accepted all the Cossacks, made detachments of them, then sent them to the Lena, the Angara, the Amur and other rivers.
The study of the process of development by the Slavs of Siberia and Far East convinces: such a super-mobilization ethno-social breakthrough, which the Cossacks made to the east of Eurasia, was only within their power (among European peoples). Only the Cossacks - the ethnic group of Slavic samurai, a people for whom the ideals of human dignity, spiritual freedom, national and social mutual support were not something abstract and distant, but a fact of their everyday reality - could accomplish this feat.
The mentioned Cossack Perfiliev is none other than the famous Cossack ataman Maxim Perfiliev, who was not only a talented military leader, but also a skilled diplomat, because he was fluent in Tatar, Evenki, Mongolian and Chinese. In 1618-1627, Perfilyev annexed the lands along the Upper Tunguska, Lena and Vitim to Moscow Russia, took the royal yasak from the natives with weapons or diplomacy. He built several fortified fortresses - ostrogs, including the famous Bratsk ostrog (now the city of Bratsk). In 1638, long before Yerofey Khabarov, ataman Perfilyev went to the Amur - "to collect de Daurian lands."
Muscovite Russia, that is Russian state before Peter I, very carefully, deliberately cautiously responded to any initiatives for its territorial expansion. Such initiatives came mainly from the Cossacks. In 1638, the Cossacks stormed the strategically important Turkish fortress of Azov at the mouth of the Don. In the summer and autumn of 1641, they heroically withstood a siege of more than three months, which included military history as "Azov seat". All this time, until the middle of 1642, the Cossacks tirelessly offered Moscow to take Azov "under its own hand", thus securing huge territories in the Sea of \u200b\u200bAzov and the mouth of the Don for the Romanov dynasty. Moscow thought for a very long time, deliberated for a very long time, but in the end abandoned Azov. The second time, and at the cost of significant Russian losses, only Peter I managed to take Azov.
Moscow behaved just as cautiously and thoughtfully in the events of the Pereyaslav Rada, when, practically without any special military efforts, on the sabers of the Zaporizhzhya Cossacks, the Left-Bank Ukraine was brought to Tsar Alexei the Quietest.
In a similar style, the policy of Muscovite Russia was implemented in Siberia and the Far East. It seemed that the lands beyond the Urals were for Muscovy a kind of "suitcase without a handle." The absence of a well-thought-out strategic line entailed spontaneity, inconsistency, and even inconsistency of actions.
Albazin. Source: 2x2.su
For the first time, the absence of a clear firm line of Moscow in the implementation of policy in the Asian East was clearly manifested in the events related to the Albazinsky Voivodeship.
In 1651, Erofei Khabarov took the fortified village of the Daurian prince Albaza, located on the Amur near the confluence of the Shilka and Argun rivers. Now the village of Albazino, Amur Region, is located in this place. Khabarov decided to establish a permanent fortress-fortress in this place. Despite the lack of people in the detachment, he left 50 Cossacks in Albazin and went further down the Amur. Albazin had an exceptionally advantageous strategic location in the upper reaches of the Amur, but despite this factor, the fortress did not receive any real help from Muscovy - neither people nor powder "potion". As a result, the constant attacks of the Manchus from China forced the Cossacks in 1658 not only to leave Albazin, but even to leave all the villages and fortresses founded to the west of the prison.
Raid of Nicephorus of Chernigov
The next arrival of Muscovite Rus on the Amur was again provided by the ethnic energy of the Cossacks. This return was ensured by Nicephorus of Chernigov, the brightest representative of the Cossack ethnic group of the middle of the 17th century. As part of the army of the Zaporozhian Sich, he fought against Muscovy on the side of the Poles in the Smolensk War (1632-1634). He was wounded, fell into Russian captivity, and in 1638 was exiled to Siberia, to the city of Yeniseisk.
Having wandered around all the Siberian prisons, Nikifor Chernigov eventually ended up in the farthest corner of the Russian ecumene - in Ilimsk on the Lena. Here the Cossack raised an uprising and personally killed the Ilim governor Lavrenty Obukhov, a pathological sadist and bribe taker. Realizing that now only the executioner's ax could be guaranteed from the Moscow Tsar, Nikifor Chernigov, at the head of a detachment of 84 rebellious Cossacks, went to the Amur region, where he again built the Albazin fortress. A talented administrator and diplomat, Nikifor Chernigov established a Cossack republic in Albazin similar to the Zaporozhian Sich, founded several new Russian villages around the fortress, and began to regularly collect yasak from the surrounding natives.
The Moscow administration turned a blind eye to the strengthening of the Albazin Cossack Republic, successfully ruled by a rebel sentenced to death. Of course, the tsarist governors in Siberia could organize a punitive campaign against Albazin, but, apparently, they did not really want to fight the Cossacks due to the strengthening of the Chinese Qing empire beyond the Amur.
The case was decided by a rich yasak, which the far-sighted Cossack Nikifor began to regularly send to Moscow. However, Nikifor of Chernigov had no other way but to try to make peace with Moscow: the stocks of gunpowder captured in Ilimsk were running out, and the onslaught of the Manchus from China was intensifying. Apparently, with the mediation of churchmen, the conflict was finally settled: in 1672, the Cossack Nikifor was forgiven and received the title of Albazin's clerk, but the Cossack republic, which swore allegiance to the Moscow Tsar, was officially abolished.
The last glorious act of the Zaporizhzhya Cossack Nikifor in Albazin was his long-range military raid in 1675 along the right bank of the Argun and Amur, that is, already along own lands Chinese emperor, in order to free the Slavs and Daurians captured by the Manchus. The main problem of Albazin was the catastrophic shortage of people, without whom it was impossible to either protect the Russian lands along the Amur or ensure their economic development. The Cossack Nicephorus of Chernigov understood well the complexity of the situation and, to the best of his ability, tried to correct it.
Muscovite Russia, apparently, was much less concerned about the problems of protecting the region: the country quickly followed the path of the final general enslavement of the peasants, after which no significant resettlement of Russian people in Asian Ukraine, of course, became impossible. As a result, from 1675 to 1680, only one royal convoy came to Albazin: it carried gunpowder, lead, some seed grain, and only six new male settlers. It seemed that the tsarist administration was more concerned not with the obvious military preparations of Qing China, but with the personal status of Nicephorus of Chernigov, which in Moscow was seen as too significant for the former rebel.
At the end of 1678, under the plausible pretext of introducing the Cossack Nikifor to Tsar Fyodor Alekseevich, he was lured from Albazin to Moscow, where, after almost two years of ordeals, on orders (analogue of today's ministries), this most experienced military man and diplomat was assigned to Krasnoyarsk as "boyar children", that is, for an honorable slow fading from melancholy and idleness.
Chinese rebuff to Cossack expansion
Immediately after the departure of Nikifor of Chernigov to Moscow, Grigory Lonshakov was appointed clerk in his place. An experienced mining engineer and a good diplomat, Lonshakov, however, did not have any serious military and administrative experience.
If the strengthening of the influence of Muscovite Russia in the region in these years depended only on the personal initiative of a few Cossacks and the arrival of rare convoys with military equipment in the region, then the strengthening of the Chinese Qing empire on the right bank of the Amur was of a systematic, strategically meaningful nature.
In 1679, the Qing emperor Kangxi, an intelligent politician and a skilled administrator, gently removed his relative Prince Songgotu from power and took control of China completely into his own hands. Difficult times were coming for the presence of Muscovy on the Amur - Kangxi was a strong-willed, decisive and consistent supporter of the expulsion of Russian people from the Amur. Having strengthened the internal position of Manchuria and secured the military support of the Mongols, Emperor Kangxi in September 1682 organized a reconnaissance raid by dignitaries (fudutuns) Langtan and Pengchun to Albazin. The extreme importance of the upcoming event was already emphasized by the fact that the reconnaissance mission was personally headed by Lantan, the future head of the expeditionary army.
The motivation for the unexpected appearance of a high-ranking Chinese governor near the Russian strategic fortress was obscenely simple, for it was clearly counting on the simpletons: Lantan declared Russian border guard that he was hunting deer and inadvertently got lost. If the Zaporozhye Cossack Nikifor had been the Russian clerk in Albazin, it is very likely that this “hunt” of Lantan would have been either fruitless for him, or even the last. But the Cossack Nikifor at that time was aimlessly wasting time on an honorable retirement in Krasnoyarsk, and the confused service Muscovites, instead of immediately sending the uninvited guest across the Amur, called Lantan to Albazin, where they met with a truly Russian scale.
When Lantan finally got ready to leave, Lonshakov's Russian clerks presented the Chinese with a valuable gift. Naive people did not suspect that their main "gift" was already in Lantan's marching pack: the Chinese intelligence officer had a full opportunity not only to inspect, but even to sketch the fortifications of Albazin.
The ethnopolitical naivete of the Great Russian clerks resulted in a sharp acceleration of China's military preparations. Based on the results of his "hunting" reconnaissance raid, Lantan drew up a detailed plan for a military expedition against Albazin, whose dilapidated wooden fortifications the Chinese assessed as "extremely weak, as if gnawed by a hungry donkey."
The Chinese implemented their plan to oust the Slavs from the Amur systematically and consistently. On the Sungari, the largest tributary of the right bank of the Amur, a river flotilla was being built, which was supposed to deliver the expeditionary force and artillery under the walls of Albazin. Here, in the state warehouses, a three-year supply of food was collected so that the Chinese army during the military campaign would not need anything.
In 1683, the "deer hunter" Lantan advanced along with the river flotilla to the Amur and, near the mouth of the Zeya, forced the surrender of a large Cossack detachment of Grigory Mylnik, who was carrying military equipment and provisions for the Dolonsky and Selemdzhinsky prisons. With the loss of this detachment, the Muscovites lost not just 70 people of the armed reserve, they lost any opportunity to show military initiative in the upcoming war. The Albazin fortress lost its defensive foreground, since the Dolonsky and Selemdzhinsky prisons had to be left without a fight: it was impossible to keep these fortresses without a supply of gunpowder and lead, without the necessary provisions.
The only remaining fortress of the Albazinsky defensive foreground - Verkhnezeya - was surrounded by a Chinese expeditionary detachment and defended itself heroically. But what could 20 Cossacks in a dilapidated fortress do against 400 selected Manchu soldiers? Nevertheless, the Upper Zeya Cossacks managed to hold out for almost half a year and only in February 1684 capitulated.
The military operations of the Kangxi emperor, about which the yasak Tungus warned the Muscovites in the winter of 1682, of course, took the tsarist government by surprise. The eternal trend of Russian foreign policy in the East - ignoring "uncomfortable" facts, ingratiating friendly gestures and talking about the world - did not develop yesterday, already Muscovite Russia clearly marked this sad trend.
With the outbreak of hostilities, the assault began: what they had not done in years and decades, they tried to do in one or two months. The miner Lonshakov was immediately dismissed, there was no time for silver. The hereditary Tobolsk Cossack Alexei Tolbuzin, an energetic, intelligent person, was sent to Albazin as governor. Since in the decades that have passed since the raid of Yerofey Khabarov, a meaningful resettlement policy has not been launched, the “military rank of people” had to be collected literally one by one throughout Siberia. By the beginning of the assault on Albazin Chinese troops these people, of course, did not have time.
Meanwhile, Lantan did not doze off. At the beginning of the summer of 1685, a 3,000-strong expeditionary force of China on the ships of a military flotilla advanced from the Aigun Chinese fortress to Albazin. Eight hundred selected Manchurian cavalry marched along the shore. For the Great Russians and Cossacks, who settled in the dilapidated fortress walls, the moment of truth has come. The forces of the parties were simply incomparable: for 450 Cossacks of the Albazin garrison there were at least three thousand Chinese infantrymen (5 thousand according to Russian data, which are most likely overestimated).
In incredible haste, clutching at everything at once, Tolbuzin's clerks could not evacuate Russian peasants from the surrounding villages to Albazin in time: the Manchu cavalry, walking along the shore, captured more than 150 fugitives who did not have time to hide in the fortress. When approaching Albazin, the Lantan flotilla fired cannons at rafts with Russian fugitives who were sailing to Albazin from the upper reaches of the Amur. According to Chinese data, 40 people were taken prisoner from the rafts.
In the Nerchinsk jail, the voevoda Ivan Vlasov hastily gathered about hundred soldiers, mainly from peasants, whose military qualities were, to put it mildly, dubious. Somewhere managed to find two guns. However, even this ridiculous, in comparison with the scale of the Chinese invasion, military assistance got stuck on the way to Albazin.
Battle for Albazin
On June 12, 1685, the Chinese expeditionary force landed at Albazin. The methodical bombardment of the fortress from the so-called "drag" cannons began. The Albazin fortress walls fully justified Lantan's derogatory assessment in terms of "being gnawed by a hungry donkey": Chinese cannonballs sometimes pierced through the fortress, breaking through both opposite walls at the same time. The bombing lasted three days and was very effective: more than 100 people were killed, food barns were completely burned down, one of the three fortress cannons was broken.
In the early morning of June 16, in the early morning fog, war drums unexpectedly roared and the rhythmic, mournful ringing of cymbals rang out: it was the Chinese who attacked from all sides simultaneously. Furiously brandishing huge shining sabers, the vanguard of the Chinese infantry, made up of shaven-headed heroes of two meters in height, rushed to the walls of the fortress with a wild battle cry. The Chinese Fusiliers, arranged in a special order, with coordinated volleys of their fuzes, supported the "barrage" in front of the guards.
It seemed that nothing could save the defenders of Albazin from mass extermination. Nothing but Cossack courage and a swampy swampy moat in front of the walls of the fortress. This was just the case when the laxity of the Moscow boyars played a good service. The defensive ditch of Albazin had not been cleaned for years, it was completely silted up and, at first glance, seemed dry, which is why the Chinese did not prepare siege bridges in advance.
In the fury of the assault, the shaven-headed guards rushed across the ditch and were immediately bogged down to the waist. The Cossacks took advantage of this, point-blank shooting at the crowded mass of human bodies. A small detachment of Donets and Cossacks of 26 people under the command of the centurion Stefan Boyko rushed over the wall with daggers in an attempt to capture the main standard of the advancing guards. Almost all of the Cossacks died (only four people survived), they did not capture the standard, but they paved a whole street of shaven-headed corpses to the standard.
As a result of all these circumstances, the Chinese plan for a one-time assault was thwarted, the struggle for the walls broke up into several centers. Governor Tolbuzin brilliantly took advantage of this circumstance, skillfully transferring Cossacks and "all ranks of Russian people" from one place of breakthrough to another.
We must pay tribute to the Chinese: they stubbornly, even fanatically, regardless of losses, stormed Albazin all day. It was not until 10 pm that the Kangxi soldiers retreated to their camp. Their losses were monstrous: Langtan lost more than 400 soldiers killed and wounded.
The next day, the stubborn Lantan gave the order to prepare a new assault. The Chinese began to cut down the surrounding forest and fill up the moat with tree trunks. They worked without hindrance, since the defenders of Albazin practically ran out of gunpowder.
Under these conditions, voivode Tolbuzin proved to be a skillful and strong-willed diplomat: he managed to negotiate with Lantan on the withdrawal of the garrison of the fortress and all Russian people towards Nerchinsk, that is, where the Cossack militia actively gathered and was already part of the ready. The Chinese insisted on the departure of the Albazin Cossacks to the north, towards Yakutsk, which guaranteed to lead to additional casualties and deprived the Cossacks of any chance to continue resistance. At a key moment in the negotiations, Tolbuzin "turned the chessboard": he told Lantan that either the road to Nerchinsk was open or the Cossacks would continue to resist. Lantan agreed.
On June 26, 1685, the Cossacks and Russian peasants left the fortress and moved westward in military march formation. To the military honor of the Kangxi officers, the Chinese kept their word - the path to Nerchinsk was open, the Chinese did not attack and did not even line up in battle formations. After the departure of Tolbuzin, Lantan partly blew up, and partly tore down the fortifications of Albazin. Then he retreated to the rear of the Aigun fortress.
In early July, all the forces of the Trans-Baikal Cossacks and the Russian militia, with a total number of about 1200 people, finally united in Nerchinsk. Feeling real at hand military force, the courageous Tolbuzin assembled the Military Circle, on which the Cossacks unanimously refused to "perpetuate glory for themselves from Albazin."
Here, in Nerchinsk, Tolbuzin found himself a reliable comrade-in-arms. It was the German Athanasius Beiton, baptized into Orthodoxy, a man of exceptional courage and great will. Beiton brought Don Cossacks and Russian peasants from Western Siberia to Nerchinsk, and until Tolbuzin's death he remained his most reliable support.
On August 27, 1685, Cossack plows again approached the blown up walls of Albazin. This time, the military forces of the governor Tolbuzin were more or less tangible: 714 Cossacks (of which 200 were mounted) and 155 Russian fishermen and peasants who wished to return to the Amur. By hard work, these people managed to restore the fortress before the first snow. Ahead of them was a terrible war of attrition with the best troops of the Qing Empire, and behind them there was nothing but vast, desert Siberia and distant Moscow, in and around which at that time they were beheading many hundreds of faithful Russian people who were accused of church "split".
Many have heard this phrase, but, to my surprise, even in the Far East, the history of the largest fortified settlement of Russian pioneers on the Amur in the 17th century is known to relatively few. Or maybe they heard and forgot. I myself, to confess, am not a great specialist in this layer of development of the region, moreover, I have not actually been to the Amur Region, where the Albazinskaya fortress once stood (except for two trips through it by train). However, I came across very interesting photographs of a mock-up reconstruction of the prison, created by the famous Khabarovsk architect and historian N.P. Kradin. Nikolai Petrovich was guided by the description of the fortress, compiled in 1684 and miraculously preserved in the archives of the Academy of Sciences, and relied on archaeological research data.
First of all, I want to recall the historical background of those years - the events associated with the foundation, life and death of the Albazinsky prison. In my story, I will use materials from the article by Alexander Rudolfovich Artemyev “New materials on the heroic defense of the Albazinsky prison in 1685 and 1686-1687” and several photographs of the author.
Albazin was first mentioned in 1650, when a detachment of the Russian pioneer Yerofey Pavlovich Khabarov occupied the town of the Daurian prince Albaza on the upper Amur, whose name later gave the name to the prison. Leaving the town in June of the following year, Khabarov burned it down. Later, with his cruel actions on the Amur, he set against himself not only the natives of the region, but also the participants in the campaign, after which he was recalled from Dauria.
The creative stage in the history of Russian Albazin began only in 1665-1666, when a group of 84 Cossacks headed by N.R. Chernigov. The Cossacks set up a prison on the site of the Albazinsky settlement and took over the functions of collecting yasak from the local population. They regularly transported the entire collected yasak through Nerchinsk to Moscow.
The prison received its first baptism of fire in the summer of 1670, when it was besieged by the Manchus. Little is known about this attack. It is only known that the Manchus sailed to the fortress on ships, and later a cavalry army approached the fortress by land. The besiegers built an earthen rampart near the prison. The seriousness of their intentions was obvious, and they hastened to report to Moscow that Albazin had fallen. Nevertheless, the prison survived.
In 1682 it had already become the center of an independent county. By this time, the Amur region, where arable farming was successfully developing, was gradually turning into a real breadbasket for the population of Transbaikalia. From the confluence of the Shilka and Argun down the Amur to the mouth of the Zeya River and along the Zeya itself, there were more than twenty Russian agricultural settlements - settlements, yasak winter quarters and prisons.
At the beginning of the same decade, the Manchu government of the Qing Empire began to prepare for aggression in the Russian Amur region. The presence of Russian pioneers in the region deprived the Manchus of sources of valuable furs and prevented the capture of the local population. The Daurian and Evenk princes - Gantimur, Tuidohun, Baodai and Wen-du - voluntarily went over with their people to the Russians, and the Manchus, not without reason, feared that other tribes would follow their example, not only on the left bank and upper Amur, but also on its right bank .
At the beginning of 1683, in order to strengthen the defense capability of the Trans-Baikal and Daurian prisons, the Yakut, Irkutsk, Ilimsk, Nerchinsk and Albazinsky counties were united into the Yenisei category and placed under the control of the Yenisei governor. According to the sovereign’s decree, it was ordered to recruit in Tobolsk and other cities “mounted and foot Cossacks and archers, and from their children and brothers and nephews, select willing 500 people and send them to Yeniseisk ... give them 50 rubles per person and a squeaker to rise.” However, a detachment led by the Yenisei boyar son Athanasius von Beyton set out for Dauria only in the autumn of 1684.
Meanwhile, even the previous summer, Albazin servicemen and industrial people cut down a new prison, enclosing a territory much larger than before with walls. Preserved detailed description prison, compiled in 1684 by the governor A.L. Tolbuzin, it was on its basis that the appearance of the fortress was recreated.
The new walls had a height of 5.3 meters and were covered with a double board with battlements. The northern wall of the prison was 85 meters long and ended with a square (6.4 x 6.4 m) corner tower, excavated by archaeologists in 1989-1990. The eastern wall was divided by a travel tower (8.5 x 8.5 m) into segments of 46 and 37 meters. The southern one also had a travel tower, but already round, which divided the wall into segments of 32 and 43 m. The western, coastal, 97-meter-long wall included two towers built back in the 1960s. Under these towers there were huts for amanats (hostages), under which yasak was collected.
In the northwestern corner of the prison there was a "state court for the arrival of governors and clerks." Further in the inventory, it is noted that “gorodni were cut down along the prison on three sides.” At one time it was believed that the wall was formed by tightly adjoining log cabins. Meanwhile, during archaeological excavations, it was found that the walls of the prison had a structure in the form of a tyn - logs dug vertically into the ground close to each other. Apparently, A.D. When compiling the inventory, Tolbuzin made a mistake, naming the tynovye walls he called gorodny. This is confirmed by the further text of the inventory, which refers to the construction with inside a wattle fence a arshin wide (0.71 m) and a sazhen high (2.13 m), and on it there were "platy" (combat passages), from which access to the loopholes was opened.
By the way, historians encountered a similar mistake when studying Mangazeya: according to the Painted List of 1625-1626, the city wall consisted of gorodens, and during archaeological research, taras were discovered - two parallel walls with cuts.
The design features of the Albazinsky prison to some extent predetermined its fate. On June 12, 1685, a Manchurian army of more than 10 thousand people with two hundred guns laid siege to Albazin. On June 16, a decisive assault on the city was undertaken. The cores of the Manchu cannons easily pierced the walls and towers of the prison. Nevertheless, having lost 100 out of 450 men, the Albazians, who had only three cannons and about 300 squeakers at their disposal, fought off the attack. After that, the attackers overlaid the walls of the city with brushwood and set it on fire. The fiery arrows of the Manchus burned the barns and the church, the stocks of gunpowder and lead were running out. Voevoda A.L. Tolbuzin was forced to begin negotiations on surrender.
The reason for such a rapid fall of Albazin was the construction of its walls not from gorodens, but in the form of a tyn. Such walls reliably protected the pioneers from the arrows of "non-peaceful" foreigners, whom the Russian population encountered in Siberia and the Far East, but could not withstand artillery fire.
Under the terms of the surrender, the surviving Albazins freely left for Nerchinsk, where they arrived on July 10 "naked and barefoot and hungry", and on July 15 the voivode sent a detachment of 70 Cossacks to reconnaissance on the Albazin ashes. Having found out that the Chinese had left, he sent a detachment there, which finally arrived in Nerchinsk, under the command of the Cossack head, Lieutenant A.I. Bayton, and then A.L. Tolbuzin with Albazins. They were ordered to build a new prison or city. The prison was erected in the same place, and before the frosts they managed to build "an earthen city four fathoms wide and one and a half fathoms high". In June 1686, the construction of a new fortress was basically completed, and only the towers could not be covered, because on July 7 (according to Chinese sources - July 8) the Manchus again besieged the city.
The third siege of Albazin lasted five months. During it, 826 defenders of the fortress successfully resisted the 6.5 thousand enemy army. The Manchus surrounded the Russian fortification with an earthen rampart, and to the north of the prison they erected a 15-meter-high peal, from which, under the leadership of 20 Jesuit Dutch, they continuously fired cannons at the city. On the south side, they tried to build a tower for the same purpose, but the Albazians burned the first of them, and destroyed the second by digging. Reciprocal digs under the city of the Manchus were not successful. Five times the Albazins made sorties from the besieged fortress. The last one was especially successful on August 16, when the Albazians tried to destroy the enemy's northern battery. On the fifth day of the siege, governor A.L. Tolbuzin was mortally wounded, and Beiton took command of the prison.
On November 30, 1686, the Manchu governors received an order from the Chinese emperor to lift the siege. The formal reason for this was the arrival of messengers from Moscow in Beijing with the news from the departure of the Russian embassy to the Amur region, headed by the roundabout F.A. Golovin for peace talks. However, no less significant reason for this decision was the difficult situation in which the besiegers found themselves. Cut off from supply bases, they lost more than 1,500 people in December to attacks, hunger and disease. The Manchus could not fulfill the order of the emperor, since the ice had already bound their ships. The siege actually continued, because the Russians were not allowed to leave the fortress. Only in May of the following year, when the ice melted on the Amur, the Manchus retreated from the city, but they did not go far. The army was stationed four versts from Albazin to prevent the townspeople from sowing bread. By this time, the enemy had lost 2,500 "military men" and many auxiliary workers.
And yet the situation of the besieged Albazins was much more difficult. By December, only 150 remained. Only 30 men and 15 teenagers could carry out guard duty, the rest were weakened from wounds and scurvy. Despite this, Bayton refused to let the Manchu doctors into the fortress. On Easter, he sent a pood of wheat cake to the astonished Chinese governors, which they "received with honor." By May 1687, only 66 people survived in Albazin. Beyton did not dare to bury the bodies of the fallen Albazians without a funeral service. On this occasion, he wrote to the Nerchinsk governor I.E. Vlasov: “And those dead people are buried in the city in a winter hut on top of the earth without a funeral service until your consideration. And now I live with the Cossacks in every stinking satiety.
Bayton failed to bury the fallen Albazians in a worthy manner near the Church of the Resurrection, where a cemetery was located in the prison. Terrible evidence of the most difficult siege of Albazin was discovered during the archaeological research of the prison. In 1991, along the edge of the river cliff of the settlement, archaeologists found, and in 1992 studied a small (3 x 6 m) semi-dugout, which turned into a mass grave for the defenders of the fortress. In its corner, a well-preserved brick oven measuring 1.5 x 2 m, the rest of the room was occupied by neatly stacked bodies of explorers. Among the 57 buried were women and children. Arrowheads were found between the remains of two Albazians, several more people died from lead bullets. With the remains, more than 20 bronze and silver pectoral crosses were found, which made up the largest collection of these items in the Far East to date.
On August 29, 1689, a Russian-Chinese treaty was signed in Nerchinsk, according to which the border between the two states was drawn along the Gorbitsa River, which flows into the Shilka from the north. The Albazinsky prison turned out to be outside the Russian territory and was subject to destruction, and its inhabitants - to resettlement. The government of Princess Sophia decided to give up Albazin and the Amur region in order to conclude a peace treaty with the Manchu government of the Qing Empire.
On August 31, the head of the Russian embassy in China, F.A. Golovin sent Beyton a decree on the abandonment and ruin of Albazin, and on September 5, the Manchu embassy arrived at the fortress. The servants, in front of the eyes of the ambassadors and governor, burned the wooden buildings of the prison and dug out the rampart. After that, they went to Nerchinsk on boats provided by the Manchus.
Almost nothing remains of the Albazin fortifications of the last period of its existence. And the Russians returned to these shores again only in the middle of the 19th century. Today, near the place where the heroic fortress stood, there is a small village of Albazino.
I want to supplement the text with a few more illustrations and details.
Here are photographs taken by archaeologists in the early 1990s during the excavations of the Albazinsky prison. Here you can see the remains of the base of the corner tower. This and the next two pictures were taken by me from here.
Remains of the tynovy wall. It should be noted that very little remains of the fortifications of the last period of the existence of the fortress - von Beyton's zeal to destroy the prison was affected so that the Manchus could not use it.
The dugout (semi-dugout) mentioned in the text, which became a mass grave for more than fifty fallen defenders.
This is how the Dutchman N. Witsen depicted the siege of the fortress in 1686-1687. Either he saw the prison with his own eyes as part of the Manchurian army, or he drew from the words of eyewitnesses. One way or another, but in the drawing dated 1692, the southeastern corner of the fortress has the shape of an almost classical bastion. This is an argument in favor of the version that before the third siege, the builders of the fortress used the achievements of European fortification art, which allowed them to withstand many times superior forces.
And another painting, this time by a contemporary Chinese artist. The file was sent to me by Nikolai Petrovich Kradin, who photographed the canvas hanging in the Harbin Museum. The picture shows how the Manchus take Russian Albazins into captivity. This episode took place in 1685, when 45 either Cossacks or simply peasants sought refuge in a besieged fortress, but were intercepted by the enemy. The captives were taken to Beijing, where they founded a small Russian colony. As I read, their descendants have even retained the Orthodox faith to this day, but, of course, in other respects they are real Chinese.
The Albazinsky prison, which towered menacingly above the Amur, became the object of hatred of the Chinese Bogdykhan and his governor, who even then dreamed of extending their possessions to the whole of Russian Siberia.
The Albazinsky prison, which towered menacingly above the Amur, became the object of hatred of the Chinese Bogdykhan and his governor, who even then dreamed of extending their possessions to the whole of Russian Siberia. On the eve of the feast of the Annunciation, March 24, 1652, the first military clash between the Russians and the Chinese took place on the Amur. By the prayers of the Most Holy Theotokos, the pagans were defeated and driven back to their own borders. This victory was a good omen for the Russians. But the fight was just getting started. Many more sons of Holy Russia had to drink the cup of death in the battle for the Amur - for the triumph of Orthodoxy in the Far East.
In June 1658, the Albazin detachment, 270 Cossacks led by Onufry Stepanov, was ambushed and completely destroyed by the Chinese in a heroic battle.
Enemies burned Albazin, devastated Russian lands, drove the local population to China. They wanted to turn a fertile cultivated land into a desert.
In those difficult years, the Most Holy Theotokos showed a special sign of Her mercy to the Amur land. In 1665, when the Russians returned and restored Albazin, Elder Hermogenes from the Kirensky Holy Trinity Monastery came to the Amur with the clergy and brought with him a blessing to the revived land - the miraculous icon of the Mother of God "The Word Flesh Became", called since then Albazinskaya. In 1671, the blessed elder founded a small monastery in the Brusyanoy Kamen tract (one and a half kilometers from Albazin down the Amur), where the holy icon stayed in subsequent years.
Albazin settled down. In two churches of the city - the Ascension of the Lord and St. Nicholas the Wonderworker - the Albazin priests offered the Bloodless Sacrifice. Not far from the city (up the Amur) another monastery was founded - Spassky. fertile land fed the whole of Eastern Siberia with bread. The local population joined the Russian Orthodox culture, peacefully part of the multinational Russian state, found Russian protection from the raids of predatory Chinese feudal lords.
In Moscow, they did not forget about the needs of the distant Amur outskirts: they strengthened the military defense, improved the management of the region. In 1682, the Albazinsky Voivodeship was formed. They took care of the spiritual nourishment of the Amur tribes. The Local Council of the Russian Church in 1681 decided to send to distant cities, to Lena and Amur, "to daurs", "spiritual people - archimandrites, abbots or priests, kind and instructive, to enlighten unbelievers with the Christian law." Daurs and Tungus whole clans approached holy Baptism, great importance had a conversion to Orthodoxy by the Daurian prince Gantimur, in the baptism of Peter, with his eldest son Katanai, in the baptism of Paul.
Meanwhile, the servants of the bogdykhan were preparing a new attack. After several unsuccessful raids on July 10, 1685, they approached Albazin with an army of 15,000 and surrounded the fortress. It contained 450 Russian soldiers with 3 cannons. The first assault was repulsed. Then the Chinese surrounded the wooden walls of the prison from all sides with firewood and brushwood and set it on fire. Further defense became impossible. With banners and shrines, among which was the miraculous Albazin icon, the garrison left the fortress in battle formation.
But the Mother of God did not leave by Her intercession the city chosen by Her. The scouts soon reported that the Chinese suddenly "hurriedly, day and night" began to retreat from Albazin, without even having time to fulfill the order of the bogdykhan to destroy the sown Russian fields. By miraculous intervention, the Heavenly Patroness not only expelled the enemies from Russian borders, but also preserved bread, which was then enough for the restored city for several winters. On August 20, 1685, the Russians were again in Albazin.
A year passed, the fortress was again besieged by the Chinese. The heroic five-month defense of Albazin began - the "Albazin seat", which occupies an honorable place in the history of Russian military glory. Three times - in July, September, October - the troops of the Bogdykhan rushed to storm the wooden fortifications. Fiery arrows and red-hot cannonballs flew at the city in a hail. The battle was such that neither the city nor its defenders could be seen in smoke and fire. And all three times the invisible Veil of the Virgin protected the Albazins from cruel enemies.
By December 1686, when the Chinese, admitting their impotence, lifted the siege of Albazin, 150 of its 826 defenders remained in the city.
These forces were not enough to continue the war with the Bogdykhan. In August 1690, the last Cossacks, led by Vasily Smirennikov, one of the heroes of the Albazin defense, left Albazin. Neither the fortress nor its shrine went to the enemy: the fortifications were torn down and destroyed by the Cossacks, the Albazin Icon of the Mother of God was transferred to Sretensk, a city on the Shilka River, which flows into the Amur.
But even after the death of Albazin, God judged its inhabitants to perform one more service for the benefit of the Church. The cessation of hostilities contributed by Divine Providence to the strengthening of the beneficial influence of Orthodoxy on the peoples of the Far East. During the war years, about a hundred Russian Cossacks and peasants from Albazin and its environs were captured and were taken to Beijing. Bogdykhan (the emperor) even ordered that one of the Buddhist temples be given away for the construction of an Orthodox church in the Chinese capital in the name of Sophia, the Wisdom of God. In 1695, Metropolitan Ignatius of Tobolsk sent an antimension, chrism, liturgical books and church vessels to the St. Sophia Church. In a letter to the captive priest Maxim, "the preacher of the Holy Gospel in the Chinese kingdom," Metropolitan Ignatius wrote: not without benefit to the Chinese people, since the light of Christ's Orthodox faith is revealed to them by you."
- The displacement is called the vector connecting the start and end points of the trajectory The vector connecting the beginning and end of the path is called
- Trajectory, path length, displacement vector Vector connecting the initial position
- Calculating the area of a polygon from the coordinates of its vertices The area of a triangle from the coordinates of the vertices formula
- Acceptable Value Range (ODZ), theory, examples, solutions