In mid-February 1789, Tsarist Russia’s special envoy for negotiations, Count Kirill Vladimirovich, arrived at the salt industry town of Usoriya, 70 kilometers north of Irkutsk, demanding that the The top military chief of the North Korean navy launched negotiations.
Usolye is a salt industry town located on the left bank of the Angara River. The salt produced in the local salt springs supplies the entire Eastern Siberia. The purpose of the Northern Navy's occupation here is self-evident.
Unlike the Manchus, the power to boil salt under Tsarist Russia was controlled by merchants or monasteries. After the Northern Navy captured Usoliya, in order to ease local conflicts, it did not take back the privileges of the priests at first. After Zhang Jingxuan took office, his first solution was to negotiate with local religious forces and complete the unified purchase and sales of salt at a middle price.
On the fourth day after the arrival of Earl Mu Jin, the newly appointed governor of the Beihai Special Region Zhang Jingxuan and Liu Sheng came from Irkutsk to meet with this favorite of the Russian Empress. Earl Mu Jin was deeply surprised that the two people arrived so quickly, which reminded him of the speed of the North Navy's troop deployment. At the same time, he was particularly surprised by the young Liu and Zhang.
After a brief exchange of greetings, the two parties quickly entered the negotiation phase.
Basically, all invaders in history have followed the bandit logic of "hitting them with a rake". Count Mujin did not mention Tsarist Russia's long-planned aggression at first, but expressed strong protest against Beihai Town's wanton attack on Novosibirsk, accusing this This behavior destroyed the long-standing mutual trust and economic and trade cooperation between Qing and Russia.
Faced with such shamelessness, Liu Sheng finally couldn't help but slapped the table, jumped up, pointed at Count Mu Jin's nose, and spewed out a series of curses from Beijing and the country, making the missionary translator behind Mu Jin turn pale and couldn't stand it at all. Don't know how to translate it. As a noble, Mu Jin was very dissatisfied with Liu Sheng's irritability. He believed that this was a sign of his lack of education.
In the subsequent negotiations between the two parties, Count Mujin made the following requests to the Northern Navy on behalf of Queen Catherine II:
1. Release the Russian soldiers captured in the battles of Aihui and Jacques;
2. The Northern Navy returned to the east of the Ergun River and restored the original borders between the Qing and Russia;
3. In view of the fact that the Northern Navy has become the actual ruler of the upper reaches of the Amur River, Russia is willing to sign a bilateral treaty with Beihai Town, like the Qing Dynasty, to regulate the exchanges of border residents, the punishment and extradition of criminals, and to resume economic and trade exchanges in Nerchinsk;
4. The Northern Navy handed over the four sailing ships captured on Bitterleaf Island and released all captured crew members.
Zhang Jingxuan suppressed his indignation and listened to the missionary's translation, and then ordered his subordinates to read out the conditions of Beihai Town in northern Mandarin:
1. The Tsarist Empire compensated Beihai Town with 500,000 taels of gold, equivalent to 6.7 million rubles of silver, to compensate for all human and property losses caused by the Russian invasion to the border residents in the middle and upper reaches of Heilongjiang;
2. As the representative of China who will replace the Manchus in the future, Beihai Town requires Russia to return to the west of the Yenisey River and demolish the Russian fortresses set up in the upper reaches of the Angara River and the Yenisey River;
3. After Russia agrees to the above terms, the two sides will start discussing prisoners of war and economic and trade issues.
Of course the Count Mother Gold would not agree, and he had no right to agree. He requested to meet with the captured Russian Eastern Front commander Suvorov and other generals above the colonel level.
After that, the two sides started wrangling for several days over their respective conditions.
During this period, Count Mujin threatened the 600,000-strong army of the Tsarist Russian Empire. If the Northern Navy did not retreat, the Russian army would use an overwhelming offensive to retake the occupied territories.
Zhang Jingxuan, who had previously learned about the current situation in Russia through Zhao Xin, responded, unless you don’t want Crimea and the Black Sea coast, and you have to abandon your ally Austria.
As soon as this statement came out, Count Mujin was greatly surprised. He did not expect that these remote "Tatars" actually knew about the war taking place in Crimea.
On December 6 last year, the Catherine Army, commanded by Duke Potemkin, had captured Vodia at the mouth of the Dnieper River after six months of siege. The situation was excellent. If a large number of troops on the Western Front were to be transferred back to the east and the "Greek Plan" was abandoned, not to mention the ally Austria, even Potemkin would not agree.
The so-called "Greek Plan" is also called the "Byzantine Restoration Plan." Its purpose was to expand the southwestern territory of the Russian Empire to Transnistria and establish a capital in Constantinople, echoing St. Petersburg to the north and south. The empress' grandson Constantine was the emperor and ruled the new empire, which included northern Greece, Albania, Macedonia, Thrace and Bulgaria. Duke Potemkin would serve as the "Kingdom of Dacia" consisting of Bessarabia, Wallachia and Moldova. It also stipulated that Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina should be assigned to Austria in order to gain Austrian support for the plan.
Before leaving, the Queen told her mother, Earl Gold, that taking into account the climate and transportation factors in Siberia, the troop size on the Eastern Front could be maintained at a maximum of 50,000 people; and for this offensive, the government was bound to issue huge national debt and print more banknotes. To maintain huge military expenditures.
Not counting waterways, there is only one 6,000-mile long post road from Moscow to Siberia. It is muddy in spring, puddled in summer, and full of potholes in winter. According to Rumyantsev's estimate, it would take more than a year just to mobilize a large army and logistics team from Europe and complete the combat deployment.
Since the outbreak of the Fifth Russo-Turkish War in 1769, the Queen has found an effective way to improve her financial situation, which is to print paper money. As of 1788, Catherine II had issued a total of more than 100 million rubles in banknotes, which was backed by an annual fiscal revenue of 48 million rubles and a national debt of 50 million rubles.
At this time, except for the United Kingdom, there was no such thing as a "gold standard" in Europe. The issuance of banknotes by the country relied entirely on the power of the government.
Beihai Town wants Tsarist Russia to pay 14% of its annual fiscal revenue as compensation, unless the old lady is crazy.
As time entered March, Count Mujin gave up the negotiations, knowing that this battle was inevitable. However, he really wanted to go to war. Only large military expenditures and massive purchases of supplies could make the nobles make a fortune.
Afterwards, Count Mujin and the Orthodox Patriarch who came with him, accompanied by a Lianbei navy, crossed the cold windy Lake Baikal on an ice sledge and headed east to Yaksa to visit the captured Russian officers and soldiers. .
For more than half a year, Yaksa's Russian troops have been "repairing the earth" under the guns of the Northern Navy, enduring mosquito bites and biting cold. Specifically, they are engaged in railway infrastructure construction from Yaksa to Heilongjiang City.
When Count Mujin arrived in Yaksa and saw the hungry prisoners being driven out to work before dawn every day, he immediately lodged a strong protest.
It is said that in another time and space in history, in order to build the Trans-Siberian Railway, Tsarist Russia recruited hundreds of thousands of Chinese from Shandong, Henan and Northeast China, and they completed most of the construction. Like the famous "Great Western Railway", the entire Trans-Siberian Railway was built on the bones of Chinese workers.
They endured exploitation by the Russians and advanced at an average speed of 587 versts per year. However, when the railway was opened to traffic, many Chinese workers had no food and clothing, and ended up wandering along the railway line, begging for a living.
As history has shown, Wu Siyu, the commander-in-chief of the Yaksa Russian Prisoner of War Management Department, had no sympathy for these seemingly pitiful prisoners. He repeatedly told the officers of his troops that these Rakshasa "fear power rather than virtue" and they must be treated harshly.
bring it on! Each person has a pickaxe and a shovel, and the hard frozen soil is waiting for you! Anyone who dares to escape and resist will be shot, and the strong wind and snow will help bury them. If you want to slow down the work by slowing down the progress of the project, stop distributing food for two days!
The prisoners in the prison camp lived in sheds made of logs and birch bark. The beds were on two floors, with only 0.5 meters of space per person. This kind of house is definitely not waterproof, but it can still keep out the cold. Just put an iron pot on the fire before going to bed at night.
The prisoners' staple food was brown bread and white boiled potatoes dipped in salt, and the construction teams that performed well were given canned meat from the North Navy once a week.
Apart from that, it is not so demanding to dress up in the Northern Navy. After all, Zhao Xin wants to work, and if they freeze to death, there will be no one to build the roadbed. For this reason, he specially purchased a large number of winter clothes and cheap thermal underwear before winter, which made all the Cossack captives burst into tears.
On the second day after Count Mu Jin arrived in Yaksa, Zhao Xin quietly arrived in Yaksa city and met with a selected Cossack prisoner.
"Do you know Pugachev?"
"I know, sir, that he was a rebel. The mother of the country took him to Moscow and hanged him."
Opposite Zhao Xin sat a Cossack from the Don River. This man's name was Krutogorov, who was less than thirty years old this year. At this moment, he was shrinking on the stool timidly, with a somewhat flattering smile on his face.
"Yes." Zhao Xin nodded, and what he said immediately made the other party almost fall out of his chair. Just listen to him say slowly: "From today on, you are Pugachev's son..."
"What?!" Krutogorov's chin hit his foot, and he was so surprised that he was completely speechless.
Just listen to Zhao Xin continue: "Look, Pugachev said that he was Peter III at the beginning, so in this way, you are the son of Peter III."
Krutogorov stammered and said, "Big, big, sir, what he said is fake, it's fake!"
"I said you are true, you are true." Zhao Xin said with a smile and squinted eyes: "Inherit Pugachev's legacy and build a country without serfs from the east of the Ural Mountains to the west of the Yenisei River. A Cossack utopia without capitation tax."
Krutogorov was stunned after hearing this. He was a tenant farmer from the Don River. He didn't expect that the Chinese man in front of him actually wanted to support him in rebellion.
For Zhao Xin, Tsarist Russia was too big. With the current strength of the Northern Navy, even if he could cross the Ural Mountains to teach the old lady the Queen a lesson, he would not be able to defend such a large territory at the moment. Before the Outer Northeast and Beihai Special Zones were firmly locked by railways, the demarcation requirement based on the Yenisei River was simply a castle in the air.
"Everyone is deceitful, the priest deceives the people, the servants deceive the lord, and the great nobles always want to deceive the Tsar... This is the current situation in Russia. And your old lady wrote to Voltaire, saying that if the peasants want to eat chicken, they can Eat whatever you want, you know the facts better than me."
Zhao Xin couldn't tell the difference and finally said: "Klutogorov, go back and think about it carefully, and then reply to me in a few days."
Who is Voltaire? Krutogorov thought to himself: How could the Holy Mother say that? As a bankrupt farmer, before he joined the army, his family could not even eat eggs, let alone chickens!
On the other side, Count Mujin finally met Suvorov who was behind bars. However, what surprised him was that there was no Northern Navy surveillance in the reception room.
This made him extremely puzzled. He didn't understand what Bei Haijun thought about allowing them to meet alone.
However, what neither of them noticed was that on the ceiling at the four corners of the reception room, several "gadgets" hidden in wooden boards were closely monitoring their every move, and even every word they spoke could be heard. Heard clearly.
In fact, Suvorov has been enjoying this kind of treatment since he was captured. He had planned several rebellions against the North Navy, and they were all easily dismantled in the end. This made Suvorov deeply suspicious of several of his men, thinking that there must be traitors among them.
When Suvorov heard from Count Mujin that the Russian army had won the victory in Vodia, he couldn't help but sigh deeply.
If Yaksa hadn't lost, if Aihui City hadn't been lost, or even if there hadn't been that strange Zhao Xin, he should be galloping around on the western battlefield now, right?
"The mother of the country is very concerned about your safety. When she got the news, she immediately recalled the governor of Little Russia."
Suvorov asked in surprise: "Marshal returned to St. Petersburg?"
Mother Jin spread her hands and said: "There is no way, there was a conflict between His Excellency the Duke and the Marshal on the direction of attack."
Suvorov thought for a while and asked: "Is Suvorovchka okay?"
Suvorovchka was his daughter. After Suvorov and his wife finally divorced in 1784, his only emotional sustenance was his daughter. Since separation from his daughter, Suvorov has felt extremely painful. He is counting the days day by day, waiting for his reunion with his daughter.
However, Suvorov actually had a younger son, but because of his cheating wife, the admiral did not recognize him as his own flesh and blood for a long time.
As an aside, these years were truly the "era of lasciviousness" in Europe, and Catherine II was unruly in this regard. Many "cuckold" husbands preferred to feign ignorance of their wives' caprices in order to avoid offending the Queen and her favorites. Suvorov ignored Catherine II's repeated attempts to mediate and broke with his cheating wife publicly. This showed that he had both a strong character and a strong will. It was also an indirect rebuke of the old lady's own character. .
Count Mother Gold took out a letter from his pocket and handed it to the other party: "I went to Smolny Girls' High School to see Natasha before I left. This is the letter she wrote to you."
...
On the other side, Zhao Xin obtained the contents of the conversation between Suvorov and Count Gold after the meeting between the two. He looked at the record and asked the officer in charge of surveillance: "Can you confirm that this is a letter from his daughter?"
"It should be possible," the officer replied, "He read the letter while crying."
Zhao Xin nodded, and after reading the record, he said: "When the Count of Gold comes back, take Suvorov with him."
Wu Siyu, who was drinking tea at the side, asked curiously: "What are your plans?"
Zhao Xindao: "There is no plan. Since he misses his daughter so much, then I will use the North Navy's cannon to completely extinguish the admiral's fire of revenge."
Wu Siyu said: "You don't want to take prisoners anymore? There are not enough people to build the railway right now."
Zhao Xin rolled his eyes and said: "Brother, bullets and cannonballs are free of charge?! If the problem can be solved with ten cannonballs, why should I use a hundred rounds?"
Wu Siyu: "..."
After meeting with Suvorov, Count Mujin asked Wu Siyu who met him what price he would pay to release the general. Wu Siyu said with a straight face: "10 poods of gold, I think the admiral is worth this amount."
According to the unit of measurement in Tsarist Russia at the end of the 18th century, 10 poods equaled 40 Russian pounds, which was equal to 1,638 kilograms, approximately twice Suvorov's weight.
After hearing this, Count Mu Jin let out a sigh of relief and said to himself that these people are really a bunch of misers who are desperate for money, and they have no gentlemanly manners at all!
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