Ivan IV's storm of Kazan in October 1552 and the annexation of Astrakhan in 1556 removed the successor khanates of the Golden Horde and opened the Volga and the Urals to Russian settlement; Tatars were expelled from Kazan itself and lands were granted to monasteries and servicemen, with episodes of forced baptism through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. East of the Urals, expansion was carried out by Cossack bands and merchant companies building fortified ostrogs along the river systems, and was financed by the yasak, a fur tribute levied on indigenous households and enforced by taking hostages, the amanaty, from each clan. Resistance, notably by the Koryak and Chukchi and in the Kamchatka risings of 1731 and 1741, was met with punitive expeditions; smallpox epidemics from the 1630s onwards killed a very large share of Yakut, Tungus, Yukaghir and Itelmen populations, in some districts most of them. Russian historiography traditionally described this as the peaceful 'joining' of Siberia; a competing literature, and some indigenous organisations, describe it as conquest with genocidal effects. The documentary base is overwhelmingly the tribute registers of the conquering state.
Muscovy and then the Russian Empire conquered the Volga khanates and Siberia, imposed a fur tribute enforced by hostage-taking, and settled Russian colonists on indigenous land
B. O. Dolgikh's classic reconstruction from seventeenth-century yasak books gives roughly 216,000-227,000 indigenous Siberians in the early 1600s; later scholars regard this as a minimum because tribute rolls counted adult men liable to pay. The figure excludes the settled populations of the Volga khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan, conquered in 1552 and 1556, which numbered several hundred thousand more.
No defensible total. Indigenous Siberian populations fell steeply between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with smallpox the largest identified cause and punitive expeditions, hostage-taking and the disruption of hunting economies also implicated; because the only systematic records are tribute rolls of taxable men, the decline can be traced but not converted into a death toll.
The taking of clan hostages including children to guarantee yasak payment, punitive expeditions against non-paying clans, forced baptism campaigns in the Volga region and the requisition of indigenous labour and transport are documented in Russian government yasak registers and voevoda reports analysed by S. V. Bakhrushin and later Russian and Western historians of Siberia.
Russia