The word amanat 1 was once well known in old Russia, as it was later in Tsarist Russia. The term itself is of Ar- abic origin and denotes a hostage. Amanaty were taken from a hostile (or potentially hostile) group for guaran- teeing peaceful relations. When ana- lyzing amanatstvo as a social institu- tion, it is necessary to distinguish it from the broader idea of zalozhnichestvo. The latter is current today when inter- national terrorism becomes one of the primary threats in the modern world. For example, terrorists or criminals, for the sake of some concrete political or economic demands, take passengers on a plane or a tourist bus as zalozh- niki for a rather limited time. In this way the seizure of the zalozhniki is always accompanied by force or threat of its use. For classical amanatstvo, by con- trast, a long stay (from several months to several years) on the opposite side was characteristic for the hostages, and their acquisition was far from al- ways being accompanied by open force (and more oftenwas a matter of voluntary or compulsory delivery of the hostages). As a rule, common people did not become amanaty, but rather primarily children and sub- adults whose parents had high social status. One would therefore never acknowledge as amanatstvo, e.g., the practice of the Nazi occupants of the Second World War when they took at random individuals from a number of peaceful citizens as hostages in u- successful attempts to stop the parti- san movement in seized territories. Speaking of amanatstvo, the cir- cumstance should also be taken into account that it was primarily a socio- political institution (though it often had an “economic” component as well). Thus, it is hardly possible to recognize as amanatstvo the taking hostage of entire town councils of cities during the Seven Years War in Europe (1756– 1763), when the opposing sides were trying by such method to obtain time- ly payment of the war indemnity (cp. the testimony of Baron Johann von Archenholtz [2001:174, 202] and oth- ers). In this case the opponents set as their goal purely economic objectives, and not the political loyalty of the pop- ulation of conquered cities. It is possible to distinguish two types of amanatstvo: mutual and unilateral. The first type denotes the equivalent exchange of hostages, that is, the sides acknowledge each other as equal and at the conclusion of peace they exchange persons of approx- imately equal social status, who are held in great esteem. In the second type, one of the sides clearly dom- inates the other, and amanaty are giv- en only by the weaker side as host- ages in the full sense of the word. In the latter case their position was as a rule notably worse than with mutual amanatstvo. The custom of hostage exchange evidently arose among peoples who found themselves in a stage of transi- tion from kinship-based to class soci- ety. Peculiar to this period were fre- quent intertribal and inter-community conflicts, and formerly hostile groups often resorted to amanatstvo in order to strengthen peace that had been attained. It was seen by non-literate peoples with strong kinship ties as a more reliable guarantee of adherence to the conditions of a peaceful oral contract. This tradition was also pre- served in class societies among some peoples of the East, primarily among nomads. Usually children or other close relatives of chiefs, elders, khans, or the like, who represented the highest social value in the eyes of the rivals, emerged as amanaty. The wide use of amanatstvo by the Tatar khans of the Golden Horde is well known with respect to the Russian princes, who for many years were required to send the Horde their sons and brothers (more rarely other close relatives) as hostages. Having shed the Tatar yoke and crossing the Urals, the Russians themselves be- gan in the sixteenth to eighteenth cen- turies to regularly resort to unilateral amanatstvo with the Native peoples of Siberia. Amanaty not only secured the loyalty of the local population to the new arrivals, but they also served as a guarantee of timely payment of yasak tribute in furs to the Russian Tsar as a sign of their obedience to his supreme authority. Here, for example, is a char- acteristic passage from a petition to the Tsar by the Tobolsk Cossack Ata- man Ivan Rebrov about his campaign in the Yana and Indigirka Rivers ba- sins in 1639: “And on the Mga, sover- eign, your river, we, your servants, took by supreme good fortune again the Yakut prince Akhtan Mulcheev’s son as an amanat, and we, your ser- vants, again collected from those Ya- kuts your, sovereign, tribute of eighteen soroki [720 skins—A.G.] of sable” (RTE 1979, Sb. dok.:75). Thus, ama- natstvo in Siberia (and then in Russian America) fulfilled a political as well as an economic function. In this connection it should be stressed that the close connection with payments of tribute changed the Siberian amanatstvo into a distinctive ANDREI V. GRINEV NATIVE AMANATY IN RUSSIAN AMERICA Andrei V. Grinev is an associate professor at the St. Petersburg Humanities Univer- sity. He has published numerous articles and books on Russian America, collabo- rating with N. N. Bolkhovitinov on a recent- ly-published three-volume work entitled Istoriia russkoi ameriki [The History of Russian America]. Author’s address: **** E-mail: **** Richard L. Bland is an archaeologist for the Museum of Natural History at the University of Oregon. 1 Since there are no adequate English equivalents for some of the concepts in this article I have used the Russian terms: amanat—a hostage held for the mainte- nance of peace amanatstvo—the institution of taking hostages as a means of maintaining peace baidar—large open skin boat (umiak) baidarka—small covered skin boat (kayak) kaiur—an involuntary native worker of one of the various merchant companies kalgi—slaves promyshlennik—a Russian hunter-trap- per-trader zalozhnik—a hostage taken under war- like conditions zalozhnichestvo—the institution of tak- ing hostages by force NATIVE AMERICAN STUDIES 17:1 2003 41 Translated by Richard L. Bland