Taming the Wild Field: Colonization and Empire on the Russian Steppe 9781501703256

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Taming the Wild Field

Taming the Wild Field Colonization and Empire on the Russian Steppe Willard Sunderland

Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

Copyright © 2004 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2004 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sunderland, Willard, 1965– Taming the wild field : colonization and empire on the Russian steppe / Willard Sunderland. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8014-4209-5 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Russia—History—1613–1917. 2. Russia—Territorial expansion. 3. Imperialism. I. Title. DK113.S86 2004 947—dc22 2004001132 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu.

Cloth printing

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Our carts, when we started, were in an awful fix. The Handcart Pioneers, Report of the Second Handcart Company, 1856

To GM and GP

Contents

List of Maps Preface List of Abbreviations

ix xi xiii

Introduction: Steppe Building

1

1. Frontier Colonization The Rus' Land and the Field The Wild Field and the Tsardom The Empire and the Steppe

11 11 15 35

2. Enlightened Colonization Reason’s Territory Reason’s Process

55 55 73

3. Bureaucratic Colonization The Vastness and the Nation The Bureaucrats and the Settlers

97 97 113

4. Reformist Colonization The System and the Peasants The Pioneers and the Public

137 137 160 vii

Contents

5. “Correct Colonization” Colonizing Capacities and the Russian Element The Dwindling Prairie and the Growing Borderland

177 177 196

Conclusion: Steppe Building and Steppe Destroying

223

Note on Archival Sources Index

229 233

viii

Maps

1. Natural Zones of Northern Eurasia 2. Russia and the Steppe Region, Late Seventeenth Century 3. The Steppe Region of European Russia, ca. 1800 4. The Steppe Region of European Russia, ca. 1900

7 33 109 198

ix

Preface

In the age of Kievan Rus' the immense steppes running north of the Black and Caspian Seas represented the Eastern Slavs’ most dangerous and seemingly alien frontier, but by the end of the tsarist period the Slavs had become far and away the most numerous inhabitants of the region and had re-created its geography and history as their own. This book is an exploration of this transformation, emphasizing the phenomenon of Russian-sponsored colonization and its impact on the making both of Russia as an empire and of the Russians as imperialists. As such, it aims to present a broad picture of a complicated historical process, but it is neither a total nor a comprehensive history, and it is certainly not the history of steppe colonization, if ever such a history could be written. Instead, it is a more limited narrative concerned less with recounting every facet of the story than with evoking the themes I found interesting and important and was able to relate. Inspired by fascination and respect for the steppe, its peoples, and the Russian empire that eventually encompassed them, the book is also an attempt to wrestle honestly with the contradictory entanglements of achievement and loss, creation and destruction, that are always present in historical change. Colonization, the making of “new worlds,” and the projection of imperial power—by Russians and others—are usually the subjects of myth and oversimplification. Here they are explored instead for their ironies, contingencies, and paradoxes in the hope that such a history offers its own important vantage point on the truth. Significant funding for this project was provided by the American Council of Teachers of Russian, the International Research and Exchanges Board, the Social Science Research Council, the Kennan Institute xi

Preface

for Advanced Russian Studies, and the University Research Council and Charles Phelps Taft Memorial Fund of the University of Cincinnati. I am grateful to all of these institutions and programs, especially the Taft Fund, without whose support this book truly could not have been written. I also thank David Ransel, Ben Eklof, Alexander Rabinowitch, and Toivo Raun for encouraging work on the study that was a distant precursor to this book; Tom Barrett for saving me with his kindness and constructive criticism at the eleventh hour; Chuck Steinwedel, Brian Boeck, Richard Wortman, Allen Frank, Mark Bassin, Jane Burbank, Janet Rabinowitch, Adeeb Khalid, Al Rieber, Paul Werth, Virginia Martin, Michael Khodarkovsky, Steven Marks, and Charles King for their helpful and generous commentary on my research at different stages; Lisa Khachaturian, Christian Kanig, Krista Sigler, and the Interlibrary Loan Division at Langsam Library of the University of Cincinnati for expert research assistance; my colleagues in the history department at the University of Cincinnati, especially Barbara Ramusack, Maura O’Connor, John Alexander, Hilda Smith, and Wendy Kline, for their patience and encouragement; my editor, John Ackerman, for crusading against my list-o-mania; my parents and sisters for never failing to ask me what I was doing; my grandparents for special inspiration; and Betsy for simply being wonderful over and over again, endlessly. Finally, I offer my deepest thanks of all to Frank, Nick, and Emma Louise, who always did their best to distract me from quiet contemplation, giggled uncontrollably whenever I talked about my research, and made repeated attempts to sabotage my computer. Without these devious muses, I would never have finished.

xii

Abbreviations

Sources AMG CASS CMRS CSSH DAI DAOO DAKO FzOG GAOO IM IIRGO ITUAK JfGO JMH JSH KS LOSKIR MERSH MDIIAN OGV OEV OI

Akty moskovskogo gosudarstva Canadian-American Slavic Studies Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique Comparative Studies in Society and History Dopolneniia k aktam istoricheskim Derzhavni arkhiv odes'koi oblisti (Odessa) Derzhavni arkhiv krym'skoi oblisti (Simferopil') Forschungen zur Osteuropäischen Geschichte Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv orenburgskoi oblasti (Orenburg) Imago Mundi Izvestiia imperatorskogo russkogo geograficheskogo obshchestva Izvestiia tavricheskoi uchenoi arkhivnoi komissii Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas Journal of Modern History Journal of Social History Kievskaia starina Listki obshchestva sel'skogo khoziaistva iuzhnoi Rossii Modern Encyclopedia of Russian and Soviet History Materialy dlia istorii imperatorskoi akademii nauk Orenburgskie gubernskie vedomosti Orenburgskie eparkhial'nye vedomosti Otechestvennaia istoriia xiii

Abbreviations

OZ PiB PSRL PSZ PVL RA RGADA RGIA RH RR RV SamGV SarGV SEER SIPKPIUS SIRIO SMDOMIPK SO SR StGV TGV TVEO TsGIA RB VE VI VIRGO ZhMGI ZhMNP ZhMVD ZOOID

Otechestvennye zapiski Pis'ma i bumagi imperatora Petra Velikogo Polnoe sobranie russkikh letopisei Polnoe sobranie zakonov rossiiskoi imperii Povest' vremennykh let Russkii arkhiv Rossiiskii gosudartsvennyi arkhiv drevnykh aktov (Moscow) Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv (St. Petersburg) Russian History/Histoire Russe Russian Review Russkii vestnik Samarskie gubernskie vedomosti Saratovskie gubernskie vedomosti Slavonic and East European Review Sochineniia i perevody k pol'ze i uveseleniiu sluzhashchie Sbornik imperatorskogo russkogo istoricheskogo obshchestva Sbornik materialov dlia opisaniia mestnostei i plemen Kavkaza Syn otechestva Slavic Review Stavropol'skie gubernskie vedomosti Tavricheskie gubernskie vedomosti Trudy volnogo ekonomicheskogo obshchestva Tsentral'nyi gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv respubliki Bashkortostana (Ufa) Vestnik Evropy Voprosy istorii Vestnik imperatorskogo russkogo geograficheskogo obshchestva Zhurnal ministerstva gosudarstvennogo imushchestva Zhurnal ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia Zhurnal ministerstva vnutrennykh del Zapiski odesskogo obshchestva istorii i drevnostei

Archival Terms f. op.

fond(holding) opis' (register) xiv

Abbreviations

d. ch. l. ll. (b) otd. neoff. ch. smes'

delo (file) chast' (part) list (page) listy (pages) back otdel/otdelenie (section) neoffitsial'naia chast' (unofficial section) miscellany (miscellaneous section)

xv

Taming the Wild Field

Introduction Steppe Building

For close to a thousand years, the most important fact about the relationship between the agricultural peoples of the Russian forests and the nomadic pastoralists of the southern steppes was that the forest peoples did not stay where they were. Whether they moved to farm, trade, or serve their state, in small parties or in mass relocations, at their own initiative or that of their government or lords, migrants from the forests were almost always coming to the steppe. Settling at first in the forest-steppe fringes north of the European steppe, then in Muscovite times along the rivers, and by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries along lines of forts, the migrants rapidly colonized the open steppe itself, changing everything in the process. Grasslands were replaced by fields and agricultural pasture; nomads were replaced by peasants (or turned into them); “free” Cossacks became the Cossack estate; and a place once considered by the Russians’ most learned spokesmen as the very antithesis of Russia became reinvented as one of its essential parts. No other originally un-Russian part of the old Russian empire was affected by the settlement of Russians and other outside migrants, and the related dynamics of Russian political and cultural appropriation, so completely for so long. This book is a study of this process, a history of how a region was created on the ground and in the imagination through the changing phenomenon of colonization itself. The book’s coverage extends from the period of early Rus', when the Eastern Slavs first started writing about their settlements in the foreststeppe, to the late nineteenth century, when major new agricultural settlement in the European steppe region ended and the Great Siberian Migration began. Despite this broad framework, however, four-fifths of the book is devoted to a study of the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries 1

Taming the Wild Field

when settlement on the steppe proved most intense. With the emphasis on the period of major Russian “incorporation” come three basic implications. The first is that the book is indeed a study of the Russian incorporation process, and, as such, it focuses on the Russian state and its colonists. That is, it treats the colonization of the steppe largely through the minds and experiences of the colonizers rather than those of the colonized because the central story being told here, a story of appropriation, was one in which the colonizers’ terms ultimately prevailed. If frontiers are “middle grounds,” appropriation is a mutual business practiced by both “natives” and “strangers,” and “power by itself is too crude an instrument for measuring all the subtleties that make up cultural interaction,” it is still true that “middle grounds” (as frontiers) invariably “close,” that all sides do not come out ahead in the equation, and that traditionally the one with the most “guns, germs, and steel” has been able to appropriate the other in ways that bring more drastic consequences.1 Though it took centuries, and was never predetermined, Eastern Slavic agricultural society, with its greater aggregate wealth and larger population, eventually overtook and then eclipsed steppe nomadism; the agents of centralized state power eventually outgunned or bought out the independent “men of the frontier”; and the “spirit of the nation” eventually insisted on claiming the nation’s “empty spaces.” This book begins with times when outsiders and natives were either broadly equal in their ability to affect the other or when the natives’ power was greater, but it ultimately emphasizes the way that outsiders made the natives’ region their own. This does not deny the history or agency of the steppe peoples or diminish the mutuality of colonial encounters. It simply acknowledges the full enormity of the change that the coming of the outsiders entailed. Second, my work proceeds from the recognition that the outsiders who came to the steppe were diverse and that the appropriation they carried out unfolded on multiple levels and changed over time. At once physical and symbolic, material and imagined, steppe colonization was an evolving process in which rural migrants, landlords, land speculators, “gentlemen travelers,” poets, scholars, and bureaucrats all played their necessary roles. In other words, my work begins with the premise that the steppe was appropriated not merely through the physical occupation of its land, the displacement or reorganization of its traditional inhabitants, the elabora1 Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region (New York, 1991); Greg Dening, “Possessing Tahiti,” in his Performances (Chicago, 1996), p. 167; Stuart B. Schwartz, “Introduction,” in Schwartz (ed.), Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting, and Reflecting on the Encounters between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era (New York, 1994), p. 7; Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York, 1999); Richard J. Perry, . . . From Time Immemorial: Indigenous Peoples and State Systems (Austin, Texas, 1996), pp. 223–52.

2

Introduction: Steppe Building

tion of official settlement programs, or as a result of being claimed by or for the Russian imaginaire, but rather through the effects of all these factors. It mattered a great deal that even as a varied constituency of plebeian colonists were moving onto the steppe, the region, its native inhabitants, its new residents, and colonization itself were being continuously invented and reinvented in the plans, fears, and dreams of Russia’s rulers and learned observers. These two planes of experience—steppe and colonization, fact and image—were sometimes contradictory and frequently out of synch, but they were always related, each with its own consequences for the transformation of the region. Third, my approach stresses the history of steppe colonization as a story of Russian imperialism, with imperialism defined “in behavioral terms” as “the process . . . of establishing or maintaining an empire” and empire defined, in turn, as “the effective control, whether formal or informal, of a subordinate society by an imperial [one].”2 The steppe belonged to other peoples before governing Russians ultimately took it over and “established” and “maintained” it as part of their empire. The projection of Russian power onto the steppe was thus, in a very basic sense, a matter of imperialism, one no less obvious for having taken place across a continent rather than across oceans and for involving “others” who were well known rather than peoples and “things never heard of, seen, or dreamed of before.”3 Yet, for all this, the Russian colonization of the steppe has rarely been interpreted as a deliberate story of imperialist expansion, especially by Russians but also by Western specialists who have—to varying degrees—followed their cue.4 Instead, the movement of Slavs and other migrants into the steppe and other “agricultural” peripheries, such as Siberia, has been viewed as a matter of “resettlement” (pereselenie), “spreading out” (rasselenie), or “internal colonization” (vnutrenniaia kolonizatsiia, an adaptation of the Germans’ innere Kolonisation, seized on by late imperial Russian observers looking for a suitable analogy for the Russian process). Similarly, peasant colonization has generally been approached from the perspective of agricultural and demographic expansion rather than from that of empire; and the imposition of Russian power and Russian norms on peripheral territories and peoples, while undeniably involving cases of conquest and expropriation, has been characterized as a process of “incorporation” and “economic development”—both ideas contained within the Russian term osvoenie, which means, literally, the making of something other into one’s own. The question of empire in 2 Michael W. Doyle, Empires (Ithaca, N.Y., 1986), pp. 45, 30. 3 Bernal Díaz, The Conquest of New Spain (trans. J.M. Cohen) (New York, 1963),

p. 214. 4 Two prominent exceptions to this general rule are Michael Khodarkovsky and Andreas Kappeler, both scholars whose works have greatly influenced this study.

3

Taming the Wild Field

colonization is thus either elided altogether or, more commonly, treated as a natural process, part of Russia’s supposedly natural national development. Much as in China, where it is more common to see Qing expansion as a process of “unification” rather than conquest, or in the United States, where visions of a Turnerian frontier (“a zone of ‘free’ land and opportunity”) are still more powerful than notions of La Frontera (“borderlands . . . of trade, violence, conquest, and cultural exchange”), the proposition that Russian colonization was imperialist sounds at best unusual.5 Colonization, as the historian Vasilii Kliuchevskii famously put it, is the “basic fact” of Russian history, but it has rarely been interrogated as a basic fact of Russian imperialism.6 Taming the Wild Field emphasizes the imperialism in colonization, though this approach necessarily means highlighting what it is about the process that has allowed it to appear so unimperialist. Indeed, the ambiguities of Russian colonization were striking and persistent, and nowhere was this more obvious than on the steppe. The representatives of the Muscovite tsars conquered and encroached on parts of the grasslands but did not seek to appropriate them in any comprehensive manner; the imperial agents of St. Petersburg, by contrast, loudly claimed the entire region in the name of “science,” “utility,” European-style colonialism, and the “Russian way,” but they never declared or treated the steppe as a clear-cut colony and for a long time preferred foreign to Russian colonists. Similarly, the coming of ordinary Russians, foreigners, and other migrants led to the expropriation of native lands and the eventual end of nomadism and the Cossack frontier—all effects comparable to the consequences of imperialism in European settler colonies—yet the migrants’ arrival on the Russian plains did not give rise to a “settler society” in which “stratification [was] based more on race and ethnicity than on socioeconomic class.” Indeed, until the end of the tsarist era (and beyond) the state displayed the same “colonial” paternalism toward its own Russian commoners that it displayed toward its officially colonized non-Russian “aliens,” some of whom themselves doubled as colonizers.7 Furthermore, for longer than 5 James A. Millward, “New Perspectives on the Qing Frontier,” in Gail Hershatter et al. (eds.), Remapping China: Fissures in Historical Terrain (Stanford, Calif., 1996), p. 120; Millward, Beyond the Pass: Economy, Ethnicity, and Empire in Qing Central Asia, 1759–1864 (Stanford, Calif., 1998), pp. 15–16; Laura Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise: Ethnography and Cartography in Early Modern China (Chicago, 2001), pp. 25, 29; Patricia Nelson Limerick, “The Adventures of the Frontier in the Twentieth Century,” in her Something in the Soil: Legacies and Reckonings in the New West (New York, 2000), pp. 87–88. 6 V.O. Kliuchevskii, Sochineniia v deviati tomakh (Moscow, 1987), v. 1, p. 50. 7 David Prochaska, Making Algeria French: Colonialism in Bône, 1870–1920 (New York, 1990), pp. 9–10; Cathy Frierson, Peasant Icons: Representations of Rural People in Late Nineteenth-Century Russia (New York, 1993); Stephen p. Frank, “Confronting the Domestic Other: Rural Popular Culture and Its Enemies in Fin-de-Siècle Russia,” in Frank

4

Introduction: Steppe Building

was the case in Western or Central Europe, Russia’s “internal expansion” (“the intensification of settlement and the reorganization of society”) and “external expansion” (“colonial conquest and immigration”) proceeded together and were almost impossible to disentangle.8 The colonization of the steppe, as a result, reflected and produced a particularly complicated kind of imperialism, one in which empire building, state building, society building, and nation building (real and imagined, of Russians and others) invariably intertwined. Uncovering and explaining this process is the central purpose of my story. The setting for the story is the western end of the great Eurasian steppe belt, also known as the Ponto-Caspian steppe, a vast area that once fell within the limits of so-called European Russia but today is divided between Moldova, Ukraine, the Russian Federation, and Kazakhstan.9 The region’s limit to the north is the front edge of the Russian forests, which bends gently upward, running west to east, from central Ukraine to the Central Urals; in the south, the foothills of the Caucasus and the northern shores of the Black and Caspian Seas; in the west, the Danube River; and in the east, the Ural River up to roughly the town of Orenburg. Along its northern edge on the border with the Russian and Ukrainian forests and in the south near the Caucasus, the region is marked by a transition zone of forest-steppe: stands of woods interspersed with prairie. Around the western Caspian, and between the Lower Volga and the Lower Ural Rivers, the region edges toward desert and is characterized, accordingly, by another intermediary zone, the desert-steppe, consisting largely of salt flats and low-lying shrubs. Around the time of the first millennium, a.d., the environment that fell between these edges and transition zones—the steppe proper or the open steppe—was all grassland: a continuous, mostly treeless, dry (though not arid) plain, less elevated and flatter along the seas and more rolling and elevated in the northeast toward the Urals and in the south toward the Caucasus Mountains, but characterized throughand Mark D. Steinberg (eds.), Cultures in Flux: Lower-Class Values, Practices, and Resistance in Late Imperial Russia (Princeton, N.J., 1994), pp. 74–107; Paul W. Werth, “From Resistance to Subversion: Imperial Power, Indigenous Opposition, and Their Entanglement,” Kritika, 2000, v. 1, n. 1, p. 22; Yanni Kotsonis, Making Peasants Backward: Agricultural Cooperatives and the Agrarian Question in Russia, 1861–1914 (New York, 1999), pp. 133–34. 8 Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Colonization, Conquest, and Cultural Change, 950–1350 (Princeton, N.J., 1993), pp. 2–3. 9 On the topography, vegetation, climate, and soil structure of the European steppe, see Robert N. Taaffe, “The Geographic Setting,” in Denis Sinor (ed.), The Cambridge History of Early Inner Asia (New York, 1990), pp. 30–35; John Sparks, Realms of the Russian Bear: A Natural History of Russia and the Central Asian Republics (Boston, 1992), pp. 146–53; John Massey Stuart, The Nature of Russia (New York, 1991), pp. 80–101.

5

Taming the Wild Field

out by one-to-five-foot tall drought- and frost-resistant grasses and forbs, such as fescues, oat and rye grasses, sedges, sagebrush, feather grass, and wild onion, as well as numerous varieties of seasonal wildflowers—perfumed hyacinths, scarlet tulips, valerians, irises. The steppe’s topsoils were chernozem (black-earth), in some places in the forest-steppe and much of the steppe proper up to three feet deep, with less fertile chestnut-brown and salinated soils more common as the plains approached the seashores and in the desert-steppes near the Caspian. At this time, the only people who had successfully adapted to life on the open steppe were shamanist, Turkic-speaking, horse-riding nomadic pastoralists, who, with the exception of the more institutionalized Khazar kaganate centered in the Lower Volga and Northern Caucasus, tended to be organized into loose tribal unions.10 Though the nomads (to varying degrees) practiced vestigial or supplementary agriculture, wintering in semipermanent camps, their principal economic occupation was livestock production, which they ensured by moving between different pastures in regular seasonal migrations with their herds (horses, sheep, and, to a lesser extent, goats, cattle, and camels).11 Dependent on their animals and with little surplus to spare, the nomads’ economy was always precarious, which meant that they were never self-sufficient. They raided rival nomadic tribes on the grasslands or joined them in tribal confederations to increase their herds or expand or defend their claims to pasture, water supply, and seasonal migration routes. Politics among nomadic groups was also shaped by shifting configurations of power on the eastern end of the “steppe highway” near China, where large steppe-based empires would form, producing migrations or invasions that displaced or incorpo10 On the steppe’s peoples prior to and around the turn of the first millennium, see Peter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples: Ethnogenesis and StateFormation in Medieval and Early Modern Eurasia and the Middle East (Wiesbaden, 1992), pp. 233–82; Golden, “The Peoples of the South Russian Steppes,” in Sinor (ed.), Cambridge History of Early Inner Asia, pp. 263–84; Imre Boba, Nomads, Norsemen, and Slavs: Eastern Europe in the Ninth Century (The Hague, 1967), pp. 40–43; Ia.A. Fedorov and G.S. Fedorov, Rannye tiurki na severnom Kavkaze (Moscow, 1978); S.A. Pletneva, “Pechenegi, torki i polovtsy v iuzhnorusskikh stepiakh,” Materialy i issledovaniia po arkheologii SSSR (Moscow and Leningrad, 1958), n. 62, pp. 151–226; and Pletneva (ed.), Stepi Evrazii v epokhu srednevekov'ia (Moscow, 1981), pp. 213–28. For a succinct discussion of the emergence of steppe pastoralism, see Nicola Di Cosmo, Ancient China and Its Enemies: The Rise of Nomadic Power in East Asian History (New York, 2002), pp. 21–43. 11 A.M. Khazanov, “Characteristic Features of Nomadic Communities in the Eurasian Steppes,” in Wolfgang Weissleder (ed.), The Nomadic Alternative: Modes and Models of Interaction in the African-Asian Deserts and Steppes (The Hague, 1978), pp. 119–26; Golden, Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples, pp. 3, 42. Though it treats contemporary Arab nomads, see also William Lancaster and Fidelity Lancaster, “Who Are These Nomads? What Do They Do? Continuous Change or Changing Continuities?” in Joseph Ginat and Anatoly M. Khazanov (eds.), Changing Nomads in a Changing World (Brighton, Eng., 1998), pp. 24–37.

6

0

C AU C A S U S RA N G E

Black Sea

St. Petersburg

O ka

500

1000 km

Caspian Sea

S T E P P E ZO N E OF E U RO P E A N RU S S I A lg a Vo

Moscow

O

R

D E S E RT

Aral Sea

Kam a

B

E

Irty s

L

U

F Ob

N

O

S

D

R

R

I E

A

s ei Eni

h

S

B T

E

R

Natural Zones of Northern Eurasia

A

T Ob

MIXED FOREST

l Ura

L S

A R

U

Dvina na

A

Forest steppe Steppe Desert steppe

I

Le

ur

Am

Baltic Sea

K o ly m a

Taming the Wild Field

rated the nomadic societies to the west. The formation of these eastern steppe empires was directly related to relations with the Chinese, a circumstance that points to an essential fact of steppe nomadic pastoralism: the people who practiced it were always tied to and dependent on the world of the sedentarists.12 This was as true for the nomadic societies of the European steppe as it was for those farther east. Through either trading, raiding, military service, or royal diplomacy, the western nomads were enmeshed with the agricultural societies and empires that bordered their territories: with the Byzantines in the Pontic region, the outposts of Arab power in the North Caucasus and Transcaucasia, the Turkic-ruled states of the northern Middle East, Central Asia, and Middle Volga (Volga Bulgaria), and, to the northwest, in an area where the forest and steppe ran together, with the people eventually known as the Rus'.13 12 Peter B. Golden, Nomads and Sedentary Societies in Medieval Eurasia (Washington, D.C., 1998), pp. 38–40; Anatoly Khazanov, Nomads and the Outside World ( Julia Crookenden, trans.) (2nd ed.; Madison, Wisc., 1994), pp. xxxi–xxxii passim. On relations between nomadic peoples and China on the eastern steppes, see Thomas J. Barfield, The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China (Cambridge, Mass., 1992). 13 See David Christian, Russia, Central Asia, and Mongolia, v. 1, Inner Eurasia from Prehistory to the Mongol Empire (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), pp. 245–352, 357–61.

8

“Vid Astrakhani i karta Kaspiiskogo moria” (View of Astrakhan and the Caspian Sea) (1678), from the German edition of Jan Struys’s Reisen durch Greichenland, Moscau, Tatarey . . . , reproduced in Natal'ia Borisovskaia, Starinnye gravirovannye karty i plany xv–xviii vekov (Galaxy, Moscow, 1992), p. 155.

Chapter One

Frontier Colonization As heaven and earth beget them, men have one same heaven, but each a different earth. Ch'iu Chün, Supplement to the “Expansion of the ‘Great Learning’ ”

The Rus' Land and the Field According to the Primary Chronicle, when the first Eastern Slavs established themselves in what would become Ukraine and western Russia they settled in woods and along waterways: “So these Slavs came and settled on the Dniepr and called themselves People of the Clearings [poliane]; others called themselves People of the Trees [drevliane] because they settled in the forests; and different ones settled on the Dvina and called themselves People of the Polota [polochane], taking the name of the Polota River, which flows into the Dvina. And those Slavs who settled near Lake Ilmen' called themselves by their own name—Slavs—and they built a town and called it Novgorod [New Town].”1 The chronicler did not indicate why the Slavs chose to settle in these environments and not others, though it was presumably because the surroundings offered fish, shellfish, berries, honey, furs, game, shelter, and fuel as well as security from enemies and opportunities for farming and trade.2 Over time, as the settlers came under the rule of Rus' Varangians “from beyond the sea” and their rulers, centered in the wooded, riverine town of Kiev, adopted a new religion and literary language “from the Greeks,” the Slavs’ habitat as well as their “Slavic tongue,” their “written law,” and their wise decision to forsake the

1 PVL, p. 144. 2 R.A. French, “Russians and the Forest,” in James H. Bater and R.A. French

(eds.), Studies in Russian Historical Geography (New York, 1983), pp. 23–25; S.V. Kirikov, Chelovek i priroda vostochno-evropeiskoi lesostepi v x–nachale xix v. (Moscow, 1979), pp. 9–18.

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Taming the Wild Field

“gloom of idolatry” for “the sunlight of the true faith” became what their Kievan spokesmen saw as their defining attributes.3 Known to the Rus' as “the field” (pole), the grassy plains that opened up to the south of their settlements appeared completely different. In contrast to the “Rus' land” (rus'kaia zemlia), “the field” contained few freshwater lakes or trees, and its inhabitants were nomadic pastoralists who did not speak Slavic, did not farm, had no permanent homes, and had little interest in either “written law” or the Christian god. Instead, as the chronicler put it, they “lived according to the ways of their fathers,” which included such unsavory habits as “shedding blood,” eating carrion and prairie dogs, and sleeping with their stepmothers.4 Most disturbing of all, the nomads periodically raided Rus' towns and ambushed their trading parties on the Dniepr, which meant that they were not merely foul and godless but also dangerous. Kievan ecclesiastics, who began writing in the eleventh century, consequently singled out the Pechenegs, Torki (Oghuz), and especially the Polovtsy (Qipchaq, Cumans), who occupied the steppe during that time, as their country’s most heinous neighbors. Indeed their heinousness was so complete that Rus' authors did not conceive of them as members of the inhabitable world made by God (oecumene) but rather as the descendants of apocalyptic peoples (such as the Ishmaelites and the unclean tribes of Gog and Magog) whose eventual victory against the Christians would herald the end of the world.5 A “pagan place” where their “meek and suffering” monkish brethren were taken away to be tortured and their “brave princes” went to do battle with the “godless armies of the Polovtsians,” the plains were the Kievan literati’s ultimate wilderness: “the threatening antitype to [their] ordered cosmos” and the “ultimate disquieting horizon of [their] medieval world.”6 3 PVL, p. 147; Ideino-filosovskoe nasledie Ilariona Kievskogo (Moscow, 1986), v. 1, p. 55. 4 PVL, p. 147. 5 Leonid S. Chekin, “The Godless Ishmaelites: The Image of the Steppe in Eleventh

to Thirteenth Century Rus',” RH, 1992, n. 1/4, pp. 12–13; W.R. Jones, “The Image of the Barbarian in Medieval Europe,” CSSH, 1971, v. 13, n. 4, pp. 399–400; Scott D. Westrem, “Against Gog and Magog,” in Sylvia Tomasch and Sealy Gilles (eds.), Text and Territory: Geographical Imagination in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia, 1998), pp. 54–75. 6 Cf. Dmitro Abramovich (ed.), Kyievo-pecher'skyi pateryk (Kiev, 1930; reprint: 1991), pp. 108–9; “Slovo o polku igoreve,” in N.K. Gudzii (comp.), Khrestomatiia po drevnei russkoi literature xi–xvii vekov (7th ed; Moscow, 1962), pp. 59, 61; David Gordon White, Myths of the Dog-Man (Chicago, 1991), p. 2; Jacques Le Goff, Medieval Civilization, 400–1500 (New York, 1988), p. 133. See also Mary W. Helms, Ulysses’ Sail: An Ethnographic Odyssey of Power, Knowledge, and Geographical Distance (Princeton, N.J., 1988), pp. 22–33. On the Rus' depiction of steppe nomads, in particular the Polovtsy, as the “fundamental antithesis” of Rus'ness, see Andreas Kappeler, “Etnische Abgrenzung: Bemerkungen zur ostslavischen Terminologie des Mittelalters,” in Uwe Halbach (ed.), Geschichte Altrusslands in der Begriffswelt ihrer Quellen: Festschrift zum 70. Geburtstag von Günter Stökl (Stuttgart, 1986), pp. 132–33.

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This was the world according to the churchmen. The world of day-today interaction was different. Relations between the Rus' and the nomads were in fact intimate as well as distant, and peaceful as well as hostile, with physical proximity creating its own rules of engagement. Southern Rus' settlements on the fringes of the forest-steppe could be as little as a few hours’ ride from habitual nomadic pastures and encampments. (According to one early eleventh-century account, it took two days to travel by horse from the town of Kiev to the edge of the “land of the Pechenegs.”)7 Consequently, Rus' princes and commoners went to “the field” to hunt bison, boar, hare, fox, and antelope or to break wild horses, while the nomads went to Rus' towns to trade, receiving honey, cloth, grain, and metal goods in exchange for horses, cattle, sheep, and hides, all of which, according to the Byzantine emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus, were much appreciated by the Rus' since “none of the aforesaid animals is found in Russia.”8 The Rus' and the nomads were also tied through the Rus'-sponsored trade “from the Varangians to the Greeks,” which crossed the steppe and consequently depended on the nomads’ cooperation for its success. Whenever the Rus' refused to provide the nomads with the “gifts” they expected, or the nomads broke their arrangements with the Rus' by raiding Rus' towns to seize slaves and other “booty,” the trade suffered, but such hostilities were rarely prolonged enough to shut the trade down completely.9 Instead, quite the opposite occurred. The trade endured and the dependencies it created turned the nomads and the Rus' into essential players within each other’s fractious politics, with a necessary blurring of distinctions between the two sides. By the late twelfth century, Rus' princes married nomadic “princesses” and vice versa; alliances were formed between Rus' and Polovtsy clans against the clans of other Rus' and nomads, and no one had a monopoly on raiding. In his Testament, the Kievan prince Vladimir Monomakh relates attacking his Rus' rivals with “his Polovtsy,” being raided by “the whole Polovtsian land” as well as their Rus' allies, rescuing certain “Polovtsian princes” from their Polovtsian captors, and, in another instance, capturing three Polovtsian princes and some fifteen notables alive and then “cut[ting] them down and throw[ing] them into the Sal'nia River.”10 This was right 7 “Pis'mo arkhiepiskopa Bruno k germanskomu imperatoru Genrikhu II,” Pamiatniki istorii Kievskogo gosudarstva ix–xii vv. (Leningrad, 1936), p. 76. 8 Gy. Moravsik (ed.) and R.J.H. Jenkins (trans.), Constantine Porphyrogenitus De Administrando Imperio (Washington, D.C., 1967), p. 51. Trade is often most intense at the junctures between different environmental habitats. See Philip D. Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History (New York, 1984), p. 16. 9 Peter B. Golden, “Aspects of the Nomadic Factor in the Economic Development of Kievan Rus,” in I.S. Koropeckyj (ed.), Ukrainian Economic History: Interpretive Essays (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), pp. 96–98. 10 PVL, pp. 241–42.

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after the prince noted that he had also “made peace with the Polovtsian princes once less than twenty times, both in my father’s day and after his death [i pri otse i bez otsa], and I gave [to them] many of my clothes and heads of stock.”11 The most obvious physical example of the complicated consequences of cohabitation was the stretches of earthen ramparts and palisades that the Rus' began building south of their settlements in the time of Vladimir the Great and Iaroslav the Wise. Known to subsequent Slavs as “serpentine walls” (zmievye valy), the intended purpose of the ramparts was to keep the nomads from raiding Rus' towns, as well as to keep the lands between the walls and the towns from being turned into nomadic pasture.12 The defenses were also recognized as an obvious dividing line between the “Rus' land” and “the field.” As the archbishop Bruno put it, having passed through the gates in an attempt to proselytize among the nomads in 1008, on one side of the ramparts lay the territory of Prince Vladimir while on the other was the land of “his enemy . . . the Pechenegs . . . the most evil of pagans.”13 Yet if the walls were intended as an “ordering concept,” their practical impact was at best disorderly.14 They never stopped either the Rus' or the nomads from crossing into each other’s territory when political or economic objectives required it (that is, neither party saw the ramparts as an obstacle to an “offensive strategy”), and because various Rus' rulers made use of nomadic allies as border guards and servitors, the defenses ultimately brought the Rus' and the nomads together as much as they kept them apart.15 The walls were not part of a deliberate policy to colonize the land behind them nor were they used as a springboard for taking over “the field,” since the rulers of Rus' conceived of their dominion in terms of “the peoples that render Rus' tribute” rather than in terms of territorial possession.16 And in any case, taking over the steppe was not a realistic proposition. Even if the Rus', as the 11 Ibid., p. 242. 12 E.A. Razin, Istoriia voennogo iskusstva (Moscow, 1957), v. 2, p. 72; P.P. Tolochko,

Kochevye narody stepei i Kievskaia Rus' (Kiev, 1999), pp. 66–67, 71; D.A. Rasovskii, “Rus' i kochevniki v epokhu sviatogo Vladimira,” Vladimirskii sbornik v pamiat' 950–letiia kreshcheniia Rusi, 988–1938 (Belgrade, 1938), pp. 149–54; M.P. Kuchera, Zmievye valy Srednego Podneprov'ia (Kiev, 1987). 13 “Pis'mo arkhiepiskopa Bruno k germanskomu imperatoru Genrikhu II,” pp. 75–76. 14 The term “ordering concept” is taken from Arthur Waldron, The Great Wall of China: From History to Myth (New York, 1990), p. 6. 15 S.A. Pletneva, “Polovetskaia zemlia,” Drevnerusskie kniazhestva x–xiii vv. (Moscow, 1975), pp. 266–69; Peter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples: Ethnogenesis and State-Formation in Medieval and Early Modern Eurasia and the Middle East (Wiesbaden, 1992), p. 269. 16 PVL, p. 146.

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beneficiaries of an agricultural economy, were in a position to depend less on the nomads than the nomads depended on them, neither “the field” nor the “Rus' land” could overwhelm the other with convincing military superiority.17 The Wild Field and the Tsardom This rough parity collapsed in 1223 when the Rus' and their Polovtsy allies were routed by an army of “unknown peoples” (iazytsi neznaeme) on the steppe near the Kalka River.18 The “unknown peoples” turned out to be the Mongols, who, some twenty years later, leading one of the largest steppe confederations ever assembled, destroyed Kiev and turned the Rus' into tributaries. This fact at once solidified the Rus' ecclesiastics’ loathing of “the field” (identified now with “these godless Moabites called Tatars”) and completely changed Rus' politics.19 The nomads were now in charge, so much so that the khans of the Golden Horde gradually began settling into a stationary capital on the Lower Volga.20 Kiev was eclipsed, and the obscure principality of Moscow, much further north and deeper within the woods, gradually became the new center of the Rus' lands. As Moscow “rose,” its princes paid the tribute to the khans, gave them hostages, and were alternatively obedient and rebellious as circumstances allowed. Once the Horde began to unravel, Moscow maintained similarly complicated relations with its fellow successor states, the Turko-Mongolic and Islamicized khanates of Kazan, Crimea, and Astrakhan. Muscovite rulers fought with the khanates over Tatar raiding and slave-taking, took sides in their internal politics, and made claims to patrimonial entitlement. But they also sent embassies seeking “friendship and love,” recruited Tatar servitors, and engaged in a good deal of commerce. Longdistance merchantmen like Afanasii Nikitin of Tver' shuttled goods between Muscovy and “the Derbent Sea—the Sea of Khvalinsk” and “the Black Sea—the Istanbul Sea,” while Muscovite nobles, or boyars, yearly exchanged furs, cloth, and walrus tusks for thousands of horses from their 17 Golden, “Aspects of the Nomadic Factor in the Economic Development of Kievan Rus',” pp. 79–82. 18 M.N. Tikhomirov (ed.), Novgorodskaia pervaia letopis' starshego i mladshego izvodov (Moscow and Leningrad, 1950), p. 264. 19 Quote from PSRL, v. 2 (1908; reprint: Moscow, 1998), pp. 806–7. On the Mongol conquest, see Charles J. Halperin, Russia and the Golden Horde: The Mongol Impact on Medieval Russian History (Bloomington, Ind., 1987); Donald Ostrowski, Muscovy and the Mongols: Cross-Cultural Influences on the Steppe Frontier, 1304–1589 (New York, 1998). 20 Golden Horde—and more commonly simply “the Horde” (orda)—is the term used in medieval Russian sources for what was usually called in the east the khanate of Qipchaq. David Morgan, The Mongols (New York, 1986), p. 141.

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Nogay (Mangyt) “friends” and “brothers” on the Volga steppes.21 In other words, the familiar realpolitik continued. Conflict with people the churchmen called “evil beasts” and “godless creatures,” now all the more heinous for having adopted Islam, did not preclude cooperation, and not even growing commitments to Orthodox messianism could eclipse the worldly pursuits of stability and profit.22 This remained the case even after the armies of Ivan IV conquered the town of Kazan in 1552. Pragmatism in relations with the steppe continued, only now the presumption was that Moscow alone should be in charge. During the next four years, the men of Ivan Vasil'evich subjugated the rest of Kazan’s territory, and in the summer of 1556, with the aid and encouragement of their allies among the Nogays, they seized the poorly defended entrepot of Astrakhan at the mouth of the Volga and chased out the independent “Astrakhan tsar,” replacing him with a Nogay khan obedient to Moscow.23 Next, the leaders of the Bashkir (Bashkort) clans, former tributaries of Kazan and the Nogays in the Southern Urals, “beat [their] foreheads” and agreed to submit to Muscovite rule in the 1550s. So, too, did the khanate of Sibir' (later conquered outright by Moscow in 1581). Using Astrakhan as a base, the tsar’s men then pushed around the western end of the Caspian and into the Northern Caucasus, building scattered forts and insisting on the fealty of local “princes.”24 Of course, even as the Muscovites “gathered” these remnants of the former Horde, they could not and did not even try for a full sweep by acquiring the Crimea or the north Pontic steppe, inhabited by the Nogay Lesser Horde, who were “vassals” of the Crimeans. Instead, the Crimeans, themselves “vassals” of the Ottomans, joined a Turkish-led and 21 SIRIO, 1884, v. 41, p. 399; Janet Martin, “Muscovite Frontier Policy: The Case of the Khanate of Kasimov,” RH, 1992, v. 19, n. 1/4, pp. 169–79; Khozhdenie za tri moria Afanasiia Nikitina, 1466–1472 gg. (2nd ed.; Moscow and Leningrad, 1958), p. 71; Andreas Kappeler, “Moskau und die Steppe: Das Verhältnis zu den Nogai-Tataren im 16. Jahrhundert,” FzOG, 1992, v. 46, pp. 94–96; Ann E. Kleimola, “Good Breeding, Muscovite Style: ‘Horse Culture’ in Early Modern Rus',” FzOG, 1995, v. 50, pp. 205–6. References to the Nogay of the Great Horde as “brothers” and “friends” were common in Muscovite-Nogay diplomatic exchange of the late fifteenth and first decades of the sixteenth century. See Posol'skaia kniga po sviaziam Rossii s nogaiskoi ordoi 1489–1508 gg. (Moscow, 1984). 22 PSRL, v. 29, p. 57; Andreas Kappeler, Russland als Vielvölkerreich: Entstehung, Geschichte, Zerfall (Munich, 1992), pp. 30–31; Martin, “Muscovite Frontier Policy”; Edward L. Keenan, “Muscovy and Kazan: Some Introductory Remarks on the Patterns of Steppe Diplomacy,” SR, 1967, v. 26, n. 4, pp. 548–58. 23 PSRL, v. 13, pp. 236, 242. 24 Michael Khodarkovsky, “Of Christianity, Enlightenment, and Colonialism: Russia in the North Caucasus, 1500–1800,” JMH, 1999, v. 71, n. 2, pp. 406–8; Chantal Lermercier-Quelquejay, “Cooptation of Elites of Kabarda and Daghestan in the Sixteenth Century,” in Marie Bennigsen Broxup (ed.), The North Caucasus Barrier: The Russian Advance towards the Muslim World (New York, 1992), pp. 18–44.

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ultimately ill-fated “expedition against Astrakhan” in 1569. Then, two years later, they organized their own, much more successful, raid against Moscow in which they and “their” Nogays devastated the Muscovite farmland, burned the capital to the ground, made “the Moscow River swell with corpses,” and hauled away “many hundreds of thousands of captives” and “much money and goods.”25 In recognition of the Crimean khans’ power, the Muscovite emissaries brought them annual cargoes of gold, falcons, and furs, though they took pains to describe the offerings as “gifts” (pominki) or “payment” (otkup) for returned hostages/slaves rather than “tribute” (dan', vykhod).26 The practice of otkup formally continued until it was banned by the Russo-Ottoman Treaty of Constantinople in 1700.27 Yet for all that, the Russian takeover of the mostly Islamic world of the Volga and trans-Volga steppes nonetheless marked a key turning point. In the second half of the sixteenth century, the eastern end of “the field” became part of the tsardom, and the tsardom itself took an important step toward becoming a colonial empire. But the colonial lands that the tsar was acquiring were, for obvious reasons, seen quite differently than those being colonized by other European states in the same period. Unlike their European peers, the Muscovites did not cross “the Western Sea” or any sea at all to obtain their possessions, and if the American continent rightly constituted a “new world,” as Amerigo Vespucci insisted, because “the ancients had no knowledge of them,”28 the same could not be said of the plains around and “beyond the Volga.” Because of the apparent seamlessness of geographic contiguity, the Muscovite conquest produced no clear colonies (the term as such did not exist in Muscovite parlance). No New Muscovy was proclaimed to compare to the newly pronounced New Spain, and there were no royal commands to the tsar’s conquistadors, as there were from the Spanish crown, “to give a name to the country as a whole and to the cities, towns, and places you find there.”29 Small rivers, hills, and 25 Quotes from Halil Inalcyık, “The Origin of the Ottoman-Russian Rivalry and the Don-Volga Canal (1569),” Ankara universitesi dergisi, 1946–47, v. 1, p. 73; PSRL, v. 13, p. 301; and Heinrich von Staden, Aufzeichnungen über den Moskauer Staat (Fritz T. Epstein, ed.) (Hamburg, 1964), p. 71. The number of captives was probably closer to one hundred thousand. See Alan W. Fisher, “Muscovy and the Black Sea Slave Trade,” CASS, 1972, v. 6, n. 4, p. 580. 26 L.A. Iuzefovich, “Russkii posol'skii obychai xvi veka,” VI, 1977, n. 8, pp. 114–15, 120–21; A.L. Khoroshkevich, “Rus' i Krym posle padeniia ordynskogo iga: Dinamika tributarnykh otnoshenii,” OI, 1999, n. 2, pp. 67–79. 27 M.A. Chepel'kin and N.A.D'iakova, Istoricheskii ocherk formirovaniia gosudarstvennykh granits rossiiskoi imperii (2–aia polovina xvii–nachalo xx v.) (Moscow, 1992), p. 31. 28 Amérigo Vespucci, El nuevo mundo: Cartas relativas a sus viajes y descubrimientos (Buenos Aires, 1951), p. 299. 29 George R. Stewart, Names on the Land: A Historical Account of Place Names in the United States (Boston, 1967), p. 12. This lack of interest in renaming native places was

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lakes in the Volga-Kama territory received Russian names as did the villages founded by new migrants, but the major rivers and towns were not renamed, and many new Russian settlements on the rivers or at the steppe’s edge either simply added Slavic names to indigenous ones or took their names from Tatar places or “princes” (Tetiushev [1550s], Saratov [1590]).30 The Muscovites’ general lack of interest in renaming the Volga and trans-Volga plains was accompanied by a general lack of wonder or even greed of the sort that drove their European counterparts into the valley of Mexico, the “doubly strange and truly marvelous” forests of Brazil, or the comparably less wondrous “deserts” and “staked plains” of Argentina and Texas.31 Some servitors of the tsar apparently believed in the existence of a strange steppe creature called the “baranets-melon,”—a sheep that grew “out of the ground” by a large stem attached to its navel— and they relayed this information to European travelers, who duly wrote it down; but they themselves were not interested enough in this “animal plant” to actually go looking for one.32 Muscovite maps (chertezhy) of the sixteenth-century Volga region have not survived, but it is unlikely that they contained the exotic images of tents, caravans, and battles between Russian and Tatar warriors that appeared on contemporary European maps of “Tartary” and “Scythia.” And certainly no Muscovite writers produced compendia or travelogues describing the nomads’ “manners and the norm in newly conquered Siberia as well. See Yuri Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North (Ithaca, N.Y., 1994), pp. 39–40. 30 James G. Hart, “From Frontier Outpost to Provincial Capital: Saratov, 1590–1860,” in Scott J. Seregny and Rex A. Wade (eds.), Politics and Society in Provincial Russia: Saratov, 1590–1917 (Columbus, Ohio, 1989), p. 11; G. Peretiakovich, Povolzh'e v xv i xvi vekakh (ocherki iz istorii kraia i ego kolonizatsii) (Moscow, 1877), pp. 241, 258–59. 31 Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago, 1991); Jean de Léry, History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil ( Janet Whatley, trans. and ed.) (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1990), p. 65; Mary B. Campbell, The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing (Ithaca, N.Y., 1988), p. 179; Ricardo Luis Molinari, Biografia de la pampa: Quatro siglos de historia del campo argentino (Buenos Aires, 1987); Carmen de Mora (trans. and ed.), Las siete ciudades de Cíbola: Textos y testimonios sobre la expedición de Vázquez Coronado (Seville, 1992); Ralph H. Vigil, “Spanish Exploration and the Great Plains in the Age of Discovery,” in Vigil et al. (eds.), Spain and the Plains: Myths and Realities of Spanish Exploration and Settlement on the Great Plains (Niwot, Colo., 1994), pp. 20–44. 32 References to the so-called “Scythian lamb” or “vegetable lamb” appeared in Europe at least as early as the fifteenth century. For comments in later European travelogues, see Sigismund von Herberstein, Notes upon Russia: Being a Translation of the Earliest Account of that Country entitled Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii (R.H. Major, ed.) (New York, n.d.), v. 2, pp. 74–75; Samuel H. Baron (trans. and ed.), The Travels of Olearius in Seventeenth-Century Russia (Stanford, 1967), p. 122; and Jacques Margeret, Un Mousquetaire à Moscou: Mémoires sur la première révolution russe, 1604–1614 (Alexandre Bennigsen, ed.) (Paris, 1983), p. 43.

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mode of life.”33 The steppe and its peoples were simply too well-known to appear exotic or to be imagined as a region of mythical cities like Coronado’s Quívira with its “streets paved of silver.”34 The Muscovites were as mercenary as anyone else, but their energies in this respect were focused less on the steppe than on the Urals and Siberia where a seemingly endless supply of “soft gold” (furs) appeared to be waiting for “the sovereign’s profit”—and the trappers’ too.35 Perhaps most importantly, the Muscovites were not given to exploring or describing their new grasslands because there was as yet no perceived need to do so.36 History continued to begin and end with God (as it would for some time to come) and did not require attention to nomads except as foils and persecutors. Ethnography did not exist except for the recognition that God’s world was made up of varied peoples, some of whom were blessed and others damned. The nomads belonged in the latter category, were given the names that other peoples had given them (that is, their self-designations were unimportant), and were defined primarily in terms of their lack of Russian religion—they were “non-Christian peoples of another faith” (nekhristianskie inovercheskie narody) or Muslims (busurmany).37 As such, they had to be dealt with as either allies or enemies, and ideally converted, but this did not make them interesting or remarkable. In fact, in the age of Ivan IV, it was sufficient to describe “the 33 For discussions of nomadic life and custom in sixteenth-century European writing, see Matvei Mekhovskii (Maciej z Miechowa), Traktat o dvukh Sarmatiiakh (1517; Moscow and Leningrad, 1936), pp. 61–68; E. Delmar Morgan and C.H. Coote (eds.), Early Voyages and Travels to Russia and Persia by Anthony Jenkinson and Other Englishmen (New York, 1968), pp. 52–53; and Herberstein, Notes upon Russia, v. 2, pp. 53–58. For images of the steppe in sixteenth-century European cartography, see the maps of Gastaldo (Castaldi), Jenkinson, Pogrobius, and Herberstein reprinted in V.A. Kordt (ed. and comp.), Materialy po istorii russkoi kartografii, v. 1, Karty vsei Rossii i iuzhnykh ee oblastei do poloviny xvii veka (Kiev, 1899), map n. 4, 14, 17, and 23. For some sense of what sixteenth-century Muscovite maps may have looked like, one can judge those of the second half of the seventeenth century. For titles and descriptions of these later maps, see, for example, V.S. Kusov, Chertezhy zemli russkoi xvi–xvii vv. (Moscow, 1993), pp. 228 (n. 825–827), 231 (n. 838–839), 232 (n. 844–848), 233 (n. 853), 239 (n. 898), 250 (n. 945–951). On the Muscovite cartographic imagination, see Valerie A. Kivelson, “ ‘The Souls of the Righteous in a Bright Place’: Landscape and Orthodoxy in Seventeenth-Century Russian Maps,” RR, 1999, v. 58, n. 1, pp. 1–25. 34 De Mora, Las siete ciudades de Cíbola, p. 64. 35 Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors, pp. 11–32; Mark Bassin, “Expansionism and Colonialism on the Eastern Frontier: Views of Siberia and the Far East in Pre-Petrine Russia,” Journal of Historical Geography, 1988, v. 14, n. 1, pp. 11–12. 36 Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors, p. 37. 37 Michael Khodarkovsky, “ ‘Ignoble Savages and Unfaithful Subjects’: Constructing Non-Christian Identities in Early Modern Russia,” in Daniel R. Brower and Edward J. Lazzerini (eds.), Russia’s Orient: Imperial Borderlands and Peoples (Bloomington, Ind., 1997), pp. 14–15.

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Engraving of the so-called baranets-melon, which appears to be from a seventeenthcentury English manuscript. Rodina, 2003, n. 5/6, p. 24.

field” as “wild” (dikoe)—because it was uncultivated—and to document the whereabouts and intentions of nomads for purposes of security, trade, diplomacy, and tribute collection; but little else was required.38 There was no long, drawn-out intellectual assimilation of the steppe to compare to the “problem of description”39 that the first Europeans encountered in the New World, for the simple reason that the steppe was not “new” and the Muscovites were not inclined toward describing. This was largely how things would stay until the eighteenth century. Yet if the Muscovites seem to have been somewhat short on ethnographic curiosity, their colonial inclinations were otherwise fully compar38 See the entry for “dikii” in I.I. Sreznevskii, Materialy dlia slovaria drevnerusskogo iazyka po pismennym pamiatnikam (St. Petersburg, 1893–1912; reprint: Moscow, 1989), v. 2, pp. 665–66. On “dikoe pole” as a generic term used to describe “the steppe territory to the south and southeast of the Russian state, separating it from the Crimean Khanate,” see Slovar' russkogo iazyka xi–xvii veka (Moscow, 1990), v. 16, p. 206. 39 J.H. Elliott, The Old World and the New, 1492–1650 (New York, 1970), pp. 21, 28.

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able to those of the Europeans. They too, as Hakluyt proposed, saw their new territories as places “to plant Christian religion, to trafficke, and to conquer,” and their apologists were easily as confident about the rightness of their cause as any of their counterparts in London, Lisbon, or Seville.40 With dependence on the Tatar khanates removed and at least some protection provided by riverside forts, Muscovite merchants were able increasingly to move caravans up and down the Volga, and Muscovite entrepreneurs (nobles, merchants, and monks included) made lucrative returns from fishing and salt-making.41 The tsar’s officials also razed mosques in the Tatar towns and offered rewards to the local Muslim leadership if they would convert to Orthodoxy, while his monks took the Word of God along the steppe rivers and into the forest-steppe of Bashkiria, all with the presumption that the best thing one could do with “non-Christian peoples of another faith” was to convert them so that they would become at once “Russian” and reliable servitors.42 Yet if some representatives of Moscow were able to impose their faith and take their profits from the tsar’s new lands, the takeover was, in general, superficial. The tsar assumed that the Volga and trans-Volga grasslands were simply another end of his increasingly large patrimony and sent military governors (voevody) to execute his wishes, but these governors did not have the means or the manpower to occupy the region with much of a military presence. Consequently, Russian power turned more on doing whatever was required to assure the loyalty of nomadic “princes.”43 The quest for new Christian souls (forcibly obtained or merely ardently encouraged) was also moderated by a generally pragmatic approach to religious politics, one in which stability and cohabitation with Muslims tended to be preferred to antiMuslim crusading, not least because such crusading ran the risk of upsetting more formidable Muslims such as the Ottomans.44 As a result, the steppes around the Lower Volga and “beyond the Kama” were claimed 40 Richard Hakluyt (the Elder), “Inducements to the Liking of the Voyage Intended towards Virginia in 40. and 42. Degrees (1585)”, in Peter C. Mancall (ed.), Envisioning America: English Plans for the Colonization of North America, 1580–1640 (Boston, 1995), p. 39. 41 V.A. Osipov, Ocherki po istorii saratovskogo kraia konets xvi i xvii vv. (Saratov, 1976), pp. 41–43, 49–52; V.V. Mavrodin, Russkoe morekhodstvo na iuzhnykh moriakh (Chernom, Azovskom, Kaspiiskom s drevneishikh vremen do xvi vkliuchitel'no) (Simferopol', 1955), pp. 150–53. 42 Chantal Lemercier-Quelquejay, “Les missions orthodoxes en pays musulmans du moyenne- et basse-Volga, 1552–1865,” CMRS, 1967, v. 8, n. 3, pp. 375–81; Michael Khodarkovsky, “The Conversion of Non-Christians in Early Modern Russia,” in Robert P. Geraci and Michael Khodarkovsky (eds.), Of Religion and Empire: Missions, Conversion, and Tolerance in Tsarist Russia (Ithaca, N.Y., 2001), p. 121. 43 Kappeler, Russland als Vielvölkerreich, p. 33. 44 Khodarkovsky, “Conversion of Non-Christians,” pp. 121–22; Kappeler, Russland als Vielvölkerreich, pp. 31–32.

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without being appropriated, and the nomads who lived there (Nogays of the Great Horde and Bashkirs) were offered “privileges” in return for making oaths of fealty (shert) to the tsar and agreeing to render service or tribute (iasak).45 As one Bashkir clan leader recalled: In the Year of the Mouse, on the second of October, the Russians took the city of Kazan and the White Prince [belyi-bii] became the sovereign [padishakh]. It was in [that year] that envoys went to all the lands with documents that said, “Let no one run away, let all remain true to their faith and customs. . . .” And I, Tatigach-bii, unable to think of anything else to do, summoned three men from the three clans of the people . . . and we traveled to Kazan where we agreed to be subjects of . . . the White Prince sovereign. We received the patent [iarlik], and gifts of food and satin cloth, and told the tsar that we are a people of three-hundred houses [i.e., nomadic tents] and that we have, after humbly requesting his permission, occupied the lands left behind by the Nogay. [The tsar] granted to us the lands—from the upper White River, bordering on the Nugush, to the lower, bordering on the Kukush, with all the rivers and steppes, hills, and rocks that are on both banks. We then promised to pay tribute [iasak] in marten pelts, and after that, the White Prince ruler granted me, Tatigach-bii, the rank of noble.46

Viewing fealty as a matter of quid pro quo, the nomads conducted themselves accordingly, alternatively cooperating with the Muscovites or raiding their settlements (or both), depending on what most suited their interests. The same Bashkirs who pledged their allegiance to Moscow in the 1550s, for example, were raiding Muscovite villages on the Kama just a few years later.47 Naturally, the “tsar’s men” were not impressed with this kind of “inconstant” behavior and built forts, took hostages, curried additional favors, and dispatched posses to try to stop it. Ill-equipped for the steppe in military terms, outnumbered, and isolated, there was not much they could do, however. And the tsar’s men were indeed isolated. The Muscovite population of the garrison towns on the Volga and the monastery lands in the foreststeppe of Bashkiria numbered just a few thousand in the late sixteenth century.48 To increase population, Tsar Ivan and his successors granted 45 Khodarkovsky, “Ignoble Savages and Unfaithful Subjects,” pp. 12–13; idem, Russia’s Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500–1800 (Bloomington, Ind., 2002), pp. 51–56. 46 R.G. Kuzeev (trans. and ed.), Bashkirskie shezhere (Ufa, 1960), p. 33. 47 Alton S. Donnelly, The Russian Conquest of Bashkiria, 1552–1740: A Case Study in Imperialism (New Haven, Conn., 1968), p. 20. 48 No comprehensive figures for the late sixteenth century are available, but fortress towns such as Ufa in central Bashkiria (founded 1586) had a population of no more than 150 musketeers (strel'tsy) in 1593. Saratov on the Volga had a “substantial” contingent of fifteen hundred. Kazan town, the command center for Muscovite power on the

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land to servitors and monasteries who then did their best to lure peasants and townsmen “to the empty places” (na pusto) with monies and “privileges.” But given that there was no “surplus population” (either real or imagined) in Muscovy, most of the Russian commoners who might be drawn to move were already claimed by other lords or monasteries (serfdom was beginning). Also many “wastes” still remained to be cleared and farmed closer to home, while the edges of the steppe remained extremely dangerous because of nomadic raiding.49 Consequently, many of the Muscovites who went to “the field” in the early years were not official colonists lured by incentives or ordered by royal command but rather unofficial “runaway people” (beglye liudi)—peasants, criminals, disgruntled servitors—who tended to join communities of “roamers” (brodniki) or Cossacks (kazaki) not within but beyond the Muscovite settlements. As the official Grigorii Kotoshikhin noted, describing the comers to the Cossack lands on the Don a century later, “They are people of Moscow and other towns, with baptized Tatars and Zaporozhians and Poles . . . among them; and many of them are peasants and traders of Muscovite boyars sentenced to execution for brigandage.”50 The “free Cossacks” who settled on the Dniepr (the Zaporozhians) served the Polish kings as border auxiliaries, while those who built settlements (gorodki) on the Don, Yaik, and Terek Rivers served the tsar by “taking away the nomad lands [ulus].” But all the Cossacks, true to their de facto status as independent frontier contractors, first and foremost served themselves.51 In addition to living by fishing, hunting, and minimal farming, they were also pirates and raiders, attacking and robbing whoever seemed most convenient. Muscovite frontier au-

Volga steppes below it and whose occupation with Russians was clearly important to Moscow, had a total Russian population in the mid-1560s of six to nine thousand while Russian peasants in Kazan and the nearby Volga district of Sviazhsk numbered perhaps fifteen thousand. Areas closer to the steppe proper had far fewer peasants. See U.Kh. Rakhmatullin, Naselenie Bashkirii v xvii–xviii vv.: Voprosy formirovaniia nebashkirskogo naseleniia (Moscow, 1988), p. 48; Hart, “From Frontier Outpost to Provincial Capital,” p. 11; Andreas Kappeler, Russlands erste Nationalitäten: Das Zarenreich und die Völker der Mittleren Wolga vom 16. bis 19. Jahrhundert (Cologne, 1982), pp. 111–13. 49 Peretiakovich, Povolzh'e v xv i xvi vekkah, pp. 263–67; Carsten Goehrke, Die Wüstungen in der Moskauer Rus': Studien zur Siedlungs, Bevölkerrungs und Sozialgeschichte (Wiesbaden, 1968), pp. 96–131. 50 Grigorii Kotoshikhin, O Rossii v tsarstvovanie Alekseia Mikhailovicha (4th ed.; Moscow, 1906), p. 135. On the varied ethnic composition of the early Don Cossacks, see Brian James Boeck, “Shifting Boundaries on the Don Steppe Frontier: Cossacks, Empires, and Nomads to 1739” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 2002), pp. 64–70. 51 N.A. Minenko et al. (eds.), Istoriia kazachestva aziatskoi Rossii, vol. 1, xvi–pervaia polovina xix veka (Ekaterinburg, 1995), pp. 22–23; Thomas M. Barrett, At the Edge of Empire: The Terek Cossacks and the North Caucasus Frontier, 1700–1860 (Boulder, Colo., 1999), pp. 21–22; I.A. Averin, “Brodniki: Mif i real'nost',” Kazaki Rossii (problemy istorii kazachestva) (Moscow, 1993), pp. 41–51.

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thorities accordingly distinguished between Cossacks who were “ours” and “good”—that is, obedient—and those who were “fugitive” and “thieving,” enlisting the former as “service Cossacks” (sluzhilye kazaki) and doing their best to persecute the latter. But the only reason that the “tsar’s men” tolerated any of them was because they were hard-pressed to do otherwise.52 Given their, at best, partial possession of “the field,” the rulers of Moscow naturally continued to defend themselves. During the “troubles” that affected the Horde in the fourteenth century, and then later following its unraveling in the mid-fifteenth, various Rus' princes resumed the old practice of building palisades and earthworks between stands of forest to “cut off” (zasechi) nomad raiding routes (shliakhy). By the late 1400s, the Muscovites had established a much longer (though interrupted) cordon along the Oka River just south of Moscow (the so-called bereg) where they mustered a border guard in the summers to meet raiders “from the Crimean and the Nogay sides.”53 In the 1500s, the bereg became a fallback defense as new Muscovites gradually completed what came to be called the “defensive line” (zasechnaia cherta), or simply “the line,” further to the south and running for some six hundred miles through a string of fortified towns between Belev, Tula, and Riazan'. Built of interconnecting stretches of felled trees, rivers, and ditches, punctuated at regular intervals with block houses and gates, overseen by a special official and a special chancellery (until 1580), defended by lower and middle-class military servitors (sluzhilye liudi, deti boiarskie), patrolled by advance guards on the steppe placed in treetop lookouts, and charged with making sure that “men of war do not come without warning upon the sovereign’s frontiers,” the line was massive, intricate, and costly.54 It was also more effective at defending the hinterland than the frontier, because the frontier, as it turned out, was not just the line. In the late 1500s, as the line was being completed, military servitors who brought their peasants with them were given lands and ordered to move to the line itself. But runaways moved beyond it, and so too did other servitors ordered to build advance-post garrison towns (the “towns of the steppe frontier” [goroda ot pol'skoi ukrainy]) such as Voronezh (1585) and Belgorod (1599). The line thus helped to 52 S.A. Kozlov, Kavkaz v sud'bakh kazachestva (xvi–xviii vv.) (St. Petersburg, 1996), pp. 10–11. 53 A.V. Nikitin, “Oboronitel'nye sooruzheniia zasechnoi cherty xvi–xvii vv.,” Materialy i issledovaniia po arkheologii SSSR (Moscow, 1955), v. 44, p. 121. 54 The quoted phrase is drawn from the “Boiarskii prigovor o stanichnoi i storozhevoi sluzhbe” (1571), AMG, v. 1, p. 2. On the sixteenth-century “line,” see Nikitin, “Oboronitel'nye sooruzheniia zasechnoi cherty xvi–xvii vv.”; A. Iakovlev, Zasechnaia cherta moskovskogo gosudarstva v xvii veke: Ocherk iz istorii oborony iuzhnoi okrainy moskovskogo gosudarstva (Moscow, 1916), pp. 18–20; Richard Hellie, Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy (Chicago, 1971), pp. 174–77; V.V. Kargalov, Na granitsakh stoiat' krepko: Velikaia rus' i dikoe pole; protivostoianie xiii–xviii (Moscow, 1998), pp. 302–16.

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impede nomadic ventures against the center (only three Tatar/Nogay raids in the late sixteenth century managed to reach beyond the Oka defenses), but it did nothing, understandably, to stop raids against settlements in front of it. That settlement would occur on the “field side” of the line was not particularly surprising. As the tsar knew, and his countrymen were proving, unlike the sixteenth-century Hapsburg Militärgrenze in Croatia or the Great Wall of the Dutch Republic built in the early seventeenth along the Ijssel and Waal Rivers, the Muscovites’ steppe defensives were not initially construed as an interstate border whose existence might restrict Muscovite movement.55 And in contrast to the walls of the Chinese against their “northern barbarians,” the Muscovite defenses (whether intentionally or coincidentally) did not divide areas more easily used for farming from ones better used for herding.56 Indeed, the sixteenth-century cherta ran through a region of forest and forest-steppe where farming could readily be practiced on either side, and some of the most attractive agricultural land—from the perspective of a Muscovite peasant, townsman, or military servitor—lay not on the inside but on the outside of the line.57 There were also compelling reasons for the state to build military centers on the “field side”—advance garrisons had their uses. Thus Muscovites, both by state design and regardless, moved “beyond the line,” and this fact then became a prime motivator for moving the line itself. This happened in 1635 when the government started building the new Belgorod line (Belgorodskaia cherta) some two hundred miles to the south-southeast of the old one. (Because two lines were considered better than one, the state also began rebuilding the former Tula defenses in 1638.) As the Belgorod line was being completed in the 1650s, Muscovite 55 Gunther Erich Rothenberg, The Austrian Military Border in Croatia, 1522–1747 (Urbana, Ill., 1960); Catherine Wendy Bracewell, Uskoks of Senj: Piracy, Banditry, and Holy War in the Adriatic (Ithaca, N.Y., 1992), pp. 36–45; Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500–1800 (2nd ed.; New York, 1996), p. 39; Jonathan Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477–1806 (New York, 1995), pp. 262–67. For Muscovite understandings of where and what a border was, see Michael Khodarkovsky, “From Frontier to Empire: The Concept of the Frontier in Russia, Sixteenth–Eighteenth Centuries,” RH, 1992, v. 19, n. 1/4, pp. 115–28. 56 One region beyond the Chinese walls where agriculture could be readily practiced with river irrigation was the Ordos, parts of which were ideal for nomads as well as for Chinese farmers. Partly because of this, and because the region represented an obvious base for nomadic incursions, the Chinese repeatedly attempted to control it. See Waldron, Great Wall of China, pp. 63–64. 57 For fulsome descriptions of the agricultural offerings of lands beyond the line on the Don and Dnepr, see Herberstein, Notes upon Russia, v. 2, p. 12; and Dennis F. Essar and Andrew B. Pernal (eds.), La Déscription d’Ukraine de Guillaume le Vasseur de Beauplan (Ottawa, 1990), p. 43.

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engineers erected the Simbirsk defenses to the east, from 1648 to 1654. They built the Trans-Kama line still farther east from 1652 to 1656, and the Izium salient to the south of the Belgorod network in the 1680s.58 The new lines were largely successful in their primary function, which was to diminish the center’s vulnerability to nomadic raids. The last deep Tatar raid on Muscovy came in 1633 when the Crimeans and their Nogays reached Serpukhov and Kolomna on the Oka River (roughly twenty miles south of Moscow). The Bashkirs—while participating in the early 1660s in the first of what would be a series of frontier revolts in which they “burned many churches, destroyed villages and settlements . . . and killed and took captive many Russian people”—rarely raided beyond the Trans-Kama line.59 In addition to these militarized defenses, the Muscovite state also built forts on the Yaik and Terek Rivers and reinforced preexisting strong points, such as Astrakhan where the German visitor Olearius in the 1630s counted 4,500 soldiers, “many metal guns,” and several Nogay “princes” held as hostages by the Russians to ensure that their fellow Nogays rendered military service when required.60 The state invested huge sums in the building and manning of these lines and outposts, both directly in terms of payments for men, provisions, and materiel, and indirectly in terms of tax concessions to frontier entrepreneurs. In 1645, the boyar businessman Mikhail Gur'ev, in return for a grant from the tsar of seven years of tax-free fishing, agreed to build a 2,800–square-foot stone fort “with four towers . . . and two gates” at the mouth of the Yaik River on the Caspian. The structure took several years to complete and ended up costing 290,000 rubles—that is, 58,000 times the median price of a Muscovite homestead.61 Lines and defenses did not mean that relations with nomads were uni58 On seventeenth-century lines, see V.P. Zagorovskii, Belgorodskaia cherta (Voronezh, 1969); Nikitin, “Oboronitel'nye sooruzheniia zasechnoi cherty xvi–xvii vv.”; Iakovlev, Zasechnaia cherta moskovskogo gosudarstva v xvii veke; D.Ch.I. Beliaev, “O storezhevoi, stanichnoi, i polevoi sluzhbe na pol'skoi ukraine moskovskogo gosudarstva do tsaria Alekseia Mikhailovicha,” Chteniia v imperatorskom obshchestve istorii i drevnostei rossiiskikh pri moskovskom universitete, 1846, n. 4, pp. 5–60. 59 A.A. Novosel'skii, Bor'ba moskovskogo gosudarstva s tatarami v pervoi polovine xvii veka (Moscow and Leningrad, 1948), pp. 214–16, appendix 4 (“skhematicheskaia karta tatarskikh vtorzhenii v 30–kh godakh xvii v.”); Materialy po istorii Bashkirskoi ASSR (Moscow and Leningrad, 1936), v. 1, p. 178; Donnelly, Russian Conquest of Bashkiria, pp. 23–26. 60 Baron, Travels of Olearius, pp. 328–29. 61 N.V. Golikova, Ocherki po istorii gorodov Rossii kontsa xvii–nachala xviii v. (Moscow, 1982), pp. 29–30; Richard Hellie, The Economy and Material Culture of Russia, 1600–1725 (Chicago, 1999), pp. 402, 397. The median price of five rubles for one dvor is for the 1600–1649 period. On the state’s enormous investments in the southern defensive lines in the seventeenth century, see Carol Belkin Stevens, Soldiers on the Steppe: Army Reform and Social Change in Early Modern Russia (DeKalb, Ill., 1995).

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formly hostile or even neatly delineated. The nomads might be savage “non-Christian peoples of another faith” who required conversion before they could be fully trustworthy and fully “Russian”; and they, along with some Cossacks, might represent the state’s most dangerous neighbors of the “non-state-organized” sort, but these presumptions did not mean there was no way to get along.62 Through the seventeenth century, pragmatic relations continued as the tsar’s men kept trading across the steppe and making arrangements with the Crimeans and others, hoping to buy peace or at least nonaggression with “gifts” and “annuities.”63 The steppe peoples, for their part, were not intrinsically opposed to the Muscovite state, and they understood its power in their own terms. Some Bashkirs rebelled against the “White Tsar” and “thought malicious thoughts,” while others did not, in the same way that some Cossacks were servitors, others were rebels, and still others managed to be both.64 The Lamaist Buddhist Kalmyks (Oirats), who displaced the Nogays of the Great Horde from the Volga steppes in the early seventeenth century, viewed what the Muscovites called their oath of allegiance to the tsar as an alliance between equal partners, and used relations with Moscow as a tool within their internal politics as well as in dealings with other steppe peoples. Thus in the 1660s some Kalmyk lords (tayishis) on the Lower Volga urged Moscow to build forts on the Yaik to help defend them from other Kalmyks in Jungaria, while other tayishis joined Bashkir raiders in attacking Russian towns in Bashkiria, and still others, beginning in the 1670s, took their followers to the Don lands and enrolled as Cossacks. In that same decade, the Kalmyk ruler Ayuki Khan, proving his autonomy, sent his cavalry to fight with the Russians against the Crimeans when it suited him and refused to send them when it did not.65 (As an acknowledgment of the Kalmyks’ de facto independent status, their affairs, like those of the Dontsy and the Zaporozhians, were handled by the foreign office 62 Khodarkovsky, “Ignoble Savages and Unfaithful Subjects,” pp. 15, 18, 11. 63 Novosel'skii estimated the total expense of Mucovite “gifts” to the Crimeans in

the 1600–1650 period (not including payment for captives [vykup]) at over 907,970 rubles (Bor'ba moskovskogo gosudarstva s tatarami v pervoi polovine xvii veka, p. 442). Although not entirely clear, it seems that the building of the lines in midcentury allowed the Muscovites to reduce their payments to the nomads because the level of the latter decreased significantly in the second half of the 1600s. My thanks to Brian Boeck for this information. On Muscovite trade through the eastern steppe with Central Asia and India, see Stephen Frederic Dale, Indian Merchants and Eurasian Trade, 1600–1750 (New York, 1994), pp. 78–100. 64 The quoted phrase is what a Bashkir had to say about Bashkir intentions in Ufa district in 1707. Materialy po istorii Bashkirskoi ASSR, v. 1, p. 212. 65 Michael Khodarkovsky, Where Two Worlds Met: The Russian State and the Kalmyk Nomads, 1600–1771 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1992), pp. 90–96, 107–11, 113–20; K.P. Shovunov, Kalmyki v sostave rossiiskogo kazachestva (vtoraia polovina xvii–xix vv.) (Elista, 1992), pp. 31–40.

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[posol'skii prikaz], while those of the Lower Volga towns fell under the Kazan office, and the lines and the “frontier towns” [ukrainskie goroda] fell under the Office of Musterings [Razriad].) Even the taking of captives created as much practical interaction as it did cultural estrangement. Muscovites serving “on the line” captured Tatars as “informants” (iazyki), while the Tatars seized Slavs as slaves to be sold on the Black Sea market. Yet both could also serve as hostages needing to be ransomed or swapped, as one Muscovite slave/hostage made clear: From Stepan Savenkov to my son Leontii, I send regards. May God bless you! You ask me of my news: I am yet alive, though I suffer in Muslim captivity in Crimea. . . . You wrote, my light, that the sovereign has commanded that your brother, mother, and myself be ransomed, and envoys did come to bargain with the Tatar, but after this I was bought by another Tatar and he desires that I should be exchanged for the Tatar Doinalei Dzhumaleev . . . who was taken this year near the new town of Tsarev Alekseev. My light, beseech the sovereign concerning this Tatar, and take him, and once there is word and the envoys are assigned, bring him for exchange. Do not let me die in the heathen faith [v busurmanskoi vere].66

Differing views regarding land ownership was another thing that did not change much in the seventeenth century. To nonstate Cossacks and steppe nomads, claims to pasture, migration routes, hunting land, or fishing weirs on the steppe and forest-steppe were established by usage and rooted in the histories of a given kinship group or the decisions of a given Cossack council.67 To the tsars, supreme rulers of an agrarian empire, by contrast, land ownership was a matter of royal prerogative, and claims based on usage were secondary. True to their patrimonial inclinations, Moscow’s sovereigns considered all land within their realm (including any of it that happened to be on or near the steppe) as their property, and, consequently, they deemed it their right to decide what to do with it. Some they granted to the iasak-paying nomads who lived on it. This was the case with Bashkir notables who, in contrast to other “iasakpeoples,” were recognized by Muscovite law as landowners (votchinniki).68 As for the rest, they either rented it out to individual lessees for hunting, fishing, and beekeeping (viz. the so-called ukhozhai lands in the foreststeppe region of Voronezh) or distributed it to institutions and military 66 AMG, v. 2, p. 202. The letter dates from 1648. 67 Thomas J. Barfield, The Nomadic Alternative (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1993), p. 144;

Anatoly Khazanov, Nomads and the Outside World (2nd ed.; Madison, Wisc., 1994), pp. 123–26; Khodarkovsky, Where Two Worlds Met, p. 9; 68 Rakhmatullin, Naselenie Bashkirii v xvii–xviii vv., pp. 28–29.

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servitors who then settled them with serfs if they had any. Such was the case with monasteries and middle or upper-level military men. Those who did not have serfs settled with their families, which was often what happened with the numerous lower service groups, such as the musketeers (strel'tsy) and poor “junior boyars” (deti boiarskie), whose status declined until they became known as homesteaders (odnodvortsy) in the eighteenth century.69 In each case, land was given in return for something else (either service or iasak); all landowners in Muscovy were only owners to the extent that the tsar allowed them to be. This rule applied whenever new steppe land was brought into the tsar’s realm as well. Thus when the Zaporozhians petitioned the tsar in 1654 to take their side in their revolt against the Poles, the tsar’s men insisted first on the tsar’s prerogatives, which meant securing a unilateral pledge of fealty from the Cossacks before then returning to them the land and “privileges” that they already claimed.70 Yet if much about the politics of the steppe frontier remained the same in the 1600s, some things did change, and the greatest changes were the result of increasing Muscovite settlement. Some towns on the lines all but disappeared as their small populations emptied out during or after Tatar raids. Others grew rapidly, like the garrison town of Kozlov, which counted a population of over 1,300 “service people” (sluzhilye liudi) in 1638 and by 1648 had 2,276, with townsmen, their families, and peasants in tow.71 In part, the government demanded and encouraged this colonization because it needed people to supply and serve its defenses. At the same time, colonists created problems, which meant that the government never supported colonization unequivocally. For one, people in seventeenth-century Muscovy were a limited resource, and the government was always wary of settling its periphery at the expense of depopulating its interior. Or, as Tsar Aleksei put it in a letter to one of his Kozlov men in 1638, “It is good to settle a new town, but not by emptying out old ones.”72 Still another problem had to do with the social status of the colonists. Some of the colonization of the frontier was done by the state’s “summoning” (svedenie) of its middle-class servitors, but most was carried out by runaway serfs, whose lords were either influential magnates or archbishops or members of the same class of people the state was summoning. The government thus found itself in the difficult position of wanting to take advantage of “free people” to settle the frontier while at the same time not wanting to upset its “strong people” and middling servitors, who hoped to 69 Judith Pallot and Denis J.B. Shaw, Landscape and Settlement in Romanov Russia, 1613–1917 (New York, 1990), pp. 21–22, 25, 28, 35–45. 70 Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A History (Toronto, 1988), pp. 134–35. 71 Novosel'skii, Bor'ba moskovskogo gosudarstva s tatarami, p. 302. 72 Ibid., p. 301.

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Taming the Wild Field

see their serfs retrieved and returned or, at least, to receive compensation for their loss.73 Also, while there might be a use for illegals who settled on the Muscovite side of the lines, illegals who crossed over them were more problematic because they ended up living in Cossack lands that fell beyond Moscow’s purview. There were thus reasons for going after people (assuming they could be found) as well as for leaving them in place, and state policy unavoidably vacillated between the two courses. Generally speaking, during the intense period of line construction before the mid1650s, the government favored allowing runaways to remain on the frontier by pardoning those who had not been caught after a certain number of years or by dragooning them into frontier military service. After the 1650s, with the formal codification of serfdom, it leaned instead toward imposing a strict border regime on the southern lines and mounting posses to retrieve or force compensation from any runaways who went beyond them.74 Regardless of what the state did or did not do about runaways, however, illegal migration did not stop. The allure of new lands and personal freedom (volia) within the Cossack settlements meant that people kept coming to the steppe frontier, and landlords behind the lines kept complaining. As one group of noble servitors from Tambov stated in a petition to the tsar in 1685: Ignoring the fear of God, as well as their sacred oaths [krestnoe tselovanie], [many commoners] flee to the Khoper and Medveditsa Rivers and to other rivers on the field . . . to the Cossacks, . . . and after spending a short time in the Cossack settlements, they return to Tambov town and Tambov District, under the pretense of buying supplies, . . . and they then stay, living . . . in the villages of their fellows and kinsmen. At their urging, other peasants from the servitors’ villages then abandon their obligations and run away to the Cossack places.75

Settlers, legal and illegal, were also diverse in terms of ethnicity and religion. If most were Orthodox Slavs, there were also Muslim Tatars and “pagan” “iasak-peoples” from the Middle Volga, who, pushed out by Muscovite colonization, moved onto Bashkir lands in the forest-steppe as “people who have been let in” (pripushchenniki). For their part, Old Be73 Brian Davies, “The Recovery of Fugitive Peasants from Muscovy’s Southern Frontier: The Case of Kozlov, 1636–1640,” RH, 1992, v. 19, n. 1/4, pp. 29–30. 74 Novosel'skii, Bor'ba moskovskogo gosudarstva s tatarami, pp. 405–6; Boeck, “Shifting Boundaries on the Don Steppe Frontier,” pp. 108–10, 113–14. 75 “Akty, otnosiashchiesia k istorii Donskikh kazakov i k istorii raskolu na Donu (1685–1690),” DAI (St. Petersburg, 1872) v. 12, n. 17, p. 123. See also A.P. Pronshtein, Zemlia donskaia v xviii veke (Rostov-na-Donu, 1961), p. 45.

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lievers, fleeing persecution and a state they saw as the Devil, established themselves with similar traditionalists in the Cossack lands.76 The coming of these varied colonists created more changes, both environmental and social. Whether legal or illegal, settlers on “the field” generally avoided areas of open steppe where they found tough prairie grasses and little water, timber, or natural defenses and gravitated instead toward the river banks, which were still relatively forested in the seventeenth century and offered alluvial soils and (in some places) hilly banks and islands that were more readily defendable.77 With increased settlement in these areas, riparian soils and woods gradually became depleted, and the local wildlife was either hunted down or displaced.78 The colonists coming to the steppe in the late seventeenth century were also no longer primarily individual men looking to live “beyond the law” but rather large parties— sometimes whole villages—of men, women, and children looking to live by farming. In response to increased agricultural colonization, some Cossacks and nomads also chose to farm, while others left for more distant places. But other Cossacks and nomads responded by revolting. Thus the Zaporozhian revolt against the Poles, which led them “under the tsar’s high hand” in 1654, was partly precipitated by an uptake in Polish colonization. The Razin uprising that began among disgruntled Cossacks on the Don in 1667 and eventually worked its way up most of the Volga was also ignited in part by the pressures of outsider settlement. And in central Bashkiria, the influx of numerous “newly arrived persons” (prishlye liudi) left Bashkir landowners “without open or unused lands . . . and with nowhere to live as nomads” (kochevat' ne daiut), which then contributed to Bashkir revolts in the late seventeenth century.79 These revolts were a reminder that the steppe—even those parts of it formally claimed by Moscow—remained mostly beyond the state’s control. The government’s presence in the region was woefully small and limited 76 Rakhmatullin, Naselenie Bashkirii v xvii–xviii vv., pp. 127–82; A.Z. Asfandiiarov, “Zaselenie Bashkirii nerusskimi krest'ianami v kontse xvi–pervoi polovine xix v.,” in Sotsial'no-demograficheskie protsessy v rossiiskoi derevne (xvi–nachalo xx v.): Materialy xx sessii vsesoiuznogo simpoziuma po izucheniiu problem agrarnoi istorii (Tallinn, 1986), v. 1, pp. 102–8. 77 Pallot and Shaw, Landscape and Settlement in Romanov Russia, pp. 17–19. 78 I. Stebelsky, “Agriculture and Soil Erosion in the European Forest-Steppe,” in James H. Bater and R.A. French (eds.), Studies in Russian Historical Geography (New York, 1983), v. 1, pp. 52–53, 56; M.A. Tsvetkov, Izmenenie lesistosti evropeiskoi rossii s kontsa xvii stoletiia po 1914 god (Moscow, 1957), pp. 22, 29–30. 79 Subtelny, Ukraine, pp. 106–7, 123–25; Michael Khodarkovsky, “The Stepan Razin Uprising: Was It a ‘Peasant War’?” JfGO, 1994, v. 42, n. 1, pp. 1–19; I.G. Akmanov, Bashkirskie vosstaniia xvii–pervoi treti xviii v. (Ufa, 1978), pp. 27–54; Materialy po istorii Bashkirskoi ASSR, v. 1, pp. 82–83.

31

Taming the Wild Field

almost entirely to areas around the lines or along major rivers, such as the Volga, Kama, and the Upper Don. The terrain, too, with the exception of the river valleys, posed challenges. In the marshy deltas of the northern Caspian there was plague and “fever” (malaria), and much of the rest of the steppe interior was considered too dry and exposed to raids to support an agricultural population that could serve the state. Because the terrain could not support agriculture, it also could not support an army, which meant that the government had to rely on nomadic and Cossack allies or servitors to do its work. In cases when this was deemed insufficient and full-fledged campaigning was required, the results were invariably disastrous. Russian armies that entered “the field” in the seventeenth century were large (up to two hundred thousand men), moved slowly at the center of trundling formations of interlocked wagons mounted with light guns (the tabor), carried most of their provisions because the country offered no food, and were constantly vulnerable, both to ambushes by the much more mobile Tatars and to various deadly or disorienting obstacles, such as steppe fires, locust swarms, drought, hailstorms, blizzards, and rapid spring thaws that made rivers impassable and turned everything else into mud.80 In 1687 and 1689, two Muscovite campaigns against the Crimea ran into several of these problems and both were defeated, the first thoroughly (after which the “Generalissimus” Vasilii Golitsyn, according to the Swiss soldier Franz Lefort, “wept most bitterly”) and the second only slightly less so.81 Yet even with its many obvious limitations, Muscovite power on the steppe by the end of the seventeenth century was much greater than before. Following the Zaporozhians’ decision to switch their allegiance from Cracow to Moscow, Muscovy acquired the territory on the left bank of the Dniepr as of the mid-1650s. And by 1689 it was confident enough to call for the Crimeans to evacuate their peninsula and pay an indemnity of two million gold coins for the Tatars’ various “injustices” against the “Great Sovereign.”82 Golitsyn’s campaign to enforce these terms failed miserably, so they did not have any practical effect—in fact, the terms were outrageous enough that they were probably little more than posturing—but they do at least reveal that the Muscovites could imagine imposing themselves on the Crimea much more thoroughly than the Crimea had ever imposed on them. (The Tatars, after all, raided Muscovite territory, but 80 William C. Fuller Jr., Strategy and Power in Russia, 1600–1914 (New York, 1992), pp. 30–33. 81 Quoted in Lindsey A.J. Hughes, Russia and the West: The Life of a Seventeenth-Century Westernizer, Prince Vasily Vasil'evich Golitsyn, 1643–1714 (Newtonville, Mass., 1984), p. 51. 82 Fuller, Strategy and Power in Russia, p. 17.

32

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Taming the Wild Field

they never sought to take it over because that would have defeated the purpose of raiding.) In addition to these new political aspirations, the late Muscovite state also had a fuller knowledge of the steppe’s spaces and a changing sense of what they might signify. Reflecting late Muscovy’s lurch toward the “territorialization of rule,”83 government chanceries compiled territorial descriptions and maps that detailed which places along the defenses were well settled and which were not, identified river crossings and the locations of wells and springs, depicted the fields and “wastes” around the “lower towns” (ponizovye goroda), and traced the run of steppe rivers and Tatar “roads” (that is, raiding and trading routes) “from the royal town of Moscow to Perekop.”84 More strikingly, some observers in Moscow were beginning to show an interest not only in the numbers, whereabouts, and political inclinations of the nomads but also in their “faith and customs,” while others were suggesting that one weakness of the “great allRussian tsardom” lay in the fact that its territory contained too few people and too much “empty land.”85 By the second half of the seventeenth century, Muscovites had even begun to call “the field” by a new name— “steppe” (step')—though the new term did not herald the end of old associations as much as the beginning of new ones.86

83 Michael Biggs, “Putting the State on the Map: Cartography, Territory, and European State Formation,” CSSH, 1999, v. 41, n. 2, p. 390. 84 For reproductions of maps and map-related descriptions, see L.S. Bagrov, “Chertezh ukrainskim i cherkasskim gorodam 17 veka,” Trudy russkikh uchenykh za granitse (Berlin, 1923), v. 2, pp. 30–43; K.N. Serbina, Kniga bol'shomu chertezhu (Moscow and Leningrad, 1950), p. 49–146; Leo Bagrow, “A Russian Communications Map ca. 1685,” IM, 1952, n. 9, pp. 99–101; H. Kohlin, “Some Remarks on Maps of the Crimea and the Sea of Azov,” IM, 1960, n. 15, pp. 84–88; and the entries from Kusov’s Chertezhy zemli russkoi that are listed in note 31. For instructions concerning inspections and reports “on the line,” see V.I. Buganov, “Zachechnaia kniga 1638 g.,” Zapiski otdela rukopisei: Biblioteka SSSR imeni V.I. Lenina, 1960, v. 23, p. 189; and AMG, v. 2, pp. 61–62, 116, 121–22 passim. 85 Andrei Lyzlov, Skifskaia istoriia, soderzhashchaia v sebe: O nazvanii skifii i granitsakh eia; o narodakh skifskikh, o nachale i umnozhenii zolotoi ordy i o tsariakh byvshikh tamo; o kazanskoi orde i tsariakh ikh, i o vziatii goroda Kazani; o perekopskoi orde ili krymskoi i o tsariakh ikh; o Magomete prelestnike agarianskom i o prelesti vymyshlennoi ot nego; o nachale turkov i sultanakh ikh, s prilozheniem povesti o povedenii i zhitel’stve turetskikh sultanov v Konstantinopole (1692; reprint: Moscow, 1787), v. 2, pp. 9–23; Iurii Krizanich ( Jurij Kriˇzaniˇc), Politika (Moscow, 1965), p. 482. 86 The term step' may be of Persian origin and was likely used in old Slavic though its earliest known appearance in Russian materials dates to the early 1600s and more frequent usage began only around the mid-seventeenth century. (Shakespeare had heard of it by the time he wrote A Midsummer’s Night Dream [first produced 1595–1596], so the first appearance of the term in Russian sources may likely be pushed back in the future.) See O.N. Trubachev, “Iz slaviano-iranskikh leksicheskikh otnoshenii,” Etimologiia 1965: Materialy i issledovaniia po indoevropeiskim i drugim iazykam (Moscow, 1967), p. 39; Max Vasmer, Russisches etymologisches Wörterbuch (Heidelberg, 1958), v. 3, p. 11.

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Frontier Colonization

The Empire and the Steppe The new meanings did not come about because the steppe changed but because Muscovy did. When Peter the Great decided that Russia had to catch up to the West, he also decided that the only way to do it was by requiring the adoption of Western ways of ruling and knowing. As devotees of the “new science,” the tsar and his entourage of “new men” and fellow travelers were convinced that they lived in a universe of unlimited possibility whose divinely ordained laws were readily decipherable through reason. In this reasonable and mechanical universe, the task of scholars was to document the world and explain its workings, while that of rulers was to harness and maximize the resources of their states (everything from minerals to people) through rational administration (politsiia, the Russian counterpart to European varieties of “policey,” police, and Polizei).87 In keeping with this new view of things, Peter’s academic-cultural elite (most of whom were Germans and Ukrainians) extolled the virtues of “useful curiosity” and “learned travel,” gave new names to everything, drew new maps based on “geometric observation,” contemplated the inexorable progress of “wisdom” (mudrost'), and insisted on the new-found glory, might, and essential Europeanness of the Russian “nation.” All this went on at the same time as the tsar and his officials (a number of whom were also scholars) issued an average of 160 decrees a year (as opposed to a mere 36 per year in the late 1600s), collected information of every sort on the country—from data on forests, mills, population, and mines to “ancient laws and other curious letters” of use to “history”—and began for the first time to conceive of the state as an economy whose essence seemed to lie in “continuous and multiple relations between population, territory, and wealth.”88 None of these developments immediately altered old patterns of statesteppe relations. Peter tried to expand Russia’s power into the deep 87 Marc Raeff, The Well-Ordered Police State: Social and Institutional Change through Law in the Germanies and Russia, 1600–1800 (New Haven, Conn., 1983). 88 Denis J.B. Shaw, “Geographical Practice and Its Significance in Peter the Great’s Russia,” Journal of Historical Geography, 1996, v. 22, n. 2, pp. 160–76; M.V. Ptukha, Ocherki po istorii statistiki v SSSR (Moscow, 1955), v. 1, pp. 296–304; N.F. Utkina et al. (eds.), Russkaia mysl' v vek prosveshcheniia (Moscow, 1991), p. 58; N.A. Voskresenskii, Zakonodatel'nye akty Petra I: Redaktsii i proekty zakonov, zametki, doklady, donosheniia, chelobit'ia i inostrannye istochnki (Moscow and Leningrad, 1945), v. 1, pp. 86–87, 506; Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), pp. 224–27; Yuri Slezkine, “Naturalists versus Nations: Eighteenth-Century Russian Scholars Confront Ethnic Diversity,” Representations, 1994, n. 47, pp. 171–72; Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” in Graham Burchell et al. (eds.), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago, 1991), p. 101; Lindsey Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great (New Haven, Conn., 1998), p. 123.

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Taming the Wild Field

steppe, and his armies even managed to wrest Azov from the Turks in 1696 and the western coast of the Caspian from Persia in 1722–23, but both these new possessions were shortly returned because the Russians were too weak to hold on to them.89 “Loyal” nomads and Cossacks continued to be rewarded with “gifts” and “payments,” while disloyal ones (such as “the traitor and apostate Mazepa” and the “thief Nekrasov”) were denounced, and every effort was made to reduce Cossack autonomy. (The administration of the Don and Yaik Cossacks, for example, was transferred from the Foreign Office to the Military College, and the state, dissatisfied with existing Cossacks, began establishing Cossack hosts of its own.)90 Muslims, for their part, remained “enemies of the Holy Cross” and the conquest of Muslim-controlled regions retained its religious purpose. As the tsar wrote to the Patriarch of Jerusalem in 1701, it was necessary “to send to Azov holy monks who know Slavic” so that they could convert “the peoples of the frontier from unbelief [iz poganstva] to the most pious Orthodox faith.”91 Under Peter, musketeers revolted in the Astrakhan territory, disaffected Cossacks and peasants rebelled along the Don and Volga, and Bashkirs rioted in Bashkiria. As before, the participants in these various uprisings, much like the state’s forces that suppressed them, were highly diverse in ethnic and confessional terms, proving that patterns of crosscultural cohabitation and political allegiance on the steppe remained fluid and complicated.92 Yet there were also striking changes. In a self-consciously Westernizing domain, the steppe’s territory had be “measured and drawn” with increasing exactitude, and its attributes and contents had to be studied and collected with increasing devotion, all in the name of “utility” (pol'za) and “science” (nauka), both new values that conveniently coincided with “the state’s interest” while at the same time underscoring the unassailably en89 Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great, pp. 17–18, 48, 57–59. Azov was returned to the Ottomans in 1711 and the western Caspian to the Persians in the 1730s. On the interesting “life and death of Azov as a Russian imperial outpost,” see Boeck, “Shifting Boundaries on the Don Steppe Frontier,” pp. 278–310. 90 PiB, v. 9, pt. 1, n. 3029, p. 59; PiB, v. 9, pt. 1, n. 3171, p. 164; Minenko et al. (eds.), Kazachestvo aziatskoi Rossii, v. 1, p. 40; Shane O’Rourke, Warriors and Peasants: The Don Cossacks in Late Imperial Russia (Basingstoke, Eng., 2000), p. 37; Bruce W. Menning, “The Emergence of a Military Administrative Elite in the Don Cossack Land, 1708–1836,” in Walter M. Pintner and Donald K. Rowney (eds.), Russian Officialdom: The Bureaucratization of Russian Society from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, 1980), p. 140. 91 Hans-Heinrich Nolte, Religiöse Toleranz in Ru;dsland, 1600–1725 (Göttingen, 1969), pp. 83–84; PiB, v. 1, n. 394, p. 473. 92 N.B. Golikova, Astrakhanskoe vosstanie, 1705–1706 gg. (Moscow, 1975); Paul Avrich, Russian Rebels, 1600–1800 (New York, 1972), pp. 32–177; I.G. Akmanov, Bashkiriia v sostave rossiiskogo gosudarstva v xvii–pervoi polovine xviii veka (Sverdlovsk, 1991), pp. 86–93.

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lightened sensibilities of the tsar’s “learned men.”93 In 1699, Peter ordered the mapping of the Don in what was the empire’s first large-scale regional survey based on the “new cartography”; shortly afterward the first surveyed maps appeared of the shores of the Black and Azov Seas; around that time, and continuing through the 1720s, military-cum-scientific expeditions were dispatched to chart the Caspian and to solve “great mysteries” such as why the sea’s volume never increased despite “all the water that perpetually [fell] into it from the clouds and rivers.” Throughout Peter’s reign, and thereafter, travelers, officials, and expeditionaries collected “many strange and curious grasses” to be deposited in the Academy of Sciences and sent “unusual things” to Peter’s “cabinet of curiosities” (later, the imperial Kunstkammer), such as the jaw of an “unknown animal” from the Don, a strange “tusk” unearthed near Tsaritsyn, gold treasures dug up from ancient burial mounds between the Don and the Volga, and “rarities from the Caspian Sea.”94 If Peter’s scholarly lieutenants ever suspected that in doing all this they were not only producing “knowledge of the territory” but also “the territory itself,” they did not let on.95 Instead, as Joseph Nicolas de l’Isle, one of the court’s well-remunerated foreign scholars put it, speaking of the labors of modern geographers, they were simply rendering “a picture of the situation . . . that [corresponded] as closely as possible to the truth.”96 Of course, a truthful rendering required more than just maps and curiosities. It also called for systematic descriptions of territories and peoples. Thus Vasilii Tatishchev, inveterate polymath, high-ranking state official, and one of just a few native-born Russians in Russia’s republic of letters, listed the empire’s “steppes and deserts” (after seas, “great lakes,” “great rivers . . . navigable by large ships,” and mountains) in his “full and 93 Slezkine, “Naturalists versus Nations,” p. 171. 94 M.I. Belov, “Rol' Petra I v rasprostranenii geograficheskikh znanii v Rossii,” in Vo-

prosy geografii Petrovskogo vremeni (Leningrad, 1975), p. 5; Atlas sukhoputnoi i morskoi evropeiskoi Rossii izdannoi v Moskve v 1701, 1702 i 1704 godakh Adrianom Shkhonbekom; Memoirs of Peter Henry Bruce, Esq., a Military Officer in the Services of Prussia, Russia, and Great Britain (Dublin, 1783; reprint: New York, 1970), p. 385; V.N. Tatishchev, “Vvedenie k gistoricheskomu i geograficheskomu opisaniiu velikorossiiskoi imperii,” in his Izbrannye trudy po geografii Rossii (Moscow, 1950), p. 162; Oleg Neverov, “ ‘His Majesty’s Cabinet’ and Peter I’s Kunstkammer,” in Oliver Impey and Arthur Macgregor (eds.), The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe (Oxford, 1985), p. 59; T.V. Stankiuvich, Kunstkamera peterburgskoi akademii nauk (Moscow and Leningrad, 1953), p. 31; C.F. Neickelius, Museographia, oder Anleitung zum rechten Begriff und nützlichen Anlegung der Museorum, oder Raritäten-Kammern (Leipzig and Breslau, 1727), p. 83; MDIIAN v. 4, p. 744, and v. 8, pp. 547–48. 95 Jacques Revel, “Knowledge of the Territory,” Science in Context, 1991, v. 4, p. 134. 96 Joseph Nicolas de l’Isle, “Projet géneral pour l’astronomie et la géographie donné en 1727,” in V.F. Gnucheva (ed.), Geograficheskii departament akademii nauk xviii veka (Moscow and Leningrad, 1946), p. 121.

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complete Russian geography” and briefly defined their location and physical qualities in his Russian Lexicon (1745).97 As for steppe nomads, they too deserved more precise attention. If it had once been enough to describe them as either loyal or disloyal or Orthodox or damned, enlightened science now required that they—like all the empire’s peoples and neighbors—be provided with a fuller “geography” and “history” that would explain the provenance of their names, the content of their “morals and customs” (nravy i obyknoveniia), as well as “how far the borders of their habitation extended in the past, who their rulers were, and how they came into contact with Russia.”98 Much as was the case in all of the inquiries of Russia’s new “learned men,” the interest in nomads had a lot to do with, on the one hand, displaying the newfound relativism of the age and, on the other, tracing the roots of the Russians themselves, and the two motivations were invariably combined. Consequently, the scholars of St. Petersburg now proudly admitted that the nomadic Scythians of Herodotus’s time were a people of almost “immeasurable bravery,” that the Polovtsy, while certainly enemies of the Rus', had also been their allies in the Kievan civil wars, and that even the once purely evil Genghis Khan deserved respect for leading the Tatars (“the most populous people of Siberia”) from darkness into light.99 Furthermore, it was now recognized without much fanfare that the Russians’ most distant ancestors had themselves been nomads, because history had become a matter of progress (“the natural history of man”) defined by temporal states of being, with “primitive” hunters and pastoralists preceding farmers and “learned peoples” in the same way that children grew into adults.100 Tatishchev admitted that it was difficult to determine with certainty “which peoples in ancient times inhabited the Russian land and which of them established themselves first following the flood,” but the fact that they had been nomadic was less important than the fact that where they lived was indeed the Russian land. The Slavs, it appeared, had now “resided from time immemorial in the environs of the Black and Caspian Seas, from where they 97 V.N. Tatishchev, Leksikon rossiiskoi, istoricheskii, geograficheskii, politicheskii i grazhdanskii (St. Petersburg, 1793), v. 1, p. 17, v. 3, p. 121; V.N. Tatishchev, “Russia ili kak nyne zovut Rossiia” (comp. 1739) in his Izbrannye trudy po geografii Rossii, p. 129. 98 V.N. Tatishchev, “Istoriia rossiiskaia, chast pervaia,” in his Sobranie sochinenii v vos'mi tomakh, v. 1 (Moscow, 1994), p. 89. 99 [Georg Bayer], Kratkoe opisanie vsekh sluchaev kasaiushchikhsia do Azova ot sozdaniia sego goroda do vozvrashcheniia onogo pod rossiiskomu derzhavu (St. Petersburg, 1738), p. 4; Tatishchev, “Istoriia rossiiskaia, chast' pervaia,” Sobranie sochinenii v vos'mi tomakh, v. 1, p. 274; G.F. Miller [Müller], Istoriia Sibiri (Moscow and Leningrad, 1937), v. 1, p. 168. 100 Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors, p. 47. On the new three or (for some) four-stage “theory of human progress,” see Ronald Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge, Eng., 1976), p. 2. See also Glyndwr Williams and P.J. Marshall, The Great Map of Mankind: British Perceptions of the World in the Age of Enlightenment (London, 1982), pp. 92–94.

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migrated [perekochevali] to the west, and having conquered many countries, settled there.”101 The attentions of Tatishchev and other “learned men” confirmed that nomads had become more interesting and that they were now members of a common humanity. (The oecumene of “science,” unlike that of the Church, included all the world’s peoples.) But, ironically, their practical standing in the eyes of the Russian elite declined in the process. If the fact that currently “learned peoples” had once been nomads was a reassuring confirmation of acquired learnedness, the fact that current nomads were as yet “unlearned” served the same purpose in reverse. Deemed primitives on the new timescale of social evolution, nomads were now living proof of a lack of politesse, and their supposed inferiority vis-à-vis the Russians consequently became even more obvious than before. As Peter’s scholars and officials saw it, measuring their people by their sense of themselves, the Russians were a “nation” that lived in towns and villages, had achieved “science and learning,” possessed “civility,” and knew something of “wisdom” and the “common good,” whereas nomads were “steppe peoples” (stepnye narody) who lived in tents, “moved from place to place,” were “inherently beastly,” and quite clearly knew no “science” or “learning” at all.102 In other words, the new Eurocentric and “scientific” hierarchy provided an updated rationale that at once reconfirmed the nomads as the antipodes of Russianness that they had always seemed to be while also changing the rules of their potential assimilation. Nomads were still “peoples of another faith,” and becoming Orthodox remained the absolute sine qua non of state inclusion, but the “steppe peoples” would now also have to acquire a whole range of improved “morals and customs” if they hoped to approach the Russians in Europeanness and civilization.103 To early eighteenth-century Westerners, a condition of uncivilized unEuropeanness was not entirely unattractive. Even before Rousseau lent his vigorous support to the ideal of “natural man” in the middle of the century, the vogue of the primitive was popular enough in the West that foreign travelers within Russia could opine that the Kalmyks were “in their own way . . . the happiest people on earth” or suggest that nomadism 101 V.N. Tatishchev, “Pred''izveshchenie,” Sobranie sochinenii v vos'mi tomakh (Moscow, 1996), v. 7/8, pp. 60, 72. 102 For unflattering descriptions of nomads in this vein, see A.P. Volynskii, “Zapiska o Bashkirskom voprose,” Materialy po istorii Bashkirskoi ASSR, v. 1, pp. 302–6; KazakhskoRusskie otnosheniia v xvi'xviii vekakh (sbornik dokumentov i materialov) (Alma-Ata, 1961), p. 31; I.I. Nepliuev, Zapiski Ivana Ivanovicha Nepliueva, 1693–1773 (St. Petersburg, 1893), pp. 146, 150. 103 This was substantially the same road required of Siberian natives as well. Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors, pp. 48, 59.

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more generally was “the most ancient and pleasant manner of life.”104 Among contemporary Russians, however—both officials and scholars alike—such wistful views of the nomad as “noble savage” were unheard of, and would remain so until the latter part of the century. Learned Russians of the Petrine and early post-Petrine period were simply too covetous of their newly acquired civility to consider that not having it might be appealing, while the nomads remained too threatening to be the source of nostalgic attraction. As a result, in the Russian view, nomads continued to be “savages” of the ignoble rather than the noble sort and were more apt to appear vicious, unreliable, backward, pathetic, or at best passé rather than in any way enviable. Thus Peter kept young Kalmyks (along with various native Siberians) as “pets” because he was amused by their supposedly grotesque features; Empress Anna included Bashkirs and other steppe nomads in a satirical parade of peoples intended to mock one of her disgraced noblemen; and in his Flourishing Condition of the Russian State (1727), the state councilor and geographer Ivan Kirilov evoked a sense of bygone savagery by noting how “empty lands” on the Lower Volga that were once terrorized by the raids of the “Kuban horde” were now filling up—thanks to “God’s help” and the Tsaritsyn line—with new settlements, fields, and melon patches.105 Where possible, nomad “unbelievers” were to be converted to Orthodoxy, given Russian names, and provided with “annuities” (as was the grandson of the Kalmyk ruler Ayuki Khan who was baptized as Prince Petr Taishin with the tsar himself as godfather) so that they could begin the process of leaving disobedience and primitiveness behind.106 Along with the steppe nomads, Cossacks, too, received scholarly attention, and by comparison they fared better. Despite the fact that they lived on or around the steppe, none of the Cossacks were referred to as “steppe peoples,” presumably because they did not practice pastoral nomadism; all were defined as Orthodox; and all were considered Slavs (though it was admitted that their speech and appearance owed something to mixing with “Kalmyks and Tatars” and that “Little Russian [Ukrainian] Cossacks 104 Memoirs of Peter Henry Bruce, p. 287; John Bell, A Journey from St. Petersburg to Pekin, 1719–1722 (ed. J.L. Stevenson) (New York, 1966), p. 51. On the place of the primitive in eighteenth-century European ethnology and social criticism, see Henri Baudet, Paradise on Earth: Some Thoughts on European Images of Non-European Man (New Haven, Conn., 1965; reprint: Middleton, Conn., 1988), pp. 34–39 passim. 105 Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great, p. 259; Stankiuvich, Kunstkamera peterburgskoi akademii nauk, p. 76; I.K. Kirilov, Tvetushchee sostoianie vserossiiskogo gosudarstva (Moscow, 1977), p. 236. For a list of the ethnic costumes and accessories requested for Anna’s “masquerade,” see MDIIAN, v. 4, pp. 276–78. 106 Khodarkovsky, Where Two Worlds Met, pp. 180–81; V.N. Vitevskii, I.I. Nepliuev, vernyi sluga svoego otechestva, osnovatel' Orenburgskogo kraia (Kazan, 1891), p. 123.

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are called Cherkassians [Cherkasy], though no one knows why”).107 Yet much like those of the nomads, Cossack “morals and customs” were nonetheless in distinct need of improvement, the surest prescription for which was greater contact with “Russian people” (rossiiane) and greater control by the Russian state. As the courtier Fedor Saltykov suggested to Peter in 1714, in reference to the Zaporozhians who had spent too long under the influence of the “nefarious Polish custom” and their own treasonous leaders: A special guard should be created under the current hetman [leader] consisting of the sons of [Russian] nobles and other educated [Russian] people who are not yet married [to serve among the Zaporozhians and then to marry with them] . . . so that this people [narod] will become mixed with Russians through rank, marriage, and custom [chinami, nravom, i svoistvom]; and thus both peoples will be protected from devastations and losses, and any treason . . . or evil intentions [on the part of the Zaporozhians] against the Russians will be openly known.

Just for good measure, Saltykov added that there was sound international precedent for this kind of plan since the English had done much the same thing with the Irish and the Welsh and were now pursuing a similar approach with the Scots, “many of whose nobles are related to English lords.”108 In addition to redefining the steppe’s territory and peoples, the Petrine era also brought developments of a more concrete sort. Indeed, efforts at describing the steppe and building and reorganizing it went hand in hand because they all served the appealing end of “utility.” Thus, at the same time that official savants were charting their maps and histories, savant engineers, officials, and advisors were organizing the digging of the DonVolga Canal (begun in 1697, though not completed until the Soviet period); initiating and upgrading defensive lines (now called linii) in Bashkiria, Ukraine (“Little Russia”), and between the Don and the Lower Volga; erecting new forts in the Northern Caucasus and around Azov; placing milestones along steppe roads “in order to avoid accidents and difficulties for travelers”; incorporating the empire’s steppe areas within giant imperial provinces in keeping with the country’s territorial reform; and 107 V.N. Tatishchev, “Vvedenie k gistoricheskomu i geograficheskomu opisaniiu velikorossiiskoi imperii,” p. 182; Relation de la Grande Tartarie dresée sure les mémoires originaux des Suedois prisonniers en Sibérie pendant la guerre de la Suède avec la Russie (Amsterdam, 1737), pp. 218–39. 108 Fedor Saltykov, “Iz''iavleniia pribytochnyia gosudarstvu,” in N. Pavlov-Sil'vanskii, Proekty reform v zapiskakh sovremennikov Petra Velikogo: Opyt izucheniia russkikh proektov i neizdannye ikh teksty (St. Petersburg, 1897), appendix, pp. 18–19.

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proposing the planting of vineyards on the banks of the Don and the Terek, the building of wool and silk works on the Lower Volga, and the opening of four “scientific academies” around the empire, with two— those of Kiev and Astrakhan—to be situated on or near the steppe and pointed toward Russia’s borders with Turkey and Persia.109 These varied initiatives were not part of a comprehensive plan of regional development; many of them were never realized, and all of them were motivated first and foremost by an assessment of the mercenary and military needs of the state. In this sense, for all that its parts and peoples were being defined in more “scientific” terms, the steppe remained to Peter what it had been to his predecessors: a remote, insecure military frontier that needed defending and at least some exploitation. These ends naturally called for a certain number of inhabitants, and so colonization remained a concern. At the same time, given the state’s small overall population (7.78 million male souls according to the first “revision” of 1719),110 the new ruling order was no less concerned than the old to make sure that movement into one area did not create “emptiness” (pustota) in another. As Ivan Pososhkov, one of the champions of the crude cameralism of the Petrine period, neatly put it, “emptiness” was to be avoided because “an empty place produces no revenue.”111 Peter’s lieutenants thus found themselves facing a familiar predicament: “emptiness” on the steppe frontier required more people, but moving people there created “emptiness” in the interior. They also faced problems with keeping track of settlers and enforcing their various obligations. Peter’s solution to this dilemma was characteristically extreme yet also both in step with the incipient populationism then drawing attention from other European courts and broadly consistent with Muscovite precedent: he took limited measures to increase overall population—for example by opening foundling homes to ensure raw material for his army and navy—while at the same time keeping almost all of his subjects fixed in place and insisting that any and all resettlement take place only under his command and approval.112 With the tsar as grand director of population distribution and 109 Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great, pp. 154, 115–16; Saltykov, “Iz''iavleniia pribytochnyia gosudarstvu,” appendix, pp. 24–26; V. Gere (ed.), Sbornik pisem i memorialov Leibnitsa otnosiashikhsia k Rossii i Petru Velikomu (St. Petersburg, 1873), p. 220. 110 V.M. Kabuzan, Izmeneniia v razmeshchenii naseleniia Rossii v xviii–pervoi polovine xix v. (po materialam revizii) (Moscow, 1971), p. 5. 111 I.T. Pososhkov, Kniga o skudosti i bogatstve (Moscow, 1937), p. 260. 112 PSZ, ser. 1, v. 7, n. 4827 (1726), pp. 565–66; Mervyn Matthews, The Passport Society: Controlling Movement in Russia and the USSR (Boulder, Colo., 1993), pp. 2–3; David Ransel, Mothers of Misery: Child Abandonment in Russia (Princeton, N.J., 1988), pp. 8, 26–29. On populationism (“a preference for a larger than existing population”) in Europe in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, see James C. Riley, Population Thought in the Age of the Demographic Revolution (Durham, N.C., 1985), pp. 38–57.

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principal enforcer of the state’s bottom line, his subjects would be more usefully deployed and his taxes and recruits better collected. Thus, prior to any resettling of their serfs, all lords were now required to obtain permission from the College of Estates (if they did not, they faced a fine), and anyone else could be shuffled whenever the “state’s interest”—that is, the “tsar’s will”—required.113 The implications of this kind of thinking for the steppe were clear. In keeping with his cameralist conviction that he was empowered by God to organize an economically useful life for all of his subjects, Peter chose to force some of them to be useful in the south. Thus, just as he compelled noblemen, merchants, and thousands of peasant laborers and craftsmen to move to his new northern capital of St. Petersburg, he distributed land to his servitors on the “empty” steppe frontier and ordered them to resettle their serfs. He dispatched thousands of families of various kinds of craftsmen to work on construction projects in Azov, Taganrog, and Voronezh; “encouraged” Russians, Armenians, and “other Christians” to move to newly conquered Persian provinces; ordered one thousand households of Don Cossacks (most of whom subsequently died from malaria) to occupy new forts in the Northern Caucasus; and decreed that soldiers caught trading in spirits or tobacco “be whipped mercilessly” and then exiled “for all their lives . . . with their wives and children” to the Terek River.114 Despite these varied measures, there was as yet no obvious steppe colonization policy. Resettlements were erratic, state assistance for nonserf migrants was meager and inconsistent, serfs moved by their lords got nothing from the state at all, and the only abiding rule was that the tsar was supposed to be in charge. In September 1711, in a characteristic episode, 1,400 carpenters intended for dispatch to Voronezh were instead ordered to St. Petersburg when the Voronezh docks were dismantled following Peter’s defeat on the Prut.115 The tsar was concerned enough about the migrants to stipulate that they be provided food and travel monies and accompanied by an escort led by a “decent officer,” but his decree offered no additional details on how the operation was supposed to take place. Certain people, when necessary, had to be moved, but the issue was not so much how they moved but rather that the movement take place only by royal command and produce “useful” results. The decrees did indeed produce something. As Peter was happy to re113 PSZ, ser. 1, v. 7, n. 4533 (1724), pp. 310–18. 114 PSZ, ser. 1, v. 4, n. 2380 (1711), pp. 701–2; PSZ, ser. 1, v. 4, n. 2448 (1711),

p. 753; PSZ, ser. 1, v. 7, n. 4462 (1724), p. 252; “Ukaz Senata o poselenii donskikh kazakov na zemliakh, raspolozhennykh po reke Sulak,” in Russko-dagestanskie otnosheniia xvii–pervoi chetverty xviii vv. (dokumenty i materialy) (Makhachkala, 1958), p. 149; Barrett, At the Edge of Empire, p. 32; PSZ, ser. 1, v. 3, n. 1716 (1699), p. 667. 115 PSZ, ser. 1, v. 4, n. 2427 (1711), pp. 739–40.

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port from Trinity Fortress (Troitskii) at Taganrog in May 1709, where “just ten years ago we saw only empty steppe” (pustoe pole), there was now “a splendid town and harbor,” and the building of lines and forts in other places confirmed that the state was indeed able (for better and for ill) to mobilize population.116 Yet if the Petrine state succeeded in forcing certain people to move, its control over movement as a whole was limited. Peter’s taskmasters in the south often complained that settlers and workers either did not arrive in sufficient numbers or were never dispatched, and, much as in Muscovite times, the larger share of settlers who moved to southern areas in the early eighteenth century were not legal migrants moving by decree or with their landlords but runaways—deserting soldiers, townsmen, and especially peasants—moving according to their own designs.117 As the illegals themselves told it (when they were caught), the move to the frontier offered an escape from death and abuse in the army and/or abuse and “poverty” (skudost' ) on the farm. But to Peter and his regime, flight was the act of “stupid” people looking to shirk their obligations, and it was therefore an “evil” that demanded punishment.118 Consequently, the state’s representatives issued scores of threatening decrees, whipped or executed any deserters they could get their hands on, fined or whipped anyone who harbored “illegals,” and organized posses to retrieve peasant escapees, torturing them when necessary to determine who they were and where they had come from.119 The state’s men on the frontier were few, however, while those who claimed that they “could not remember their name or their provenance” (ne pominaiushchii imeni i rodstva svoego) were many, which meant that these efforts generally had little effect. Despite the state’s declared intention of deporting all “vagrants,” the more common scenario was not for runaways to be sent back but rather 116 PiB, v. 9, pt. 1, n. 3178, p. 168. 117 Boris Nolde, La Formation de l’empire russe: Études, notes et documents (Paris, 1953),

v. 2, p. 16; John Perry, The State of Russia Under the Present Czar, in Relation to the several great and remarkable Things he has done, as to his Naval Preparations, the Regulating his Army, the Reforming his People, and Improvement of his Countrey (London, 1716; reprint: New York, 1967), pp. 4–5. 118 N.V. Kozlova, Pobegi krest'ian v Rossii v pervoi tretii xviii veka (iz istorii sotsial'no-ekonomicheskoi zhizni strany) (Moscow, 1983), pp. 58–59; P. Miliukov, Gosudarstvennoe khoziaistvo Rossii v pervoi chetverty xviii stoletiia i reforma Petra Velikogo (2nd ed.; St. Petersburg, 1905), p. 404. The elite’s dim view of the Russian rural population is concisely expressed in a Senate resolution from 1718: “Among the peasants, there are no thinking people” (v uezdakh is krest'ianstva umnykh liudei net). See “Zakonnoproekt ob organakh mestnogo upravleniia, sostavlennyi v senate i rozdannyi dlia izucheniia senatoram i prezidentam gosud. kollegii, ot 3 noiabria 1718 goda,” in Voskresenskii (ed.), Zakonodatel'nye akty Petra I, v. 1, p. 61. 119 John L.H. Keep, Soldiers of the Tsar: Army and Society in Russia, 1462–1874 (New York, 1985), pp. 114–16; Kozlova, Pobegi krest'ian v pervoi treti xviii veka, pp. 65–70, 128–40.

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for them to be registered in their new locales and locked into new obligations, because the tsar was far away and these settlers—while undeniably illegal—nonetheless had their uses for frontier military commanders, landlords, “factories,” and Cossack hetmans.120 Thus, legal, illegal, and de facto legalized migrants continued to settle on or near the steppe, and much as before the migrant pool continued to represent different “nations” and faiths—Orthodox Great Russians and Little Russians, Russian Old Believers, Muslim Tatars, and so forth. The scale of colonization under Peter remained limited. Not counting nomads, the population of the steppe under Russian control amounted to only about two hundred thousand male souls in 1719.121 The state’s control over the process also remained at best minimal. But in one important respect things had changed for good. It was now presumed that the steppe, wherever possible, should indeed be colonized. In the heady dawn of the new self-consciously European absolutism, at a time when swamps were being turned into “Paradise” (Peter’s pet name for St. Petersburg) and the Russians were being led by their officially “great” and divinely secular monarch “from nonexistence into being,” everything seemed transformable.122 Indeed, everything needed to be transformed, because the production of progress was increasingly regarded as the very purpose of autocratic power and the cornerstone of Russia’s newly enhanced state myth. The steppe was no exception to this rule. If Muscovite tsars had sought security, profit, and reliable tribute from “the field,” and had hoped for—while only barely pursuing—the conversion of its “peoples of another faith,” the new “emperor” wanted all of this and something more. The difference was in the level of assertiveness and the framework of comparison. In the new world according to St. Petersburg, it was increasingly impossible to imagine conquest without appropriation and territorial exploitation without scientific knowledge or rational administration. And the role model for expansion was no longer the old Muscovite gathering of the lands but the newfangled mercantilist maritime empires of the West, whose ways in general seemed 120 Kozlova, Pobegi krest'ian v Rossii v pervoi treti xviii veka, pp. 132–33. 121 Kabuzan, Izmeneniia v razmeshchenii naseleniia Rossii, appendix 2, pp. 59–70. To ar-

rive at this figure, I added together Kabuzan’s totals for regions falling entirely within the steppe zone, that is, the Lower Volga, Southern Urals, the Don Cossack lands, and what became later Ekaterinoslav Province in New Russia. I did not include Left-Bank Ukraine (909,651), the Middle Volga (651,405), or the Central Agricultural Region (1,561,417) because these regions only partially overlap with forest-steppe areas. 122 Grigory Kaganov, Images of Space: Petersburg in the Visual and Verbal Arts (Stanford, Calif., 1997), p. 13; Stephen Lessing Baehr, The Paradise Myth in Eighteenth-Century Russia: Utopian Patterns in Early Secular Russian Literature and Culture (Stanford, Calif., 1991); V.M. Zhivov, “Gosudarstvennyi mif v epokhu prosveshcheniia i ego razrushenie v Rossii kontsa xviii veka,” Vek prosveshcheniia: Rossiia i Frantsiia; materialy konferentsii (Moscow, 1989), p. 147.

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to provide the “absolute and incontestable model [and] only possible standard of behavior.”123 In keeping with this broad shift in political culture, the steppe gradually became the object of a new sort of imperialism, one that sought not only security and profit but also worldly glory, scientific knowledge, and the deeper transformation of people and territory. The clearest expression of this new imperialism was the Orenburg Expedition (Orenburgskaia ekspeditsiia), which, though undertaken in 1734, nearly a decade after Peter’s death, was nonetheless a direct product of Petrine thinking.124 Conceived in the spirit of Peter’s fascination with the “riches of the East” and commanded by Ivan Kirilov, one of the deceased tsar’s former protégés, the purpose of the expedition was to build a fortified town at the confluence of the Or and Yaik Rivers in southeastern Bashkiria in order to consolidate Russian control over the Bashkirs and Kazakhs (in particular, the Kazakhs of the Little Horde who had formally pledged their allegiance to Petersburg just three years earlier). At the same time, the expedition was to promote trade with Central Asia, exploit deposits of precious metals, and chart and document the entire region between the Kama River and the Aral Sea.125 The scientifically inspired mercantilist imperialism implicit in the plan was hard to miss and entirely appropriate for a state that was now officially an empire (imperiia) in the European absolutist mold and whose ruling elite was eager to compare its imperial and scientific credentials with those of the rest of the civilized world. Henceforth, Europe’s expansion overseas would meet its parallel in Russian expansion into the steppe. Kirilov made this more than clear in his proposal to Empress Anna, comparing the profits and glory to come from his initiative to the achievements of the Spanish and the Dutch in the Americas and Batavia. At the same time he requested that his force include not only a priest, an interpreter, an architect, soldiers, and craftsmen but also a “notable botanist,” a “professor of natural history and physics,” an astronomer “to provide true readings of longitude and latitude for newly discovered places,” and geodesists “to describe new lands and draw scientific maps [landkarty].”126 123 Greenfeld, Nationalism, p. 223. 124 The name of the expedition was changed to the Orenburg Commission (Oren-

burgskaia komissiia) in 1737. Donnelly, Russian Conquest of Bashkiria, p. 96. 125 Donnelly, Russian Conquest of Bashkiria, pp. 54–63. On the tsar’s “mythic visions of reserves of gold” in Central Asia and his interest in finding an overland route to India, see Catherine Poujol, “Les Voyageurs russes et l’Asie Centrale: Naissance et declin de deux mythes, les réserves d’or et la voie vers l’Inde,” Central Asian Survey, 1985, v. 4, n. 3, pp. 59–60, 65. 126 PSZ, ser. 1, v. 9, n. 6571 (1734), pp. 315–16; RGADA, f. 248, kn. 750, ll. 59(b)–60(b). In addition to several thousand troops and support personnel (including Bashkir and Kalmyk detachments), the expedition counted approximately 130 officers and civilian specialists. Iurii Smirnov, Orenburgskaia ekspeditsiia (komissiia) i prisoedinenie Zavolzh'ia k Rossii v 30–40–e gg. xviii veka (Samara, 1997), p. 24.

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Colonization was an essential part of the plan. Just a few years prior to Kirilov’s proposal to move into southeastern Bashkiria, the Russian government began building what became the new Trans-Kama line in the northwest, opening the “empty” steppe lands behind it to the usual assortment of legal and illegal colonists and settling the line itself with “land-militia regiments” made up of retired soldiers, state peasants (that is, peasants living on state lands), and various other willing commoners, who were given a uniform and required to do line duty as well as farm.127 Kirilov’s new town—given the name of Orenburg by Anna—was part of the same effort to advance “the sovereign’s interest” in the region, and, consequently, it, too, required population. As the empress stated in her approval of Kirilov’s plan, “The first thing, in order to create this town . . . [is] to furnish it with inhabitants.”128 As far as Her Majesty was concerned, these inhabitants might be “of all callings and faiths” and could include foreigners from Europe and “Asian countries” as well as “any of the peoples of Russia,” including local Bashkirs and Kazakhs. In fact, the only people explicitly denied an invitation to settle the town were “runaways from [the sovereign’s] service” and taxpaying peasants.129 In August 1735, with these instructions in hand, Kirilov founded the town and wrote to St. Petersburg to congratulate Anna on the occasion, informing her that she had acquired not only a new settlement but the gateway to a “new Russia . . . rich in metals and minerals.”130 The term “new Russia” did not become a formal title for Kirilov’s new domain, but it was not forgotten, and the fact that it was coined in conjunction with the Orenburg project was all the more confirmation of the expedition’s self-conscious adoption of European colonial style. Some Bashkir notables joined Kirilov’s team, receiving pledges of the sovereign’s gratitude and ornate sabers in return, but others were wary, and even before Kirilov’s congratulatory dispatch to the empress, the wary ones revolted. Predictably, the government’s response was to “exterminate the Bashkir criminals” (as Kirilov himself put it), confiscate their lands and open them for sale to Russian nobles, and extend colonization deeper within Bashkiria in order to “pacify” the territory.131 127 PSZ, ser. 1, v. 8, n. 5808 (1731), pp. 517–18. 128 PSZ, ser. 1, v. 9, n. 6576 (1734), p. 323. 129 PSZ, ser. 1, v. 9, n. 6584 (1734), p. 345. Kirilov himself proposed distributing an

invitation to settlement in both Russian and Tatar. See A.I. Dobromyslov (ed.), Materialy po istorii Rossii: Sbornik ukazov i drugikh dokumentov kasaiushchikhsia upravleniia i ustroistva Orenburgskogo kraia (Orenburg, 1900), v. 1, p. 22. 130 Materialy po istorii Bashkirskoi ASSR (Moscow and Leningrad, 1949), v. 3, p. 497. The town was subsequently moved twice before being built at its current location in 1743. 131 Kirilov’s phrase, from a report to the empress from August 1736, appears in Nolde, La Formation de l’empire russe, v. 1, p. 224. For the government’s orders on the suppression of the revolt in early 1736 (most of them based on Kirilov’s recommenda-

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Construction on the new Trans-Kama line was halted in late 1735 and new forts, outposts, and lines were, instead, built further to the southeast along the upper Yaik and Samara Rivers. These new forts and lines, with the town of Orenburg at their center, were later organized into a single defensive network (ultimately known as the Orenburg line) and reinforced with new state-created Cossack detachments. Local authorities then opened a regional “resettlement office” and scrambled to take advantage of just about anyone—land-militia units from the Trans-Kama line; Cossacks from “Little Russia,” Ufa, and forts near the Volga; convicts; runaway serfs (before they were reprimanded by central authorities for doing so); retired soldiers; “people of various ranks”; Ukrainian, Mordvin, Tatar, and Mishar peasants; and “honest” Kalmyk and Bashkir nomads—to join the Cossack corps on the line or to populate the lands behind it.132 As they colonized the territory and suppressed the revolt, Kirilov and his lieutenants also kept their eyes on the prizes of science and conversion. Thus the expedition continued mapping “new lands” and collecting what Kirilov expected would be “many thousand . . . natural specimens” for dispatch to the Academy of Sciences. The expedition also enforced a ban on new Bashkir mosques, organized a Russian-language school in Ufa to incline Bashkir “unbelievers” toward “a knowledge of the Christian faith and civil law,” and built a special fort for Bashkir “new Christians” to isolate them from old coreligionists and keep them under the careful supervision of new ones.133 By the mid1740s, the poll-tax paying (that is, Slavic) population of Bashkiria had grown to 52,242 (male souls) compared to approximately 140,662 Bashkirs, a dramatic change in the ratio between the former and the latter from just a quarter century earlier.134 This influx of newcomers, along with periodic campaigns of aggressive Orthodox conversion (both real and suspected), helped to provoke another massive Bashkir revolt in 1750, though even then immigration did not abate. Between 1754 and tions), see the summary in N. Firsov, Inorodcheskoe naselenie prezhniago kazanskogo tsarstva v novoi Rossii do 1762 goda i kolonizatsiia zakamskikh zemel' v eto vremia (Kazan', 1869), pp. 269–273. 132 Smirnov, Orenburgskaia ekspeditsiia, pp. 124–41. 133 Karl Svenske (comp.), Materialy dlia istorii sostavleniia atlasa rossiiskoi imperii izdannago imperatorskoi akademieiu nauk v 1745 godu (St. Petersburg, 1866), p. 113; PSZ, ser. 1, v. 9, n. 6890 (1736); Michael Khodarkovsky, “ ‘Not by Word Alone’: Missionary Policies and Religious Conversion in Early Modern Russia,” CCSH, 38, no. 2 (1996), p. 282. The school was proposed in 1738. See Materialy po istorii Bashkirskoi ASSR, v. 1, p. 366. 134 In 1719, poll-tax payers (i.e., mostly Slavic peasants) in Bashkiria represented 15.2 percent of the region’s population. In 1744, they amounted to 33.1 percent. Kabuzan, Izmeneniia v razmeshchenii naseleniia Rossii, pp. 19, 33.

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1762, close to 47,000 illegal migrants resettled to Bashkiria from Kazan district alone.135 Compared with the Orenburg Expedition, the state’s initiatives on the Lower Volga were less comprehensive and less violent, but the spirit behind them was the same. Between 1719 and 1744, the region experienced the greatest concentration of new settlement of any place within the empire, as a kaleidoscope of state settlers “came in” (illegally and legally) and the serf population of Saratov Province almost tripled.136 The work of the state’s representatives in matters of colonization and appropriation was accordingly pronounced. As governor of Astrakhan in the 1740s, Vasilii Tatishchev (a former director of Orenburg affairs) noted lands “to be surveyed and populated” along the Tsaritsyn line, identified where it would be “most useful” to plant fruit trees and flax, called for the resettlement to Astrakhan town of Persian craftsmen and other skilled “foreigners,” described the remains of noteworthy kurgans and “ancient cities,” and reminded the president of the Academy of Sciences that the academy’s maps failed to record all the empire’s “notable steppes.”137 As governor, and earlier as head of the Kalmyk Commission, Tatishchev also tended to nomadic affairs, conducting parlays with feuding tayishis in the tents of the “ulus Kalmyks” near Astrakhan and, somewhat more to his liking, organizing the settlement in 1738 of over two thousand semisedentary “Kalmyk new Christians” (the followers and descendants of Peter’s Prince Taishin) in a fort near the Volga north of Samara. The goal of the fort, appropriately named Stavropol' (Greek for “City of the Cross”), was to incline the Kalmyk converts “toward the plow and the Russian way,” by providing them with Russian peasant instructors (or non-Russian as long as they were not “Tatars or Bashkirs”), and oversee their “instruction in the faith,” by giving them priests and churches and removing them from the influence of their “idol-worshiping” countrymen.138 In the general en135 V.M. Kabuzan, Emigratsiia i reemigratsiia v Rossii v xviii–nachale xx veka (Moscow, 1998), p. 22, table 1. 136 Ibid., p. 15; Kabuzan, Izmeneniia v razmeshchenii naseleniia v Rossii, p. 31. 137 A.I. Iukht (ed.), Nauchnoe nasledstvo, v. 14, Vasilii Nikitich Tatishchev: Zapiski, pis'ma 1717–1750 gg. (Moscow, 1990), pp. 284–85, 299, 301, 310–11, 323. 138 “Utverzhdennoe kabinet-ministrami soobshchenie Pr. Senata o soderzhanii kniagini Anny Taishinoi i obretaiushchikhsia pri nei kreshchennykh zaisanov i kalmykov, o dache im zemli pri reke Toke, vpadaiushchei v r. Samaru i pr.,” SIRIO, v. 124, pp. 464–67; PSZ, ser. 1, v. 10, n. 7228 (1737), p. 128, and n. 7335 (1737), p. 227. Tatishchev’s initial suggestion was for the settlement to be called “Epiphany, Greek for enlightenment.” See N. Popov, V.N. Tatishchev i ego vremia: Epizod iz istorii gosudarstvennoi, obshchestvennoi i chastnoi zhizni v Rossii, pervoi poloviny proshedshago stoletiia (Moscow, 1861), p. 262. The settlement project is also briefly described in Khodarkovsky, Where Two Worlds Met, pp. 208–9; and Shovunov, Kalmyki v sostave rossiiskogo kazachestva, pp. 47–56.

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thusiasm for the Kalmyks’ adoption of agriculture and Orthodoxy, there was no concern about their losing their Kalmykness, because it was assumed that if the latter amounted to “wandering” and “idolatry” then it was a good thing to lose. Furthermore, the state’s utility, rather than the Kalmyks’ concerns, was the most important thing. Thus, while Tatishchev aimed to turn the Stavropol' Kalmyks into peasants “to advance Her Majesty’s interest,” by the late 1740s other officials decided that this was better done by organizing them into “commands” (roty) and turning them into Cossacks. The pursuit of a sedentary way of life and the true faith, of course, continued.139 On steppes farther to the west, the state’s new, more ambitious form of imperialism was less in evidence, though only because geopolitical circumstances were less favorable. With the Zaporozhians (who had moved to Turkish territory after Peter’s destruction of the Sech' in 1709), various Nogay hordes, the Crimeans, and the Ottomans as immediate neighbors and recurrent adversaries, the state’s representatives on the Black Sea frontier had fewer opportunities to transform nomads since the latter had not even formally submitted to Russian rule, and the utility of security was naturally more important than that of ancient ruins and fruit trees. Post-Petrine courts attacked the steppe when it appeared to suit their interests and maintained their lines and forts, but major campaigns were rare because they still carried obvious disadvantages. During the Russo-Ottoman War of 1735–39, Marshal Münnich’s soldiers and Cossacks advanced farther than any previous Russian army, making it into the Crimea itself, burning and looting towns as they went. But half of the men that Münnich led into the steppe never made it out again (most died as a result of thirst, exposure, and disease), and what was left of his army ultimately abandoned the Crimea and the deep steppe because they ran out of supplies.140 (As one of Anna’s counselors wryly observed, the “famous Crimean campaign” created “much noise in foreign countries . . . and considerable glory for its commander, but . . . not even the slightest advantage for the [Russian] state.”)141 The rest of the war went better for the Russians, but they later had to surrender their gains due to French and Austrian pressure in the postwar peace 139 Vitevskii, I.I. Nepliuev, vernyi sluga svoego otechestva, p. 138; Shovunov, Kalmyki v sostave rossiiskogo kazachestva, pp. 205, 56. 140 In the 1737 Crimean campaign, the Russians lost 2,114 men on the battlefield and 34,500 men to disease. Jeremy Black, War and the World: Military Power and the Fate of Continents, 1450–2000 (New Haven, Conn., 1998), p. 103. 141 General de Manstein, Mémoires historiques, politiques et militaires sur la Russie, contenant les principales Révolutions de cet Empire & les Guerres des Russes contre les Turcs & les Tatares, avec un Supplément qui donne une idée du Militaire, de la Marine, du Commerce, &c. de ce vaste Empire (Lyon, 1772), v. 1, p. 206.

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talks, a reminder of the other sort of trouble that could undermine a forward strategy.142 Because of these challenges, the state’s more abiding approach on the Pontic steppe was not offense but defense, which meant either military settlement or, where agreed on in treaties, no settlement at all. Following a precedent established by the Russo-Turkish agreements of the Petrine period, the Russians and Ottomans pledged in the peace treaty of 1739 and attendant accords to leave certain lands “empty, so as to provide a buffer [barriera] between the two empires” and agreed to dispatch “talented commissars” to survey and delimit the vacant areas.143 On lands within Russian borders, where no respect for emptiness applied, the government continued building forts and a new defensive line (the Ukrainian line, begun in 1731), settling them with land-militia regiments and “homesteaders” (odnodvortsy). They also allowed Zaporozhian émigrés from the Turkish side, once they pledged allegiance to Anna in 1734, to return to build a new Sech', not far from the old one. Somewhat later, with security concerns still primarily in mind, Empress Elizabeth offered additional “places beyond the Dniepr” to the first large group of foreign settlers invited to the empire. These South Slavic volunteers from the Austrian Balkans were organized into regiments under the command of their persistent recruiter, General-Major Horvat, and settled in two semiautonomous military districts (New Serbia and Slavic Serbia [Slavianoserbia]). They were granted salaries, farming tools, and uniforms, as well as permission to organize their own schools and churches in return for serving along the state’s border and becoming “the sovereign’s subjects.”144 No other settlers were allowed to live in the foreign enclaves, so the state’s representatives were ordered “to deport [any such people] to their previous places” and several thousand Zaporozhian returnees and peasants from Poland were indeed “deported.” By the end of 1754, New Serbia counted a population of 2,225 men and 1,694 women, with Moldavians, despite the colony’s name, making up about three-fourths of the total and Serbs, Macedonians, Bulgarians, Walachians, Hungarians, and a few Germans making up the rest.145 Beginning in the 1740s, the Russian-claimed 142 M.A. Chepelkin and N.A. D'iakova, Istoricheskii ocherk formirovaniia gosudarstvennykh granits rossiiskoi imperii (2–aia polovina xvii–nachalo xx v.) (Moscow, 1992), pp. 32–33. 143 T. Iuzefovich (comp.), Dogovory Rossii s vostokom: Politicheskie i torgovye (St. Petersburg, 1869), p. 17; Nolde, La Formation de l’empire russe, v. 2, pp. 28–29. 144 Erik Amburger, “Militärsiedlungen in Rußland im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert und ihr Einfluß auf Siedlungsbild und Ortsnamen,” JfGO, 1993, v. 41, n. 1, pp. 24–25; PSZ, v. 13, n. 9924 (1752), pp. 581–85; Nolde, La Formation de l’empire russe, v. 2, pp. 30–52. 145 V.M. Kabuzan, Zaselenie Novorossii (Ekaterinoslavskoi i Khersonskoi gubernii) v xviii–pervoi polovine xix veka (1719–1858) (Moscow, 1976), p. 88.

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lands in the north Black Sea steppe started overtaking the Lower Volga as the empire’s leading colonization zone, with a total population, according to the pertinent registers, of 123,400 people.146 Yet all of these efforts at colonization ironically did little to change the basic aspect of the steppe in the official Russian imagination. Presenting himself as a knowing “modern” correcting the mistaken “ancients,” Tatishchev shifted the long accepted boundary of Asia from the Don (Tanais in classical Greek) to the Urals in the 1730s, but this did not keep the Russians, like their European peers, from continuing to see the now more geographically “European” steppe as Asian in its “barbarism” (both ancient and modern).147 They also persisted in seeing it as almost completely empty even though colonization was increasing and the region was still home to hundreds of thousands of nomads. Nowhere was this more visible than in the new order’s expressly scientific maps. Kirilov’s “general map” of the Russian empire (1734), the first to display the results of the Petrine surveys, offered a south that was virtually vacant;148 the Academy of Sciences’ Russian Atlas (1745) covered it with small dashes, marking it here and there with images of nomadic tents and lines of Russian forts;149 and the Orenburg Expedition mapmaker, Krasil'chikov, marked his southeastern steppes in 1755 with tracings of lines, trees, and hills running alongside rivers, the ruin of an “ancient town” near Gur'ev on the Caspian, and oversized cartouches of baptized Kalmyks and Cossacks (conveniently covering a great deal of “empty” space), but he left the immense areas surrounding these markings for the most part simply blank.150 In other words, the steppe was claimed by geographical science 146 Kabuzan, Izmeneniia v razmeshchenii naseleniia Rossii, p. 29; Kabuzan, Emigratsiia i reemigratsiia v Rossii, p. 19. 147 Mark Bassin, “Russia between Europe and Asia: The Ideological Construction of Geographical Space,” SR, 1991, v. 50, n. 1, pp. 6–7; Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, 1994), pp. 284–331; Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, “Asia through Russian Eyes,” in Wayne S. Vucinich (ed.), Russia and Asia: Essays on the Influence of Russia on the Asian Peoples (Stanford, Calif., 1972), p. 8. 148 I. Kirilov, Atlas vserossiiskoi (1734; reprint: Leningrad, 1959), general map. A better (if smaller) reproduction of the general map appears in Aleksei Postnikov, Russia in Maps: A History of the Geographical Study and Cartography of the Country (Moscow, 1996), pp. 44–45. 149 Atlas rossiiskii sostoiashchii iz deviatnadtsati spetsial'nykh kart predstavliaiushchikh rossiiskuiu imperiiu s pogrannichnymi zemliami, sochinennoi po pravilam geograficheskim i noveishim observatsiiam s prilozhennoiu pri tom general'noi kartoiu velikoi seia imperii, staraniem i trudami imperatorskoi akademii nauk (St. Petersburg, 1745), maps number 7, 10, 11, 13. On cartouches in colonial maps, see G.N.G. Clarke, “Taking Possession: The Cartouche as Cultural Text in Eighteenth-Century American Maps,” Word and Image, 1988, v. 4, n. 2, pp. 455–74. 150 Orenburgskaia guberniia s prilezhashchimi k nei mestami po ‘landkartam’ Krasil'chikova i ‘topografii’ Rychkova 1755 goda (Orenburg, 1880), maps 1, 2, and 3.

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and promptly turned into a void. Whoever might live there, there were not enough of them with villages, towns, roads, canals, fields, churches, or even mosques to make much of a cartographic impression. Thus by the middle of the eighteenth century, the Russian establishment had grown accustomed to viewing the steppe as an alien and empty frontier that required colonization, both as a matter of state security and for effective governance. In the coming decades, the commitment to the new imperialism would become even stronger. All it would take was the leadership of a new imperialist.

53

“Volga Fishermen, Kaluga Merchant,” from Johann-Gottlieb Georgi, Opisanie vsekh v rossiiskom gosudarstve narodov . . . (St. Petersburg, 1776–77). Reproduced in Kostium narodov Rossii v grafike 18–20 vekov (USSR Cultural Advertising Bureau, USSR Ministry of Culture, Moscow, 1990), p. 38.

C h a p t e r Tw o

Enlightened Colonization Nature belongs to you, for your fertile hand to create, using the elements of the world. Abbé de Lille, Les Jardins, ou l’Art d’embellir les Paysages

Reason’s Territory The leader who renewed the state’s commitment to the new imperialism was Catherine the Great. In contrast to Peter and his followers and successors, who tended to see everyone’s obligation as serving the state, Catherine and her supporters told themselves that the state’s first obligation was serving “the citizen.” Yet, ironically, this only resulted in an even greater insistence on the state’s prerogatives. According to the empress, who based her views on a creative misreading of Montesquieu, the only suitable form of government for a country as large as Russia was “autocratic power,” and the abiding purpose of autocracy was to promote the glory and welfare of state and citizenry through laws crafted “in accordance with nature” and “the spirit of the nation” and then deftly deployed to “direct the actions [of men] toward the attainment of the greatest possible good.”1 In other words, autocracy was the functional equivalent of rational altruism, and it was only natural to assume that its benevolent impact should be increased wherever possible. Catherine became the lawgiver (zakonodatel'nitsa), and the varied benighted residents of her state—from the “red-haired Finn” to the “slanty-eyed Hun” and the “faraway savage peoples covered in fur and scales” (presumably a reference to native Siberian northerners)—were now imagined as the joyous law1 N.D. Chechulin (ed.), Nakaz imperatritsy Ekateriny II, dannyi kommissii o sochinenii proekta novago ulozheniia (St. Petersburg, 1907), pp. 3, 4, 12. Montesquieu wrote that a “great empire presupposes despotic power” (pouvoir despotique) but Catherine conveniently changed the phrase to pouvoir souveraine, which was then translated into Russian as samoderzhavnaia vlast'.

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receivers.2 Reason’s arrival in Russia was thus reaffirmed, and the enlightened autocrat, justified at once by God and the philosophes, was expected to introduce it to everyone everywhere. The steppe was obviously included in this vision of a reasoned empire, and all the more so because the urge to take reason to the region coincided with a new round of steppe expansion. Thanks to improvements in tactics, command, and weaponry, and even more to the disastrous military performance of the Ottomans and Crimeans, the Russians under Catherine finally overcame the obstacles to expansion on the western steppe that had plagued them during the preceding century. As a result of their victory in the Russo-Turkish War of 1768–74, they secured Azov, a section of the Black Sea coast between the Lower Dniepr and the Lower Bug, as well as Ottoman recognition of an “independent” Crimea.3 At the same time, the representatives of the empress obtained new or renewed pledges of loyalty from the people of the Northern Caucasus (invariably understood as declarations of subjecthood), and her troops invaded the semiautonomous Sech', on the Dniepr, “arresting the hetman and his lieutenants . . . and destroying the whole Zaporozhian regiment and . . . their camp.” This led to the territory’s rapid incorporation into the empire.4 Then in 1783, after consistently meddling in “independent” Crimean affairs during the preceding decade, Catherine made her boldest move of all and summarily announced the annexation of the khanate, which her court, like earlier ones, viewed as “the key to Russian and Turkish power.”5 The annexation, which included the adjacent north mainland steppe and the Kuban', helped to provoke a second war with the Ottomans (1788–1791), which the Russians also won and which extended their northern Black Sea border further west to the Dniestr. All told, these gains 2 G.R. Derzhavin, “Izobrazhenie Felitsy” (1789), in his Stikhotvoreniia (Leningrad, 1957), p. 135. See also Harsha Ram, “Russian Poetry and the Imperial Sublime,” in Monika Greenleaf and Stephen Moeller-Sally (eds.), Russian Subjects: Empire, Nation, and the Culture of the Golden Age (Evanston, Ill., 1998), pp. 42–44. 3 For summaries of the Russian and Turkish perspectives, the events of the war, and the entanglements of “Eastern Question” diplomacy, see Virginia H. Aksan, An Ottoman Statesman in War and Peace: Ahmed Resmi Effendi, 1700–1783 (New York, 1995), pp. 100–169; Isabel de Madariaga, Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great (New Haven, Conn., 1981), pp. 187–236. 4 B.B. Piotrovskii (ed.), Istoriia narodov severnogo kavkaza s drevneishikh vremen do kontsa xviii v. (Moscow, 1988), pp. 435–48; O.I. Rigel'man, Litopisna opovid'pro Malu Rosiiu ta ïï narod i kozakiv uzagali (Kiev, 1994), p. 680. 5 Alan W. Fisher, The Russian Annexation of the Crimea, 1772–1773 (New York, 1970); “Opisanie sostoianiia del vo vremia gosudaryni imperatritsy Elisavety Petrovny (sochineno grafom M.L. Vorontsovym v iiule 1762 g.),” Arkhiv kniazia Vorontsova, 1882, v. 25, p. 309; “Doklad imperatritse Ekaterine II-oi po vstuplenii eia na prestol, izobrazhaiushchii sistemu upravleniia krymskikh tatar, ikh opasnost'dlia Rossii i pretenzii na nikh,” ITUAK, 1916, v. 53, p. 191.

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completed the Russians’ “Gathering of the Lands of the Golden Horde”6 and inspired countless odes of self-congratulatory imperial glee. It transformed the empire virtually overnight into a Black Sea power and amounted to the state’s largest incorporation of new steppe lands since the sixteenth century. The takeover of new steppes in the Black Sea region and the Northern Caucasus was complemented by the reassertion of power over old ones in the area from the Volga to the Yaik. In 1771, squeezed by the growing number of Russians on their pastures and growing Russian interference in their affairs, over 150,000 Kalmyks (that is, approximately three-fourths of all the Kalmyk “tents” in the empire) abandoned the Lower Volga for Chinese Jungaria. As one Kalmyk leader saw it, the choice for the Kalmyks was simple: they could either stay in the empire and “carry the burden of slavery, or leave Russia and . . . end all [their] misfortunes.”7 Not surprisingly, Catherine saw things differently: The Kalmyks’ obligations were not slavery but service, and they were not free to leave because they were Russian subjects whose first obligation was to abide by the will of their sovereign— and in this instance, the sovereign’s will was that it would be “more useful for Our empire . . . if [the Kalmyks] remained in their current location.”8 The empress dispatched an expeditionary force made up of dragoons as well as Yaik Cossacks and Bashkirs to retrieve the Kalmyk migrants. When that failed she appealed to the Qing emperor to return all the Kalmyk “scoundrels who left in treacherous fashion” and had now reached his domain.9 These appeals also, however, had no effect (the Chinese did not see much sense in letting their new tributaries revert to being someone else’s), and, in the end, the Kalmyk exodus proved permanent. This then opened the way for the government to turn the remaining Kalmyks into more obedient subjects through Russian administration and to change their territory as a whole through the importation of new inhabitants. Two years later and somewhat farther east, the Pugachev uprising, which had started among the Yaik Cossacks but spread throughout the 6 Andreas Kappeler, Russland als Vielvolkerreich: Entstehung, Geschichte, Zerfall (Munich, 1992), p. 53. 7 Michael Khodarkovsky, Where Two Worlds Met: The Russian State and the Kalmyk Nomads, 1600–1771 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1992), pp. 230, 232. 8 “Proekt reskripta k astrakhanskomu gubernatoru,” SIRIO, 1896, v. 97, p. 123. This order to the Astrakhan governor was issued before the Kalmyk emigration in July 1770. 9 “Sobstvennaia zapiska imperatritsy (Dekabr'1771 g.),” SIRIO, 1908, v. 118, p. 1; Khodarkovsky, Where Two Worlds Met, pp. 233–35; N.N. Pal'mov, Ocherk istorii kalmytskogo naroda za vremia ego prebyvaniia v predelakh Rossii (2nd ed.; 1992), pp. 92–105. The Kalmyks who reached Jungaria were far fewer than those who had left the Volga. Khodarkovsky suggests perhaps as many as one hundred thousand died in the exodus due to disease, hunger, cold, and attacks by the Kazakhs. See Where Two Worlds Met, pp. 233–34.

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Volga-Ural region and counted many Bashkirs among its earliest supporters, also changed the steppe. The revolt proved to be the last great Cossack-centered frontier rebellion and the most explosive expression yet of a broadly popular frontier view that it was time to get rid of the lords, high taxes, and “the German empress” and reinstate “freedom” (vol'nost'), the “quiet life” (spokoinaia zhizn'), the cross and beards for those who wanted them, and “rivers, seas, steppes, and lands” for everyone else.10 The response of the German empress was predictably severe and thorough: First, the rebellion, which had progressed brutally, was brutally suppressed and its more notable “thieves,” “rebels,” “apostates,” and “renegades” hunted down and executed.11 Then, once the violence of official recrimination was over, Catherine, in the way expected of enlightened monarchs, granted her “all-merciful general and particular pardon” to the rest of the revolt’s plebeian participants and proceeded to wage a second war against Pugachevism through reform.12 As the empress saw it, most people who had joined the rebellion had done so out of “blindness, stupidity, ignorance, [and] superstition,” all of which were exacerbated by the obvious “weakness, indolence, carelessness in respect to their duties, idleness, arguments, disagreements, extortions, and injustices [perpetrated by] individual authorities” and local government.13 The surest way to “restore general tranquility and the desired peace” was thus to get rid of all of the above, not least among the Yaik Cossacks and the “steppe peoples.” Catherine’s diagnosis of the Pugachev problem and her proposal for the cure were fully consonant with the now seemingly incontrovertible view that the steppe represented a volatile, vulnerable, and insufficiently civilized frontier that had to be changed. Indeed, conflict with the Turks (both real in the present and imagined in the future), as well as problems with nomads and Cossacks, proved that leaving the steppe as it was simply wasn’t an option. The empire needed “defendable borders” in the south, patrolled by dependable Cossacks; and, at the same time, behind these borders, it needed faithful subjects, whose faithfulness could only be guaranteed, everyone now agreed, by the imposition of direct imperial administration and the more ardent promotion of Russian-style “improvement.” The creation of this sort of steppe was not to be a wholly one-way process. The paternalism that was fashionable at Catherine’s court envisioned some airing of local grievances and called for some attention to local 10 Paul Avrich, Russian Rebels, 1600–1800 (New York, 1972), pp. 180–254; R.V. Ovchinnikov, Manifesty i ukazy E.I. Pugacheva: Istochnikovedscheskoe issledovanie (Moscow, 1980), pp. 29, 265 passim. 11 Ovchinnikov, Manifesty i ukazy E.I. Pugacheva, p. 96. 12 PSZ, ser. 1, v. 20, n. 14275 (1775), p. 850. 13 Ibid.; “Sobstvennoruchnyi chernovoi manifest imp. Ekateriny II o prestupleniiakh Pugacheva, izdannyi posle usmireniia bunta,” SIRIO, 1880, v. 27, pp. 9–10.

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needs. (While the empress idolized Peter the Great, she saw herself as considerably more gentle.) But the government had no doubt that it knew best, especially when it came to matters relating to “savage peoples without law.” With the state’s increasing presence in the region, options would necessarily have to narrow for the steppe’s traditional inhabitants. The residents of the state’s steppe might resist by revolting like the Pugachevites, or leaving like many of the Kalmyks, but staying meant having to change. Change started with the loss or erosion of local autonomy. On Catherine’s steppe, in keeping with broader patterns of administrative standardization within the empire,14 native institutions were reformed or closed and replaced with imperial ones. Troublesome or unnecessary Cossack hosts were abolished, including the Ukrainian hetmanate and the Zaporozhian Sech', which the empress, cribbing from the opinion of the scholar Gerhard Friedrich Müller, characterized as a “wholly alien political assembly . . . [whose ways] defied the intentions of the Creator.” All had their elites inducted into the structures of the Russian nobility and their internal organization reformed through civil administration so that they could “secure the requisite respect and be drawn closer to the other residents of the state.”15 At the same time, the tradition of creating new Cossack hosts continued, with the most lasting formed to serve on the new Caucasus line that ultimately stretched from Kizliar to Azov and was built in stages beginning, formally, in 1776.16 Similar approaches were applied to nomads. After most of the Kalmyks left, the government abolished the title of khan among those who remained and assigned the management of 14 Marc Raeff, “Uniformity, Diversity, and the Imperial Administration in the Reign of Catherine II,” in Hans Lemberg et al. (eds.), Osteuropa in Geschichte und Gegenwart: Festschrift für Günther Stökl zum 60. Geburtstag (Cologne, 1977), pp. 97–113. 15 Zenon H. Kohut, Russian Centralism and Ukrainian Autonomy: Imperial Absorption of the Hetmanate, 1760s–1830s (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), pp. 95–103; PSZ, ser. 1, v. 20, n. 14354 (1775), p. 190; Gerhard Friedrich Müller, “Razsuzhdenie o zaporozhtsakh,” in his Istoricheskie sochineniia o malorossii i malorossiianakh (Moscow, 1846), p. 39; “Predlozhenie kniaziia Potemkina po povodu posledovavshago Vysochaishago poveleniia ob uchrezhdenii v Voiske Donskom Grazhdanskago Pravitel'stva,” in A.A. Lishin (comp.), Akty, otnosiashchiesia k istorii voiska donskogo (Novocherkassk, 1894), v. 3, pp. 206–7. 16 M.M. Bliev, “Administrativnoe i voennoe ustroistvo na Stavropol'e i kavkazskoi linii v xviii—pervoi polovine xix veka,” in Don i stepnoe predkavkaz'e: xviii–pervaia polovina xix v.; sotsial'nye otnosheniia, upravlenie, klassovaia bor'ba (Rostov-na-Donu, 1977), p. 91; Thomas M. Barrett, At the Edge of Empire: The Terek Cossacks and the North Caucasus Frontier (Boulder, Colo., 1999), p. 33. The Caucasus line was, like earlier Russian lines, never stationary and the exact date of its founding is debatable since its construction was an evolving project. In 1776 Catherine approved her viceroy Potemkin’s proposal to extend the existing Terek line from Mozdok (founded 1763) to Azov. Initially the new defensive cordon was called the line of Azov-Mozdok, but it later came to be known as the Caucasus line. See S.A. Kozlov, Kavkaz v sud'bakh kazachestva (xvi–xviii vv.) (St. Petersburg, 1996), p. 97.

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their affairs to an office (ekspeditsiia) within the Astrakhan provincial administration.17 By 1786, the Kalmyks had lost their native courts, and their cases were reassigned to Russian district judges.18 The Nogays of the Black Sea region, brought under the “protection of Russian arms and the imperial scepter” as an “independent nation” in the first Russo-Turkish war, were moved out of the war zone, placed under the oversight of a special ekspeditsiia, and then, in 1783, told to become Russian subjects.19 The Bashkirs were turned into a special Cossack-style host in 1798.20 Through the 1780s, Muslim imams in the Crimea were awarded salaries and placed under imperial supervision, while the first “spiritual assembly of Muslim law” was created in Ufa in 1788 for the purpose of licensing “clerics” deemed to be of “good conduct” and “reliable in loyalty.” The assembly’s affairs were ordered to be conducted in Russian as well as Tatar so that the Orenburg general-governor would know exactly what his reliably loyal Muslim “clerics” were up to.21 Along with, and because of, the reduction of their formal autonomy, the inhabitants of the steppe were also expected to continue “improving” by adopting the “Russian way.” Indeed their improvement became increasingly important because Russian elites were increasingly excited about what having a civilizing mission said about their own civilized status. After all, what better way to demonstrate one’s own reason than to attempt to impart it to those who did not seem to have it—that is, to the many peoples “in the extremes of the north and south . . . as yet untouched by God’s grace or the light of Man’s knowledge?”22 The content of the mission changed somewhat, however. The natives’ conversion to Orthodoxy continued to be important, but it ceased to be the essential first step of improvement that it had been even as late as Elizabeth’s time. Under Catherine, if “peoples of another faith” were to be led to the “true 17 Khodarkovsky, Where Two Worlds Met, p. 234; Pal'mov, Ocherki istorii kalmytskogo naroda, p. 114; Ocherki istorii kalmytskoi ASSR (dooktiabrskii period) (Moscow, 1967) v. 1, p. 222. 18 Pal'mov, Ocherk istorii kalmytskogo naroda, pp. 114–16. 19 A.A. Sergeev, “Nogaitsy na molochnykh vodakh (1790–1832): Istoricheskii ocherk,” ITUAK, 1912, v. 48, p. 14; B.-A.B. Kochekaev, Nogaisko-russkie otnosheniia v xv–xviii vv. (Alma-Ata, 1988), pp. 227–31. 20 Zakony rossiiskoi imperii o bashkirakh, misharakh, teptiarakh i bobyliakh (Ufa, 1999), pp. 186–99. 21 Ibid., pp. 74–75; Charles Steinwedel, “Invisible Threads of Empire: State, Religion, and Ethnicity in Tsarist Bashkiria, 1773–1917” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1999) pp. 55–58. 22 Cited in S.E. Desnitskii, “Iuridicheskoe rassuzhdenie o raznykh poniatiiakh, kakie imeiut narody o sobstvennosti imeniia v razlichnykh sostoianiiakh obshchezhitel'stva . . . govorennoe . . . aprelia 21 dnia 1781 goda,” in Izbrannye proizvedeniia russkikh myslitelei vtoroi poloviny xviii veka (Moscow, 1952), v. 1, pp. 268, 271.

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religion,” the process was expected to be gradual, voluntary, and sincere rather than immediate, coerced, and superficial; and in the case of Muslims, given practical concerns of state security, active Orthodox proselytism was banned altogether.23 There were other gifts of civilization to be given, however, and they could be offered right away: Russian goods (to promote greater refinement); where environmentally possible, a “Russian way of life” based on agriculture (to promote greater utility); and Russian schools and administrators (to promote a greater sense of state belonging or at least greater state oversight). Like most of their enlightened counterparts in the West, educated Russians in Catherine’s time admired the diversity of the “Great Map of Mankind”—indeed they took a great deal of pride in the fact that many of the peoples in the Great Map lived within the Russian empire—but this did not stop them from assuming that diversity would eventually yield to uniformity and that Voltaire’s famous “empire of custom” would eventually substantially dissolve.24 The way of the world was the way of progress, and all peoples progressed in the same way. The Russians were well ahead of the backward subjects of their empire, but that only meant that the latter were eventually bound to follow suit and move in the same direction. In this hopeful scheme of improvement through Russification, Cossacks had far to go, but they were at least, as far as Catherine and her observers were concerned, recognizably “Russian.” By the second half of the 1700s almost everyone agreed that the Cossacks of the original hosts might have “faces that looked Tatar,” but they were nonetheless “of one language and faith with the Russians” and lived in settled communities where they engaged in at least some agriculture, as well as other pursuits, while providing border service and “defending the fatherland from sudden foreign attack.”25 (The fact that Cossack settlements included both Christianized and non-Christianized natives was apparently no obstacle to 23 Michael Khodarkovsky, “ ‘Not by Word Alone’: Missionary Policies and Religious Conversion in Early Modern Russia,” CSSH, 1996, v. 38, n. 2, pp. 287–89; Alan W. Fisher, “Enlightened Despotism and Islam under Catherine II,” SR, 1967, v. 27, pp. 542–53. 24 P.J. Marshall and Glyndwr Williams, The Great Map of Mankind: Perceptions of New Worlds in the Age of Enlightenment (London, 1982), p. 93; David Carrithers, “The Enlightenment Science of Society,” in Christopher Fox et al. (eds.), Inventing Human Science: Eighteenth-Century Domains (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1995), p. 254. 25 “O nachale i proizkhozhdenii kozakov,” SIPKPIUS, 1760 (April), p. 291, 315–16; S.E. Desnitskii, “Predstavlenie o uchrezhdenii zakonodatel'noi, suditel'noi i nakazatel'noi vlasti v rossiiskoi imperii,” in Izbrannye proizvedeniia russkikh myslitelei vtoroi poloviny xviii veka, v. 1, pp. 322–23; I.G. Georgi, Opisanie vsekh obitaiushchikh v rossiiskom gosudarstve narodov, ikh zhiteiskikh obriadov, obyknovenii, odezhd, uprazhnenii, zabav, veroispovedanii i drugikh dostopamiatnostei (2nd ed.; St. Petersburg, 1799), v. 4, p. 197.

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considering the Cossacks “Russian” in general, nor was the fact that some were “Little Russians,” because Little Russians were Russians as well.) By the 1780s, under the growing influence of the sentimentalists (proto-Romantics), some writers began to add more shine to the Cossack image, turning backward brigands into hardy frontiersmen. Even the Zaporozhians, excoriated and disbanded by the empress and her army in 1775, saw a resurrection of their renown. As one French observer noted in 1788, the former Zaporozhians, “who now prefer the name of Little Russians,” were “well built, robust, agile, generous, proud, jealous of their liberty . . . very impatient with authority, tough, brave, [and] indefatigable, though also somewhat inclined to drink [un peu ivrognes].”26 At the very least, Cossacks remained “a special estate . . . [that was] very useful for the Russian empire.”27 In other words, some aspects of Cossack life were unappealing (drunkenness and lackluster farming, for example), but these were “habits” to be “softened” through “education” and reform.28 Cossackdom was not inherently flawed, only certain of its manifestations. Much as earlier, the situation of steppe nomads was different. Given that they were not Russian, not Orthodox (with the exception of a few “new Christians”), by definition engaged in little or no agriculture, and had a history—going back to “the middle of the tenth century”—of inflicting Russia with “insults, thievery, and destruction,” nomads remained the antithesis of enlightenment and utility.29 Consequently, improving them meant pursuing a more fundamental transformation. As every knowing Russian official recognized, the nomads’ basic problem was how they lived, or rather how they did not live. As the Orenburg governor put it in 1763, “Wherever one finds plowed fields, one finds the settled life [domostroistvo], and wherever there is settled life, there is civil peace [tishina]. By contrast, nomadic peoples will always be unreliable [vetreny] and ungovernable [za26 Jean-Benoit Scherer, Annales de la Petite Russie, ou Histoire des Cossaques-Saparogues et des Cossaques de l’Ukraine, ou de la Petite Russie, depuis leur origine jusqu’à nos jours (Paris, 1788), v. 1, p. 3. See also Iakov Markovich, Zapiski o malorossii, eia zhiteliakh i proizvedeniiakh (St. Petersburg, 1798), pp. 66–67. 27 J. Pöhlmann, Die Kosaken, oder historische Darstellung ihrer Sitten, Gebraüche, Kleidung, Waffen, und Art Krieges zu führen (St. Petersburg, 1799), p. 1. 28 Desnitskii, “Predstavlenie o uchrezhdenii,” pp. 324–25. This was precisely the spirit with which reforms to the Cossack hosts were proposed at the Legislative Commission. See “Proekt zakonov o pravakh voisk kazach'ikh,” in SIRIO, v. 36, pp. 235–44. 29 Pavel Levashov, Kartina ili opisanie vsekh nashestvii na Rossiiu Tatar i Turok, i ikh tut branei, grabitel'stv i opustoshenii, nachavshikhsia v polovine desiatogo veka i pochti bezpreryvno chrez vosem'sot let prodolzhavshikhsia (St. Petersburg, 1792), passim; “Istoricheskaia zapiska Aleksandra Andreevicha Bezborodko ‘Kartina ili kratkoe izvestie o rossiiskikh s tatarami voinakh i delakh, nachenshikhsia v polovine desiatogo veka i pochti bezpreryvno chrez vosem'sot let prodolzhaiushchikhsia’ (1776 god),” SIRIO, v. 26, pp. 339–70. What appears to be an early variant of Bezborodko’s manuscript can be found in RGVIA, f. VUA, d. 18094.

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konam ne podchineny].”30 As long as nomads were nomadic, in other words, they would be flawed. It followed, then, that they should be sedentarized wherever possible. Indeed, if there was a reason not to sedentarize them, it was not because nomadism was a valid way of life but because its flaws occasionally served Russian purposes. In 1764, the College of Foreign Affairs approved settling some of the Kalmyks but rejected doing the same for “the entire Kalmyk people,” because, while the Kalmyks were “barbarians by nature and given to predation and thievery,” the fact that “they move from place to place provides our border settlements [on the Lower Volga] with some security from other barbaric neighbors,” that is, from the Kazakhs, who seemed even worse.31 Not all educated Russians were so dismissive, but even those who displayed greater sympathy for the nomads’ “morals and customs” still judged their way of life ultimately in terms of what it could do for the Russians. Thus the scholar Ivan Lepekhin, who visited the ulus of the Astrakhan Kalmyks in the late 1760s, argued that the Kalmyks were indeed “useful” as nomads, though this did not have anything to do with who they were per se but rather with the fact that “they occup[ied] empty steppes unsuitable for any form of [sedentary] habitation” and supplied the Russians with horses and wool.32 The flaws of nomadism persisted even after the rise of sentimentalism and the emergence toward the end of the century of a new view of nomads as noble savages. In keeping with Gibbon, who admired Attila enough to call him a “savage hero,” and colonial Americans, who praised the dignified gravitas of the Shawnees, Russian officials and commentators (the empress included) wrote fables of proud nomadic khans and waxed lyrical about Bashkirs and Kazakhs who lived “according to the laws of nature” and “knew nothing of the refinements of education that give rise to envy.”33 But this did little to change basic expectations. The image of the nomad as noble savage began to be embraced in the very late 1700s largely because the threat of the nomad as ignoble savage was receding; but nomadism itself was still seen as deficient, and change was still necessary. No longer quite so frightening, nomads were now all the more obvi30 RGADA, f. 16, op. 1, d. 813, l. 16. 31 RGADA, f. 16, op. 1, d. 619, l. 119–(b). See also “Proekt reskripta k astrakhan-

skomu gubernatoru,” p. 123. 32 Polnoe sobranie uchenykh puteshestvii po Rossii, vol. 4, Prodolzhenie zapisok puteshestviia akademika Lepekhina (St. Petersburg, 1822), p. 379. 33 Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (New York, 1911), v. 3, p. 522; Gary B. Nash, “The Image of the Indian in the Southern Colonial Mind,” in Edward Dudley and Maximillian E. Novak (eds.), The Wild Man Within: An Image in Western Thought from the Renaissance to Romanticism (Pittsburgh, 1972), p. 74–78; RGVIA, f. VUA, d. 18537, ll. 4–4(b); D.V. Mertvago, Zapiski D.V. Mertvago, 1760–1824 (Moscow, 1867), p. 52; Sochineniia imperatritsy Ekateriny II (St. Petersburg, 1849), v. 1, pp. 261–78, 281–96.

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ously “immature people, lacking proper upbringing, morals, and manners” and, hence, deserving of enlightened concern.34 As Catherine wrote to her officials concerning the Nogay hordes, which the Russians relocated from Ottoman lands to the Azov steppe in 1792: We hereby command you to devote your care and concern to these people . . . in order to ensure that they are provided with tranquility and all the necessary advantages so that . . . in time they may be put to better use and ultimately turn themselves from wanderers into sedentary settlers. This must only occur with [their] voluntary consent [which is to be cultivated] through demonstrations of kindness and justice.35

Nomads were thus to become “sedentary settlers,” preferably sedentary Cossack-style border guards, but the state’s efforts to promote sedentarization were at best inconsistent, in part because of a persistent lack of officials; and the serious pursuit of sedentarism did not occur until later in the new century. The serious pursuit of rational administration, however, began immediately. As heirs to the Petrine revolution and peers of the late Enlightenment, Catherine and her advisors knew that “the essence of the state [lay] in its land and its people. The wealth, power, and happiness of the state stem from these sources, and the two are mutually related.”36 It then stood to reason that effective statecraft was a matter of knowing the “land” and the “people” and managing their interrelationship effectively. Much as before, the key to this proposition was science (nauka), understood not only as a method for unlocking the diverse yet interconnected workings of the world but also as the attribute of wise rulership and a state of human achievement. At once process and result, science confirmed knowledge and produced utility. What this meant for the “land” and the “people” was clear: each had to be scientifically described, its “qualities” assessed, and its potential “utility” exploited. As Müller had stated just a few years prior to Catherine’s accession, “It is clear to everyone that persons charged with the state’s administration require an exact rendering of the lands under their authority.” Consequently, he continued, every region within the empire (and the world as a whole) had to be submitted to exhaustive de34 Dov B. Yaroshevskii, “Attitudes towards the Nomads of the Russian Empire under Catherine the Great,” in A.G. Cross and G.S. Smith (eds.), Literature, Lives, and Legality in Catherine’s Russia (Nottingham, Eng., 1994), pp. 19–20. 35 Cited in A.A. Skal'kovskii, “O nogaiskikh tatarakh zhivushchikh v Tavricheskoi gubernii,” ZhMNP, 1843, pt. 40, sect. 2, p. 150. 36 A.L. Schlözer, Von den Unschädlichkeit der Pocken in Russland und von Russlands Bevölkerrung überhaupt (Göttingen and Gotha, 1768), p. 115.

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scription. Everything from the location of “profitable metals,” “useful plants,” and rivers “that can be opened to shipping” to the “language, appearance, habits, morals, occupations, [and] law” of its residents and “the location of ruins; the history of how the country was conquered and populated; the lie of its borders, its neighbors and their mutual relations” had to be fully described.37 Geography, ethnography, history, and archeology thus remained part of a common project of knowledge, and the acquisition and use of this knowledge remained a prerequisite for “persons charged with the state’s administration.” Science and government were fused, leading to the increasing scientization of the latter. The impact of these values on the steppe was significant and not long in coming. Pursuing the double objective of systematization and full employment for loyal members of her nobility, Catherine launched a territorial reform in 1775 that gradually spread to the imperial borderlands and led to the reorganization of the steppe zone into new provinces that were smaller than the old Petrine units and had administrative posts, departments, and districts identical to those of interior provinces.38 (One exception was the Land of the Don Cossacks, which retained its separate Cossack administrative structure until 1802.) The names and parameters of steppe provinces shifted repeatedly during Catherine’s reign, particularly in the Black Sea and Northern Caucasus regions where the state was acquiring new territory. Later, a new, and largely retroactive, spate of territorial reorganization followed under Paul. And it was only under Alexander I that the broad layout of the southern provinces stabilized somewhat. All of this shuffling naturally required drafting new maps and surveying new provincial limits. And this was also the case with the state’s shifting international borders, which after each new expansion were invariably surveyed, projected on maps, and re-created on the ground through “descriptions” of imaginary lines running between capes, river banks, forts, and kurgans. These “descriptions” then appeared in handbooks and textbooks, often accompanied by maps, all of which helped the state’s new confines—despite the fact that they were frequently changing—to appear natural and permanent.39 37 Stepan Krashenennikov, Opisanie zemli Kamchatki (St. Petersburg, 1755), v. 1, foreword, no page number. No author is indicated for the foreword, but Müller’s authorship is known from other sources. 38 John P. LeDonne, “The Territorial Reform of the Russian Empire, 1775–1796: Part II, The Borderlands, 1777–1796,” CMRS, 1983, v. 24, n. 4, pp. 418–28; and LeDonne, Ruling Russia: Politics and Administration in the Age of Absolutism, 1762–1796 (Princeton, N.J., 1984), pp. 291–315. 39 See, for example, “Geograficheskiia i istoricheskiia izvestiia o novoi pogranichnoi linii rossiiskoi imperii, provedennoi mezhdu rekoiu Terekom i Azovskim morem,” Mesiatsoslov istoricheskii i geograficheskii na 1779 god (St. Petersburg, 1778), pp. 127–77;

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Meanwhile, the content of the region within these confines continued to be transformed by a new generation of enlightened investigators. Expeditionaries in the employ of Catherine’s Academy of Sciences explored the steppe (and other parts of the empire) for the “general benefit of the state and the promotion of science” and, once home, published exhaustive reports of “everything worthy of observation.”40 (They also submitted so many samples of minerals, insects, reptiles, rodents, and “wonderful shrubs” that the Kunstkammer was forced to add new shelf space.)41 In a similar spirit, the academy, the Free Economic Society, and the School of Cadets distributed questionnaires to “knowledgeable urban residents” on the steppe as well as “the best peasants” in order to obtain “reliable information” about local lands and peoples.42 Mapmakers and handbook writers came to the conclusion—based in part on the preceding information—that the steppes along much of the Lower Volga and north of the Black Sea constituted the empire’s “most wonderful portion,” while areas near the Caspian were “flat, dry, elevated, infertile, and full of salinated soils” (solonchaki).43 A desire for geographical definition and categorization likewise led to the conclusion that, given the variety in their “climate and products of the earth,” some steppe provinces appropriately fit within “Topograficheskoe opisanie dostavshimsia po mirnomu traktatu ot Ottomanskoi Porty vo vladenie rossiiskoi imperii zemliam 1774 goda,” ZOOID, 1868, v. 7, pp. 166–98; “Opisanie Kubani,” Mesiatsoslov istoricheskii i geograficheskii na 1791 god (St. Petersburg, n.d.), pp. 1–40; “Kratkoe geograficheskoe opisanie kniazhestva moldavskago i lezhashchikh mezhdu Chernym i Kaspiiskim moriami zemel'i narodov, s landkartoiu sikh zemel',” Sobranie sochinenii vybrannykh iz mesiatsoslovov na raznye gody (St. Petersburg, 1789), v. 3, pp. 91–106. 40 N.G. Fradkin, “Instruktsiia dlia akademicheskikh ekspeditsii, 1768–1774 gg.,” Voprosy geofrafii (Moscow, 1950), v. 17, p. 215. The notion of “bringing together everything worthy of observation” belongs to the expeditionary Samuil Georg Gmelin. See his Puteshestvie po Rossii dlia issledovaniia trekh tsarstv estestva, vol. 1, Puteshestvie iz Sanktpeterburga do Cherkasa, glavnogo goroda donskikh kozakov v 1768 i 1769 godakh (St. Petersburg, 1771), foreword, no page number indicated. 41 T.V. Stankiuvich, Kunstkamera peterburgskoi akademii nauk (Moscow and Leningrad, 1953), p. 150. For references to the many botanical specimens sent back by the expeditions, see P.S. Pallas, Opisanie rastenii rossiiskogo gosudarstva s ikh izobrazheniiami (St. Petersburg, 1786), p. ii passim. 42 These calls for information went out across the empire. See PSZ, ser. 1, v. 15, n. 11029 (1760), p. 421; “Ekonomicheskie voprosy kasaiushchiesia do zemledeliia po raznosti provintsii,” TVEO, 1765, v. 1, pp. 180–93; L.I. Bakmeister, Topograficheskie izvestiia sluzhashchie dlia polnogo geograficheskogo opisaniia rossiiskoi imperii (St. Petersburg, 1771), v. 1, introduction, no page numbers indicated; and N.L. Rubinshtein, “Topograficheskie opisaniia namestnichestv i gubernii xviii–pamiatniki geograficheskogo i ekonomicheskogo izucheniia Rossii,” Voprosy geografii, 1953, v. 31, pp. 60–62. 43 S.I. Pleshcheev, Obozrenie rossiiskoi imperii v nyneshnem eia novoustroennom sostoianii s pokazaniem novoprisoedinennykh k Rossii ot Porty Ottomanskoi i ot rechi Pospolitoi Pol'skoi oblastei (St. Petersburg, 1793), p. 4.

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the empire’s “central” zone and the rest in its “southern” one.44 The steppe thus remained a recognizable geographical region, but its particularities were rapidly convincing its enlightened observers that it was not entirely internally coherent. These same enlightened observers also made a point of documenting the human diversity of the steppe, describing its nomads, Greeks, enclaves of Tatars and Armenians, and various other “foreigners,” all of whom had their distinguishing “capabilities and morals” (sklonnosti i nravy).45 The “Russians” who lived on or around the steppe also drew attention, and they, too, turned out to be diverse and deserving of “description.” Thus the first detailed proto-ethnographic surveys of Little Russians appeared in the 1770s; Cossacks began to be described in the same vein around the same time; and the “simple Russian folk,” the newly discovered bearers of national tradition, were also not neglected. Pioneers of “Russian” folklore, like their folk-inventing counterparts in Germany, Britain, and Scandinavia, “collected” “popular” songs of medieval knights and nomads; praised the worthiness of regional “dialects” (narechiia) such as “Little Russian,” which contained many words “directly related to Slavic . . . and therefore serve to explain the origin of other words”; and “discovered” unknown “epics” of ancient Rus' and “the field” like the “Lay of Igor’s Campaign,” whose anonymous Kievan author, that “falcon-like, glorious bard,” was apparently every bit as talented as Homer or Ossian.46 There was as yet no concern that the Little Russians and Great Russians who were being discovered might represent distinct “cultural nations” or that the western end of the steppe might belong to one rather than the other. Instead, the thoroughly Westernized, folk-extolling Great Russian noble44 Iz"iavlenie po polosam gubernii i namestnichestv rossiiskoi imperii (St. Petersburg, 1785); Prostrannoe zemleopisanie rossiiskogo gosudarstva izdannoe v pol'zu uchashchikhsia (St. Petersburg, 1787). See also the divisions by “zones” (polosa) in Rossiiskii atlas iz soroka chetyrekh kart sostoiashchii i na sorok dva namestnichestva imperiiu razdeliaiushchii (1792). The quoted phrase is from Pleshcheev, Obozrenie rossiiskoi imperii v nyneshnem eia novoustroennom sostoianii, p. 5. 45 Cited in “Opisanie gorodov Azovskoi gubernii,” Letopis'ekaterinoslavskoi uchenoi arkhivnoi komissii, 1904, v. 1, p. 93. The description was composed in the early 1780s. 46 David B. Saunders, The Ukrainian Impact on Russian Culture, 1750–1850 (Edmonton, Can., 1985), pp. 122–24; M.K. Azadovskii, Istoriia russkoi fol'kloristiki (Moscow, 1958), pp. 59–68, 76–81; A.N. Pypin, Istoriia russkoi etnografii (St. Petersburg, 1890; reprint: Leipzig, 1971), v. 1, p. 188; S.A. Tokarev, Istorii russkoi etnografii (dooktiabrskii period) (Moscow, 1966), pp. 122–23; Hans Rogger, National Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century Russia (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), p. 154. The manuscript of the Lay of Igor’s Campaign was uncovered in a monastery in Yaroslavl' in the late 1700s and first published in 1800. See S.O. Shmidt, “Pervoe izdanie ‘Slovo o Polku Igoreve’ v razvitii kul'tury Rossii,” in 200 let pervomu izdaniiu Slova o Polku Igoreve: Materialy iubileinykh chtenii po istorii i kul'ture drevnei i novoi Rossii (Yaroslavl', 2001), pp. 11–22.

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men assumed that all “Russians” were Russian and so did their Little Russian counterparts, most of whom were simply arguing for a more “native” and “Slavic” (that is, less Westernized) notion of “what it meant to be a Russian.”47 The “divergence” between Russia and Ukraine, with its correspondingly divergent claims to the steppe, would come later. Historians, too, continued to play their part in the unconscious politics of symbolic appropriation. Nomads “who resided in Russia in ancient times” were dutifully described in the spirit of enlightened objectivity,48 and the country’s historical relationship with the steppe received a new gloss appropriate to an age of ripening national consciousness. The ripening process produced a few ironies, however, largely as a result of the Russian elite’s increasingly complicated position vis-à-vis the West. On the one hand, as true éclairés, Catherine’s historians continued to speak as objectively as they could about past nomads and insisted on seeing them as their distant ancestors, “the peoples who migrated and wandered across the steppes, our forbears, the Scythians, Sarmatians, Alans, and Rossolans”49—all positions that allowed them to assure themselves (and their country’s Western critics) that their nation was just as civilized as any. Yet Catherine’s scholars and publicists were now as concerned with asserting distinction as they were with proving commonality. The Russians were as polished as the Europeans, but they were also different, and, consequently, it was important to make clear the “undeniably different ways in which nature and history had left their imprint on Russia for all times.”50 And in this history, the nomads—admittedly later ones—played the more familiar role of primordial victimizers,51 though now, even as they victimized the Russians, they could not truly defeat them or affect their “Russian ways.” As Ivan Boltin argued, referring to the Mongol conquest: Having defeated [the Rus'] principalities, the Tatars imposed tribute on their enslaved subjects one by one. They then left baskaks [officials] to collect the 47 Saunders, Ukrainian Impact on Russian Culture, p. 5. 48 Petr Rychkov, Vvedenie k astrakhanskoi topografii, predstavliaiushchee v pervoi chasti

raznye izvestiia o drevnom sostoianii sei gubernii i obitavshikh v nei narodov; a vo vtoroi o pokorenii sego tsarstva pod derzhavu rossiiskikh monarkhov (Moscow, 1774); [Gerhard Friedrich Müller], O narodakh izdrevle v Rossii obitavshikh (St. Petersburg, 1773). 49 “Opyt o drevnikh rossiiskikh monetakh,” Akademicheskiia izvestiia, 1780, v. 6 (November), p. 308. 50 Rogger, National Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century Russia, p. 231. 51 Levashov, Kartina ili opisanie vsekh nashestvii na Rossiiu Tatar i Turok; “Istoricheskie izvestiia o Kryme,” Sobranie sochinenii vybrannykh iz mesiatsoslovov na raznye gody (St. Petersburg, 1789), v. 3, pp. 379–81. In the 1750s, Mikhail Lomonosov composed a list of all of Russia’s invaders and tormentors, with steppe peoples prominently mentioned. See his “Drevniaia rossiiskaia istoriia ot nachala rossiiskogo naroda do konchiny velikogo kniazia Iaroslava pervogo, ili do 1054 goda,” in his Pol'noe sobranie sochineniia (Moscow and Leningrad, 1952), v. 6, p. 169.

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In other words, the magic of enduring nationality had appeared. The steppe had once imposed itself on the Russians, but the Russians had emerged intact and unaffected and were now doing some imposing of their own. Boltin opined that eventually “all the various non-Russian peoples” (inoplemennye narody) within the empire, who had “neither towns, nor merchants, nor nobles,” would probably “become Russian” within “about a hundred years,”53 and views of this sort were common. The editor of the Description of All the Peoples of the Russian State (1799), for example, agreed: “With bounding strides, the government is now gathering our crude peoples . . . [through the spreading of] Russian enlightenment into a single body and a single soul, a wonderful union that will stand as . . . a giant for hundreds of centuries.”54 The steppe, like the rest of the empire, thus found itself headed for total appropriation. It was therefore only natural that its previous world would have to give way, and this included its previous names. Under Catherine, New Serbia became New Russia; the Yaik host, Yaitsk, and the Yaik River, all associated with the “state criminal” Pugachev, became the Ural host, Uralsk, and the Ural River respectively; the post of hetman in Little Russia was abolished, with instructions “to eradicate [the period of the hetmanate] from memory”; and the “very name of the Zaporozhian Cossacks” was ordered “stricken for all future time . . . because of [their] actions and insults against Our Supreme commands.”55 In the Black Sea region and the Crimea, Turco-Tatar names were replaced with Hellenic ones (Kırım/Krym became Tauris [Tavrida]; Hacibey became Odessa; Akmeçet became Simferopol', and so forth). In these areas and elsewhere new forts, towns, and territories received names designed to evoke the glory and generosity of the empress (Ekaterinoslav, Ekaterinodar), the return of Russian orthodoxy to “its source” in the south

52 Ivan Boltin, Primechaniia na istoriiu drevniia i nyneshnyia Rossii g. Leklerka (St. Petersburg, 1788), v. 2, p. 295. 53 Ibid., pp. 147–48. 54 Georgi, Opisanie vsekh obitaiushchikh v rossiiskom gosudarstve narodov, v. 1, pt. 1, p. ix. 55 PSZ, ser. 1, v. 16, n. 12099 (1764), p. 658; Avrich, Russian Rebels, p. 245; Kohut, Russian Centralism and Ukrainian Autonomy, pp. 95–103, 104; PSZ, ser. 1, v. 20, n. 14354 (1775), p. 190.

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(Kherson, Voznesensk), the projection of Russian power (Vladikavkaz), and the mythical towns of ancient Rus' (Slaviansk).56 The point of all of this naming and renaming was not the least bit subtle. As the attorney general turned historian A.N. Samoilov put it, new names were needed “to eliminate any memory of the barbarians” and “to further dazzle everyone [bolee porazit' umy] with the brilliant achievements of the Great Catherine.”57 (They also heralded “the first step toward ridding Europe of the Mohammedans and conquering Istanbul,” a necessary stage in Catherine’s so-called Greek Project.)58 In other words, new names—along with other “ceremonies of possession”—announced a triumphant transformation.59 The old steppe was Asian and stateless; the current one was statedetermined and claimed for European-Russian civilization. The world of comparison was now even more obviously that of the Western empires. Consequently, it was all the more clear that the Russian empire merited its own New Russia to go along with everyone else’s New Spain, New France, and New England. The adoption of the name of New Russia was in fact the most powerful statement imaginable of Russia’s national coming of age. There was now, it seemed, a recognizable and containable entity called Russia that could be replicated in a new place and, more important, projected through the ages. Catherine and her cohort were intent on turning the south, in particular the freshly conquered north Pontic steppes, into the first official version of the Russian future. There would not be another national “land of the future” until the age of the Great Siberian Migration that began toward the close of the nineteenth century. Much as with Siberia later, the most important factor that gave the south this appeal was its perceived potential for transformation through colonization. According to eighteenth-century wisdom, the steppe was an “empty” place. Maps continued to represent it as largely vacant, and the 56 Andrei Zorin, “Krym v istorii russkogo samosoznaniia,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 1998, n. 31, p. 130. 57 A.N. Samoilov, “Zhizn' i deianiia generala-fel'dmarshala kniazia Grigoriia Aleksandrovicha Potemkina-Tavricheskogo,” RA, 1867, col. 1015. 58 Ibid. 59 Acts of symbolic appropriation included empirewide festivities (coordinated by the empress) celebrating the Russian acquisition of territories from the Turks in the first Russo-Turkish War and Catherine’s ostentatious tour of the south in 1787. See “Pis'ma Ekateriny Vtoroi k baronu Grimmu,” RA, 1878, v. 16, n. 9, pp. 16–17; S. Kovalev, “Torzhestvo prazdnovaniia Kuchuk-Kainardzhiiskogo mira v gorode Vologde,” RA, 1903, n. 3, pp. 513–18; Opisanie uveselitel'nykh ognei, kotorye predstavlenny v prodolzhenii mirnogo torzhestva zakliuchennago mezhdu rossiiskoi imperieiu i ottomanskoiu portoiu . . . pri mnogochislennom narodnom sobranii bliz Moskvy na Khodynke 1775 goda iiulia 23 dnia (Moscow, 1775); and Richard S. Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy (Princeton, N.J., 1995), v. 1, pp. 139–42. On “ceremonies of possession” more generally, see Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640 (New York, 1995).

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term was habitually translated into Western languages as desert, wilderness, désert, or Wüste.60 Yet by Catherine’s time, with the complete assimilation of Petrine presumptions of transformation, it was clear that things did not have to stay this way. The steppe might be peopleless by nature, but it could be made populous by the Russians. As if to stress this point, the Dictionary of the Russian Academy [begun 1789] defined a “steppe” as “an empty, unpopulated, and treeless place of great expanse,” while also indicating that the verb “to settle” (zaselit', “to occupy with human habitation”) was best illustrated by the phrase “to settle steppes, empty places,” suggesting that the natural condition of steppes did not have to be permanent.61 The academy’s itinerant scientists and a variety of other travelers, ode writers, and provincial officials saw things much the same way, bemoaning the emptiness of the south while stressing the potential of most of it for greater population, cultivation, and commerce.62 Thus, like the seemingly “unimproved” landscapes that greeted European colonizers in the Americas and the Pacific, the “unimproved” steppe was redeemed by the prospect of importable productivity.63 As one school primer put it, in 60 For eighteenth-century renderings of “steppe” as “desert” or its equivalent in various European languages, see Kh. Chebotarev, Geograficheskoe metodicheskoe opisanie rossiiskoi imperii s nadlezhashchim vvedeniem k osnovatel'nomu poznaniiu zemnago shara i Evropy voobshche, dlia nastavleniia obuchaiushchagosia pri Moskovskom universitete iunoshestva (Moscow, 1776), p. 16; Jonas Hanway, An Historical Account of the British Trade over the Caspian Sea (2nd ed.; London, 1754), v. 1, p. 9; Johann Philipp Balthasar Weber, Die Russen, oder Versuch einer Reisebeschreibung nach Russland und Durch das Russische Reich in Europa (1804; Innsbruck, 1960), p. 147; Elizabeth Craven, A Journey through the Crimea to Constantinople (London, 1789), pp. 160–61; and Mémoires historiques et géographiques sur les pays situés entre la Mer Noire et la Mer Caspienne, contenant des détails nouveaux sur les peuples qui les habitent, des observations relatives à la topographie ancienne et moderne de cette contrée (Paris, 1797), p. 10. 61 Slovar' akademicheskoi rossiiskoi (St. Petersburg, 1789–94), pt. 5, p. 730, and pt. 3, p. 413. 62 See, for example, “Opisanie saratovskogo namestnichestva,” Sobranie sochinenii vybrannykh iz mesiatsoslovov na raznye gody (St. Petersburg, 1790), v. 6, pp. 24, 40; P.S. Pallas, Voyages de M.P.S. Pallas en differentes provinces de l’empire de Russie et dans l’Asie septentrionale (Paris, 1788), v. 1, p. 316; “Zapiska puteshestviia v iuzhnuiu Rossiiu akademika sankt-peterburgskoi akademii nauk Gil'denshtata v 1773–1774 g.,” ZOOID, 1879, v. 11, p. 191; Polnoe sobranie uchenykh puteshestvii po Rossii, vol. 3, Zapiski puteshestviia akademika Lepekhina (St. Petersburg, 1821), p. 203; Rychkov, “O sposobakh k umnozheniiu zemledeliia v orenburgskoi gubernii,” TVEO, 1767, v. 7, pp. 4–5; Vasilii Zuev, Puteshestvennye zapiski Vasiliia Zueva ot S. Peterburga do Khersona v 1781 i 1782 godu (St. Petersburg, 1787), pp. 226, 228; Discours academique sur les produits de Russie, propres pour soutenir la balance du commerce extérieur toujours favorable . . . par A.J. Güldenstaedt (St. Petersburg, 1776), pp. 9–10, 25–26, 37–38 passim; Andreas Schönle, “Garden of Empire: Catherine’s Appropriation of the Crimea,” SR, 2001, v. 60, n. 1, p. 16. 63 See, for example, Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York, 1992), p. 61; Dennis Porter, Haunted Journeys: Desire and Transgression in European Travel Writing (Princeton, N.J., 1991), p. 115; and Alan Taylor, William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Early American Frontier (New York, 1995), p. 38.

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rhyme so that young readers would find the information “easier and more convenient” to remember: If today’s golden reign does not cease The settlement of the south entire will increase And the agriculturalist’s ardent labor Will bring forth to us the fruits we favor64

Such productive visions, poetically expressed or otherwise, flowed naturally from the accepted truths of Catherinian political economy. As passionés of the most utilitarian kind of eighteenth-century populationism, the empress and her elite decried Russia’s “vast expanses lying waste without inhabitants” and believed fervently in the optimistic mystique of an ever-growing population;65 as physiocrats (of a sort), they saw agriculture and commerce as the foundations of societal wealth; and as committed cameralists, they recognized, along with Joseph Sonnenfels, the last great cameralist theoretician, that “the welfare of the parts is based upon the welfare of the whole, but at the same time the welfare of the whole springs only from the welfare of the parts.”66 In other words, they believed in the necessity of “provincial development.”67 The issue of whether to expand population, agriculture, and commerce on the steppe—that is, whether to encourage colonization—was never really an issue at all. The only objections at court or among “the public” centered on what the colonization of the south would cost, both in lives and in funds, and how the state’s growing emphasis on the region would impact the center and the north, where many nobles continued to see their greatest interest.68 But these objections did not carry the day. Given the regime’s grand acquisition of new 64 Irinarkh Zavalishin, Sokrashchennoe zemleopisanie rossiiskogo gosudarstva sochinennoe v stikhakh dlia pol'zy iunoshestva (St. Petersburg, 1792), p. 39. The Russian original reads: “No est li vek zlatoi pravleniia prodlitsia / So vremenem strana vsia iuzhna zaselitsia / I zemledel'cheski prilozheny trudy / Ot stran nam tekh dadut zhelannye plody.” 65 M.V. Lomonosov, “O sokhranenii i razmnozhenii rossiiskogo naroda,” Izbrannye proizvedeniia (Moscow, 1986), v. 2, p. 131. See also Roger P. Bartlett, Human Capital: The Settlement of Foreigners in Russia, 1762–1804 (New York, 1979), pp. 25–29; and Frederick G. Whelan, “Population and Ideology in the Enlightenment,” History of Political Thought, 1991, v. 12, n. 1, pp. 38–40, 49–57. 66 Robert E. Jones, Provincial Development in Russia: Catherine II and Jacob Sievers (New Brunswick, N.J., 1984), p. 22. 67 Ibid., pp. 1–3 passim. 68 One colonization naysayer was Aleksandr Radishchev who, while traveling from St. Petersburg to Moscow, mused that too much settlement on the steppe would only serve to depopulate the interior: “If you have acquired a desert, it will become a grave for your fellow citizens . . . in settling the new desert you will turn a fertile land into a sterile one. What shall it profit you to convert a desert into settlements if in so doing you cause other settlements to be deserted?” Cited in Robert E. Jones, “Opposition to War and Expansion in Late Eighteenth Century Russia,” JfGO, 1984, v. 32, p. 48.

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steppe territory and its grandiose social, economic, and strategic ambitions, colonization in the south had to occur, and preferably on a large scale. The real issue was how this would happen.

Reason’s Process Catherine’s first settlement initiatives appeared right at the start of her reign. In 1762, declaring that her empire contained “many empty places without settlement,” the new empress issued a brief decree inviting all foreigners “except Jews” to resettle to Russia. In 1763, she created a special office “with powers and privileges equal to [the] state’s colleges” to oversee the expected immigration, the Chancellery for the Guardianship of Foreigners (Kantseliariia opekunstva inostrannykh); and issued a new and longer decree (with loftier language and no anti-Jewish restrictions) detailing the future migrants’ rights and responsibilities and providing a register of lands “free and convenient for [their] Plantations.” With the exception of two areas in Tobol'sk Province, all the lands on the list fell within the European forest-steppe and steppe zones.69 In that same year, the empress also sacked General-Major Horvat and ordered that his previously exclusive South Slav military colony of New Serbia be opened to additional settlement, because “at present an inadequate number of [South Slavs] has come in.”70 Then in 1764, influenced by a coterie of advisors with their own designs on the area, she closed the semiautonomous colony altogether and reorganized its territory as the “Russian province” (rossiiskaia guberniia) of New Russia.71 According to its statute, the new province was to have three categories of residents—state settlers, landlords, and military personnel, with the latter predominating because of the province’s “border location.” The new inhabitants, including foreigners, were to be recruited by agents (verbovshchiki) and lured to the region with financial incentives, tax exemptions, and land grants. (Such generosity extended to free settlers only, however. Landlords that chose to relocate their serfs were expected to do so “out of [their] own pocket.”) As far as administration was concerned, the province was to be carved into carefully delineated districts that were themselves to be composed of lots (zhereb'i) and settlement tracts 69 On the manifestoes of 1762 and 1763, see Bartlett, Human Capital, pp. 31–56. Also A. Klaus, Nashi kolonii: Opyty i materialy po istorii i statistike inostrannoi kolonizatsii v Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1869), v. 1, pp. 7–13, 15. 70 PSZ, ser. 1, v. 16, n. 11861 (1763), pp. 297–99. 71 PSZ, ser. 1, v. 16, n. 12099 (1764), pp. 657–58. The territory of Slavic Serbia was added to the new province later that same year. PSZ, ser. 1, v. 16, n. 12180 (1764), p. 795.

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(uchastki), each designed to accommodate a specific number of people. There were to be schools “for all young children,” and a hospital and a foundling home were planned. Administrators were instructed to offer special rewards to encourage local residents to plant trees, organize commercial ventures with Crimea and Turkey, and open “useful manufactures,” such as tanneries, a cap factory, and silk and tobacco farms.72 New Russia was thus not just a “new” territory—it was a territory specifically designed for enlightened colonization. With these beginnings, colonists did indeed “come in.” In the first place were foreigners. Like other European courts, Catherine’s encouraged foreign immigration because foreigners created an immediate population increase while filling the state’s “empty places” in the most seemingly natural way. As the empress noted in her Instruction (1767), making the point elliptically (by way of Montesquieu), “The savages of Canada generally burn their prisoners, but when they have empty huts to offer them, they induct them into their tribe.”73 The result of this kind of thinking was the active solicitation and then influx into the empire of some one hundred thousand foreign migrants during Catherine’s reign, with the lion’s share being directed to the steppe, in particular to New Russia and the environs of Saratov on the Lower Volga.74 The list of foreigners included Albanians, Corsicans, French, Greeks, Moldavians, Poles, Polish Jews, Swedes, Serbs (and various other South Slavs), Scots, Walachians, and a significant number of Germans, Catholics as well as members of different Protestant denominations. In addition, Old Believer refugees from Poland and “other Russian runaway people,” who had fled “their fatherland due to ignorance,” were called to resettle to New Russia. “New Christian Asiatics” (novokreshchennye aziattsy), who managed to escape slavery among the Kazakhs, were recruited for settlement in Stavropol' in the hopes that “most of them [could be] made into agriculturalists.” “Transcaucasian immigrants” (Armenian and Georgian traders and craftsmen) were invited to settle in North Caucasus fortress towns. And Ossetian and Kabardian converts who had fled their lords on the other side of the line were organized to do the same.75 Foreign settlers (particularly in New Russia) provided military ser72 PSZ, ser. 1, v. 16, n. 12099 (1764), pp. 663–67. The decree is summarized in detail in Bartlett, Human Capital, pp. 111–15. 73 Chechulin (ed.), Nakaz imperatritsy Ekateriny II, p. 85. 74 Roger Bartlett and Bruce Mitchell, “State-Sponsored Immigration into Eastern Europe in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” in Roger Bartlett and Karen Schönwälder (eds.), The German Lands and Eastern Europe: Essays on their Social, Cultural, and Political Relations (Basingstoke, Eng., 1999), p. 98. 75 “O vyrabotke kantseliiarieu opekunstva inostrannykh sovmestno s orenburgskim gubernatorom Volkovym polozheniia otnositel'no otpravki na zhitel'stvo i vydachi pasportov aziattsam, vybezhavshim iz rabstva ot kirgiz-kaisak i priniavshim kreshchenie v predelakh Rossii,” Senatskii arkhiv (St. Petersburg, 1910), v. 14, p. 93; PSZ, ser. 1, v. 16,

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vice and worked as craftsmen or founded homesteads. In the early going, almost any occupation was acceptable because almost any foreigner was valuable. Some of Catherine’s courtiers and advisers supported the solicitation of foreign settlers (explicitly Europeans) as models for backward Russian peasants, but this was not the dominant motive behind the international recruitment program, whose fundamental goal was simply to increase population. With this in mind, Prince Grigorii Potemkin, viceroy of the south, even allowed a small colony of Turks to be established near Nikolaev and toyed with the idea of settling British convicts in the Crimea before he was made to understand that this would reflect poorly on the Russian nation.76 Domestic settlers were just as important. Like previous regimes, Catherine’s government worried about the dangers of creating emptiness in the interior by promoting colonization on the frontier; but the needs of the frontier were simply too pressing, and foreign migrants alone could not solve the problem. For one, they cost too much (the 1763 manifesto provided generous subsidies), and, furthermore, despite the principled cosmopolitanism of the Russian establishment, foreigners were always at least potentially suspect, because, as the conservative courtier Mikhail Shcherbatov argued in the 1770s, “it is always dangerous to entrust foreign peoples and fugitives from the fatherland with the defense of the state’s frontiers.”77 (Catherine herself admitted that welcoming foreigners into the state was a temporary measure that would no longer necessary “once there [were] sufficient numbers of people.”)78 As a result, right from the start, domestic migration was considered essential. At first, particularly in the newly acquired regions of New Russia and the Northern Caucasus, the stress fell on military settlement. Disbanded Zaporozhians were reconstituted as the Black Sea Cossacks and accorded lands for settlement in the Kuban'; Cossacks from the Volga, Don, and Khoper hosts were moved to the Terek; and retired soldiers, state peasants, and odnodvortsy (by now simply a subset of the state peasantry) were enrolled in military regiments in New Russia or as Cossacks in other places.79 Frontier

n. 11861 (1763), pp. 297–99; Bartlett, Human Capital, pp. 120–22; Michael Khodarkovsky, “Of Christianity, Enlightenment, and Colonialism: Russia in the North Caucasus, 1500–1800,” JMH 71, no. 2 (1999), pp. 417, 422, 425–26. 76 Bartlett, Human Capital, pp. 128, 138–39; Hans Auerbach, Die Besiedlung der Südukraine in den Jahren, 1774–1787 (Wiesbaden, 1965), pp. 27–28. 77 M.M. Shcherbatov, Statistika v razsuzhdenii Rossii (Moscow, 1854), p. 42. 78 Chechulin (ed.), Nakaz imperatritsy Ekateriny II, p. 85. 79 Kozlov, Kavkaz v sud'bakh kazachestva, pp. 93–101, 103–4; V.M. Kabuzan, Zaselenie Novorossii (Ekaterinoslavskoi i Khersonskoi gubernii) v xviii–pervoi polovine xix veka, 1719–1858 (Moscow, 1976), pp. 124–66; Judith Pallot and Denis J.B. Shaw, Landscape and Settlement in Romanov Russia (New York, 1990), p. 48.

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authorities in the North Caucasus did much the same thing with most serf runaways that they found on the lines, compensating their former owners with “recruitment dispensations” (rekrutskie kvitantsii) or cash payments (provided by the runaways themselves), or, as often happened, due to a combination of malfeasance and a lack of officials, not compensating them at all.80 A decree in 1796 allowed runaways in the North Caucasus to remain in their new homes and change their social estate. Within a few years thousands petitioned to enroll as state peasants.81 Also, following the by now familiar pattern, as military settlement continued and the state’s borders became more secure, civilian settlement behind them increased. The crown surveyed, sold, or simply awarded land to noble landlords with the expectation that they would resettle their serfs; towns were founded (though often with little more than a name and a statute); and numerous decrees encouraged the resettlement and allocated land to various “state settlers” regardless “of their provenance and station” (bez razlichiia roda i zvaniia).82 All of this, of course, had implications for defense, because everyone recognized that “the state’s army is maintained not by territory alone but by the revenue generated by the territory and the people who live in it.”83 But the state’s encouragement of civilian settlement had other equally obvious motivations. In the world according to St. Petersburg, agriculture and commerce were the roots of wealth and civil peace. Therefore, more agriculture and more trade implied more prosperity, more productivity, more revenue for the state, and less frontier rebellion. As a result, almost any agricultural or commercial resident of the state had potential use as a “state settler,” including state peasants, “economic peasants,” crown peasants, as well as merchants, townsmen, and craftsmen—and there were no absolute rules about ethnicity or religion. “Useful citizens” included Russians, “Little Russians,” Orthodox non-Russians (Maris, Chuvash, Mordvins), Russian Old Believers, and even Muslims. Islamic “immigrants” (vykhodtsy) from Transcaucasia were not allowed to settle on Russian-held lands on or behind the lines in the North Caucasus, but Tatars from the Middle Volga were permitted, even encouraged, to move to Orenburg. As the colonization enthusiast Petr Rychkov noted in 1767, “the good, rich, soft, and thick black-earth soils” of Orenburg Province required “talented ploughmen,” and the first on his list were Muslim Tatar “admiralty peasants” (lashmany) from Svi80 Don i stepnoe predkavkaz'e xviii–pervoi polovine xix veka: Zaselenie i khoziaistvo (Rostov-na-Donu, 1977), pp. 56–57. 81 V.M. Kabuzan, Naselenie severnogo kavkaza v xix–xx vekakh: Etnostatisticheskoe issledovanie (St. Petersburg, 1996), p. 48. 82 PSZ, v. 22, n. 16114 (1784), p. 270. 83 The quoted phrase is from “Sekretnyi plan predstavlenii gr. Z. Chernyshevym,” SIRIO, 1880, v. 51, p. 9.

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azhsk District, who could be recruited with the help of a reliable and discriminating Muslim overseer named Nauraz Tiugaev.84 In all, and partly as the result of such officially catholic views, almost half a million people moved to the steppe during the Catherinian period. This was by far the most intense wave of migration to date and it initiated a century of large-scale steppe settlement. Within the region, pride of place went to New Russia, which for most of the period after 1775 was no longer an individual province but was becoming synonymous with the entire region north of the Black Sea—what became known in the nineteenth century as the New Russian Territory (Novorossiiskii krai). Between 1782 and 1795, over 56 percent of all settlers within the empire settled in this region.85 And the rest settled elsewhere in the south: 18 percent in the Lower Volga (Saratov and Astrakhan Provinces), 16 percent in the North Caucasus (Caucasus Oblast), and around 10 percent in the Southern Urals (Orenburg). Though Orthodox Slavs made up the vast majority overall, the ethnic and social composition of the migrants varied from area to area.86 In New Russia, Ukrainians (that is, settlers relocating from “Little Russian” provinces) predominated, with Russians representing the next largest group, and various foreign colonists making up the rest. Most were various sorts of “state settlers,” while serf colonists amounted to a notable minority of the migrant pool. In the North Caucasus, migrants were mostly Russian and Ukrainian state settlers of different sorts, though with a small minority of serfs. On the Lower Volga, the situation was similar, though there were many more serf and foreign (mostly German) colonists. On the Orenburg steppe, most settlers were state peasants, with Russians in the majority and sizeable minorities of Tatars, Chuvash, Mordvins, and Teptiars from the Middle Volga and the more wooded parts of Bashkiria.87 Although the level of migration was unprecedented, St. Petersburg, in keeping with prevailing tradition, expected to be in charge of all of it. Official colonization thus remained colonization by decree, but the difference from earlier practice was equally clear. Rather than the piecemeal and erratic sponsorship of settlement that had occurred before, the government was now engaged in colonization wholesale, as it would be until the end of the tsarist regime. The decrees, as a result, became more nu84 P. Rychkov, “O sposobakh k umnozheniiu zemledeliia v Orenburgskoi gubernii,” TVEO, 1767, v. 7, pp. 17–18. On prohibitions against Muslim settlement in the Northern Caucasus, see Khodarkovsky, “Of Christianity, Enlightenment, and Colonialism,” p. 425. 85 S.I. Bruk and V.M. Kabuzan, “Migratsiia naseleniia v Rossii v xviii–nachale xix veka (chislennost', struktura, geografiia),” Istoriia SSSR, 1984, n. 4, p. 49. 86 Ibid. 87 Ibid.

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merous and increasingly detailed. The empress and her representatives stipulated who should be encouraged or required to resettle, where they should move, how they should move, when resettlement should stop and start, what lands were to be surveyed, which could be sold to private landlords for serf resettlement, which should be set aside for state settlers, how settlers should pay their taxes, and what privileges and exemptions—if any—they should receive for moving. The watchword for the process was “utility,” the same “utility” that had appeared in the Petrine period and that presupposed total harmony between the good of the state and the public interest. The state-controlled process was expected to benefit everyone. Or, as the language of state decrees put it, the settlement of “empty lands” was to be “useful” “both for the crown and for private people.”88 Natives, too, were expected to benefit. Among Western intellectuals in the Age of Reason there was a certain amount of hand-wringing about the balance sheet of European colonization. Diderot wondered aloud whether European power had done more harm than good in the Americas; Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) offered a lament for the “free, brave, moral, and responsible” Native Americans, so many of whom “we have suffered . . . already to extinguish”; and enlightened litterateurs created “noble savages”—from Purea the Tahitian “queen” to Logan the Great Mingo—who scolded Europeans for their abuses or outshone them in wisdom or generosity.89 Even patriotic metropolitans who saw absolutely nothing wrong with European conduct toward native peoples began to doubt, based on the evidence of the Revolutionary War in the American colonies, whether large-scale European settlement overseas was the right way to create a durable empire. The result was the beginning of a gradual shift toward the “new empire” of the nineteenth century, one based more on “indirect rule” and exploitation than significant European settlement.90 Of course, none of this diminished the inequities of European imperialism or even put much of a dent in views of its essential rightness and inevitability. At century’s end, the Count de Condorcet could still proclaim that “distant countries . . . seem to be waiting only to be civilized and for us to give them the means to do so.”91 But ambiguous views of European settlement were at least in the air. 88 This phrase appears in PSZ, ser. 1, v. 22, n. 16572 (1787), p. 890. 89 Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Ro-

manticism (New Haven, Conn., 1993), pp. 158–63; Anthony F.C. Wallace, Jefferson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), pp. 77–79; Greg Dening, “Possessing Tahiti,” in his Performances (Chicago, 1996), pp. 147–56. 90 Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain, and France, c. 1500–c. 1800 (New Haven, 1995), pp. 6–9. 91 Ibid., p. 10.

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In Catherine’s empire, where the Russians’ self-consciousness about their own newly civilized status was still pronounced and there were no breakaway transoceanic colonies to worry about, things were different. Large-scale settlement did not appear politically dangerous, and Russian imperialism seemed largely beneficial. There might be abuses (the empress recognized that “timid and helpless iasak people” in Siberia suffered from the inconsiderate tactics of Russian traders and tax collectors, for example), but abuses could be corrected through “Our special motherly condolence.”92 At bottom, the coming of settlement and regional development were equivalent to the coming of civilization, and all three were needed by backward natives. In her decree On the Organization of the Province of the Caucasus and Astrakhan' Oblast of May 1785, Catherine ordered her officials to encourage extensive agricultural settlement and to build towns, roads, and mines in the region with the clear implication that all of this activity, along with the opening of native schools and the “gentle” encouragement of sedentarization, would help “to disabuse [local peoples] of all that might be unpleasant in their manner of thinking and their appreciation of things” and would “strengthen [their] association with Our other subjects.”93 That the settlement of some of the empress’s other subjects in the vicinity of “steppe peoples” was fundamentally good for the latter went without saying. As the Orenburg governor Dimitrii Volkov had noted some twenty years earlier, “If indeed it turns out that the Bashkir begin to feel crowded [by new settlers], which may well happen, they will be led to observe how the Russian peasants [rossiiskie krest'iane] among them live in even closer quarters, and, seeing this, they themselves will turn to agriculture and the settled life.”94 Later eighteenth-century officials, like Osip Igel'strom, one of Volkov’s successors in Orenburg, showed more subtlety in their understanding of the nomadic economy, but cultural change continued to be seen in mechanistic terms, and the promotion of agricultural settlement in nomadic areas remained an accepted tool for inspiring nomads to abandon their nomadism.95 To promote settlement properly naturally required a thorough knowledge of regional resources, and Catherine’s lieutenants in the regions were informed that exacting detail was required: First of all, you must proceed to learn about the province that has been entrusted to you in all of its conditions and confines, and, for this purpose, you 92 Yuri Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North (Ithaca, N.Y., 1994), pp. 66–67. 93 PSZ, ser. 1, v. 22, n. 16194 (1785), p. 391. 94 RGADA, f. 16, op. 1, d. 813, l. 49(b). 95 For Igel'strom’s more nuanced view of Bashkir land use, see one of his reports to Paul in 1798: RGIA, f. 1345, op. 98, d. 240, ll. 6(b)–7.

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Taming the Wild Field are to obtain a reliable map of sufficient detail to indicate the location of regiments, towns, settlements, villages, outlying farms, seasonal work camps [otkhozhie], monasteries, hermitages, manufactures, and any and all places of human habitation, as well as rivers, lakes, marshes, woods, farmland, steppes, roads, and the location of [all] . . . borders.96

To do the reconnoitering, surveyors, either working in conjunction with the empire’s General Land Survey or on more particular assignments, were outfitted with military escorts, sworn to uphold the highest standards of accuracy and integrity, and dispatched around the steppe provinces. The result was estate maps, district maps, provincial atlases, and accompanying “economic notes” (ekonomicheskie primechaniia) listing the quality of local soils, the position of local boundaries, the numbers of residents (calculated in terms of households containing male and female “souls”), numbers of desiatinas under plow or pasture, and the “economic qualities” (ugod'e) of a given area (that is, whether it contained woods with timber “suitable for building,” steppe land “suitable for agriculture,” and so forth).97 This information was then translated by provincial officials on the steppe into “descriptions” and “registers” indicating “which land of what quality was suitable for human habitation and how many households might be settled upon it.”98 Documentation of population was equally important and just as zealously pursued. “Revisions” (revizii) of the empire’s taxpaying population in 1762, 1782, and 1795 produced lists of numbers and, in some cases, “lists of settlements” (spiski naselennykh mest). “Reliable registers” indicating “the number of souls who have moved between provinces” were required from provincial governors beginning in 1787. Foreign missions sent lists to St. Petersburg of potential migrants from abroad. And the empress made periodic calls to her provincial authorities for similar lists of domestic subjects “willing to undertake resettlement.”99 This statistical in96 “Nastavlenie dannoe grafu Petru Rumiantsevu, pri naznachenii ego malorossiiskim general-gubernatorom, so sobstvennoruchnymi pribavkami Ekateriny II (noiabria 1764 goda),” SIRIO, 1871, v. 7, p. 377. 97 L.V. Milov, Issledovanie ob “ekonomicheskikh primechaniiakh” k general'nomu mezhevaniiu (k istorii russkogo krest'ianstva i sel'skogo khoziaistva vtoroi poloviny xviii v.) (Moscow, 1965), pp. 37, 160–75. One desiatina was equivalent to 2.7 acres. 98 The quoted phrase appears in a “description” of lands for settlement submitted to Catherine by Orenburg governor Johann Reinsdorf in 1769. RGADA, f. 16, op. 1, d. 816, l. 36. 99 V.M. Kabuzan, Narodonaselenie Rossii v xviii–pervoi polovine xix v. (po materialam revizii) (Moscow, 1963), pp. 84–85; “Poimennyi spisok otpravliaemykh v Rossiiu inostrannykh poselentsev (prilozhenie k reliatsii rossiiskogo rezidenta v Dantsige I.M. Rebindera imperatritse Ekaterine II),” in Pod stiagom Rossii: Sbornik dokumentov (Moscow, 1992), pp. 418–21; PSZ, ser. 1, v. 22, n. 16585 (1787), pp. 944–45; PSZ, ser. 1, v. 22, n. 16210 (1785), p. 415.

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formation helped to provide a picture of “who might be resettled from where and in what quantity.” Ethnographic understandings then helped to determine which settlers would be most useful in which places. In a world divided into “nations,” each possessing its own “morals and customs,” the empress and her advisors knew that different “nations” were influenced by different “climates” (environments) and predisposed to different “uses and occupations,” all of which (ideally) needed to be taken into account when charting the course to maximum settlement utility. As the Academician Peter Simon Pallas noted in a memorandum on the settlement of the Crimea: Generally speaking, the Russian peasant is good only for farming and never shows any interest in any other kind of [agricultural activity] regardless of how beneficial it might be. The residents of Little Russia are also primarily farmers, though they have a greater inclination for stock raising [than the Russians] as do the Poles. Therefore, all colonists of this sort should be settled on the flat land [of the peninsula] . . . where one finds an immense low-lying plain, very fertile and suitable for grain production. If one were to settle members of the above-noted nations in the mountainous part of Tauris, they would only languish, and beautiful opportunities for orchard planting, viticulture, silk farming, and many other forms of cultivation that we currently lack would be utterly wasted. To realize these possibilities, we will need instead Asiatic colonists [that is, Armenians, Georgians, Persians, Greeks, and Moldavians] or hard-working emigrants from France, Germany, or Italy.100

In a plan from the 1770s to establish “settled regiments” made up of colonist-soldiers, Mikhail Shcherbatov noted that when considering who to settle where, one had to take into account the “different climates and the [varied] situations of the country. . . . For example, those settling on the Turkish border would be well rewarded with land, but the climate is so hot as to be harmful to northern residents; while those settling on the border with Sweden would be exposed to scurvy and a rude climate.”101 The logic of useful combination did not stop with these sorts of proposals. As avid producers and consumers of territorial and demographic information, the learned followers of Russian agriculture were well aware that some peasants in central provinces—serfs and state peasants alike— had sufficient land, while others had none at all or (more commonly) so little that they could barely provide for their families or pay their taxes. Accordingly, the land survey instructions of 1754 expressed the desirability of equalizing peasant landholdings and made provisions for resettling 100 RGADA, f. 16, op. 1, d. 189, l. 142(b)–143. 101 M.M. Shcherbatov, “Mnenie o poselennykh voiskakh,” in his Neizdannye sochi-

neniia (Moscow, 1935), p. 73.

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“homesteaders with insufficient land” (malozemel'nye odnodvortsy). In 1760, landless household serfs from a confiscated estate in Orel were ordered resettled to nearby villages “so as to keep them from committing, as a result of their lack of land, nefarious acts.” And in 1766, new survey rules required surveyors to indicate in their “survey books” whether peasants and homesteaders in a given village had sufficient land, and if they did not, the provincial governor was expected to determine where they might be resettled.102 By the time of the Legislative Commission of 1767, the presumption that resettlement could serve as a tool for rectifying land imbalances among peasants seemed obvious enough that the delegate M. Belezlii from Elizavetgrad, a member of the Committee on the Increase of Population, Agriculture, and the Economy, endorsed it as the first point in his “opinion,” specifying that it should be conducted as economically as possible and only with Her Majesty’s permission.103 It was not long before the logic of balancing land and people was extended to steppe settlement. In 1776, a decree appeared ordering two thousand “economic peasants from areas with land shortages” to be moved to lands on the Lower Volga that had been freed up by the resettlement of Volga Cossacks to the Terek.104 According to the decree, the relocation was to be voluntary (a statement of Catherine’s kinder and gentler values), though if too few volunteers were found, the rest would be chosen by lot, and everyone who resettled would receive an unspecified amount of land and a one-and-a-half year exemption from the poll tax. (Not wanting to incur any loss in revenue, Catherine ordered the villagers remaining behind to render a double poll tax for the same one-and-a-half year term as just payment for the extra land they would receive from departing settlers.)105 Other decrees followed in the same vein, and the era of large-scale state-directed economic resettlements began.106 The goal of these resettlements, as the empress stated following her tour of New Russia in 1787, was to remove people “from various provinces with insufficient land” and direct them to “fertile and spacious lands that We have seen with our own eyes” in the provinces of Ekaterinoslav and Tauris. The result was a rational redistribution of population that would help the people moving, the people staying, and the “state’s interest.”107 102 These decrees are summarized in V. Iakushkin, Ocherki po istorii russkoi pozemel'noi politiki v xviii i xix v. (Moscow, 1890), pp. 159, 162–63. 103 A.V. Florovskii, Iz istorii ekaterinskoi zakonodatel'noi kommissii 1767 g.: Vopros o krepostnom prave (Odessa, 1910), p. 201. 104 PSZ, ser. 1, v. 20, n. 14521 (1776), pp. 434–36. 105 Ibid., pp. 435–36. 106 See, for example, PSZ, ser. 1, v. 21, n. 15177 (1781), pp. 186–87; v. 22, n. 16114 (1784), pp. 270–71; and v. 22, n. 16572 (1787), pp. 890–91. 107 PSZ, ser. 1, v. 22, n. 16559 (1787), p. 877.

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Because there was still plenty of available steppe land, the gradual turn toward emphasizing the resettlement of domestic state peasants did nothing to dampen the enthusiasm for “useful Germans,” “industrious Bulgarians,” and other foreign colonists who continued to be welcomed into the empire almost indiscriminately throughout Catherine’s reign, under Paul, and into the early years of Alexander I. It also did nothing to reduce the attraction of serf resettlements, which were seen to be as much an instrument for the achievement of territorial-demographic balance as the resettlement of “state settlers.” Indeed, their movement had the additional advantage (from the government’s perspective) of coming at the expense of the landlord rather than the treasury. Thus, nobles were awarded land grants or sold land on the steppe at reduced prices with the expectation of settlement, and, if settlement did not occur, they faced fines or expropriation. Yet, overall, because noble landlords were not just the state’s subjects but also the state itself, the government stayed out of the business of regulating what they did with their serfs—in matters relating to resettlement and otherwise—and the result was that they did mostly what they pleased. In 1762, a decree released noblemen from the Petrine obligation to petition the government for permission to resettle their serfs, requiring instead a simple letter indicating that the resettlement had taken place and providing proof that the serfs’ tax and draft obligations had been met.108 Sensing an opportunity, landlords increasingly shuffled serfs between estates to keep them “in between rolls” and avoid rendering taxes or recruits. This then led to the reinstatement of a requirement of prior notification in 1782, though now landlords were allowed to inform the local district judge instead of being forced to go to the greater time and expense of contacting St. Petersburg.109 Neither of these decrees had anything to say about how serfs should be treated while being moved since this was considered the landlord’s discretion. With the exception of isolated government initiatives, landlords also had to cover the cost of resettlement, which could be considerable depending on the distances and the numbers of serfs involved. A certain Levshin—who won the Free Economic Society’s award in 1798 for best essay on the question “How to Settle Serfs in Steppe Areas and Found a Successful Estate?”—advised landlords to send advance parties of peasants to build sod houses and prepare the land, to budget annual sums for the purchase of tools, supplies, and grain, and to forget about any revenue from their new estate for several years. As the essayist put it, the challenge of “transforming wastes into flourishing fields” and “an abode of serpents 108 V.I. Semevskii, Krest'iane v tsarstvovanie imperatritsy Ekateriny II (St. Petersburg, 1881), v. 1, p. 146; PSZ, ser. 1, v. 15, n. 11423 (1762), pp. 895–96. 109 PSZ, ser. 1, v. 21, n. 15549 (1782), p. 709.

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into a residence of men” was long and costly enough to require a commitment from only the “most deserving of patriots.”110 Of course, some patriots of this sort could be found because, as one noble entrepreneur put it in a petition to the empress in 1785, along with “benefits for the treasury” and “benefits for society” there were also “benefits for oneself” in “settling an uninhabited country.”111 In this case, the beneficial plan involved buying “up to 1,000 serfs and their families” from private estates affected by land shortages in the interior and then transporting them to lands on the Caspian provided by the “supreme authority” where the settlers would work as “farmer-fishermen,” while impressing local Kazakhs with the example of their “useful settlement.”112 Generally speaking, however, regardless of the potential “benefit,” there were far fewer of these resettlements than the government would have liked. Serf relocation was costly and most nobles focused more on the immediate expense than the potential long-term gains. Consequently, landlord-sponsored resettlements amounted to only a small percentage of the total movement of migrants in the Catherinian period, and the proportion remained small through the rest of the servile era. Instead of moving large numbers of their own serfs, landlords on the steppe preferred to rent out their lands to others, use them for pasture (which was often more environmentally feasible and less labor intensive), or simply to save money on resettlement by enserfing state peasant illegals and other landlords’ runaways that could be found on the spot. In the 1770s, Nikita Beketov, governor of Astrakhan, petitioned Catherine for permission “to acquire ownership over runaways” who, as he saw it, were causing “trouble” in the province while denying the state its revenue. With more serfs, Beketov assured the empress that he would be able to drain the marshland on his estate, cultivate more fields, and produce “valuable products as yet unseen in Russia,” by which he meant cotton, silk, grapes, and melons. (He also promised to erect an obelisk to the “great life-giver [ozhivotvoritel'nitsa] so that Her munificence would be forever remembered.”)113 This sort of second enserfment was not supposed to happen, but it did frequently enough, and the state’s blanket endorsement of population increase tended to encourage it because runaways, even when found, were rarely returned. Naturally this practice was resented by landlords in the interior who, like the nobleman Zoriankov of Kursk Province, protested their property loss and counseled against populating southern 110 [No first name indicated] Levshin, “Otvetnoe sochinenie na zadachu Ekonomicheskogo obshchestva 1798 goda o zaselenii stepei,” TVEO, 1801, v. 53, pp. 191, 225–45. 111 RGADA, f. 16, op. 1, d. 189, ch. 1, l. 152. 112 Ibid, ll. 150–156(b). 113 RGADA, f. 16, op. 1, d. 610, ll. 3(b)–6.

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Herald of the District of Kamyshin, Saratov Province (1781), from P. P. fon Vinkler, Gerby gorodov, gubernii, oblastei i posadov Rossiiskoi imperii (St. Petersburg, 1899; reprint: Planeta, Moscow, 1991), p. 62.

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provinces with people who were nothing more than “shirkers, drunkards, and homeless paupers” (bezdomovnye).114 In 1796, the government ordered runaways uncovered in New Russia or Caucasus Province to be sent back, those who had managed to register themselves as state peasants to be conscripted into the army, and any local landlords caught helping or hiring them to be fined. But this decree, like the many others that preceded it earlier in the century, appears to have had little effect.115 Illegal migration was high throughout the Catherinian period and remained so into the nineteenth century. There were few constants in how this migration was pursued. Beyond the Catherinian regime’s enthusiastic support for the settlement of almost anyone, its general view that resettlement should be voluntary rather than coerced (serfs, of course, excepted), and its relentless bid to spread enlightenment to benighted borderland peoples, it did not have a unitary colonization policy. For one, there was no central colonization agency. Matters of resettlement were handled through the court and the Senate, which directed orders to the appropriate provincial governors, colleges, or the Office for the Guardianship of Foreigners. Under Paul, in 1797, the Office of the State Economy, Guardianship of Foreigners, and Rural Husbandry (Ekspeditsiia gosudarstvennogo khoziaistva, opekunstva inostrannykh i sel'skogo domovodstva) was established within the Senate. It handled many colonization-related cases and, with its emphasis on agriculture, became an early forerunner of the Ministry of State Domains, which in turn was a forerunner to the Ministry of Agriculture, but the competence of the office extended well beyond colonization, and it never operated with anything approximating a single colonization plan. Instead, the issue of who would move and on what terms was decided on a decree-by-decree basis. There was little consistency in how the state’s largesse (land grants, subsidies, and tax exemptions) was distributed or its obligations (tax and draft requirements) enforced, either between or within different settler categories. Among state-sponsored colonists, foreigners received by far the most generous terms. According to the manifesto of 1763, foreign nationals were invited to settle “wherever they please, in all Our provinces,” and they were to receive government “transit funds” (putevye dengi), no-interest construction loans, duty-free import of all personal effects and sale goods up to three hundred rubles, a half-year’s free lodging on arrival, a thirty-year exemption from “all taxes and obligations” for settling on “vacant lands” (five or ten years if they settled in towns), permanent exemp114 RGADA, f. 16, op. 1, d. 189, ch. 1, l. 89. 115 PSZ, ser. 1, v. 24, n. 17638 (1796), pp. 233–34.

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tions from military or civil service, and, for entrepreneurs, a ten-year exemption from import duties. Foreign colonists were likewise free to own serfs, to live “in accordance with the doctrines and rituals of their faith,” and even to proselytize, though only among Muslims “living near the borders of Our Empire” not among Christians “living in Russia.”116 Not all foreigners were treated under these terms—Prussian Mennonites, deemed especially “useful,” were promised “special privileges and gratuities” in 1787 and received their own “charter” in 1800.117 But to those whom they applied, the conditions remained in effect for more than forty years and changed only in 1804, when a new decree restructured the foreign immigration program. By contrast, the terms offered to “state settlers” were never as fixed and always less favorable. To lure Zaporozhians and Russian subjects “from abroad” to New Russia in 1764, the empress promised household tracts (uchastki) of either twenty-six or thirty desiatinas, one-time cash awards of twelve rubles (foreigners received the same amount though agents were paid a greater commission for recruiting them), and periods of tax exemption from six to sixteen years depending on the quality of the land. (Military servitors did not have to pay a land-based tax, but they were required to submit one soldier for service.)118 Differing terms were then extended to different colonists over the rest of Catherine’s reign. For example, in 1773, thirteen hundred peasant families to be resettled to the Akhtiuba silk farms on the Lower Volga were exempted from taxes for two years and afterward instructed to pay their dues in silk.119 And in 1779, “military people of the lower ranks, peasants, and people of Poland who illegally fled abroad” were offered six years’ exemption to resettle to the provinces of New Russia and Azov.120 In 1781, all settlers headed for the same areas saw the exemption period reduced to one and a half years; and in 1785, a grant (posobie) of twenty rubles per household was to be given to all “state settlers” settling on the road between Tsaritsyn and the Caucasus line.121 Land allotments for domestic settlers frequently went unspecified, and there was no attempt at standardization until 1797, when it was decreed that “state peasants with land shortages” should receive up to fifteen 116 “Manifest imperatritsy Ekateriny II o svobodnom poselenii inostrantsev v Rossii,” Pod stiagom Rossii, pp. 409–13. See also Bartlett, Human Capital, pp. 47–48. 117 David G. Rempel, “The Mennonite Commonwealth in Russia: A Sketch of Its Founding and Endurance, 1789–1919,” Mennonite Quarterly Review, 1973, v. 47, n. 4, pp. 289, 303. 118 PSZ, ser. 1, v. 16, n. 12099 (1764), pp. 663–65. 119 PSZ, ser. 1, v. 19, n. 14052 (1773), p. 847. 120 PSZ, ser. 1, v. 19, n. 14870 (1779), p. 818. 121 PSZ, ser. 1, v. 22, n. 16194 (1785), p. 390.

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desiatinas per soul from state reserves (oborochnye dachi).122 This allotment then became the general minimum standard for state peasant settlers in the new century. The government’s main concern was always its bottom line, which meant keeping a tight lid on settler assistance. A year after the twentyruble grant was decreed for domestic settlers in Caucasus Province, Grigorii Potemkin informed the Senate that most new settlers had “neither homes nor grain” and were therefore obliged to spend the money “on surviving” (na propitanie) rather than on setting up their economies. Potemkin politely asked whether he should substitute cash with disbursements of grain and whether the settlers might be helped by the cancellation of their arrears. The Senate told him that it was up to “his discretion” how he assisted the settlers, but there was no mention of increasing the amount. Everyone was expected to pay their arrears; no one was to receive an exemption from the draft; and no peasants currently renting state lands were to be allowed to resettle until their rental period expired or they found someone to take over their contract.123 In other cases, more generous subsidies, grain allocations, and tax exemptions were proposed and approved, but the state’s insistence on its right to revenue remained unassailable, and not all migrants could expect to receive state largesse. Two senators dispatched to the Northern Caucasus in 1787 to inspect settlement affairs reported that the policy of providing one and a half years of tax relief was justified given the need “to promote agriculture in this country,” though they pointed out that “dead settlers” should not qualify.124 Catherine’s regime thus gave more to foreign colonists than it did to its own (both the living and the dead), a fact that raised little dissent in the late eighteenth century but later provoked cries of indignation from nineteenth-century nationalists. For all the attention to colonization, the process still did not have a universal name. Domestic migration was referred to as “resettlement” (pereselenie), while the migrants themselves were “resettlers” (pereselentsy); but the people and the process were also described as “settlers” and “settlement” (poseliane, zaselentsy, zaselenie). Foreign migrants were called “colonists” (kolonisty) and “settlers”—though never “resettlers,” because resettlement seemed to be a purely domestic affair—but it was not until the early nineteenth century that they were officially designated as “colonists” in a way that formally distinguished them from domestic migrants. Nothing in official colonization vocabulary expressed the larger political or economic acts of incorporation or the dominance of a metropole over a subordinate 122 Iakushkin, Ocherki po istorii russkoi pozemel'noi politiki, pp. 159–60. 123 PSZ, ser. 1, v. 22, n. 16429 (1786), pp. 675–77. 124 RGADA, f. 23, op. 1, d. 31, l. 10.

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territory, even though these understandings were clearly imbedded in European colonizing terminology. As Diderot’s Encyclopédie noted, European powers had established “colonies” in the Americas with the goal of promoting “culture and commerce,” and this inevitably involved “conquering territories and chasing out the former inhabitants so that they could be replaced with new ones.”125 A colony, in other words, was a conquered region that was then populated with outside colonists. By contrast, in Russia the word “colony” (koloniia) did not even appear in the most authoritative dictionary of the late eighteenth century (the Dictionary of the Russian Academy); and when it was used in Russian writings of the period, it did not refer to the sort of colony that the Encyclopedists had in mind but simply to a nationally distinctive enclave or rural settlement, in particular of foreigners. (The 1763 decree on foreign immigration, for example, noted that foreigners were free to settle in the empire by founding “colonies and towns” [koloniiami i mestechkami].)126 The European steppe as a whole was never described as a colony, presumably because it was not geographically separated from the rest of the state, though in other respects—most obviously, the name of New Russia—the implication of colonial status seemed clear. The inherent ambiguity of all this revealed a basic truth about the steppe that would not go away: at once different enough to demand exploration, dangerous enough to require the settlement of Cossacks and the rule of military viceroys, un-Russian enough to be conquered and appropriated, and still remote enough that it could seem to people in St. Petersburg as “all but bordering China,”127 the steppe was not, for all that, defined as a region wholly distinct from Russia. The Russians thus began their most intense period of steppe colonization by invoking much of the rhetorical style of European colonialism yet without clearly identifying the colony in question as a colonial place. Of course, despite the wide variations, inconsistencies, and ambiguities of colonization policy and terminology, the state’s colonization decrees were at least constant in one key respect: they reflected the official view of the process. Colonization beyond the decrees was considerably more complicated. Indeed, the already long-standing disconnect between official colonization and real colonization became even more pronounced in the Catherinian period because the state’s ambitions to control the process increased while its ability to do so remained as limited as before. Governors or commentators on the steppe frequently grumbled that provincial officials were deficient “not just in talent but in number,” that the military 125 V.D.F., “Colonie,” Encyclopédie (Paris, 1753; reprint: New York, 1969), v. 3, p. 650. 126 Pod stiagom Rossii, p. 410. 127 A. Skal'kovskii, Khronologicheskoe obozrenie istorii novorossiiskogo kraia, 1730–1823

(Odessa, 1838), v. 2, p. 2.

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cordons in the Northern Caucasus and along the Ural River were inadequately organized and poorly supplied, that the Ural Cossacks who were supposed to be defending foreign colonists “beyond the Volga” actually “team[ed] up with the Kazakhs to raid and rob them.” They likewise complained that that numerous steppe-bound migrants left “without warning” or died in transit, that many others who arrived took a long time to settle down in one place or did not farm, plant trees, or tend their stock as well as they should (all faults usually attributed to “laziness” and “ignorance”), and that still others were let down by the failings of central planning.128 This was the case, for example, with several hundred “Tatars and other settlers” who were dispatched in the late 1780s to the infertile steppe west of the Caspian where farming was close to impossible. As a result, officials reported, “many of the settlers have died” and others “have run away to the town of Tsaritsyn and the settlements of the Don Cossacks to provide for themselves and to save their lives.”129 Although settlement in more fertile areas was usually more successful, it was never easy. Government assistance, even for foreign colonists who were supposed to receive the most, was usually delayed or deficient, and preparations for settlers—including settlers whose arrival was expected— was often inadequate. A group of 417 Volga Cossacks traveled for three months in the spring and summer of 1770 to arrive “in the vicinity of Mozdok,” only to find that “there was no room for them in the Caucasus” (that is, no lands had been prepared for them) and there were no supplies to help them survive the winter. They were consequently ordered back to their homes and told to reresettle the following year after having “better equipped themselves.”130 The lack of woods and readily available or reliable sources of water in many steppe locales forced settlers to dig wells, pay expensive prices for timber and firewood, or use less familiar or reliable fuel (hay, manure) and building materials (sod, clay bricks). Frost, heat, periodic locust swarms, steppe fires, hailstorms, whirlwinds, and even antelope migrations destroyed crops or were otherwise economically threatening.131 Malaria and plague still appeared on the Caspian and 128 RGIA, f. 383, op. 29, d. 905, l. 1; “Materialy dlia istorii severnogo Kavkaza, 1787–1792,” Kavkazskii sbornik, 1897, v. 18, p. 394; RGIA, f. 1146, op. 1, d. 168, ll. 1, 11, passim; “Primechaniia na lezhashchie okolo Saratova mesta, v razsuzhdenii sel'skogo domostroitel'stva,” TVEO, 1767, v. 7, pp. 30, 35, 36–38; “Primechaniia sluzhashchie k poznaniiu domostroitel'stva i sostoianiia mest po reke Volge ot Sizrana do Astrakhana lezhashchikh,” Akademicheskie izvestiia, 1780, pt. 6, p. 94. 129 RGADA, f. 23, op. 1, d. 33, ll. 15–17. 130 P. Iudin, “S Volgi na Terek (k istorii zaselenii Povolzh'ia i Kavkaza),” RA, 1901, v. 2, n. 8, p. 538. 131 For one reference to an “unusually large number of saigas from the Kuban' steppe” that trampled fields in Saratov Province in 1784, see RGADA, f. 16, op. 1, d. 918, ch. 2, l. 381.

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places such as the Lower Bug on the northern Black Sea, despite the insistence of Platon Zubov, Catherine’s last viceroy in the south, that “rumors of the sickly airs of this country [lands near the viceroy’s dream town of Voznesensk] are entirely unjustified.”132 And then there was the physical isolation. Even in areas witnessing intense new settlement, there was so much space that villages were few and far between. The German settler Christian Gottlieb Züge remembered arriving at his party’s settlement site on the Lower Volga and feeling “shocked to see ourselves here in a wilderness that, apart from a small wood, showed nothing but three-feet-high, largely withered grass as far as the eye could see.”133 The poverty of most new settlers made all of this worse, especially in the early going. Peasant migrants sold off their homes and possessions at fire sale prices and took only what they could drag or cart with them. They usually arrived at their destinations with little or nothing and often had to hire themselves out to work in nearby towns or settlements—that is, if these towns and settlements existed. If they did not and if settlement proved too difficult, settlers often simply abandoned their new lands altogether and “ran away.” In fact, there was a great deal of running away, or at least moving in ways that unsettled the authorities, and not just by failed resettlers. Polish Jews invited to resettle to New Russia shuttled between their old and new homes to trade, to the dismay of border officials; and disgruntled Don Cossacks serving in the Kuban', on learning in 1792 that the empress had decided to make their temporary posting “on the line” into a permanent relocation, returned to the Don without permission, prompting rumors that they intended to ride into Cherkassk (the Don center) and “kill all the officials.”134 In this world of varied and shuttling migrants, “illegal” settlers were more vulnerable than most. Unless they managed to register as “legals,” they often did not qualify for even the state’s meager assistance. They could be impressed as Cossacks on less than generous terms, or they could end up for all intents and purposes enserfed by local Cossack potentates and Russian nobles, with the usual rough treatment. In 1788, according to one group of aggrieved peasants, a certain Pavel Grechka, a runaway in the employ of the Don Cossack Aleksei Fomin, refused to work more than two days a week for his new “lord” and was consequently “cruelly punched and beaten and had a tooth knocked out . . . while Makar Grigor'ev for the same thing was whipped mercilessly.” The Don ataman’s decrees required no more than two days per week of corvée, but by the 1780s and 1790s three and four days were 132 RGADA, f. 16, op. 1, d. 699, ch. 2, ll. 9(b)–10. 133 Cited in Bartlett, Human Capital, p. 96. 134 S. Stanislawskii, “K istorii kolonizatsii evreev v Novorossii (po arkhivnym materi-

alam),” Voskhod, 1887 (September), p. 124; Kozlov, Kavkaz v sud'bakh kazachestva, p. 105.

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common.135 (Incidents of this sort undoubtedly helped give meaning to the peasant proverb “The Don! The Don! But home is better” [Don, Don, a lushche doma].)136 Some settlers were simply unprepared for agricultural settlement. Out of a total male working population of 7,186 German colonists settled near Saratov in 1767, only 61.8 percent were categorized as farmers, while the rest were artisans, merchants, or “people of various ranks” (raznochintsy). Many artisans were bunched together in villages, with the result that there were too few experienced farmers to go around and harvest failures were common in the first settlement years.137 The relative lack of women could also be a problem. The government generally encouraged family migration because it was considered more economically viable and therefore more likely to succeed. And, indeed, many rural colonists (foreigners, domestic peasants, Cossacks) resettled as “household units” (dvorami), not just because the state favored the practice but because the migrants’ economies were structured around household production. But individual migration was never banned, and individuals who migrated were almost uniformly single men. Men vastly outnumbered women among the illegal settlers who fled their homes to join Cossack hosts on the lines or settled in especially isolated and thinly populated areas behind them. To accommodate the needs of these “wifeless” migrants and further its own colonizing objectives, the government pursued a variety of measures from encouraging bachelor runaways to marry Don Cossack women in order to enroll in the host (the more Cossacks the better) to resettling women convicts from the Russian interior and “distributing” them among frontier settlements (the more people the better). In such cases, it was common to pair couples off as expeditiously as possible. In several villages in the Dneprovsk District north of the Black Sea, for example, women were reportedly brought into villages and told to pick hats from piles—“whoever’s hat was picked [then] became the husband of the woman who picked it.”138 When the government was not actively seizing and parceling out women, settler communities did so on their own. Greben Cossacks in the North Caucasus raided not only neighboring steppe peoples “beyond the line” for brides but also conducted bride-stealing “campaigns” into “Rus' ” (that is, central Russian and Volga provinces), apparently with the tacit approval of local powers.139 The realities of frontier settlement also remained complicated when it 135 A.P. Pronshtein, Zemlia donskaia v xviii veke (Rostov-na-Donu, 1961), p. 197. 136 L.N. Pushkarev, Dukhovnyi mir russkogo krest'ianina po poslovitsam xvii–xviii vekov

(Moscow, 1994), p. 59. 137 Bartlett, Human Capital, p. 98. 138 Zelenkevich [no first name indicated], Severnoe priberezh'e dneprovskogo uezda tavricheskoi gubernii (materialy dlia statistiki) (Simferopol', 1863), p. 57. 139 Barrett, At the Edge of Empire, pp. 131–32.

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came to relations between settlers and their native neighbors. According to enlightened opinion, steppe nomads were expected to appreciate the arrival of new colonists because, as Catherine said with the Kalmyks in mind in 1766, settlers would impress them with “their talent, their crafts, and their hard work” (svoim isskustvom, rukodeliem i prilezhaniem), not to mention many products “as yet unknown to them.”140 Most nomads undoubtedly saw things differently. Settlers—depending on the situation— might be perceived as a nuisance, as the avant-garde of expropriation, as potential renters, or simply as new people with whom to raid or trade. Colonists saw the nomads in similarly practical terms. Depending on circumstances, they might be feared as malevolent raiders and stock rustlers, cursed as enemies of Christ, resented as inconsiderate neighbors whose herds trampled their crops, or recognized as people one could work with (or take advantage of) to obtain a good piece of ground. “Pioneer” landlords, like the Timashevs, Mansurovs, Ermolaevs, and Krashennikovs in Orenburg District, exploiting the government’s increasingly “soft” line on the commercialization of Bashkir land and, offering feasts and barrels of vodka to their Bashkir sellers, bought hundreds and thousands of desiatinas of steppe land for just a few hundred rubles between the 1760s and 1790s.141 Plebeian comers, mostly “iasak-paying new Christians” as well as Tatars, Mishars, Teptiars, and Russian state peasants from the Middle Volga region, followed in the steps of their predecessors and went to Bashkiria as “people who have been let in,” signing officially mandated rental agreements (also on favorable terms) with the Bashkirs.142 The buyers, renters, and native sellers would agree to keep the announced prices even lower than they already were to avoid excessive “duties,” and the Bashkirs would then receive additional “signing bonuses” (tamgovye dengi) for putting their “marks” (tamgy) on the contract (kupchaia) and agreeing “not to let [any other settlers] come in.”143 (Local officials also received kickbacks.) Of course, the land was rarely well surveyed or surveyed at all—the General Land Survey did not even begin in Orenburg until 1798—and the same parcel might be rented or sold several times to different people or simply seized by renters who remained on the land after 140 “Ukaz k nakhodiashchemu pri kalmytskikh delakh podpolkovniku Kishenskovu,” SIRIO, 1889, v. 67, p. 202. 141 D.N. Sokolov, Orenburgskaia guberniia: Geograficheskii ocherk (Moscow, 1916), pp. 94–95; M.M. Kulisharipov, “Zemel'naia politika tsarizma v Bashkirii v kontse xviii–nachale xix v.,” Vestnik moskovskogo universiteta, ser. 9, Istoriia, 1972, n. 4, pp. 56–58. See also N.A. Chuloshnikova, “Ocherk istorii bashkirskogo zemlevladeniia do izdaniia ukaza 1832 goda,” Trudy orenburgskogo obshchestva izucheniia kirgizskogo kraia, 1921, v. 1, p. 26, 34. 142 See, for example, Materialy po istorii Bashkirskoi ASSR (Moscow, 1960), v. 5, pp. 108–19 passim. 143 Ibid., p. 114.

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their leases expired. All of this led to conflict, the “poverty and ruin” of the Bashkirs (as many of their petitioners themselves put it), and more “confusions” (neuriaditsy) than the government could address.144 Indeed, the government was part of the confusion because it announced itself the guarantor of the Bashkirs’ “proprietary rights” (votchinnye prava), while at the same time largely condoning their continuing loss of property. Unsurprisingly, such complexities and shortcomings had no impact at all on the elite’s evolving mythology of colonization. Presided over by the great Minerva, colonization appeared to be banishing emptiness and creating productivity, erasing barbarism and spreading civilization, and, seen in these terms, there was nothing wrong or complicated about it at all. As Prince Potemkin put it in 1786 in reference to New Russia, his principal bailiwick and Catherine’s favorite colonization zone, “This country, with your care, has been turned from a place of uninhabited steppes into a garden of abundance, from a lair of beasts to a pleasing refuge for peoples from all countries.”145 Miracles of transformation were celebrated, and even as some foreign and domestic detractors accused Potemkin of exaggerating his achievements (“Potemkin villages”), few doubted the essential rightness of the prince’s “civilizing motif” or hesitated to celebrate the empress as a benevolent progress-producing demiurge: “She [Catherine] speaks, and the fruitless deserts are transformed into a garden. . . . She looks at the fields, and the corn then ripens.”146 The newly conquered plains north of the Black Sea, as the state’s premier colonizing arena, were singled out for especially ecstatic visions of transformation, but even the Orenburg steppe, which had been formally within the empire for two centuries, was considered by its leaders to be “as yet in a state of infancy,” awaiting a promising future of “agriculture and increasing population.”147 There was a growing sense, too, that there was something deeply Russian about the country’s colonizing activity. As Vasilii Tred'iakovskii noted in his On the Origins of the Rosses, “The view that the name of the Russians (rossiane) derives from [the word for] spreading around (razseianie) is so 144 Chuloshnikova, “Ocherki istorii bashkirskogo zemlevladeniia,” pp. 36–38; Kulisharipov, “Zemel'naia politika tsarizma v Bashkirii,” p. 53. 145 “Sobstvennoruchnye bumagi kn. Potemkina-Tavricheskogo,” RA, 1865, v. 3, p. 394. 146 From the “Birthday Ode to Catherine” by Ermil Kostrov (1781) cited in Baehr, The Paradise Myth in Eighteenth-Century Russia: Utopian Patterns in Early Secular Russian Literature and Culture, p. 66. On the myth of “Potemkin villages” and the Prince’s “civilizing motif,” see A.M. Panchenko, “Potemkinskie derevni kak kul’turnyi mif,” XVIII Vek, 1983, v. 14, pp. 93–95, 100. See also Simon Sebag Montefiore, Prince of Princes: The Life of Potemkin (London, 2000), pp. 379–83. 147 V.I. Lamanskii (ed.), “Zapiska orenburgskogo gubernatora Reinsdorfa o nedostatkakh vverennoi ego upravleniiu gubernii 1770 g.,” Vestnik imperatorskogo russkogo geograficheskogo obshchestva, 1859, pt. 29, p. 95.

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widespread that to disagree with it is to submit oneself to accusations of stubbornness and arrogance.”148 (Apparently willing to suffer the abuse, Tred'iakovskii did indeed disagree with this idea, though not before acknowledging that “the dispersal of the Russians” was nonetheless “a famous and certifiable fact.”)149 A few decades later the Academician Johann Georgi still listed the derivation as a theory that could explain the origin of the national name. Even if other explanations seemed more convincing, it was at least plausible that the Russians could once have been known as “the Spread Out Ones” (razseianne) because they had indeed “spread themselves out across much of the globe.”150 Naturalized as a simple “fact” of national behavior, associated with the useful transformation of peoples and places, and fully recognized as a necessary preoccupation of the state, colonization—and in particular, the colonization of the steppe—seemed too good a thing for knowing Russians to see as a bad proposition. If there were problems, they could be fixed with even more colonization. 148 Vasilii Tred'iakovskii, “Tri razsuzhdeniia o trekh glavneishikh drevnostiakh rossiiskikh,” in Sochineniia Tred'iakovskogo (St. Petersburg, 1849), v. 3, p. 473. The proposed etymology appears to have begun with, or was at least first recorded by, Tatishchev. See “Vvedenie k istoricheskomu i geograficheskomu opisaniiu velikorossiiskoi imperii,” (1744) in V.N. Tatishchev, Izbrannye trudy po geografii Rossii (Moscow, 1950), p. 144. 149 Tred'iakovskii, “Tri razsuzhdeniia o trekh glavneishikh drevnostiakh rossiiskikh,” p. 473. 150 Georgi, Opisanie vsekh obitaiushchikh v rossiiskom gosudarstve narodov, v. 2, pt. 4., p. 75.

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“Ural Cossack Outpost,” from Emelian Mikhailovich Korneev, Narody Rossii (Paris, 1812). Reproduced in Kostium narodov Rossii v grafike 18–20 vekov (USSR Cultural Advertising Bureau, USSR Ministry of Culture, Moscow, 1990), p. 19.

C h a p t e r Th r e e

Bureaucratic Colonization It is the sinfullest thing in the world to forsake or destitute a plantation once in forwardness. Francis Bacon, Of Plantations

The Vastness and the Nation In 1812, the Russian Empire increased the steppe land under its control by annexing the formerly Ottoman territory of Bessarabia. (The original plan had been “to liberate” the Danubian principalities as a whole, but the Russians’ military offensive against the Turks produced a stalemate, and Alexander I had to settle for Bessarabia alone due to deteriorating relations with Napoleon.) Colonization was on everyone’s mind, even before the annexation. Military commanders on the ground wanted to populate the “newly acquired oblast” so that it could provide a logistical base for future campaigns against the Turks. Ministers in St. Petersburg saw its potential for agriculture and commerce (and accordingly rewarded themselves with generous Bessarabian estates). The military governor of Kherson Province viewed the region as a source for “Trans-Danubians” who could settle his own territory. Moldavian boyars from the right bank of the Prut, courted by the Russians, saw a relocation to the left bank as an easy way to acquire land while retaining “their local laws, customs, and privileges.” And a variety of plebeian refugees and settlers (legal and illegal, foreign and domestic) envisioned the territory as a “God-given opportunity” where they were sure to be better off than they were at home.1 Besides the Ottomans, the only people who undoubtedly did not want the 1 George F. Jewsbury, The Russian Annexation of Bessarabia, 1774–1828: A Study of Imperial Expansion (New York, 1976), pp. 30–54, 58–60, 68–69, 72–73; V.M. Kabuzan, Narodonaselenie bessarabskoi oblasti i levoberezhnykh raionov pridnestrov'ia (konets xviii–pervaia polovina xix v.) (Kishinev, 1974), pp. 21–26.

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region colonized were its nomadic residents, approximately seven thousand Bucak Nogays who lived in the environs of Akkerman; but they were removed by Russian occupation forces to “their brothers” in New Russia in 1807.2 Given the attractions, Bessarabia, not surprisingly, saw a rapid influx of settlers, though in 1812, even after several years of indiscriminate colonization, an official survey reported that the oblast contained a mere 43,160 inhabitants (male souls).3 The eagerness of Russian authorities in the new century to continue colonizing their steppes was matched by the readiness of the Russian public to continue participating in the region’s symbolic appropriation. Something in the tone of the appropriation changed, however. As Romanticism began to make its impact on Russian high culture, “wild” peoples became commendable contrasts to civilization while “wild” nature became a salve for the overly refined soul—all of which quickly made the empire’s undeniably “wild” borderlands much more attractive.4 Deemed as good a venue as any for uncovering noble savagery and dreadful splendor, the natural condition of the steppe received a new cachet. Thus the poet M. K. reveled in the evocative sublime of the grasslands (“How beautiful you are, my dear steppe! / How still and deserted . . . / How [your] blue vastness calls to me”); Semen Raich identified with the melancholy of the rootless tumbleweed (perekati-pole); Aleksandr Pushkin, on his way to Arzrum (Erzurum), found himself tempted by the “wild beauty” of a Kalmyk girl who could not even begin to think of “prattling in French” and knew nothing of Shakespeare; and Pavel Kudriashev, “Singer of Picturesque Bashkiria, the Fast-Moving Ural, and the Limitless Steppes of the Kirgiz-Kaissaks,” devoted much of his short life to translating Bashkir songs about their legendary warriors (batyri), whom he described as “similar to ancient knights, though with a distinctly Bashkir character.”5 When 2 A.A. Sergeev, “Nogaitsy na Molochnykh Vodakh, 1790–1832: Istoricheskii ocherk,” ITUAK, 1912, v. 48, pp. 32–35. 3 Jewsbury, Russian Annexation of Bessarabia, p. 57. The historical demographer Vladimir Kabuzan estimates the region’s total population in 1812 to have been closer to three hundred thousand. Kabuzan, Narodonaselenie Bessarabskoi oblasti, p. 27. 4 R.F. Iusufov, Russkii romantizm nachala xix veka i natsional'nye kul'tury (Moscow, 1970), pp. 66–194; Yuri Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North (Ithaca, N.Y., 1994), pp. 73–74; Mark Bassin, “Inventing Siberia: Visions of the Russian East in the Early Nineteenth Century,” AHR, 1991, v. 96, n. 3, pp. 782–84; Monika Greenleaf, Pushkin and Romantic Fashion: Fragment, Elegy, Orient, Irony (Stanford, Calif., 1994), pp. 108–55; Susan Layton, Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy (New York, 1994); Katya Hokanson, “Literary Imperialism, Narodnost', and Pushkin’s Invention of the Caucasus,” RR, 1994, v. 53, n. 3, pp. 336–52. 5 M.K., “Moia step',” Teleskop, 1835, pt. 28, pp. 414–15; A.S. Pushkin, “Kal'mychke” in Pushkin, Sochineniia, v. 1, Stikhotvoreniia 1814–1836 godov, skazki (Moscow, 1971), p. 275; Raich, “Perekati-pole,” in Urania: Karmannaia knizhka na 1826 god dlia liu-

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not busily reinventing nomads, Russian Byrons and Coopers did much the same thing with Cossacks, turning them into “mythic heroes . . . intimately in touch with national origins and the elemental power of nature.”6 With the turn of the century came renewed excitement about Oriental and classical pasts. The philosophes’ fascination with Greco-Roman antiquity, arabesques, and chinoiseries met the Romantics’ awe for the seamlessness of time and the original truths of ancestral cultures (not to mention the “glorification of the active, dynamic, and imaginative self”) and a new sensibility was born.7 Kurgans, “stone women” (stelae), and Greek ruins began new careers as evocative reminders of bygone ages and Romantically inspired travelers and scientists canvassed the steppe (literally and figuratively) to hunt them down. Petr Keppen began his survey of the ruins of the Crimea (“that most marvelous of countries”) with a reference to the “terrifying Tavrians” who once sacrificed shipwrecked sailors to their gods on the southern coast.8 Other historically inclined Russians felt the titillating shiver of the ancient past as they parsed Herodotus (“Scythia! The word alone provokes nervous fear and desperate curiosity!”) or traveled through the ruins of Tatar settlements in Bessarabia “now overgrown with tall grasses, yet . . . filled with the cloying smell of wild plants that remind one of the residents of past times.”9 “Antiquities” became display pieces in newly opened archeological museums (Odessa [1825], Kerch [1826], Orenburg [1831]), and the territories of ancient peoples were depicted in “archeological atlases” superimposed on the Russian provinces they formerly occupied.10 Interested readers could thus bitel'nits i liubitelei russkoi slovesnosti (Moscow, 1825; reprint: Moscow, 1998), pp. 60–61; “Petr Mikhailovich Kudriashev, pevets kartinnoi Bashkirii, bystrogo Urala i bezpredel'nykh stepei Kirgis-Kaisatskikh,” OZ, 1828, n. 100, p. 149. For other examples of steppe-inspired poetic rapture, see S. Baranovskii, “Kurgan,” Sovremennik, 1842, v. 26, pp. 96–97; E.P. Grebenka, “Step',” Sovremennik, 1844, v. 35, p. 106; and K. Evripidin, “Step',” Teleskop, 1835, pt. 29, pp. 236–37. 6 Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, The Cossack Hero in Russian Literature: A Study in Cultural Mythology (Madison, Wis., 1992), pp. 21, 24. 7 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1979); Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East (Gene Patterson-Black and Victor Reinking, trans.) (New York, 1984), pp. 51–128; Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, The Emergence of Romanticism (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1992), pp. 70–71; Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism (Henry Hardy, ed.) (Princeton, N.J., 1999), p. 93. 8 Petr Keppen (Peter Köppen), O drevnostiiakh iuzhnogo berega Kryma i gor tavricheskikh (St. Petersburg, 1837), p. 1. 9 N. Nadezhdin, “Gerodotova Skifiia ob"iasnennaia chrez slichenie s mestnostiami,” ZOOID, 1844, v. 1, p. 8; “Vospominaniia o Bessarabii,” Sovremennik, 1837, v. 7. 10 V. Iurgevich, Istoricheskii ocherk piatidesiatiletiia imperatorskogo odesskogo obshchestva istorii i drevnostei, 1839–1889 (Odessa, 1889), p. 41; Iu.S. Zobov, “Prosveshchenie i kul'tura v pervoi polovine xix v.,” Orenburg (Cheliabinsk, 1993), p. 61; and Jean Potocki, Atlas archéologique de la Russie européenne (St. Petersburg, 1805).

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tell at a glance whether their province had once been inhabited by the “Scythians, Sakes, and Skolotes (of the Tatar race)” according to Herodotus or later became the land of the Pechenegs or Khazars “according to . . . Constantine Porphyrogenitus.”11 That all of it was now the land of the Russian state was obvious. The new emotionally charged image of the steppe was best expressed by the region’s most famous visitor, the international scientific celebrity Alexander von Humboldt. A globe-trotting disciple of Romantic science who described his life’s mission as “the earnest endeavor . . . to represent nature as one great whole, moved and animated by internal forces,”12 Humboldt spent seven months in Russia in 1829 touring, sampling, and taking measurements between St. Petersburg and Tobolsk, including five weeks on the steppes between Orenburg and the Lower Volga.13 The goal of the trip, generously funded by the Russian government, was to investigate the geology of the Urals and the Altai as well as the hydrology of the Caspian basin, but the Freiherr admitted that there was little likelihood of making great discoveries “in such well-studied regions,” and his own prime motivation seems to have been simple wanderlust.14 (As he wrote to the Russian finance minister toward the end of the expedition, “I cannot get enough of admiring your country; I cannot die without seeing the Caspian Sea!”)15 His impressions of the steppe—integrated with reflections on the world’s other plains, pampas, llanos, savannas, and deserts— were accordingly both scientific and Romantic, mixing dread (“Thus swept a pestilential breath from the Mongolian deserts over the fair Cisalpine soil, stifling the tender, long-cherished blossoms of art!”) with splendor (“The Steppe fills the mind with a sense of the infinite”) and not forgetting evocative botanical description: On crossing the trackless portions of the herb-covered Steppes in the carriages of the Tartars, it is necessary to stand upright in order to ascertain the direction to be pursued through the copse-like and closely crowded plants that bend under the wheels. Some of the Steppes are covered with grass; oth11 Potocki, Atlas archéologique, maps 1 and 6. 12 Alexander von Humboldt, Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe

(New York, 1859), v. 1, p. vii. 13 Humboldt describes the scientific conclusions of his travels in the empire in Séance extraordinaire tenue par l’Académie Impériale des sciences de St.-Pétersbourg en l’honneur de M. le Baron Alexandre de Humboldt du 16 Novembre 1829 (St. Petersburg, 1829), pp. 29–44. For the routes and stages of the expedition, see Perepiska Aleksandra Gumbol'dta s uchenymi i gosudarstvennymi deiateliami Rossii (Moscow, 1962), pp. 7–13, 200–203. 14 Perepiska Aleksandra Gumbol'dta, p. 8. 15 Ibid., p. 12.

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Yet if Romanticism brought a new tone to descriptions of the steppe, it did not banish old impressions. Indeed, the Romantics were themselves highly ambivalent about the full allure of the steppe and its traditional residents (Pushkin’s “Kalmyk girl,” for example, appeared at once enticing and revolting). Consequently, for everyone except the most ardent of the new primitivists, the negative continued to outweigh the positive. In the end, the still mostly unsettled landscape of the plains remained “depressing” and “monotonous” (not to mention “dangerous for the traveler”); Cossacks were still somewhat crude, and steppe nomads persisted in being more savage than noble.17 Bashkirs, for example, might be “endowed by nature with considerable insight, but they have no learning. They are resilient, suspicious, opinionated, tough, and, as a result, dangerous”; while Nogays were “pleasant, sincere, serious, and hospitable yet also somewhat wild, unkempt, ignorant, and inclined to thievery.”18 To idealize nomads was simply naive. As the ethnographer Aleksei Levshin suggested, referring to the Kazakhs, though he could have been describing any of the pastoralists of the European steppe: “The simplicity of their way of life, so close to nature, offers an interesting spectacle to the novelist or poet. . . . But the more thoughtful traveler will recognize [these nomads] as nothing more than half-savages, like the Scythians of Herodotus, the Mongols of Chengiz, the Bedouins of today, the Kurds . . . and other uncivilized races of Africa and Asia.”19 16 Alexander von Humboldt, Views of Nature: or Contemplations on the Sublime Phenomena of Creation; with Scientific Illustrations (London, 1850; reprint: New York, 1975), p. 4. The preceding citations are drawn from pages two and five. For an early Russian translation of Humboldt’s steppe-based impressions, see A. Gumbol'dt, “O stepiakh,” Moskovskii telegraf, 1829, pt. 29, n. 18, pp. 151–80. 17 Pavel Sumarokov, Puteshestvie po vsemu Krymu i Bessarabii v 1799 godu s istoricheskim i topograficheskim opisaniem vsekh tekh mest' (Moscow, 1800), p. 6; Iosif Debu, Topograficheskoe i statisticheskoe opisanie orenburgskoi gubernii (Moscow, 1837), p. 3; P.S., “Pis'ma s Kavkaza,” Moskovskii telegraf, 1830, pt. 33, n. 10, p. 174; Georges de Meyendorff, Voyage d’Orenbourg à Tashkent fait en 1820 (Paris, 1826), p. 11; “Elizavetpol'skaia dolina (pis'mo iz Gruzii),” Moskovskii telegraf, 1826, pt. 8, sect. 1, pp. 28–29; N.B. Golitsyn, “Poezdka v poludennuiu Rossiiu i k beregam Tavridy v 1844 godu,” Moskvitianin, 1845, pt. 3, p. 149; and S.V. Soplenkov, Doroga v Arzrum: Rossiiskaia obshchestvennaia mysl' o vostoke (pervaia polovina xix veka) (Moscow, 2000), p. 15. 18 These descriptions appear in N.S. Vsévolojsky, Dictionnaire géographique-historique de l’empire de Russie (Moscow, 1813), v. 2, p. 32, and v. 1, p. 17. 19 Alexis de Levshin, Déscriptions des hordes et des steppes des Kirghiz-Kazaks ou KirghizKaïssaks (Paris, 1840), p. 309.

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Levshin was writing in 1840 at a time when reverence for the Orient was turning into dismay over its supposed stagnation and degeneracy. But even in the heyday of Romanticism, nomads still appeared more deplorable than admirable. The most telling proof lay in their classification. During the first decades of the nineteenth century, in state decrees and public commentary, the nomads largely ceased to be generically categorized as “peoples of another faith” and instead became “peoples of another birth,” or “aliens” (inorodtsy).20 Although never uniformly defined, the new term implied a condition of backward non-Russianness and was most often used to describe native easterners and southerners— that is, peoples of the steppe, the Middle Volga, the Urals, the Caucasus, and Siberia ( Jews were also included). By contrast, the designation only infrequently extended to Poles, Finns, Balts, and European colonists, because these groups, while obviously non-Russian, nonetheless met or at least approached educated Russians’ accepted definition of civilized living. (Orthodox and “sectarian” Slavic peasants and Cossacks were also considered uncivilized in the eyes of the state and most of “society,” but because they were “Russians” they could never be aliens.) In other words, steppe nomads might possess certain appealing qualities, and a few Romantically inspired champions of primitivism might even argue that they were true exemplars of “natural man,” but this was not enough to keep them—along with the rest of the empire’s backward natives—from being stamped as “congenital and apparently perennial outsiders.”21 Yet much as before, backward natives could be improved, and the Russians’ civilizing mission remained one of bringing their “enlightenment” (prosveshchenie) to those “distant . . . sons of another language and faith” who were somehow managing to live without it.22 For distant nomads, the successful transmission of enlightenment inevitably required sedentarization, and, it continued to be expected of all “wandering tribes.” Whether these nomads were organized as Cossacks (like the Bashkirs and some of the Kalmyks) or lived under Russian civilian administrations (like the rest of the Kalmyks and the Nogays of the Azov region and the North Caucasus), their ultimate destination was the “settled life.” The intensity of the state’s efforts to promote sedentarism varied, however, and was directly related to calculations of utility. If a given group of nomads seemed useful 20 Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors, p. 53; Andreas Kappeler, Russland als Vielvölkerreich: Entstehung, Geschichte, Zerfall (Munich, 1993), pp. 140, 225; John W. Slocum, “Who, and When, Were the Inorodtsy? The Evolution of the Category of ‘Aliens’ in Imperial Russia,” RR, 1998, v. 57, n. 2, pp. 178–82; and Paul W. Werth, At the Margins of Orthodoxy: Mission, Governance, and Confessional Politics in Russia’s Volga-Kama Region, 1827–1905 (Ithaca, N.Y., 2002), pp. 127–30. 21 Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors, p. 53. 22 Cited in A.S. Kaisarov, “Rech' o liubvi k otechestvu,” SO, 1813, pt. 7, n. 27, p. 17.

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enough as Cossacks despite their nomadic or seminomadic state, or if they lived on lands that were either undesirable or removed enough from areas of peasant settlement that they were not a problem, the transition to agriculture was considered less urgent. The Bashkirs, Kalmyks, and Nogays in Caucasus Province fell into these categories, and serious efforts at sedentarizing them were not pursued until the 1830s or later.23 By contrast, the campaign to sedentarize the seventeen thousand Nogays of Azov, considered inadequate Cossack material and located in a district seeing rapid settlement, began in 1805. In May of that year, a special Nogay administration was created with the express purpose of introducing this “rude people . . . to the great advantages of the settled over the nomadic life,”24 and when Dmitrii Mertvago, the governor of Tauris Province, met with the Nogay “elders” on the steppe shortly thereafter to deliver the news, he urged them to welcome the change: Talking with them of ways in which they could live better, [I] advised them to try to imitate the German colonists who were settled next to their lands, to build more durable homes, put more land to the plow, and dig wells where there was abundant pasture for their herds. All [those assembled] expressed their desire to do these things and requested a subsidy.25

Officials like Mertvago styled themselves as the benevolent tutors and guardians (popechiteli) of their “voiceless” charges.26 Consequently, the pursuit of the “settled life” was supposed to be gentle, and the nomads’ turn toward Russian/European culture was to occur naturally over the very long term. Wanderers were encouraged to take “to the plow” with incentives such as financial subsidies, free seeds, and equipment, with the most noteworthy new sedentarists receiving imperial medals for their efforts. Local officials interceded to keep their fledgling farms free from the encroachments of incoming settlers and potential “shortages of land” while at the same time urging more settlement so that nomads could “unite with the Russians and receive new understandings and a better way of think-

23 R.Z. Ianguzin, “Meropriatiia tsarskogo pravitel'stva po perevodu bashkir k osedlosti i zemledeliiu v period kantonnogo upravleniia (1798–1865 gg.),” in Sostsial'no-ekonomicheskoe razvitie i klassovaia bor'ba na iuzhnom urale i srednem povol'zhe: Mezhvuzovskii sbornik (Ufa, 1988), pp. 67–71; Ocherki istorii kalmytskoi assr (dooktiabrskii period) (Moscow, 1967), v. 1, pp. 226–29, 232–33, 246–47. 24 PSZ, ser. 1, v. 28, n. 21752 (1804), p. 1033. 25 A. Skal'kovskii, “O nogaiskikh tatarakh zhivushchikh v tavricheskoi gubernii,” ZhMNP, 1843, pt. 40, sect. 2, p. 159. See also Sergeev, “Nogaitsy na molochnykh vodakh,” p. 28. 26 This adjective was used in reference to the Bashkirs by Orenburg Military Governor Petr Essen in 1824. See TsGIARB, f. I-2, op. 1, d. 1671, l. 1(b).

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ing.”27 Aiming for this sort of improvement, the Russian language was taught to small numbers of nomad schoolboys, who (it was hoped) would someday go on to “read Lomonosov and Racine while sitting in their felt tents;”28 and eventual conversion to Orthodoxy was anticipated as the aliens moved closer to Russian “civility” (grazhdanstvennost' ), but neither was imposed by fiat. Indigenous languages continued to be used by nomads in their interactions with their Russian overlords, while forced conversions to Orthodoxy remained officially banned among Muslims due to security concerns. Missionary activity was even unpronounced among the Kalmyks, despite some acceleration of efforts in the 1820s.29 Of course, notwithstanding their constant repetition in official decrees and correspondence, gentleness and toleration did not always prevail. Overzealous Russian officials in the 1830s apparently forced their Bashkir charges to practice plowing in the snow, while in 1812, the Nogays’ “Russian overseer” (russkii pristav), a Frenchman by the name of de Maisons, was so annoyed that 407 Nogay “households” had failed to build houses while the rest continued to live next to the newly built homes in their nomadic tents that he had the tents confiscated and burned, making “stationary housing” the only option.30 The results of these heavy-handed efforts (as well as gentler ones) were mixed. Despite sedentarizing initiatives of varying intensity, most of the Kalmyks of Astrakhan were still “wanderers” in the 1850s, while Bashkirs persisted in being seminomadic, as did Nogays, despite the fact that the Nogay administration was declared a success in 1832 and its supposedly sedentary beneficiaries were recategorized as state peasants.31 Sedentarized or not, however, real steppe nomads were far from the main concern of the Russian public in the early nineteenth century. Indeed, by this point, the steppe’s primary importance in Russian high culture had largely ceased to have anything to do with the steppe itself and was instead a function of the symbolic role it could play in what was rap27 Ianguzin, “Meropriatiia tsarskogo pravitel'stva,” pp. 67–71; DAKO, f. 26, op. 1, d. 5638, l. 13–13(b), 16–16(b); R. Vibe, “Proiskhozhdenie obraztsovoi nogaiskoi kolonii Akkerman,” ZhMGI, 1855, v. 54, otd. 1, p. 99; N. Nefedev, Podrobnye svedeniia o volzhskikh kalmykakh sobrannye na meste (St. Petersburg, 1834), p. 124. 28 “Kartina Orenburga i ego okrestnostei (iz zhivopisnogo puteshestviia po Rossii izdatelia ot. zap., v 1824 godu),” OZ, 1828, pt. 35, n. 99, p. 27. The reference in this instance is to the “sons of Kazakh sultans and Bashkir functionaries” schooled at the Nepliuev school in the town of Orenburg. 29 Dittmar Schorkowitz, “The Orthodox Church, Lamaism, and Shamanism among the Buriats and Kalmyks, 1825–1925,” in Robert P. Geraci and Michael Khodarkovsky (eds.), Of Religion and Empire: Missions, Conversion, and Tolerance in Tsarist Russia (Ithaca, 2001), p. 215. 30 E. fon Knaut, “Ob otnoshenii administratsii k narodnomu khoziaistvu,” in Sbornik statei, pomeshchennykh v orenburgskikh gubernskikh vedomostiiakh za 1862 god (Ufa, 1862), p. 303; Sergeev, “Nogaitsy na molochnykh vodakh,” p. 32. 31 Sergeev, “Nogaitsy na molochnykh vodakh,” p. 66.

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idly becoming the Russian elite’s most absorbing pastime: the enthusiastic and self-conscious search for Russian nationality (narodnost'). Enlightenment visions of universalist national development were fading. Romantic notions of organic and individual nationality were growing. And Russia’s calm passage through the revolutionary upheavals of the late eighteenth century, followed by its rebuke of Napoleon in 1812, seemed absolute proof to the Russian educated class that their nation was unique.32 Defining this uniqueness proved somewhat complicated, however. Was Russian nationality a matter of believing in the Orthodox Church, the state, and the Romanov dynasty (Official Nationality) or was it a “spirit” rooted in the sayings, songs, traditions, kasha, and kvass of the folk (cultural nationality à la Herder)? Did the Russians’ “national character” express itself in the constantly thwarted search for freedom or in the persistent embrace of autocracy? Were all Russians Great Russians, with a few minor regional variations, or were Little Russians, now also known as Southern Russians, so distinct from “northerners” as to be a nation unto themselves? Much was at stake in these questions, and thus much work went into answering them. Ancient manuscripts, songs, and folk epics were collected (then “purified, corrected, and reworked”);33 historical and literary societies were founded; and many dusty versts were crossed because, as the Polish seeker of narodnost' Zorian Chodakowski put it in 1819, “This epoch is practically not to be found in books; it is scattered throughout the whole expanse of our land and requires many more sacrifices and special dedication.”34 The results of this dedication as they applied to the steppe created contradictory historical images that were to have a long life in elite culture. Romantic nationalists of a liberal persuasion evoked the steppe’s past of popular rebellion (when they could get their evocations past the censor) while Romantic and dynastic conservatives maligned rebellious Cossacks and extolled “patriotic” ones; and Great Russian nationalists claimed the steppe’s historical association with ancient Rus' and its Cossack lore for themselves, 32 See Nathaniel Knight, “Constructing the Science of Nationality: Ethnography in Mid-Nineteenth Century Russia” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1994), pp. 67–86; Mark Bassin, Imperial Visions: Nationalist Imagination and Geographical Expansion in the Russian Far East, 1840–1865 (New York, 1999), pp. 37–45; David Saunders, “Historians and Concepts of Nationality in Early Nineteenth-Century Russia,” SEER, 1982, v. 60, n. 1, pp. 44–62; Nicholas Riasanovsky, Nicholas I and Official Nationality in Russia, 1825–1855 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1959), pp. 124–67. 33 Quotation from Giuseppe Cocchiara, The History of Folklore in Europe (Philadelphia, 1981), p. 259. On early nineteenth-century folklore and proto-ethnography, see also S.A. Tokarev, Istoriia russkoi etnografii (dooktiabr'skii period) (Moscow, 1966), pp. 179–206; and Knight, “Constructing the Science of Nationality,” pp. 51–63, 68–71, 74–82. 34 Cited in Saunders, “Historians and Concepts of Nationality,” p. 51.

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while “Little Russian” nationalists did the same. Ultimately, however, the conservative Great Russian position predominated because the conservative Great Russian nationalists were in charge. When it came to historical views of Russia’s relations with the steppe nomads, however, the differences between the various sorts of nationalists were largely insignificant. Everyone agreed that the Russians were victims, that the nomads were brutal aggressors, and that it had been the Russians’ destiny to avenge their humiliations, throw off the Tatar yoke, turn themselves into “rulers over Batu’s descendants,” and expand the national patrimony toward “the boundaries set by nature herself—the Ural Mountains, the shores of the Caspian, the Caucasus, and the Black Sea.”35 Russian historians still felt the need to compare themselves to the West—only now there really was no comparison. The Russians were better all around, and Russia’s historical entanglement with the steppe provided additional proof. Like the Muscovite chroniclers, the nationalist historians found virtue and distinction in the country’s afflictions. As the historian Nikolai Karamzin noted in 1802, although it was true that other European peoples had also spent time “in bondage,” “at least our conquerors [the Mongols and their descendants] terrorized [the world] from east to west. . . . And what other people so gloriously shattered the chains that bound them? So gloriously avenged their fearsome enemies?”36 Building on the trends of earlier writing, history was now clearly destiny. “The blood of holy Russian heroes” spilled during the Rout of Mamay (1380) was the same blood spilled in the fight against Napoleon,37 and Russia’s long historical advance into the steppe frontier was ultimately unstoppable. Writing in 1836, the prolific chronicler of New Russia, Apollon Skal'kovskii, offered the following typical assessment: From beyond the Dniepr came the first Russian [russkie] and foreign warriors and farmers to the New Russian steppe. They built homes there, and, as their power and numbers inevitably increased, they moved farther and farther south, and they did not stop until the Russian [eagle’s] Black Wings were unfurled across the shores of the Black and Azov Seas, until the entire steppe

35 Seymour Becker, “Contributions to a Nationalist Ideology: Histories of Russia in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century,” RH, 1986, v. 13, n. 4, pp. 333–37. The quoted phrases belong to Nikolai Karamzin and Nikolai Ustrialov. See also Seymour Becker, “The Muslim East in Nineteenth-Century Popular Historiography,” Central Asian Survey, 1986, v. 5, n. 3/4, pp. 30–35. 36 Nikolai Karamzin, “O liubvi k otechestvu i narodnoi gordosti,” in his Izbrannye stat'i i pis'ma (Moscow, 1982), p. 95. 37 This parallel was drawn in a proposal submitted in 1824 by the governor of Tula for a monument to be built at Kulikovo Field along with a home for wounded veterans of 1812. RGIA, f. 1308, op. 1, d. 88, l. 3–3(b). The monument, an obelisk with a bronze inscription, was erected a few years later. See “Rossiiskie pamiatniki,” Slavianin, 1827, v. 1, n. 3, sect. 2, pp. 25–32.

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Bureaucratic Colonization from the Danube to Kremenchug became a great and flourishing Russian region [oblast' russkaia].38

To Skal'kovskii and other like-minded contemporaries, the inevitability of Russia’s presence on the steppe made perfect sense given that the region was indeed becoming increasingly “Russian.” With the annexation of Bessarabia, the tsarist state’s last annexation of territory on the European steppe, the whole immense area between the lower Danube and the Ural Rivers fell within the empire. By now the territory was divided into imperial counties, districts, and provinces (gubernii) or regions (oblasti) under the rule of governors subordinated to governors-general, military governors, or viceroys. It was likewise divided into parishes and bishoprics under the rule of the Holy Synod. All the traditional inhabitants of the region, whether they liked it or not, were also the tsar’s subjects. In contrast to Slavic peasant migrants, Cossacks and nomads possessed their own administrations (this was also true of foreign colonists), rendered distinct obligations, and, in the case of Cossacks and certain Cossackized nomads, were organized into distinct territorial units. Muslims in the Crimea gained a “spiritual assembly,” while those in Orenburg retained theirs. Moldavian peasants (¸taran and other categories) had special privileges respected by tsarist decree. But everyone was under state rule, and no one was formally autonomous. Of course, because of the habitual problem of undergovernment, autonomy by default continued, but the state’s presumptions of power on the steppe were, if anything, increasing. After a short-lived experiment with rule “in accordance with the laws and social customs of the Bessarabian region,” Bessarabia was turned into a Russian oblast in 1828. Tauris Oblast (the Crimea) saw its relative “administrative autonomy” reduced as it officially became a “province” (guberniia) in 1802. The handling of Kalmyk affairs officially passed from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the Ministry of the Interior in 1825. And ten years later, the Land of the Don Host, whose territory escaped the standardization drive of the late eighteenth century and whose state-appointed atamans had long been able to do what they pleased (including seizing vast expanses of stanitsa land for themselves and the rest of the Don elite), was reorganized to bring it more in line with other Russian provinces.39 Under Nicholas, Cossack administrations were standardized, 38 A. Skal'kovskii, Khronologicheskoe obozrenie istorii novorossiiskogo kraia, 1730–1823 (Odessa, 1836), pt. 1, p. 7. 39 Boris Nolde, La Formation de l’empire russe: Études, notes, documents (Paris, 1953), v. 2, pp. 286–91; Ocherki istorii kalmytskoi assr, v. 1, p. 243; R.T. Deinikov, “Ot vassal'nogo khanstva osmanskoi imperii do tavricheskoi gubernii v sostave Rossii,” Otechestvennaia istoriia, 1999, n. 2, p. 87; Shane O’Rourke, Warriors and Peasants: The Don Cossacks in Late Imperial Russia (Basingstoke, Eng., 2000), p. 41.

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eliminating discrepancies between the hosts in order to create a single “Cossack estate.”40 Much as before, the steppe’s diverse non-Russian population, its “empty spaces” for colonization, relative lack of nobles or serfdom, high volume of international trade, and heavily militarized frontiers (in Orenburg and the North Caucasus especially) meant that the region remained in many respects a borderland distinct from “Russia.” That the court saw things this way is clear in that the plains were still a place where the tsars could send problematic people. The banished Pushkin penned his “southern poems” in Odessa and Bessarabia; and a number of Decembrists, Polish “conspirators,” and participants in military colony uprisings found themselves sentenced to Orenburg and the North Caucasus.41 Dukhobor “heretics” in 1802 likewise found themselves encouraged to relocate from Tambov, Voronezh, and other areas to steppes north of the Sea of Azov, in part because Tsar Alexander believed their new home would provide the isolation required for the “cancellation . . . of their heresy.”42 Yet ambiguities persisted, and the steppe’s distinctiveness remained at best unclear. In fact, for Russian elites the region seemed as much an extension of Russia as a territory distinguishable from it, and it was not necessarily a coherent region at all. A new round of investigators (official and scholarly) again pointed out that some “steppes” within the steppe were fertile while others were not,43 and none of the regionalist schemes proposed by imperial statisticians and geographers in the early nineteenth century treated the steppe provinces as a united area. Evdokim Ziablovskii’s “southern, or warm zone” included the steppes of New Russia, the Northern Caucasus, and the Lower Volga, but the plains between Saratov and Orenburg were part of the “temperate belt.” Karl German, basing himself “on the principle of land and climate,” divided the steppe provinces from west to east into three regions. Konstantin Arsenev split them into four, all of which overlapped with areas that were parts of “central Russia” or “Little Russia” and which, as he put it, represented “spaces completely distinct from one 40 N.A. Minenko et al. (eds.), Istoriia kazachestvo aziatskoi Rossii, v. 1, xvi–pervaia polovina xix veka (Ekaterinburg, 1995), p. 54. 41 Greenleaf, Pushkin and Romantic Fashion, p. 109; Iu.S. Zobov, “Orenburgskaia politicheskaia ssyl'ka,” Orenburg, pp. 56–59; E.A. Abulova, “Iz istorii vzaimootnoshenii intelligentsii severnogo Kavkaza i Rossii,” in Intelligentsiia severnogo Kavkaza v istorii Rossii: Materialy mezhregional'noi nauchnoi konferentsii (10–11 aprelia 1998 g.) (Stavropol', 1998), v. 1, p. 6. 42 Nicholas B. Breyfogle, “Heretics and Colonizers: Religious Dissent and Russian Colonization of Transcaucasia, 1830–1890” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1998), p. 44. 43 K.F. German, “O nyneshnom sostoianii zemledeliia v Rossii,” SO, 1814, pt. 14, n. 21, p. 56, and pt. 14, n. 22, p. 93.

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Moscow

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Uralsk W RUSSIA NE Taganrog IA Melitopol’ Rostov-on-Don Astrakhan’ RAB SSA Odessa Kherson BE Caucasus Perekop Line Kuba Stavropol’ Simferopol’ Ekaterinodar Mozdok Kizliar Sevastopol’ k R. ere Vladikavkaz BLACK SEA CA SPI A N CA UC ASU SEA S MO UN TA IN S

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Approximate extent of Russian controlled territory Russian defensive lines

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another in all respects.”44 Administrative and economic distinctions were likewise ambiguous. The steppe was ruled by governors-general, but so too were interior provinces (until 1837). The region was never singled out as its own entity in the various “official” federalist projects of Alexander’s time, and its nomadic aliens (in contrast to those of Siberia) never received a statute establishing a single legal order for their affairs. The western part of the steppe, including Kherson, Ekaterinoslav, and Tauris Provinces, with the exceptions of the cities of Nikolaev and Sebastopol', formed part of the Pale of Jewish Settlement (fully delineated by 1835), while the rest, like the Russian interior, was not. And with its growing Slavic peasant population, much of the region was increasingly characterized by an agricultural economy broadly similar to that of the Russian heartland. Because the steppe was indistinct, it was rarely referred to as a colony, though the term was by the 1810s periodically used in regard to Siberia and Transcaucasia, areas that still seemed evocatively alien, had either small or negligible Slavic populations, and were separated from “Russia” (by convention at least) by mountains.45 There was no sense that the steppe, because it was a place filling with colonists, was itself a colony separate from the metropole. Instead, the prevailing view was that the steppe was simply Russian. Calling it a colony or anything other than Russia was therefore moot. As the editor of the Geographical Dictionary of the Russian State (1801–9) suggested, repeating the basic outlines of a formula that had first evolved in the early eighteenth century, the Russian Empire consisted of “original and essential territories” (sushchestvennaia chast') (“Great Russia, Little Russia, White Russia, and Red Russia”) as well as territories that were “acquired” (priobretennaia chast'). But the only steppe areas that fit in the latter category were “part of Bessarabia” and the Crimea. The rest of the European steppe was included by default in the country’s “original and essential” domain, because the Russian state “in ancient times stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea . . . while to the east, its limits [were] unclear, though one can suggest the Urals.”46 In other words, New Russia, the Lower Volga, the Northern Caucasus, and the 44 B.A. Val'skaia, “Obzor raionirovaniia Rossii s kontsa xviii v. po 1861 g.,” Voprosy geografii, 1950, v. 17, pp. 146–54. 45 For references to Siberia and Transcaucasian lands as colonies, see K. Arsenev, Obozrenie fizicheskogo sostoianiia Rossii i vygod ot togo proistekaiushchikh dlia narodnykh promyslov, nyne sushchestvuiushchikh (St. Petersburg, 1818), p. 7; and Tadeusz Sweitochowski, Russia and Azerbaijan: A Borderland in Transition (New York, 1995), pp. 12–13. For one reference to New Russia as having the “characteristics of a colony,” see K.F. German, Statisticheskie issledovaniia otnositel'no rossiiskoi imperii (St. Petersburg, 1819), v. 1, p. 138. 46 A. Shchekatov (ed.), Geograficheskii slovar' rossiiskogo gosudarstva, sochinennyi v nastoiashchem onogo vide (Moscow, 1807), v. 5, col. 78–79, 140.

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Orenburg area were not “acquired” territories but were, if anything, reacquired ones. They were not lands beyond Russia but parts of Russia itself. The state’s ethos of rule on the steppe was also not appreciably different than it was in the Russian interior or anywhere else in the empire. With the coming of the new century, the essential values of enlightened cameralism and paternalism (the bases of Catherine’s well-ordered police state) remained sacrosanct, only now they were supplemented by an even greater faith in the benevolent power of order and administration.47 Government was to become more systematic and rational and subjects living under the rule of a systematized rational administration (Alexander’s understanding of the Rechtstaat) would inevitably become more rational and productive. As Alexander’s Swiss tutor put it in a letter to the tsar in 1803, “Once sound laws are instituted that are known to all and provide protection for one’s person and property against arbitrariness, and once courts staffed with virtuous men devoted to the study of law begin to execute these laws against any and all who violate them, then human industry will have no fear of advancing.”48 With the establishment of the ministerial system and the gradual formation of a class of trained ministerial officials during the early nineteenth century, a growing central bureaucracy became the chief agent for pursuing this goal of rational government and increased human industry. Officialdom, to its supporters, was a very good word indeed, and faith in the principled need for (if not always the reality of) bureaucratic government increased with the accession of Nicholas I. Officials were the systematizers of the will of the tsar, the guardians of order, the architects of maximized productivity, the pedagogues of “the people” (narod) and the aliens. There were no problems that bureaucracy could not solve, no hurdles that could not be overcome with a virtuous official and a list of printed instructions, and this way of thinking applied as readily in Taganrog as it did in Tula or Tambov.49 The most obvious difference in the governance of the steppe and the Russian interior was simply that the scope and urgency of official action 47 On the values and structures of early nineteenth century governance, see Marc Raeff, Michael Speransky: Statesman of Imperial Russia, 1772–1839 (The Hague, 1957), esp. pp. 29–48, 119–69; Walter M. Pintner, “The Evolution of Civil Officialdom, 1755–1855,” in Walter M. Pintner and Don Karl Rowney (eds.), Russian Officialdom: The Bureaucratization of Russian Society from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, 1980), pp. 190–226; George L. Yaney, The Systematization of Russian Government: Social Evolution in the Domestic Administration of Imperial Russia, 1711–1905 (Urbana, Ill., 1973), pp. 193–228; and Daniel T. Orlovsky, The Limits of Reform: The Ministry of Internal Affairs in Imperial Russia, 1802–1881 (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), pp. 13–29. 48 Jean Charles Biaudet and Françoise Nicod (comps.), Correspondance de FrédéricCésar de la Harpe et Alexandre Ier (Neuchatel, 1979), v. 2, p. 96. 49 On the “mythical power of paper” and “lists of instructions,” see Yaney, Systematization of Russian Government, p. 202.

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on the steppe was perceived to be greater. With few nobles in the steppe provinces, the state had to rule on its own. Furthermore, with enormous “empty spaces,” many of them close to vulnerable borders, and a small population, much of which was made up of new peasant migrants, Cossacks, nomads, and other aliens, the region, even those parts of it that had been under formal Russian power for centuries, appeared too economically promising and strategically important to remain undeveloped. As Orenburg Military Governor Vasilii Perovskii noted in a report to the tsar in 1842, “The Orenburg region has double significance: as the source of great riches as yet only barely exploited and as a bulwark for defending against and gaining influence over tribes that once caused Europe to tremble with their invasions.”50 Although Perovskii admitted that “good officials were hard to obtain” because of Orenburg’s remoteness from the capital, “the size of [its] districts, and the character and paucity of the local population,” it was clear that—good or not—there was much for officials to do. In the “economic area” alone this work included “documenting [the region’s] natural resources, protecting property rights, limiting the improper use of state and private funds, creating investment capital, creating manufacturing ventures, improving commerce, and organizing economic institutions.”51 Much as was the case with his eighteenth-century predecessors and current gubernatorial peers, Perovskii’s plans for the Orenburg steppe rested on the firm conviction that the state knew best and that rational administration premised on the scientific knowledge of territory and population offered the surest road to state utility. That state utility continued to be served by the promotion of colonization was equally obvious. Colonization was needed for security purposes on the lines in Orenburg and the Northern Caucasus, and it was needed for general development everywhere else. To the empire’s geographical lexicographers, a steppe remained an area of land that was “open,” “empty or deserted,” or “unbuilt” (nepristroenaia)—the opposite of a “populated place”—and imperial patriots were more convinced than ever that too much territory of this sort was a problem.52 The statistician K. F. German, an exuberant participant in the “fetishism for numbering” that erupted across Europe in the early nineteenth century, calculated that out of European Russia’s total surface area of 420,353,431 square desiati50 Orenburgskii gubernator Vasilii Alekseevich Perovskii: dokumenty, pis'ma, vospominaniia (Orenburg, 1999), p. 121. 51 Ibid., p. 123. 52 Vsévolojsky, Dictionnaire géographique-historique de l’empire de Russie, v. 2, p. 228; Shchekatov (ed.), Slovar' geograficheskii rossiiskogo gosudarstva, v. 5, col. 1204; G. (Gospodin) Lokhtin, “Kratkoe topograficheskoe i statisticheskoe opisanie astrakhanskoi gubernii,” Tekhnologicheskii zhurnal, 1806, v. 3, pt. 4, p. 4.

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nas, only 279,804,416 were “used” as forest, fields, pastures, household plots, roads, buildings, or water resources; the rest, close to one-third of the total, was made up of “swampland, deserts, and steppes” that were “not in use.” This was unfortunate but also not unchangeable, at least judging from international experience: “In Austria, more than one-fifth of all unused land is considered usable.”53 The portion in the Russian south seemed much greater. Even in the 1830s, after decades of settlement, “every right-thinking observer could see” that “many vast and wonderful places” in Orenburg still lay “completely empty”; that “steppes” in Saratov outnumbered fields “one hundred to one”; and that fertile spaces from the Crimea to the Northern Caucasus were calling out for new “hands,” for “settlers equipped with an enterprising spirit, a sound work ethic, vision, and necessary knowledge.”54 The colonizing achievements of the Catherinian era continued to be mythologized as “miraculous,” and what was needed was more of the same: “Just imagine what intelligence and hard work could produce here, if only one could take advantage of all that commerce promises and the land provides, if only these steppes, today empty, could be populated and cultivated.”55 Still considered largely uninhabited, uncivilized, and underused at the dawn of the nineteenth century, the steppe’s future continued to be imagined as the exact opposite of its present.

The Bureaucrats and the Settlers State and society’s recognition of the continued need to settle the steppe coincided with an increase in the number of plebeian people doing so. Between 1796 and 1835, some 1.7 million new migrants moved to the region, more than a tripling of the migration totals for the 1762–1795 period. As a result, the south as a whole remained by far the 53 K.F. German, “O nyneshnom sostoianii zemledeliia v Rossii,” SO, 1814, pt. 13, n. 15, pp. 100–101. On “statistical enthusiasm” in early nineteenth-century Europe, see Ian Hacking, “Biopower and the Avalanche of Printed Numbers,” Humanities in Society, 1982, v. 5, n. 3/4, p. 281. 54 Citations from Debu, Topograficheskoe i statisticheskoe opisanie orenburgskoi gubernii, p. 24; A. Leopol'dov, Statisticheskoe opisanie saratovskoi gubernii (St. Petersburg, 1839), p. 27; S. Siestrzencewicz, Histoire du royaume de la Chersonèse Taurique (2nd ed.; St. Petersburg, 1824), p. 432; and P. Zubov, Kartina kavkazskogo kraia, prinadlezhashchego Rossii i sopredel'nykh onomu zemel' v istoricheskom, statisticheskom, etnograficheskom, finansovom i torgovom otnosheniiakh (St. Petersburg, 1834), v. 1, p. 17. See also Sumarokov, Puteshestvie po vsemu Krymu i Bessarabii v 1799 godu, pp. 211–12. 55 Vladimir Izmailov, Puteshestvie v poludennuiu Rossiiu (Moscow, 1805), v. 2, pp. 89, 64. See also A.O. Ishimova, “Kniaz' Potemkin-Tavricheskii,” Sovremennik, 1838, v. 10, pp. 20, 24.

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empire’s leading settlement zone and would remain so until it was surpassed by Siberia in the very late 1800s.56 Until 1815, the New Russian Territory (the provinces of Ekaterinoslav, Kherson, and Tauris) saw the most new settlers; thereafter, with the first warnings of “insufficient open land” in New Russia, the leading edge of new settlement passed to the Lower Volga and the Southern Urals. As before, almost all the new migrants were rural people, and of these the overwhelming share were Russian and Ukrainian Orthodox peasants. Un-Orthodox “dissenters” (Old Believers and “sectarians”), European colonists (mainly Germans, Greeks, Bulgarians, and other “Balkan peoples”), non-Russian “subjects” from “beyond the lines” (Kazakhs in the Orenburg Territory, Kabardians and Ossetians in the Northern Caucasus), and domestic aliens ( Jews, Mordvins, Maris, Udmurts, Tatars) were still present in the migrant pool, but their overall numbers either remained small or diminished. This was in part due to shifts in state policy and in part due to the fact that land shortages, which continued to be the primary factor motivating domestic resettlement, were more noted in predominantly Slavic areas (Ukraine, central Russia) than in other parts of the empire. Most of the peasants who resettled remained peasants, but some were drummed into Count Aleksei Arakcheev’s military colonies or drifted into towns, while a significant number of others were enrolled as Cossacks in the growing hosts of Orenburg and the North Caucasus. Cossacks themselves were resettled, both within the region and beyond it. Much as before, “willful”—that is illegal—migration persisted on a large scale, and state peasants moved by the government continued to vastly outnumber serfs moved by their lords. The empire’s leaders continued to view colonization as a state enterprise, but their organization of the enterprise began to change. Colonization became increasingly bureaucratic, routinized, systematized, and distinguished by the presumption that the micromanagement of settlement would not only better populate the steppes but also better serve the cause 56 For overviews of the numbers and varieties of settlers in the first decades of the nineteenth century, see S.I. Bruk and V.M. Kabuzan, “Migratsiia naseleniia v Rossii v xviii–nachale xx veka (chislennost', struktura, geografiia),” Istoriia SSSR, 1984, n. 4, p. 49; V.M. Kabuzan, “Gosudarstvennye krest'iane Rossii v xviii–50-kh godakh xix veka (chislennost', sostav i razmeshchenie),” Istoriia SSSR, 1988, n. 1, p. 81; V.M. Kabuzan, Naselenie severnogo Kavkaza v xix–xx vekakh: Etnostatisticheskoe issledovanie (St. Petersburg, 1996), pp. 42–54, 62–72; V.M. Kabuzan, Zaselenie Novorossii (Ekaterinoslavskoi i Khersonskoi gubernii) v xviii–pervoi polovine xix veka, 1719–1858 (Moscow, 1976), pp. 166–216; A.V. Fadeev, Ocherki ekonomicheskogo razvitiia stepnogo Predkavkaz'ia v doreformennyi period (Moscow, 1957), pp. 45–60; E.I. Druzhinina, Iuzhnaia Ukraina v 1800–1825 gg. (Moscow, 1970), pp. 69–172; S.B. Bernshtein, “Osnovnye etapy pereseleniia Bolgar v Rossiiu v xvii–xix vekakh,” Sovetskoe slavianovedenie, 1980, n. 1, pp. 48–50; Iu.M. Tarasov, Russkaia krest'ianskaia kolonizatsiia iuzhnogo Urala: Vtoraia polovina xviii–pervaia polovina xix v. (Moscow, 1984), pp. 91–118.

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of social welfare. The watchword of the new course was tutelage (popechenie, popechitel'stvo). Russia’s rulers and enlightened seigneurs had long known that most people had to be monitored and instructed if they were to be rendered happy and useful,57 but in the new age of growing ministerial bureaucracy, this presumption became institutionalized and applied on a broader scale. Required almost everywhere and seemingly capable of ameliorating the most incorrigible backwardness, bureaucratic paternalism usually involved providing material incentives for improvement, arranging for instruction by good example, and, last but certainly not least, defending against lapses or deviations through intense administrative vigilance and discipline. (This latter component was the special contribution of the early nineteenth century and was increasingly considered the sine qua non of the whole endeavor.) Faced with such obvious “care,” all the empire’s backward subjects, not least of all its backward Russian peasants, would have no choice but to improve their moral and economic condition, and usually concurrently given that the two were considered interrelated. This kind of thinking applied as much to the politics of populating the steppe as it did to anything else. The demonstration of tutelage thus became an essential modus operandi of state colonization policy. Colonists were to be led to the steppe and to social welfare at the same time. An early indication of the evolving agenda of official colonization came with the reform of foreign immigration. Under Paul, the pace of foreign immigration dipped, but within six months of Alexander’s accession, a surge of new migrations began that continued through the 1810s. The most numerous newcomers consisted of Greeks and “Trans-Danubians” (Bulgarians, Gagauz, Moldavians, Walachians), most of whom were refugees fleeing war or banditry in Ottoman lands. There were also Lutherans, Catholics, and Mennonites from the German states, some of whom were also fleeing war as well as seeking religious freedom and economic opportunity. In the very early 1800s, these and other foreigners continued to be actively recruited by Russian military men or by special agents, and they were welcomed by regional authorities who continued to see foreigners as “good colonists for our steppes.” They were particularly welcomed in New Russia and Russian-occupied Bessarabia, though foreign settlement also continued in the Saratov area (Germans) and, to a much lesser extent, the Northern Caucasus (Scottish missionaries).58 In 57 Michael Confino, “La Politique de tutelle des seigneurs russes envers leurs paysans vers la fin du xviiième siècle,” Revue des études slaves, 1960, v. 37, n. 1, pp. 39–70; Edgar Melton, “Enlightened Seignorialism and Its Dilemmas in Serf Russia, 1750–1830,” JMH, 1990, v. 62, n. 4, pp. 675–708. 58 Roger P. Bartlett, Human Capital: The Settlement of Foreigners in Russia, 1762–1804 (New York, 1979), p. 188; Fadeev, Ocherki ekonomicheskogo razvitiia stepnogo Predkavkaz'ia, p. 58.

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1803, however, when it turned out that large convoys of Germans who were supposed to be well-off were instead arriving in the south in “beggarly . . . condition,” Minister of Internal Affairs Viktor Kochubei began to express doubts that there could be “any benefit from their settlement in our country,” and the following year state policy shifted.59 In a decree of 1804, based on Kochubei’s recommendation, the unfettered populationism that had motivated Catherine’s foreign colonization program was officially retired.60 Henceforth there would be no active recruitment abroad, no funds given to anyone before they reached the Russian border, and only foreigners of sufficient means who could prove that they were “good agriculturalists” or had experience in viticulture, stock raising, and certain “useful” crafts were to be accepted. According to Kochubei, since Catherine’s decree of 1763, too many of the foreigners who had come to the empire had been “extremely poor,” and providing for them had cost the state too much. Furthermore, with the supply of available land decreasing in the “southern territory” and “overcrowding” (tesnota) increasing in the empire’s “interior provinces,” one also had to consider that greater numbers of “our own subjects may themselves need to be redistributed.”61 Thus the basis of state policy had to change: instead of “settling [the steppes] with foreigners,” the goal should now be “to settle a limited number of foreigners on [the steppes]” whose principal purpose would be to serve as “models in their farming and craftsmanship.”62 The 1804 decree renewed the state’s commitment to provide generous privileges for qualified migrants, but the turn to didactic settlement unavoidably presaged the end of large-scale foreign colonization. Citing excessive cost, subsidies for foreign migrants were cancelled in 1810; admission of new foreign migrants was halted by decree in 1819; and most foreign migration on the basis of the 1804 legislation ended in practice by 1830, though colonists already within the empire continued to expand their settlements.63 Deemed more useful as tutors than as populators, far fewer foreigners were required. 59 Bartlett, Human Capital, p. 195. 60 PSZ, ser. 1, v. 28, n. 21163 (1804), pp. 137–40. 61 Ibid., p. 137. 62 Ibid. 63 PSZ, ser. 1, v. 31, n. 24131 (1810), pp. 68–69; ser. 1, v. 36, n. 27912 (1819), p. 325; v.

36, n. 27954 (1819), p. 362; Roger Bartlett and Bruce Mitchell, “State-Sponsored Immigration into Eastern Europe in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” in Roger Bartlett and Karen Schönwälder (eds.), The German Lands and Eastern Europe: Essays on the History of Their Social, Cultural, and Political Relations (Basingstoke, Eng., 1999), p. 100; Fadeev, Ocherki ekonomicheskogo razvitiia stepnogo Predkavkaz'ia, p. 58. Additional foreign migrants entered the empire later in the century (Bulgarians and other peoples of the Balkans to New Russia in the 1830s and 1860s, Prussian Mennonites to Samara between the 1850s and 1870s), but these were separate initiatives unrelated to the 1804 legislation.

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Of all the state’s would-be foreign culture-bearers, the most favored by far were the Mennonites, the Germanized descendants of Dutch Anabap´ sk) district. The first tists centered in West Prussia and the Danzig (Gdan Mennonites to come to Russia were directed to Khortitsa Island on the Dniepr (the site of the old Zaporozhian Sech') beginning in 1788; subsequent arrivals (1804–05, 1806–22) established themselves in over thirty villages on state-allocated lands in the Molochnye Vody area of Tauris Province north of the Azov Sea.64 The Mennonites had everything that a Russian administrator could want in a foreign colonist: “capital” (dostoianie), laudable personal qualities (industriousness, cleanliness, moderate drinking habits), and expertise as farmers and craftsmen, which they proved with their “broad lands, abounding in pasture, hayfields and quite fertile for any crops . . . fine orchards . . . horses and cattle of the finest stock . . . [and their] communal winery, brewery . . . and wind and water mills.”65 As one official wrote in 1841 after a trip to the Molochnye Vody settlements, “When you enter the Mennonite colonies, you feel as if you are entering another country . . . [while everywhere else] there is laziness and neglect . . . which together with a lack of education block every path to progress.”66 Because of the thrilling contrast they provided with the rest of the Russian countryside, the Mennonites were extremely well treated by Russian authorities, receiving special privileges that exceeded even those granted to other foreign colonists, with the expectation that their good habits would eventually rub off on the coarser people around them. As the judge and literary traveler Pavel Sumarokov remarked in 1803, “Why, I asked myself, would our peasants not want to imitate these settlers? Why would they not prefer profit and tranquility to filth and disorder? Would it not be better for them to live in airy and sunny rooms rather than to suffocate in smoke, breathe foul air, and share their dwellings with cattle?”67 The possibilities that the government saw in the Mennonites were best embodied in one of their most active economic proselytizers, Johann 64 David G. Rempel, “The Mennonite Commonwealth in Russia: A Sketch of Its Founding and Endurance, 1789–1919,” Mennonite Quarterly Review, 1973, v. 47, n. 4, pp. 293–308; Lawrence Klippenstein, “The Mennonite Migration to Russia, 1786–1806,” in John Friesen (ed.), Mennonites in Russia, 1788–1988: Essays in Honour of Gerhard Lohrenz (Winnipeg, 1989), pp. 13–42; Druzhinina, Iuzhnaia Ukraina v 1800–1825 gg., pp. 126–28. 65 “Izvestie iz Ekaterinoslava ot 5 Genvaria,” Severnaia pochta, 1810, n. 23, no page number indicated. See also S.D. Bondar', Sekta mennonitov v Rossii (v sviazi s istoriei nemetskoi kolonizatsii na iuge Rossii); ocherk (Petrograd, 1916), pp. 32–33. 66 “Byt molochanskikh menonitskikh kolonii,” ZhMGI, 1841, pt. 1, bk. 2, pp. 553, 560. 67 P. Sumarokov, Dosugi krymskogo sud'i, ili vtoroe puteshestvie v tavridu (St. Petersburg, 1803), v. 1, p. 75.

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Cornies (Ivan Kornis) (1789–1848). The son of a doctor who had migrated to the Molochnaia River in 1806, Cornies eventually became the undisputed leader of the Molochnye Vody colonies in the 1830s and 1840s and a kind of surrogate official of the tsarist state. He had a close relationship with the leading lights of the Guardianship Committee for Foreign Settlers and wrote articles encouraging “rational, market-oriented agriculture, resting on experimentation and ceaseless calculation” that appeared regularly in central Russian as well as regional German-language publications.68 Among other things, Cornies was credited with teaching Ukrainian peasants how to plant thousands of fruit trees and convincing the Nogays who lived near the Mennonite settlements to raise Merino sheep and build their villages “according to geometric plan.” He had particular success in this regard with the Nogay settlement of Akkerman, which was founded in 1834 and which the officially sponsored German traveler August von Haxthausen described a few years later as “a perfectly German [village built] on the Mennonite model.”69 As Cornies proudly exclaimed, unintentionally revealing the essential point of the project, “the visitor who sees [Akkerman] for the first time will never believe for a moment that it was built and is lived in by Nogays.”70 When the great man (“a foreigner by birth but a Russian in his soul”)71 died unexpectedly at the age of fifty-nine, he was eulogized profusely and held up to fellow Mennonites and German colonists (as well as inspired Russian readers) in a reverential official biography as a man “worthy of imitation.” “His example reminds us: ‘Love God and put your faith in Him; love those close to you and do good among them; love nature and live by her laws.’ Guided by these ideals, Kornis’s life was indeed rich—rich with good works.”72 The politics of tutelary colonization worked differently for less obviously progressive colonists. In 1804, in its “Regulation on the Jews” (Polozhenie o evreiakh), the government pledged ten years’ tax exemption and generous subsidies on a par with those given to foreign colonists 68 On Cornies, see Harvey L. Dyck, “Russian Servitor and Mennonite Hero: Light and Shade in Images of Johann Cornies,” Journal of Mennonite Studies, 1984, v. 2, pp. 9–28. The quoted phrase appears on page 10. 69 Baron von Haxthausen, The Russian Empire: Its People, Institutions, and Resources (London, 1856; reprint: New York, 1968), v. 1, p. 426. Haxthausen visited Akkerman in 1843. 70 I. Kornis, “Neskol'ko slov o nogaitsakh v melitopol'skom uezde tavricheskoi gubernii,” LOSKIR, 1839, n. 5/6, p. 360. 71 This was the description provided of Cornies by the editor of one of his “unattributed” publications. See “Kratkii obzor polozheniia nogaiskikh tatar vodvorennykh v melitopol'skom uezde tavricheskoi gubernii,” Teleskop, 1836, pt. 33, p. 3. 72 “I.I. Kornis,” ZhMGI, 1848, v. 29, sect. 2, p. 231. The Russian-language biography/eulogy was a somewhat abridged translation of a German original that first appeared in the Unterhaltungsblatt für deutsche Ansiedler im südlichen Russland, 1848 (October), supplement, pp. 9–18.

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Herald of the District of Berdiansk, Tauris Province (1844), from P. P. fon Vinkler, Gerby gorodov, gubernii, oblastei i posadov Rossiiskoi imperii (St. Petersburg, 1899; reprint: Planeta, Moscow, 1991), p. 12.

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to any Jews from formerly Polish areas who volunteered to become farmers and relocate to state lands, either in their home provinces or on the steppe (the provinces of Astrakhan, Caucasus, Ekaterinoslav, Kherson, and Tauris).73 The reasoning behind this plan was clear according to the members of Alexander’s Committee for the Organization of Jewish Life: Jewish vodka peddlers exploited their Orthodox peasant customers, while Jews in general were poor because they had nefarious “moral habits” and did not practice “useful” pursuits. Part of the solution to the emerging “Jewish question” was thus to remove the Jews and their taverns from Orthodox villages (which would reduce “antipathy toward them on the part of the Christians”) and encourage their transformation into farmers (which would inculcate them with the virtues of “independent physical labor” and in the process increase their “utility”).74 Resettling them to the south held out the additional advantage of “populating the extensive New Russian steppes.”75 A first petition requesting resettlement was tendered in 1806 from Israel Lentport and Nokhim Finkenshtein, representing thirty-six families in Cherikovsk district in Mogil'ev, and the number of petitions increased markedly in 1807 and 1808 as the government began enforcing its requirements that Jews move out of Christian settlements. The Jewish migrants were placed under the aegis of the Guardianship Office for Foreign Colonists, and Minister Kochubei, believing that concentrating the new settlers in one area would be better “both for the Jews and for the government,” directed all the migrants to Kherson Province.76 Within four years (1807–10), some ten thousand landless Jews from Belorussia and Lithuania were dispatched to the Kherson plains, though as many as one thousand did not arrive, either dying or deserting along the way.77 It did not take long for the government to reconsider its plan. In 1810, resettlement to the colonies was halted because of excessive costs and high mortality stemming from “the Jews’ unfamiliarity with agriculture and their foul living habits.”78 (Both the high costs and the high mortality influenced the government’s decision, but the costs were listed first in the decree.) Instead, the emphasis shifted to salvaging the colonies through intense administrative tutelage mixing incentives, instruction, and disci73 PSZ, ser. 1, v. 28, n. 21547 (1804), pp. 732–33. On the 1804 statute, see John Doyle Klier, Russia Gathers Her Jews: The Origins of the “Jewish Question” in Russia, 1772–1825 (DeKalb, Ill., 1986), pp. 116–43. 74 V.N. Nikitin, Evrei zemledel'tsy: Istoricheskoe, zakonodatel'noe, administrativnoe i bytovoe polozhenie kolonii so vremeni ikh voznikoveniia do nashikh dnei, 1807–1887 (St. Petersburg, 1887), p. 7. See also S.Ia. Borovoi, Evreiskaia zemledel'cheskaia kolonizatsiia v staroi Rossii: Politka, ideologiia, khoziaistvo, by˛t po arkhivnym materialam (Moscow, 1928), pp. 26–29. 75 Nikitin, Evrei zemledel'tsy, p. 7. 76 Ibid., p. 11. 77 Ibid., p. 30. 78 PSZ, ser. 1, v. 31, n. 24185a (1810), p. 1.

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pline. As the director of the Guardianship Office wrote to St. Petersburg from Odessa in 1811, the improvement of the colonies required “constant efforts through considerate regulation to urge the settlers to improve their economic habits,” including the assignment of overseers (smotriteli), the adoption of programs to “eliminate laziness,” and the use of “native Russian state settlers” as agricultural instructors.79 As the overseer Develdeev noted in the summer of 1812, “A few Russian people should be hired or assigned . . . to every Jewish village in order to teach the Jews how to farm.”80 Thus Russian peasants whose agricultural ways were backward enough that they needed the guidance of Mennonite colonists were sufficiently advanced to be imagined as mentors for the even more backward Jews. Another local official writing a few months later noted that Russian peasants living near the Jewish colonies tended to take advantage of their neighbors by charging them excessive fees to plow and harvest their fields, and were themselves far from fully successful farmers. But this was only further proof that the “Jewish settlers are more deserving than other colonists of the government’s benevolent attention.”81 In the early 1820s, new Jewish migrants, forced from Belorussia by famine and local councils (kahals) seeking to get rid of unreliable taxpayers, were allowed to join the colonies; and another phase of migration began in the late 1830s after a short-lived initiative to resettle Jews to Siberia was shelved and the would-be Siberians were directed instead to the steppe.82 These new migrations brought new questions about how to improve the colonies, but administrative oversight remained essential. There were proposals to transform the Jewish villages into military colonies; to provide subsidies only to those households that every year “show the most inclination and talent for agriculture . . . and are noted for their good conduct and work ethic and have no fewer than two male workers”; and to extend the settlers’ tax-exempt status while dispatching any colonist “who display[s] an obvious disregard for farming and disrespect to [his] superiors” to serve in “worker battalions.”83 Incentive campaigns 79 RGIA, f. 383, op. 29, d. 846, l. 14. 80 Ibid., l. 50(b). 81 Ibid., ll. 81, 83(b). 82 Borovoi, Evreiskaia zemledel'cheskaia kolonizatsiia, pp. 79–97, 136–44. On the

aborted initiative to resettle the Jews to Siberia, see V.O. Levanda (comp.), Polnyi khronologicheskii sbornik zakonov i polozhenii kasaiushchikhsia evreev ot ulozheniia tsaria Alekseia Mikhailovicha do nastoiashchego vremeni: 1649–1873 god (St. Petersburg, 1874), pp. 363–66, 396–97, 410–11; Julius Elk, Die jüdischen kolonien in Rußland: Kulturhistorische Studie und Beitrag zur Geschichte der Juden in Rußland (Frankfurt, 1886; reprint: New York, 1970), pp. 37–55; and Michael Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas and the Jews: The Transformation of Jewish Society in Russia, 1825–1855 (Philadelphia, 1983), pp. 39–40. 83 PSZ, ser. 2, v. 1, n. 52 (1826), pp. 74–79; Nikitin, Evrei zemledel'tsy, pp. 128–68; Borovoi, Evreiskaia zemledel'cheskaia kolonizatsiia, pp. 100–101.

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for “successes in agriculture” were likewise initiated, with “good farmers” receiving awards through the Guardianship Committee and bad ones forced to pay fines and to be tied to posts with boards nailed above their heads explaining their particular economic shortcomings.84 In 1837, jurisdiction over the colonies (some of which were now located in Ekaterinoslav Province as well as Kherson) was transferred from the committee to the office of the governor-general of New Russia, with the recommendation that their persistently lackluster achievements in agriculture and overall ramshackle appearance could be improved through the hiring of additional overseers drawn from the ranks of willing “retired military officers.”85 At least one of these new bosses then immediately set about dividing his charges into five “units” (razriady) “according to [their] conduct,” while the overseer Tol'stoi proposed providing his colonists with “lessons in all areas of work under the direct supervision of instructors.”86 In other words, the Jewish settlements continued to be seen as a problem and their “improvement” continued to be seen as a matter of combining material incentives (both positive and negative) with close supervision. Whatever was wrong with the Jewish colonists, they were not going to be left alone. There were limits to the government’s interest in improving backward people through steppe settlement. Gypsies (Roma) living in interior provinces were considered too “disdainful of the settled life” and too much trouble to resettle, despite a number of proposals;87 “heretics” such as the Dukhobors and Molokans, induced to resettle to Tauris Province from central Russia in the first decades of the nineteenth century, were moved less for the sake of improvement than to get them out of the way;88 and the same was true of several thousand “impoverished Kazakhs” near the Orenburg and Ural lines who, “pushed by hunger,” rustled cattle and horses from Cossack stations and sold their children as slaves to the Russians. The Kazakhs’ proposed relocation to “Muslim villages in Orenburg . . . [and] other Russian provinces” was expected to “ease their unfortunate fate” and put an end to their “uselessness,” but the main motivation was simply to get them away from the lines.89 84 Nikitin, Evrei zemledel'tsy, p. 147. The bureaucratic urge to classify Jewish colonists as either “well-suited” or “ill-suited” for agriculture, already apparent in earlier legislation, became especially prominent starting in the 1820s. See Borovoi, Evreiskaia zemledel'cheskaia kolonizatsiia, pp. 101–3. 85 Ibid., p. 140, 145–46. 86 Ibid., p. 146. 87 RGIA, f. 1285, op. 1, d. 86, ll. 2–9. 88 Breyfogle, “Heretics and Colonizers,” pp. 42–48, 88–92. 89 Materialy po istorii kazakhskoi SSR, 1785–1828 gg. (Moscow and Leningrad, 1940), v. 4, pp. 233–35, 238–40. The Kazakh removal was permitted by imperial decree in 1808.

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Yet Gypsies, “sectarians,” Jews, Kazakhs, and even laudable Mennonites were at best secondary players in the emerging colonizing script of St. Petersburg’s new bureaucrats. Rising above them all was a new if unglamorous star: the state peasant, in particular the Slavic Orthodox state peasant from central Russian and Ukrainian provinces. Poor, benighted, rendered “land-poor” (malozemel'nyi) or “landless” (bezzemel'nyi) by demographic increase and/or noble encroachment, and under the state’s direct administration, the state peasant settler was an obvious emblem of concern for high officials whose educations now convinced them that it was their duty to offer “the people” “material and technical assistance” as well as “spiritual and moral leadership.”90 Serfs, of course, were “the people” too, but they were harder to move. The government continued promoting serf resettlements through cheap land sales, threatened landlords with expropriation when they failed to populate their estates or settled them with fictitious migrants (“dead souls”), and even began demonstrating some concern over how serf settlers were treated in transit (if only because of the potential for “disturbances”). But servile relocation necessarily remained the nobles’ business, and the nobles were not doing much of it.91 By contrast, land-poor state peasant settlers, as state wards, could seemingly be relocated whenever and wherever the state desired, and there was little doubt that the wards themselves deserved their guardians’ increased attention. As Minister Kochubei noted in 1806, the government simply had “to put an end to the tragedies and deprivations [neudobstva i bedstviia] that so often accompany the peasants’ thoughtless acts and provide them with the possibility to be of greater use, both to themselves and to the state.”92 Kochubei’s allusion to peasant thoughtlessness was a reference to the fact that, according to current practice, land-poor state peasants were allowed to resettle to the south “without any kind of plan” and sometimes without “the necessary supplies to feed themselves or complete their journeys,” leading to their “extreme immiseration” as well as “problems” (neudobstva) for the government.93 The minister therefore concluded that the state should act “to alleviate the condition of [these] settlers and provide them with the means to improve their resettlement, . . . the goal being to show our own [migrants] the same concern that . . . is now shown to foreign colonists.”94 The fullest, earliest statement of the new concern for set90 Marc Raeff, Understanding Imperial Russia: State and Society in the Old Regime (New York, 1984), pp. 129–39. 91 DAKO, f. 26, op. 4, d. 461, ll. 1–4; Druzhinina, Iuzhnaia Ukraina v 1800–1825 gg., pp. 179–81. 92 RGIA, f. 379, op. 1, d. 4, l. 23(b). 93 Ibid., l. 25. 94 Ibid., l. 25–26(b).

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tler welfare came in a decree from 1805 dealing with the resettlement of three thousand “land-poor” state peasants from Smolensk to New Russia. The peasants possessed a meager three and one-half desiatinas of arable land per soul, had no resources to pay their taxes, and, in bad harvest years, could not provide for themselves at all, forcing the government to spend enormous sums on food relief. No state land was available to accommodate them within Smolensk, and buying additional land from private landlords was considered too expensive. Consequently, the peasants had to be moved to “available treasury lands” in the “southern territory,” and new procedures were required to establish their “colonies” on a firm basis: The experience of earlier resettlements makes [the adoption of such procedures] absolutely necessary. Undertaken without proper preparation, without supervision over the settlers, and without the requisite concern for their fate while in transit or once they arrived, being allocated at most twenty rubles, which often did not even reach them, the majority of earlier settlers became the victims of their own privations, and, if one is to believe the general view, out of some fifty thousand souls sent to the Caucasus Province no more than fifteen thousand remained alive. Furthermore, of these, as a result of despair and unfamiliarity with the techniques required to farm their new lands, most were unable to establish their settlements on a satisfactory level.95

To avoid a similar fate, the Smolensk settlers required funds to support themselves on the road as well as until their first harvest, loans to provide for “their full establishment in their new places,” a five-year exemption from taxes and “all duties,” gentle terms for the repayment of their loans, and fifteen desiatinas of land per male soul. The settlers also needed to plan their relocations more practically: the decree instructed them to dispatch an advance party to select their new lands, build new homes, and begin planting, with the idea that, after final approval from the authorities, the rest of the migrants would follow, resettling in groups of no more than thirty households “to avoid problems with quartering and provisioning along the way.”96 Local officials would provide for the settlers’ safekeeping while in transit and determine the extent of their needs on a caseby-case basis once they arrived. Peasants remaining in their original villages were also to assist the settlers financially, with the specific amount and form of the assistance determined by the local provincial administra95 PSZ, ser. 1, v. 40, n. 21779(a) (1805), p. 43. 96 Ibid., pp. 43–44. The decree did not specifically mention the settlers’ draft obli-

gations, but it was later determined that they should be exempted from the requirement for the first five years following their resettlement. See A.V. Florovskii, “Neskol'ko faktov iz istorii russkoi kolonizatsii Novorossii v nachale xix v.,” ZOOID, 1919, v. 33, p. 39.

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tion. To avoid any “confusion in accounts,” the minister of Internal Affairs would inform the minister of Finance every year of the amount to be dispensed to the settlers “in keeping with the norms that apply to the expenditures on foreign colonists.” And the settlers themselves were to be placed under the “special tutelage of the New Russian Guardianship Office,” the administrative organ of the southern foreign colonies.97 The 1805 decree applied only to the Smolensk case, though Kochubei hoped that its provisions might ultimately serve as “general rules” for “the resettlement of all peasants from provinces with little remaining open land.”98 As it turned out, however, specific resettlement terms continued to fluctuate in the early decades of the nineteenth century, varying across different decrees, and only in isolated incidents were subsequent domestic settlers placed under the foreign colonists’ administration.99 Also, despite the offer in one instance of fifty desiatinas of land per household and draft exemptions of up to five years,100 the material incentives pledged to domestic steppe-bound settlers remained limited compared to those offered to foreign colonists, at least while new foreign colonists continued to be admitted into the empire. The reason was simple: it was presumed that the government could get away with offering less to domestic migrants.101 Furthermore, being too magnanimous with peasants was ill-advised. As the Kherson military governor and the director of the Guardianship Office argued in 1806, if Russian peasants ever found out that they could receive all the material privileges offered to foreign colonists, they would rapidly deplete the treasury by “resettling in droves,” and even those who did not have to relocate would do so just to get the benefits.102 (A similar line of reasoning was voiced in the early 1800s regarding offering exemptions from the draft; such exemptions, as a result, were only 97 Ibid., pp. 44–45. The relocation of the Smolensk peasants to lands in Ekaterinoslav Province began in the summer of 1807, though by then only 892 of the original 3,002 settlers decided to take part. See N. Petrovich, “K istorii krest'ianskogo pereselencheskogo divizheniia,” Arkhiv istorii i truda v Rossii, 1923, bk. 10, p. 152. 98 The minister expressed this view in a letter to Kherson Military Governor Emmanuel de Richelieu in July 1805. DAOO, f. 1, op. 219, d. 3 (1806), l. 3(b). 99 When Bulgarian colonists were given lands in New Russia in 1819, Moldavian, Ukrainian, and Russian “aboriginal residents” already living in the settlement area were treated as foreign colonists, presumably because it made the administration of the area more convenient. See Druzhinina, Iuzhnaia ukraina v 1800–1825 gg., p. 114. 100 This generous offer was extended to “citizens and homesteaders of the Western Provinces” considering resettlement to Caucasus Province in 1832. PSZ, ser. 2, v. 7, n. 5249 (1832), pp. 153–58. 101 The decree of 1810 that curtailed subsidies for foreign colonists made this very clear, stating that the funds “expended on a single German family, exempted from conscription and other obligations, could readily be used to resettle fifty Russian peasant households [semei rossiiskikh krest'ian].” PSZ, ser. 1, v. 31, n. 24131 (1810), p. 69. 102 RGIA, f. 1285, op. 1, d. 79, ll. 19, 20–20(b).

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rarely decreed.)103 Yet even with its restricted scope, the Smolensk initiative signaled an important shift: for the next half century, the resettlement of the empire’s own land-poor state peasants would stand at the heart of official colonization efforts, and the defining attribute of the program would be a commitment to increased material support and increased administration. Deemed too “thoughtless” and poor to look out for themselves, yet too potentially useful and troublesome to be left alone, state peasants would henceforth be rescued by bureaucratic consideration. It was, of course, no accident that the great majority of potential settlers within the state’s newly favored migrant pool happened to be Orthodox Slavs. But the turn toward emphasizing state peasant resettlement was not explained in terms of nationality or religion but rather cost-effectiveness and necessity: state peasants were cheaper to move than foreigners, and their movement was required because they had too little land where they were. Land-poor state peasants who were also non-Russian aliens, such as “new Christian” Chuvash, Maris, and Mordvins or Muslim Tatars from Middle Volga provinces, were not excluded from the policy. While there were constant concerns with barring Muslim settlement in sensitive border areas such as Bessarabia or the Northern Caucasus (largely the settlement of Muslims coming into the empire from “the Ottoman side”), there was no blanket ban on Muslim migrants, and the idea that Russians (rather than Orthodox people more generally) should settle the south was rarely expressed, even in the exuberant dawn of Official Nationality.104 Even the decision to prohibit Jewish settlement in Caucasus Oblast in 1825 was based not on ethnicity but because “as experience has shown, the Jews are unfamiliar with agriculture and therefore cannot be of any use to the territory in this regard.”105 The architects of colonization undoubtedly believed in the evolving nineteenth-century statist goal of a truly “Russian” Russian empire—“the gradual merging [sliianie] of ele103 This view was advanced by Kochubei, who argued in 1806 that a broad exemption from the draft would “lead to endless resettlements by peasants who do not require it and would thus cause the government a great deal of trouble.” See Florovskii, “Neskol'ko faktov iz istorii russkoi kolonizatsii Novorossii,” p. 37. Mikhail Speranskii, among others, also expressed the concern that Orthodox peasants might take up the Dukhobor “heresy” if they found out about the generous terms that Alexander’s decrees offered to Dukhobor settlers in New Russia. Breyfogle, “Heretics and Colonizers,” p. 51. 104 In 1829, opposing a plan to allow a new wave of Bulgarian migrants to settle in New Russia, Minister of Finance E.F. Kankrin argued that the territory should be settled with Russians alone even if that meant that “it would develop more slowly.” Kankrin’s objections, however, were overruled. See I. Meshcheriuk, Pereselenie Bolgar v iuzhnuiu Bessarabiiu 1828–1834 gg. (iz istorii razvitiia russko-bolgarskikh druzheskikh otnoshenii) (Kishinev, 1965), p. 73. 105 Borovoi, Evreiskaia zemledel'cheskaia kolonzatsiia, p. 120.

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ments of different provenance [raznorodnye elementy] into one whole, one unboundable state, where everyone submits to the one Russian law, where the Russian language reigns supreme and the Orthodox Church is triumphant”—but the goal was distant. State policy in the meantime remained flexible or, interpreted in a different way, inconsistent.106 On the road to an empire of greater Russianness, it was still possible for German Catholics and Mennonites to provide an example of efficiency and sobriety to Russian colonists and for Jews or Muslims (though admittedly in small numbers) to colonize at least some Russian borderlands without renouncing their Judaism or Islam. Authority over the growing operations of state peasant resettlement was centered in the ministries of Internal Affairs and Finance, with state peasants formally administered by the latter until 1838. In the first years following the Smolensk decree, the minister of Internal Affairs continued the older practice of sending out calls for resettlement to governors in “land-shortaged provinces” (malozemel'nye gubernii). They, in turn, replied with lists of prospective settlers. Later, as something of a system developed and resettlements from certain interior districts became more commonplace, aspiring settlers, usually after having dispatched scouts to the steppe to search for new lands, requested permission to resettle by submitting petitions to the minister of Finance via their provincial treasuries. As the representatives of Tatar state peasants from a village in Voronezh wrote in 1820: The 1,650 souls of the village Troitskii Iurt, having long suffered from a lack of land and good woods, have released us and our followers in the number of fifty-two souls from the village and provided us with a document witnessed in the county office, giving us permission to be resettled wherever open land can be obtained. We hereby request Your Excellency to command whoever is required to allow us and our fifty-two followers to resettle in Astrakhan' Province, Chernigov District, to open and fertile lands in the village of Viazovka . . . so that we no longer have to live with insufficient land and in hardship.107

With such petitions in hand, the provincial treasury in the home province would correspond with the provincial treasury in the destination province to determine whether the resettlement was indeed viable given the prospective numbers of people, land, and rubles involved. Both would then communicate with the Ministry of Finance to obtain final permission or denial for the initiative. 106 Citation from N. Ustrialov, Istoricheskoe obozrenie tsarstvovaniia gosudaria Nikolaia I (St. Petersburg, 1847), p. 167. 107 RGIA, f. 379, op. 1, d. 312, ll. 1–1(b), 2(b).

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At all times—and resettlement paperwork and the approval process usually took months if not years to complete—the center was supposed to be in charge. Indeed, given its insistence on complete control, St. Petersburg persistently required its representatives in the provinces to quell inaccurate resettlement rumors, intercept illegal migrants, provide legal ones with “every form of legal assistance, good treatment, and protection,” and dutifully submit maps of settlement sites and lists of expenses incurred or anticipated, desiatinas distributed or undistributed, and settlers “firmly settled,” “living in dugouts,” dead, sick, or “not yet arrived.”108 Detailed instruction and expectations of dedicated oversight were the norm. A resettlement decree of 1824, for example, began by listing the different categories of land that could be allocated to land-poor villagers. It then defined exactly how land-poor a land-poor villager had to be before he could qualify for land allocation, and went on to enumerate twenty-six additional “quite useful and absolutely necessary points of clarification” (iz"iasneniia), spelling out exactly how officials were to ensure that the former and the latter could be productively joined.109 These “points of clarification” were then supplemented with additional resettlement “rules” in 1831.110 In keeping with the prevailing spirit of bureaucratic diligence and exactitude—and to compensate for the deficiencies or entire absence of local administration—special resettlement committees were also created at the provincial or district level in high settlement areas such as Saratov, Orenburg, Bessarabia, and Caucasus Province. They were directed by official overseers and local marshals of the nobility and staffed with doctors, surveyors, and clerks.111 In New Russia, in at least one instance, a special “guardian of the settlers” (popechitel' pereselentsev) was appointed to inspect the condition of newly arrived migrants while a “chief inspector of the settlers” worked in the North Caucasus.112 The scale of individual resettlement projects increased in keeping with the growing appetite for bureaucratic management. Peasants who did not resettle continued to be officially obligated to pay taxes for those who did. Consequently, there was some concern with making sure whole villages were not emptied out. At the same time, there was no longer much fear of depopulating the interior, because the interior was by now widely recognized as having too many people. As a result, it became routine for hundreds, even thousands of peasants to be relocated to the steppe in single 108 RGIA, f. 379, op. 1, d. 582, l. 3; GAOO, f. 6, op. 4, d. 8897, ch. 1, ll. 1–1(b); 109 PSZ, ser. 1, v. 39, n. 29848 (1824), pp. 227–32. 110 PSZ, ser. 2, v. 6, n. 4311 (1831), pp. 113–15. 111 GAOO, f. 6, op. 5, d. 10747, ll. 2–5; PSZ, ser. 1, v. 29, n. 22367 (1806), pp. 878–79;

RGIA, f. 379, op. 1, d. 4, ll. 58(b)–59, 66; PSZ, ser. 2, v. 7, n. 5664 (1832), pp. 692–93. 112 DAOO, f. 1, op. 219, d. 3 (1806), ll. 67/68(b)–77/77(b); Fadeev, Ocherki ekonomicheskogo razvitiia stepnogo Predkavkazia, p. 53.

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initiatives, and some plans were much greater. Between 1825 and 1828, the Commission to Settle State Settlers in Bessarabia drafted a budget, land surveys, and directives to relocate twenty thousand male souls to the oblast from Chernigov, Poltava, Orel, and Kursk, noting that, at a ratio of three male souls per household, this would require providing 6,667 homes, 66,670 plows, 66,670 door frames, and 80,004 frames for windows, among other necessary items.113 In 1838, similar plans were launched to resettle twenty-five thousand souls from Kursk to Orenburg and Saratov.114 Peasants were not the only ones targeted for such resettlements en masse. It was also deemed “useful” to relocate twenty-five thousand “Little Russian Cossacks” (male souls) to the “insufficiently populated lands” of the Black Sea host on the Caucasus line in 1808, as well as the same number again in 1820. In both cases, special consideration was to be given to families “with young girls and widows still available for marriage.” Male Black Sea Cossacks on the line outnumbered their female counterparts two to one, and, with losses due to raids by “Caucasian tribes,” it was feared that without “new reinforcements . . . this estate may well perish.”115 Much as in the Catherinian era, the assumption behind the economic resettlements, large or small, was that they would ultimately improve the peasants’ livelihood. Now, though, simply planting land-poor peasants on new acreage was considered insufficient. Bigger land allotments and increased material support were essential to alleviate the peasants’ poverty, but tutelage and oversight were also needed so that their backward ways would improve. Left on their own on the steppe, settlers would remain as benighted as they had been in their original homes. As one inspector noted in reference to a party of Ukrainians in Tauris Province in 1810, the peasants, ignoring the ways of the better-adjusted settlers around them, baked bread “that was good for nothing” and made them sick, ate “underboiled or even raw fish” because they did not know any better, had no idea how to plow “this excellent ground” or how to build homes “appropriate to these woodless places,” and were generally “negligent and lazy” in their “way of life,” all of which was proof that they needed to be “supervised with special care and diligence.”116 And these Ukrainians were just one case. All across the steppe were settlers whose inadequate ways required changing. Used to petty subsistence farming, peasants needed to 113 DAOO, f. 1, op. 214, d. 12 (1825), ll. 5–20, 28–32(b), figures from ll. 30–30(b). 114 RGIA, f. 383, op. 1, d. 299, l. 3. See also f. 383, op. 1, d. 298. 115 PSZ, ser. 1, v. 30, n. 22902 (1808), p. 133; and RGIA, f. 1285, op. 1, d. 165, ll.

32–38(b), esp. l. 34(b). According to the Ministry of the Interior, the resettlements took place between 1809 and 1811 (23,088 men, 18,672 women) and 1820 and 1825 (23,857 men, 21,849 women). See RGIA, f. 1285, op. 1, d. 165, l. 35(b); and f. 1285, op. 1, d. 171, l. 379. 116 DAOO, f. 1, op. 219, d. 3 (1806), ll. 68(b), 77.

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discover the profit motive; familiar only with the planting of grain, they needed to recognize the utility of stock raising, viticulture, and orchard agriculture; and resigned to poverty and ignorance, they needed to be introduced to prosperous and industrious role models who could teach them a better way—“useless” “new residents,” after all, were hardly useful, and their presence could even be “counterproductive” (vredno).117 The focus was, therefore, on making sure that the settler pool provided as much utility as possible. As Minister of Finance Count Kankrin noted in 1826, one of the “bases [pravila] of the current financial system” was “the gradual redistribution of great numbers of land-poor [state peasants] [so as] to improve their agriculture while at the same time encouraging their engagement in various other economic pursuits [raznye promysly].”118 The urge to reform and improve settler life through tutelage would reach its apogee under the Ministry of State Domains beginning in the late 1830s, but the aspiration was already pronounced in official thinking in the first decades of the century. If the amelioration of peasant backwardness was implicit to the state’s resettlement program, it was absolutely central to Count Arakcheev’s military colonies, sixteen cavalry regiments of which were established in Kherson and Ekaterinoslav Provinces beginning in 1817 and whose population counted some forty-nine thousand people by 1822.119 Unlike the policy of economic resettlements, the southern military colonies (much as those in the north) were not created by moving would-be military colonists to the steppe but rather by dragooning peasant settlers who were already there into designated military districts where they were to live and work alongside soldier recruits. The two groups—the soldiers and the “agricultural residents,” which in New Russia included not only Russian and Ukrainian Orthodox state peasants but also Russian Old Believers, Cossacks, Moldavians, Bulgarians, and Gypsies—were then expected over time to merge into a single class of peasant-soldiers, whose villages, like army bases in miniature, were to have identical houses symmetrically arrayed along a single street, a central drilling area, a school, fire station, chancellery, and small exercise room. Given that the abiding purpose of the colonies, beyond providing the empire with a new system of military defense, was the beneficent quest to “transform a vulgar people,” no expense was spared 117 Debu, Topograficheskoe i statisticheskoe opisanie orenburgskoi gubernii, pp. 24–25; Zubov, Kartina Kavkazskogo kraia, pp. 17–19. 118 I.N. Bozherianov, Graf Egor Frantsevich Kankrin, ego zhizn', literaturnye trudy i dvadtsatiletnaia deiatel'nost' upravleniia ministerstva finansov (St. Petersburg, 1897), p. 123. 119 Druzhinina, Iuzhnaia Ukraina v 1800–1825 gg., pp. 98–100; L.P. Bogdanov, Voennye poseleniia v Rossii (Moscow, 1992), p. 35.

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and no resistance from the vulgar people involved was tolerated.120 The initial riots of the discontented were suppressed. The “open” steppe was surveyed and carved into geometrically arrayed settlement areas and new villages were built or old ones refurbished. In the words of one foreign observer in 1828, through “wise counsel” as well as some more “acerbic measures,” the southern colonists were led to produce bumper harvests while being transformed from “an assortment of bad and potentially worrisome subjects” into people who conformed to “a regular social order.”121 Like the rest of the empire’s military colonies, those of the New Russian provinces were gradually changed during the reign of Nicholas I (the “Iron Tsar” did not look favorably on the idea of giving guns to peasants), but they remained operational until the late 1850s.122 The military colonies were an extreme expression of the early nineteenth-century conviction that officialdom could recast the peasant and that “administrative utopia” (or “conservative statist utopianism”) was attainable.123 Yet no matter how much St. Petersburg tried to manage, plot, direct, and categorize the movement or transformation of its steppe colonists, the distances remained huge, communications remained slow, the settlers greatly outnumbered the state’s officials, and order remained largely an illusion. This was particularly clear once one got outside the boardrooms of St. Petersburg and into the settlement zones. Writing from the latter to the former in the summer of 1833, the military governor of Orenburg described near total chaos and requested a halt to resettlement: In part because many of the most attractive lands have already been settled but due even more to the settlers’ willfulness, intolerable violations of property rights are common here. Incoming migrants, often having come to the province without any permission or documentation whatsoever, simply wander around until they decide to settle on lands that usually prove to be already allocated. The administration then only learns of [the new arrivals] when they 120 The quoted phrase is how an associate of Arakcheev’s described the count’s view of the colonies. See “Vospominaniia M.F. Borozdina,” Graf Arakcheev i voennye poseleniia, 1809–1831 (St. Petersburg, 1871), p. 4. 121 “Russie: Colonies militaires,” Spectateur militaire, 1828, v. 5, pp. 247, 250. The reference to the impact of “wise counseling” on the colonists’ farming appears in “Des colonies militaires de l’empire de Russie,” Spectateur militaire, 1830, v. 9, p. 470. See also Bogdanov, Voennye poseleniia v Rossii, pp. 56–60, 66, 70. 122 Bogdanov, Voennye poseleniia v Rossii, pp. 79–81; Alan D. Ferguson, “The Russian Military Settlements, 1825–1866,” in Alan D. Ferguson and Alfred Levin (eds.), Essays in Russian History: A Collection Dedicated to George Vernadsky (Hamden, Conn., 1964), pp. 123–24. 123 Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (New York, 1991), pp. 19–22; Leonid Heller and Michel Niqueux, Histoire de l’utopie en Russie (Paris, 1995), p. 108.

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Taming the Wild Field become embroiled in disputes with the old settlers [starozhily]. Of course, some cases of undetected settlement are clearly the fault of the district police, but in other cases such settlers are [ordered out] yet refuse to respect any authority and stubbornly ignore even Your Excellency’s own directives. . . . After repeated strictures against illegal movement, the vagabondage of some state settlers has assumed a different character: now they come with temporary passports or sometimes on monthly work passes and either establish . . . their own villages or track down their countrymen who resettled here previously and move in with them. Their communes then hide them, as well as other passportless people such as serf runaways and even murderers, from the police. . . . [Other settlers] unable to find lands available or to their liking, return to their home provinces [na rodinu] even though they remain registered here, while those who are settled illegally have to be forcibly removed despite the fact that they are firmly established, . . . which surely ruins them. Still others, having left all their belongings in their former homes, are denied access to land when they arrive here because they did not receive [prior] permission for resettlement from their provincial treasury.124

On the basis of this and subsequent reports, the government eventually banned all migration to Orenburg between 1835 and 1839, though not before the minister of Finance reminded the governor that his problems could be easily solved if only his subordinates “correctly followed the appropriate [resettlement] procedures.”125 Similarly complicated situations could be found in other intense settlement zones. All across the steppe, there were settlers who resettled before they were supposed to, did not end up where they set out to go, returned to their original villages having already sold off their homes, or, as provincial officials put it, simply “roamed about.” There were lands that were not fully surveyed or not even surveyed at all, and land disputes abounded between new settlers, “old settlers,” nomads, Cossacks, and private landlords. There were also functionaries who did not live up to expectations, such as the men running the special resettlement office in Caucasus Province in 1806 who were supposed to “bring order to [the distribution of] land and increase stock raising [in the province as well as] to teach ways to plant trees and other useful plants” but apparently “did neither the one nor the other.”126 Despite admonitions to “take all necessary measures to safeguard the health of settlers,”127 thousands continued to fall sick or die due 124 GAOO, f. 6, op. 5, d. 10643, ll. 1(b)–2(b). 125 Ibid., ll. 6–8. For the initial decree halting resettlement, issued in March 1834,

see PSZ, ser. 2, v. 9, n. 6888 (1834), pp. 206–7. 126 “Obozrenie zemel' kavkazskoi gubernii v otnoshenii svoistva ikh, sostoianiia i zvaniia naseliaiushchikh onuiu obitatelei: Sostavleno v 1820 godu,” Akty kavkazskoi arkheograficheskoi komissii, v. 6, pt. 1, n. 977. 127 PSZ, ser. 2, v. 7, n. 5249 (1832), p. 157.

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to deprivations on the road or exposure on arrival to unfamiliar foods, climates, damp dugouts, and epidemics. Colonists on or near the frontiers in the Caucasus or Orenburg and the Caspian still faced the danger of raids by Kazakhs or “mountain peoples.” And for the state’s well-intentioned officials, there remained the challenge of somehow addressing the needs of tens of thousands of destitute migrants, such as the “crowds . . . of beggars in the most dismal clothing and with their small children worn out by hunger” whose condition “shocked” the governor of Saratov in 1832,128 or the fifty “poor and suffering . . . homesteaders” from Kursk on their way to Stavropol'—via a failed resettlement in Siberia—whose “miserable convoy” of oxen carts was described by an official in Astrakhan in 1827.129 If the government’s “procedures” were intended to move colonists at the pace bureaucratic exactitude required, land hunger and simply hunger determined a different pace for settlers. Many of them applied for resettlement but then gave up waiting for official permission and resettled on their own, thus partially abiding by the spirit (as well as the formal requirements) of the “procedures” while violating them at the same time.130 When too many people moved “willfully” and local authorities were overwhelmed, the typical response, much as was done in Orenburg, was to shut down resettlement by decree, though this rarely had the desired effect. Not every aspect of colonization produced misery, confusion, and conflict. Even as each new agriculturalist arriving on the steppe diminished the opportunities for pastoral nomadism and the rationale for Cossackdom, there were still deals and accommodations to be made with settlers over land and labor, many of which worked to the advantage of individual nomads and Cossacks. If new arrivals (domestic and foreign alike) made it through the first withering years of adaptation to their new lands, they often did well relative to what their economic conditions had been at home, a simple truth that served as the most important of the factors “pulling” people to migrate. And if officials were disdainful of “willful” or “rumor-mongering” peasant settlers and “disobedient” nomads, they could also be compassionate toward both; at the same time, peasants and nomads, inherently wary of officialdom, could also find benefits in cooperation. Beyond the obvious fact that colonization was edging out the nomads and turning the steppe into an increasingly Slavic and agricultural domain, there were few absolutes. The process continued to produce contradictory entanglements of hope and misery, opportunity and expropri128 RGIA, f. 379, op. 1, d. 1171, ll. 18–18(b). 129 RGIA, f. 379, op. 1, d. 597, ll. 96–98(b). 130 See the examples in Willard Sunderland, “Peasants on the Move: State Peasant

Resettlement in Imperial Russia, 1805–1830s,” RR, 1993, v. 52, n. 4, p. 480.

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ation, winners and losers, among native inhabitants as well as settler newcomers. In the relations between the state and its settlers, however, one constant paradox endured: even as the government increased its commitment to the management of large-scale colonization and identified the land-poor state peasant from the interior as its principal colonist, its control over the process remained at best incomplete, and land shortages in the interior did not go away. By the late 1830s, for well-meaning reformers who knew that they had the peasants’ best interests at heart, the solution was thus to urge even more peasants to move to the steppe and to make sure this movement occurred with even greater dedication to their welfare.

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Portrait of P. D. Kiselev, by Franz Krüger (1851), reproduced in B. I. Asvarishch, ‘Sovershenno modnyi zhivopisets’ Frants Kriuger v Peterburge (Slavia, St. Petersburg, 1997), p. 106, n. 33. The painting is held by the Hermitage Museum, inventory number Erzh212.

Chapter Four

Reformist Colonization And now they were standing face to face with a man who had broken new soil, a man who also had faith in his country, and what was more, who showed it in his deeds. Halldór Laxness, Independent People

The System and the Peasants Greater dedication to peasant welfare came in December 1837 with the creation of the Ministry of State Domains. Founded to oversee all “state properties” (everything from forests to mines), the new ministry’s primary function was to oversee the state peasants and, more explicitly, to “provide [them] with the most proximate and direct tutelage so as to improve their condition.”1 This was a major development because the state peasantry had never been singled out before as a category to be ruled by its own ministry, and no single ministry had ever been so clearly identified with the cause of rural reform. (Reluctant to do much to uplift the nobles’ peasants, Tsar Nicholas’s regime was at least committed to uplifting its own.) At the same time, the actual content of the reform being offered was not appreciably new. Having concluded that previous attempts at turning backward peasants into prosperous, rational farmers through bureaucratic paternalism had been less than fully successful, the tsar and his lieutenants simply decided to try again with more paternalism and a new bureaucracy. Faith in the apparently irresistible appeal of enlightened self-interest continued to run high. As Pavel Kiselev, the first head of the new ministry, noted in a circular in 1843, “Based on my many personal encounters with peasants, I have become convinced that they are ready to 1 Istoricheskoe obozrenie piatidesiatiletnei deiatel'nosti ministerstva gosudarstvennykh imushchestv, 1837–1887 (St. Petersburg, 1888), v. 1, p. 27. On the founding of the ministry, see also N.M. Druzhinin, Gosudarstvennye krest'iane i reforma P.D. Kiseleva (Moscow, 1946), v. 1.

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follow useful advice, and I am certain that if only their superiors [nachal'stvo] would treat them considerately and demonstrate genuine concern for their welfare all [our] efforts would be greeted with trust and gratitude.”2 Resettlement was not a factor in the decision to create the new ministry, but it quickly developed into an important ministerial concern. For one, resettling peasants continued to appear to be a logical way to alleviate land shortages and assuage rural poverty. As a result, it retained a natural appeal for Kiselev and his fellow reformers. Furthermore, the government continued to need people for its “empty spaces,” and because most nobles remained reluctant to move their serfs and colonization by foreigners was all but closed, state peasants remained the empire’s most desirable and numerous colonists. These facts, combined with the new ministry’s varied related areas of activity, meant that State Domains ultimately became the closest equivalent yet to a Russian ministry of colonization, with extensive responsibilities for surveying and allocating state land, selecting and relocating state peasant migrants, and providing new arrivals in the borderlands with seeds, plows, and, of course, tutelage. The approach throughout was predictably reformist. If resettlement policy in the early nineteenth century had been based on the twinned inclination to populate the periphery and improve the peasantry, the new ministry would now see to it that resettlement itself was improved through “considerable modification to the appropriate measures.”3 If such modification seemed necessary, it was because the evidence of problems with resettlement was overwhelming. The Orenburg military governor’s description of “disorder” was the rule rather than the exception. According to a report completed in March 1837 in preparation for the founding of the ministry, far too many state peasants resettled illegally “despite the repeated efforts of provincial authorities,” and far too many settlement zones were chaotic as these “willful” migrants either roamed about and settled wherever they wished, provoking land disputes, or gave up and returned home “in a completely ruined state and became a burden to their communes.” With so much uncontrolled movement, the report concluded, “Many peasants simply disappear from the government’s sight.”4 There were other problems besides. According to Kiselev, when his new ministry began its tenure there was no clear system for land allocation (consequently most settlers simply “grabbed land wherever they could”), and official record-keeping was so incompetent that at least 2 Cited in A.P. Zablotskii-Desiatovskii, Graf P.D. Kiselev i ego vremia: Materialy dlia istorii imperatorov Aleksandra I, Nikolaia I i Aleksandra II (St. Petersburg, 1882), v. 2, p. 193. 3 “Obozrenie mer po pereseleniiu gosudarstvennykh krest'ian,” ZhMGI, 1854, v. 52, otd. 2, p. 7. 4 RGIA, f. 1589, op. 4, d. 19, l. 23(b)–24.

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24,205 “willful” settlers had managed to go unrecorded in their new locales, while officials in their former villages simply recorded their mounting arrears: “In 1837, 402,568 silver rubles [of such arrears] were uncovered in Kursk Province alone!”5 As of 1838, not even 1 percent of the approximately ninety million desiatinas of state land in European Russia had been surveyed;6 resettlement regulations were occasionally contradictory; and resettlement officials remained grossly outnumbered by their peasant charges and only slightly more enlightened. The remedy for this challenging situation was clear. Resettlement had to be improved with an all-around increase in standardization and regulation based on more knowledge about the state’s resources, more numerous and better trained officials, and a revitalized ethos of tutelage, all of which appeared to go together. Increased regulation and standardization would eliminate inconsistencies and confusion in resettlement procedures; fuller data on the state’s resources would improve efficiency; better officials would do the same; and greater tutelage would continue to reduce the peasant’s ignorance and poverty, making him into a more successful—that is, a more obedient and prosperous—settler. The ministry began working toward this vision right away. Beginning in 1838, all of its provincial offices (palaty) were instructed to submit “statistical descriptions” of state lands under their purview (this complemented the more detailed population data that the first provincial statistical committees had begun providing to the Ministry of Interior a few years earlier). New measures against illegal resettlement were drafted (though never adopted). Special survey teams were dispatched to high settlement areas. New resettlement was halted (as before, by decree) wherever available lands appeared in short supply or remained uncounted. Thousands of illegal settlers were “amnestied” and allowed to stay in place in order to avoid the ruinous consequences of forcing them home. Calls went out to governors in “land-poor provinces” to provide lists of prospective future settlers so that St. Petersburg would know just how many people might be willing to move. Agronomists, foresters, and accountants were assigned to the cause. And, last but not least, the first steps were taken toward devising a comprehensive resettlement law, one that would reflect the “considerable information [that the ministry had been able to accumulate] on the needs and challenges involved in such a complicated enterprise.”7 5 “Obozrenie upravleniia gosudarstvennykh imushchestv za posledniia 25 let s 20 noiabria 1825 po 20 noiabria 1850 g.,” SIRIO, 1896, v. 98, p. 472. 6 Druzhinin, Gosudarstvennye krest'iane (Moscow, 1958), v. 2, pp. 170–71 passim. 7 V.M Kabuzan, Narodonaselenie Rossii v xviii–pervoi polovine xix v. (po materialam revizii) (Moscow, 1963), p. 87; Istoricheskoe obozrenie piatidesiatiletnei deiatel'nosti ministerstva gosudarstvennykh imushchestv, 1837–1887, v. 2, pt. 2, pp. 21–24; RGIA, f. 1589, op. 1, d. 265, ll. 2–17(b); “Obozrenie mer po pereseleniiu gosudarstvennykh krest'ian,” p. 12.

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This law turned out to be the Supplementary Regulations on the Resettlement of Land-Poor State Villagers to Land-Abundant Places, approved by the tsar in April 1843.8 In its basic prescriptions, the new decree differed little from those that had appeared earlier in the century. Prospective settlers were to continue to petition for permission to resettle; only those from “land-poor communes” (five desiatinas or less per male soul) and with no outstanding obligations could qualify; and every last step of their resettlement was still to take place under minute official supervision. Yet the decree also set a new precedent. Henceforth all state settlers would be covered by one set of terms (the only exceptions noted were peasants exiled by their communes or those moving to Caucasus Oblast to enroll as Cossacks), and the terms themselves became more generous, reflecting the ministry’s concern with limiting return migration and demonstrating as much tutelage as possible. Settlers were now promised construction funds (up to thirty-five silver rubles), lumber (one hundred korni per household), an inventory allowance (up to twenty rubles) to purchase “agricultural tools and stock animals” as well as an eight-year exemption from taxes and duties, a six-year exemption from troop quartering, and a reprieve from three rounds of the draft. As the ministry’s arm in the countryside, the provincial palaty became the crucial on-the-ground managers of resettlement, expected to provide everything from escort teams for settler parties to mathematically precise land allocations (“One-fifth of every village allotment is to be set aside to accommodate population increase [dlia pribylnykh dush], one-tenth shall be maintained for retired soldiers or those released from service”).9 Much as before, all “willful” resettlement was to be severely punished, and the new procedures were to be followed to the letter since the peasants’ welfare depended upon it. As Kiselev indicated in a report from 1843, “Love for one’s fellow man demands the strictest compliance with these regulations.”10 In both what it said and what it did not, the law of 1843 neatly encapsulated the fundamental meanings of colonization in government culture in the mid-nineteenth century. Interpreted as a question of reforming peasants, rationalizing land allocation, and improving farming colonization amounted to agricultural resettlement (pereselenie), which is to say that it was defined and addressed first and foremost as a matter of rural economic policy. As stated in a State Domains document clarifying the decree a few months later, “The movement of state peasants through voluntary resettlement has two goals: (1) to expand the economic resources 8 PSZ, ser. 2, v. 18, n. 16718 (1843), pp. 235–40. See also ZhMGI, 1843, v. 8, n. 3, pp. xiv–xxii. 9 PSZ, ser. 2, v. 18, n. 16718 (1843), p. 237. 10 Zablotskii-Desiatovskii, Graf P.D. Kiselev i ego vremia, v. 4, p. 171.

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available to land-poor communes by relocating some of their members; and (2) to put surplus hands to use in developing empty spaces.”11 The location of the “empty spaces” was not specified, but it was clear that they could just as well be “within the borders of [the peasants’ home] province” as in the periphery, and there was nothing to suggest that the “surplus hands” to be dispatched needed to be Russian or even Orthodox. The implication was that any land-poor peasant of any ethnicity or religion could apply and any unoccupied land anywhere was a potentially suitable destination. Indeed there was no language in the decree or in any State Domains correspondence on the question to indicate that resettling peasants was a specifically colonial policy with implications for imperial power. There might still be eastern and southern aliens of varying levels of backwardness who could be helped by the presence of Russian colonistmentors, and there might still be frontiers that ideally needed reinforcing with larger populations, but to the ministry in charge colonization/resettlement was “principally a means of equalizing land between and providing land for local communes,” and consequently concerns of the prior sort went unstated.12 Empire was certainly not irrelevant to Kiselev and his team, but the matter at hand was agriculture, which tended to gloss over the rest. Much as before, there was no question that a good deal of the government’s unimperialist resettlement would be focused on the steppe. The European plains, despite the rising attractions of Siberia, continued to represent the empire’s leading colonization zone throughout the preGreat Reforms period. Between 1836 and 1858, New Russia took 28 percent of all migrants in the empire, the Lower Volga 10 percent, Orenburg 13 percent, and the Northern Caucasus 21 percent, some 931,600 settlers in all.13 Much as before, the vast majority of the settlers were state peasants from land-poor provinces in central Russia and Ukraine, and most of them appear to have been “legal” migrants moved by State Domains.14 Indeed, settlement on the steppe, much like settlement elsewhere, developed into a State Domains operation, organized by the ministry’s provincial offices, plotted by its surveyors, and described in exacting detail by its 11 “Instruktsiia dlia rukovodstva po pereseleniiu gosudarstvennykh krest'ian (1843),” Hoover Institution Archives, Collection: Russia, Ministerstvo Gosudarstvennykh Imushchestv, Box No. 1, Accession No. 8903211.16, pp. 356–57. This passage also appears almost verbatim in the 1843 decree. 12 Ibid., p. 367. 13 These totals and the related percentages are based on my calculations of the figures provided in table 3 of S.I. Bruk and V.M. Kabuzan, “Migratsiia naseleniia v Rossii v xviii–nachale xx veka (chislennost; structura, geografiia),” Istoriia SSSR 4 (1984), p. 49. Bruk and Kabuzan’s numbers are based on evidence from the 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th revizii. 14 Ibid., p. 51.

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statisticians. The region’s enduring importance as an officially approved settlement zone stemmed entirely from the fact that approving officials continued to see it as largely “empty” and eminently exploitable. Even if some steppe areas—like limited parts of Ekaterinoslav and Kherson Provinces—were growing “crowded” (due both to in-migration and natural increase), most were not, and although steppes were still defined in the government’s lexicon as areas that were “thinly settled [malozaselennye], short on water [malovodnye], and treeless,”15 their potential to be the opposite (well settled, well irrigated, and arboreal) remained equally obvious. One official in 1839 surmised that irrigation and population could turn the scrubland around the Caspian into “fields, orchards, and pastures, much like the dry valleys of Egypt were made fruitful by the waters of the Nile.” Another official wrote that the steppes of Kabarda offered a “rich reserve [of land] for future resettlements from the interior.” And still another stated in 1848 that the vast plains on either side of the Lower Volga, while as yet “unstirred by the labor of man,” nonetheless suggested “a most spacious field for rational economic activity.”16 This by now longstanding vision of the south as a promising horizon for future settlement persisted largely unchallenged in official and semiofficial writings well into the Great Reforms era.17 The pursuit of rational economic activity took a variety of forms. In addition to surveying vast tracts of previously unsurveyed steppe land and attempting to move state settlers to the plains as systematically as possible, State Domains invested in building roads and granaries, digging wells, planting woods, and establishing or encouraging the work of experimental farms. Among the latter was the old homestead of Johann Cornies in Tauris Province, which by the 1850s had passed into the hands of his sonin-law and continued to be held up as an inspirational example for “surrounding settlers . . . to elevate and perfect their farming.”18 Another was an ambitious project to break peasants from their attachment to communal land tenure on 7,600 desiatinas of steppe land along the Stepnaia Chernokovka River in Simbirsk Province. In 1849, the official E. E. Lode 15 A. Shmakov, “O sposobakh dobyvanii vody v stepnykh mestakh iuzhnoi i iugo-vostochnoi chasti evropeiskoi Rossii,” ZhMGI, 1844, v. 10, otd. 2, p. 1. 16 Solomon, “Statisticheskie zapiski ob Astrakhanskoi gubernii,” ZhMVD, 1839, v. 33, p. 316; A. Zablotskii, “Otryvok iz putevykh zapisok po kavkazskoi oblasti,” ZhMVD, 1839, pp. 286–87; L. Zaustsinskii, “Kalmytskie stepi v sel'sko-khoziaistvennom otnoshenii,” ZhMGI, 1848, v. 29, pp. 212–13. 17 See, for example, I.F. Shtukenberg, Opisanie stavropol'skoi gubernii s zemleiu chernomorskikh kazakov in his Statisticheskie trudy (St. Petersburg, 1857), p. 1; Kalmytskaia step' astrakhanskoi gubernii po izsledovaniiam Kumo-Manychskoi ekspeditsii (St. Petersburg, 1868), v. 1, pp. 1–6; and I. Palimpsestov, Ob ustroistve vodokhranilishch v stepiakh iuga Rossii (Odessa, 1867), pp. 16–17. 18 Svechnikov, “Myza Iushanleia,” Odesskii vestnik, 1853, n. 112, p. 1.

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enthusiastically proposed relocating 204 households of land-poor peasants to this site where they were to set up individual farms and engage in “rational methods of agriculture,” with a portion of the land set aside to be worked “in the traditional manner . . . so as to provide a standard for comparison.”19 Plans for Lode’s settler laboratory were scaled back almost immediately because of poor organization, high cost, his superiors’ lack of confidence in “our people’s maturity” for yeoman husbandry, and a growing sense after 1848 that communal agriculture, whatever its economic drawbacks, was at least more socially reliable than individual homesteading. But the very fact that the project had been proposed was proof that the steppe continued to be seen as a tabula rasa where new beginnings could easily be imagined. Indeed, new beginnings were imagined even for the vast majority of “resettlers” who did not end up anywhere near an experimental farm, the presumption being that the opportunity to work more land in a new place, combined with ministerial tutelage, would itself produce a positive impact on backward habits. As Kiselev noted in a memorandum to the tsar in 1847, resettlement to “distant provinces” was so potentially transforming in this regard that it could even be used in some cases as a “corrective measure” to reform delinquent peasants who refused to make efforts to improve their farming or pay their taxes.20 Land-poor peasants from central Russian and Ukrainian provinces were not the only settlers expected to benefit from the ministry’s plans. Having acquired jurisdiction over the Guardianship Committee for Foreign Colonists from the Ministry of Internal Affairs in 1837, State Domains also became responsible for the south’s bewildering array of foreign colonists, and consequently, they too received the ministry’s “care.” Ministry officials collected data on foreign settlements, surveyed their lands, provided new allocations to accommodate their “daughter colonies,” and dispensed funds to build their mills, cisterns, schools, bridges, and fire stations. In the ministerial view, the preestablished hierarchy of foreigners prevailed: Germans—in particular Mennonites, referred to as mennonity/mennonisty to differentiate them from the rest of the kolonisty—appeared the most prosperous and upstanding of all, with Bulgarians and Armenians still lauded but a notch below, and Greeks, Moldavians, and Walachians (usually) lower still.21 The foreigners, for their part, might grumble about ministerial rulings on this or that land dispute, but their language of interaction with Odessa, Saratov, or St. Pe19 Druzhinin, Gosudarstvennye krest'iane i reforma P.D. Kiseleva, v. 2, p. 196. 20 RGIA, f. 1589, op. 1, d. 737, l. 1(b). 21 For examples of official views of various foreign colonist communities, see E.I.

Druzhinina, Iuzhnaia Ukraina v period krizisa feodalizma, 1825–1860 (Moscow, 1981), pp. 26–38, 61.

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tersburg was invariably deferential, reflecting the fact that, as the Molochna Mennonites declared in 1848, theirs was a “genuine attachment and devotion to throne and country [and] to the existing legal order and government.”22 Such devotion was not surprising given that the privileges provided by the existing legal order were still generous and would remain so until the reforms of the early 1870s. In a typical case of demonstrative loyalty, the Bulgarian colonist leadership in Bessarabia expressed its gratitude to the state by petitioning in 1845 to have the remains of the recently deceased director of the Guardianship Committee, General Ivan Nikitich Inzov, brought for burial in the main Bulgarian settlement where a marble monument would mark his grave: “He gave the settlers new life in their new fatherland.”23 Overall, the empire saw little new foreign colonist immigration in the mid-nineteenth century, though small numbers of Bulgarians and Austrian Mennonites were permitted to move to New Russia (mostly Tauris Province) and the Lower Volga, respectively, in the 1850s and early 1860s. The Jewish colonists of the south were also not forgotten. The government resumed promoting Jewish resettlement from the Western Provinces to New Russia (though largely at the settlers’ own expense), and New Russia’s Governor-General Mikhail Vorontsov established a special committee to assist the neediest arrivals in 1841.24 In 1847 the officially designated “Jews-agriculturalists” (evrei-zemledel'tsy) of the region were then passed to the oversight of the irrepressibly reformist Guardianship Committee for Foreign Colonists, which promptly embarked on the most elaborate plan yet to “correct” its new charges’ persistent poverty, “unsatisfactory agriculture,” and apparent “reluctance to perform any work on the land.”25 Supervisors were assigned to Ekaterinoslav and Kherson Provinces to manage the colonies’ funds; special advisory boards “as in the German colonies” were established to run each colony’s affairs; and, given that “in public much as in private life, the greatest influence comes 22 Cited in Detlef Brandes, Von den Zaren adoptiert: Die deutschen Kolonisten und die Balkansiedler in Neurußland und Bessarabien, 1751–1914 (Munich, 1993), p. 474. Vorontsov’s office was formally in charge of administering the colonies between 1838 and 1844, when they were passed to State Domains. See Istoricheskoe obozrenie piatidesiatiletnei deiatel'nosti ministerstva gosudarstvennykh imushchestv, v. 2, p. 192. 23 A. Skal'kovskii, Bolgarskie kolonii v Bessarabii i novorossiiskom krae: Statisticheskii ocherk (Odessa, 1848), pp. 44–45. 24 D.Z. Fel'dman, “M.S. Vorontsov i evreiskoe naselenie iuzhnoi Rossii v pervoi polovine xix,” Vorontsovy—dva veka v istorii Rossii (St. Petersburg, 2000), pp. 92–95. 25 These references are drawn from a report by the Ekaterinoslav governor that was used by State Domains in preparation for the jurisdictional transfer to the Guardianship Committee. RGIA, f. 383, op. 9, d. 8045/I, l. 7–7(b). On the jurisdictional transfer, see Istoricheskoe obozrenie piatidesiatiletnei deiatel'nosti ministerstva gosudarstvennykh imushchestv, v. 2, pp. 194–95.

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from a good example,” volunteers from among the area’s “best German farmers” were urged to take up residence in the Jewish settlements.26 (In contrast to plans from earlier in the century, local Russian peasants no longer seemed suitable for this purpose because, as one official put it, “compared to the German colonists, [they] presently stand at a much lower stage of economic development and thus have little to offer the Jewish colonist.”)27 Calls for Germans willing to resettle as “model administrators, blacksmiths, and cartwrights” were duly posted in the committee’s German-language newspaper (along with a list of generous incentives), and by 1851, eighty-three German colonists, many of them Mennonites, found themselves distributed (unevenly) among a little over seventeen thousand Jews.28 Given the numbers, it is no surprise that the ministry’s plan did not produce the intended effect. “The undeniable if rather disquieting truth is that at the current time [1859] we do not yet have Jewish colonies in Russia, if by the word colony one means a rural locality settled by people whose chosen occupation is agriculture and who actually live as agriculturalists.”29 Most of the Jewish colonists, regardless of the efforts of their would-be Kulturträger and threats of forced conscription by the ministry, continued to work as traders or small craftsmen, often relocating permanently or seasonally to towns while remaining in their villages only “on paper.” Furthermore, neither the Jews nor the Mennonites, each of them insular in their own way, were completely comfortable with the realities of cohabitation, as one Mennonite resident noted in his diary in reference to a quarrel over a cow in the village of Novovitebsk in 1860: The Jews expressed their hatred of us by threatening legal action with the government to force our departure. Several Jews said as much to me this morn26 F. Zakharevich, “Istoriko-statisticheskoe opisanie evreiskikh kolonii novorossiiskogo kraia,” Novorossiiskii kalendar'na 1853 god (Odessa, 1852), pp. 400–401; V.O. Levanda (comp.), Polnyi khronologicheskii sbornik zakonov i polozhenii kasaiushchikhsia evreev, ot ulozheniia tsaria Alekseia Mikhailovicha do nastoiashchego vremeni; 1649–1873 g. (St. Petersburg, 1874), pp. 669–70. The reference to the influence of good examples is drawn from an inspector’s report on the Jewish colonies from 1851. See DAOO, f. 3, op. 1, d. 2, l. 30. 27 Cited in Julius Elk, Die jüdischen Kolonien in Rußland: Kulturhistorische Studie und Beitrag zur Geschichte der Juden in Rußland (Frankfurt am Main, 1886), p. 206. 28 “Die Hebräer-kolonieen in Süd-Rußland” and “Aufforderung an deutsche Kolonisten, sich als Musterwirte, Schmiede, und Wagner in den Juden-Kolonieen niederzulassen,” Unterhaltungsblatt für deutsche Ansiedler im südlichen Rußland, 1848, n. 3, pp. 19–21; Zakharevich, “Istoriko-statisticheskoe opisanie evreiskikh kolonii novorossiiskogo kraia,” p. 409. Totals for the Jewish colonist population of New Russia and the Germans living in Jewish settlements are drawn from DAOO, f. 3, op. 1, d. 2, ll. 15, 22(b)–25. 29 A. Dumoshevskii, “Evrei-zemledel'tsy v Rossii,” VIRGO, 1859, v. 27, p. 70.

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Although the ministerial lords of St. Petersburg became noticeably less enthusiastic about the prospects of the plan after the 1850s, at least some measure of faith persisted in the idea of turning Jews into farmers throughout the pre-Emancipation period. New Jewish agricultural settlement in New Russia was only formally halted in 1866.31 If changes were expected of steppe settlers, foreign and domestic, the same held true for the region’s nomads and seminomads, most of whom, beginning at different times, also became charges of State Domains, whose administration of them continued to be defined by the degree and perceived usefulness of their nomadism. The Nogays of Tauris Province were considered weaned enough from their wandering ways to be declared state peasants in 1832, and thereafter they began to be administered “on a par with other state settlers.” Less seemingly sedentary Nogays and other “nomadic aliens” in Stavropol' had their “supervision” tightened with the appointment of a State Domains director (pristav) in 1841, and much the same thing was done with the Kalmyks of Astrakhan' in 1847. The Bashkirs, first subjected to aggressive and then somewhat more gentle sedentarizing campaigns led by the Orenburg military governor’s office between the 1830s and early 1850s, were removed from their Cossack-like military-cantonal administration and transferred to “civilian government” (grazhdanskoe vedomstvo) in 1865. (Those Bashkirs who served in the Orenburg Cossack host, however—about two hundred thousand in 1859—remained Cossacks.)32 The coming of State Domains to the nomads meant continued expectations of their gradual and largely voluntary turn toward “order” and “enlightenment,” as defined by agriculture, Orthodoxy, Russian-style villages, Russian-style schools, and smallpox immunizations, though real developments on any of these fronts were extremely limited and contradictions 30 Harvey L. Dyck (trans. and ed.), A Mennonite in Russia: The Diaries of Jacob D. Epp, 1851–1880 (Toronto, 1991), p. 141. 31 For the decree halting new Jewish agricultural resettlement, see Levanda (comp.), Polnyi khronologicheskii sbornik, p. 1059. 32 Svod zakonov rossiiskoi imperii (St. Petersburg, 1857), v. 2, pt. 2, bk. 7, pp. 87, 59; PSZ, ser. 2, v. 22, n. 21144 (1847), pp. 349–72; Ocherki istorii kalmystskoi ASSR, pp. 244–48; “O peredache upravleniia Bashkirami iz voennogo v grazhdanskoe vedomstvo: Vysochaishe utverzhdennoe mnenie gosudarstvennogo soveta,” Zakony rossiiskoi imperii o Bashkirakh, Mishariakh, Teptiariakh i Bobyliakh (Ufa, 1999), pp. 418–44.

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persisted. Indeed, with the gradual extension of State Domains’ jurisdiction, what had formerly been the contradictions of government policy in general now became contradictions within a single ministry. Pledged to “protect” the nomads, the ministry’s men were also expected to gently urge them to change while settling the steppe with agricultural colonists who likewise required “protection” and whose presence made protecting nomads increasingly difficult and their transformation all but forced. Surveying steppe land invariably led to the conclusion that nomads did not need as much of it as they currently enjoyed (this “excess” land was then claimed by the state, sold, rented out, or allocated for settlement) and safeguarding the interests of nomadic/seminomadic “proprietors,” such as Bashkirs and the “new Christian” Kalmyks of Stavropol' on the Volga, rarely extended to evicting settlers (even unabashed squatters) from the nomads’ lands, if the settlers turned out to be “firmly settled settled peasants” (s prochnim vodvoreniem poselivshies' krest'iane). The Senate provided the following definition of this category in 1837: “Firm settlement presupposes the existence of a working farm built by the peasants in question with farming implements, livestock, and fields under cultivation. . . . Those [settlers] as yet without a farm or still living in other peoples’ homes cannot be counted as truly settled.”33 Meanwhile Russia’s ministerial statisticians, as convinced as their Western counterparts that “numbers rule[d] the world” and that moral qualities were best revealed when they were quantified,34 offered new proof of nomadism’s apparently irredeemable lack of utility. As one official noted with painstaking thoroughness in 1839: The nomadic residents [of Astrakhan Province] raise 2,856,000 head of stock on 16 million desiatinas of land, while sedentary residents raise 264,000 on 300,000 desiatinas. It follows that the former raise one animal per every five desiatinas while the latter have a ratio of almost one to one. Accordingly, one can see that one desiatina of land as used by nomadic residents represents a productive capital of not more than eighteen kopecks, while the same desiatina used by sedentary residents represents more than ninety kopecks, thus proving that stock raising as practiced by sedentary residents is five times more successful than it is among nomads.35

Studies like this only helped to confirm what the government already knew: nomads were increasingly irrelevant. Around the middle of the cen33 RGIA, f. 383, op. 30, d. 927, l. 32(b). 34 Theodore M. Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820–1900 (Princeton, N.J.,

1986), p. 45; Porter, “Making Things Quantitative,” in Michael Power (ed.), Accounting and Science: Natural Inquiry and Commercial Reason (New York, 1994), pp. 36–56. 35 Solomon, “Statisticheskie zapiski ob Astrakhanskoi gubernii,” p. 341.

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tury, the European steppes were home to a few hundred thousand nomads, but the agricultural population of the region now numbered in the millions. Even acknowledging the nomads’ service as border guards, regimental cavalrymen, or road laborers, and the value of their animals and animal products for regional markets, the numbers made it plain that their importance had faded. Having long since lost either their ability to threaten or advance Russian power, they were now all but forgotten except by the scattered officials that had to deal with them and a small number of passing travelers, priests, and would-be ethnographers. Official reviews of their contributions to the empire were at best mixed. Most of the nomads and seminomads of the European steppe were Muslims—hence one could always wonder, as was the case during the Crimean War, how deeply their allegiances ran to Russia. They also caused “trouble” by stealing horses or, as sometimes happened with Bashkirs or the Stavropol' Kalmyks on the Volga, by attacking settler-squatters when they would not move off their lands. (Officials readily recognized the squatters’ responsibility in these confrontations, but that did not mean that the nomads appeared any less troublesome.) Even imaginary nomads were a problem. In the summer of 1858, the peasant Pavel Dmitr'ev rode into the village of Kozlovka, Buzuluk District, Orenburg Province, shouting that “many thousand” Kazakh and Bashkir raiders were burning their way through nearby villages and “killing many people.”36 As it turned out, Dmitr'ev made the whole thing up as a prank, but over the next two days hundreds of terrified settlers from Kozlovka and forty surrounding settlements streamed into the nearby district town where they ignored the persistent reassurances of the local authorities and hunkered down to wait out “the enemy.”37 Fictitious raiders and the panic they induced were proof that colonization on the ground continued to be shaped by rules and rhythms far removed from the dictates of central planning. Even as provincial officials redoubled their efforts to keep track of “resettlers,” drafting lists of individual colonists and possessions down to the numbers of overcoats and caftans in their carts,38 “undocumented parties” of state peasant migrants repeatedly surfaced as did groups of runaway serfs, pushed and pulled to run to the steppe by (among other things) harvest failures, landlord abuse, the lure of “freedom” (volia) and abundance (privol'e), the lure of New Jerusalems, the urge to rejoin kin who had migrated before them, and creative “misunderstandings” of state legislation. After the Crimean 36 GAOO, f. 6, op. 6, d. 13585, l. 7–7(b). 37 Ibid. 38 See, for example, the list provided for a party of thirty-one households resettling

from Kaluga to Orenburg in May 1848: GAOO, f. 18, op. 2, d. 56, ll. 28–33.

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War, for example, word spread that the government supposedly intended “to settle [southern] towns destroyed by the invader with runaway serfs and peasants from interior parts of Russia.” The result, according to a Third Section report from 1856, was “a flood of many thousands of drunken and obstreperous people” descending on Ekaterinoslav Province.39 Other rumors told of officials welcoming any and all settlers to enroll as Cossacks on the lines of the North Caucasus and Orenburg (this did in fact happen, but it was not the standing policy that rumors held it to be); of serfs being invited to the frontier to become state peasants; and, in the summer of 1853, of the plans of Princess Olga who, having apparently married the King of Persia, intended to establish five provinces in her new country “to be settled with Russian subjects, particularly those from Orenburg Province as they are already familiar with the life and ways of Asiatics.”40 In 1861, the retired clerk Evsenii Krshzhonstovskii “secretly traveled to the settlements of Zembreny and Goreshty [in Bessarabia] and announced to villagers that the government was calling settlers to . . . the Crimea . . . and granting them various privileges and monetary incentives.” Offering his services as petition writer, Krshzhonstovskii signed up eighty-four households, charging three rubles per family, with the exception of serfs, whom he charged five rubles because “they were allowed to resettle only to the Caucasus and the Amur, and petitions for those resettlements were much more complicated.”41 Land disputes—between “old residents” (starozhily) and “newcomers” (novosely, novoprishel'tsy), between Russians and aliens, between aliens and aliens, between “newcomers” and Cossacks—did not perceptibly diminish in the settlement zones. Peasants who arrived on the steppe and who, for whatever reason, did not like what they found continued to move around, as officials reported, “in search of better lands.”42 Others continued to get sick due to malnutrition, poor shelter, and inadequate hygiene. Such was the situation, for example, with over half of the 207 peasants from Orel 39 S.V. Okun' (ed.), Krest'ianskoe dvizhenie v Rossii v 1850–1856 gg.: Sbornik dokumentov (Moscow, 1962), pp. 582, 584. Rumors during the Crimean War also encouraged serfs to head for the south to serve in the army. See David Moon, Russian Peasants and Tsarist Legislation on the Eve of Reform: Interaction between Peasants and Officialdom, 1825–1855 (Basingstoke, Eng., 1992), pp. 113–64. 40 For these examples, see Thomas M. Barrett, At the Edge of Empire: The Terek Cossacks and the North Caucasus Frontier, 1700–1860 (Boulder, Colo., 1999), pp. 45–46; GAOO, f. 6, op. 5, d. 1139, ll. 1–6; and GAOO, f. 6, op. 8, d. 51, ll. 5–5(b). 41 I.G. Budak (comp.), Polozhenie krest'ian i obshchestvenno-politicheskoe dvizhenie v Bessarabii (1861–1895 gody): Dokumenty i materialy (Kishinev, 1964), pp. 18–19. 42 On this phenomenon, see Willard Sunderland, “An Empire of Peasants: EmpireBuilding, Interethnic Interaction, and Ethnic Stereotyping in the Rural World of the Russian Empire, 1800–1850s,” in Jane Burbank and David L. Ransel (eds.), Imperial Russia: New Histories for the Empire (Bloomington, Ind., 1998), pp. 177–79.

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and Tambov who settled near Berdiansk on the Azov Sea in 1862 and were found to be suffering from “catarrhal and rheumatic fevers, gastric and intestinal fevers, fevers indicative of typhus, and acute and chronic bloody diarrhea.”43 Graft also endured, especially among surveyors, who, despite being sworn to the highest ethical standards (“Bribes are not to be given or taken”),44 were notoriously impure. The old timers of Logachevka in Buzuluk District, for example, told of how a certain surveyor Bubnov led them out to the steppe to plot their village allotment in the 1830s and graciously accepted coins in his hat for every reading he took that enlarged the peasants’ tract. By the end of the afternoon, the hat was full and the new survey line ran across the top of a rise that became known as Bubnov’s Bump (Bubnovaia shishka).45 Of course, the persistence of graft and confusion did nothing to diminish the government’s conviction that it alone should run the resettlement process. It also did nothing to keep it from moving people by force when required, even despite the long-standing presumption that relocation should never “occur without first securing the agreement and readiness of the settlers themselves.”46 If most of the state’s “free rural residents” were potential settlers, neither all “free rural residents” nor all resettlements were the same. Land-poor state peasants from Poltava or Tambov might not (at least legally) be compelled against their will to go to the steppe as colonists, but Cossacks could continue to be ordered from one line or fort to another, as were Dontsy, Kubantsy, and the baptized Kalmyks of Stavropol' on various occasions. Jews could be ordered to leave a fifty-versta zone along the Prussian and Austrian borders. “Christian aliens” (formerly known as “new Christians”) in the Volga region could be resettled (either within their province or beyond it) if authorities deemed them at risk of “apostasy.” And “dangerous” sectarians could face summary deportation whenever the danger they posed seemed to require it.47 This hap43 DAKO, f. 26, op. 1, d. 24533, ll. 8–8(b). For descriptions of the dismal health and high mortality of varied migrant parties, see Druzhinin, Gosudarstvennye krest 'iane i reforma P.D. Kiseleva, v. 2, p. 192. 44 D. Alekseev (comp.), Pamiatnik iz mezhevykh zakonov (Moscow, 1833), p. 16. 45 N.M. Ogorodnikov, Ocherki istorii sela Logachevka (Buzuluk, 1993), p. 17. According to another Logochevka story, the peasants collected money to bribe Bubnov but he simply pocketed it and gave them much less land than they were due. 46 This injunction appears in a communication sent by the director of the First Department of State Domains to the ministry’s office in Tambov Province in August 1839: RGIA, f. 383, op. 1, d. 298, l. 18. 47 I. Popko, Chernomorskie kazaki v ikh grazhdanstvennom bytu i ocherki kraia, obshchestva, vooruzhennoi sily i sluzhby (St. Petersburg, 1858); Barrett, At the Edge of Empire, p. 46; Levanda (comp.), Polnyi khronologicheskii sbornik, pp. 550–52; Paul W. Werth, At the Margins of Orthodoxy: Mission, Governance, and Confessional Politics in Russia’s Volga-Kama Region, 1827–1905 (Ithaca, N.Y., 2002), pp. 109–10.

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pened in 1841 to the approximately four thousand Dukhobors of northern Tauris Province, who were first accused of murder, torture, and various other insults against “the power and commands of state and tsar” and then abruptly ordered to relocate to Transcaucasia so that they would no longer be able “to bring harm to those around [them].” This last point was a clear reference to the government’s biggest problem with the Dukhobors—the fact that they were now surrounded by too many Orthodox settlers and consequently needed to be removed to a less Orthodox frontier where they could still do good as colonists without doing evil as “pernicious heretics.”48 Following the deportations, which occurred over the next four years, new migrants from Poltava and Chernigov Provinces, as well as neighboring Orthodox, Germans, and Molokans ( just as “sectarian” as the Dukhobors but less “dangerous”) then received “supreme permission” to take over the “Dukhobor places.”49 The readiness to deport undesirable groups and replace them with more reliable ones—that is, to link resettlement with expulsion—became a deliberate policy in the south on a new and ominous scale after the Crimean War, when at least seven hundred thousand Muslims from the Crimea and the Northern and Western Caucasus “emigrated” to the Ottoman Empire. Some participants in this massive exodus left due to the dislocations and requisitions of the war, the encouragement of Ottoman agents and/or active sympathizers, and popular expectations of spiritual comfort and better treatment in “the Abode of Islam.” But others (the mountaineers of the Western Caucasus in particular) were simply burned out of their homes and deported to the Kuban' steppe or forced to flee to Turkey so that their lands could be occupied by Cossacks, euphemized by Minister of War Dimitrii Miliutin as the “Russian element.”50 (Prince Aleksandr Bariatinskii, viceroy of the Caucasus, went further and called them 48 Nicholas Breyfogle, “Heretics and Colonizers: Religious Dissent and Russian Colonization of Transcaucasia, 1830–1890” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1998), pp. 88–90. New Dukhobor resettlement from the interior to New Russia had been banned as of 1830 and directed instead to Transcaucasia for the same reasons. See RGIA, f. 379, op. 1, d. 1043, l. 1(b). 49 See, for example, DAKO, f. 26, op. 1, d. 12459, ll. 2–3 passim; and Sbornik statisticheskikh svedenii po Tavricheskoi gubernii, vol. 1, pt. 2, Krest'ianskoe khoziaistvo v Melitopol'skom uezde (Moscow, 1887), pp. 9–10. 50 Peter Holquist, “To Count, to Extract, and to Exterminate: Population Statistics and Population Politics in Late Imperial and Soviet Russia,” in Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin (eds.), A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (New York, 2001), pp. 116–19; Alan W. Fisher, “Emigration of Muslims from the Russian Empire in the Years after the Crimean War,” JfGO, 1987, v. 35, n. 3, pp. 356–71; and Brian Glyn Williams, “Hijra and Forced Migration from Nineteenth-Century Russia to the Ottoman Empire: A Critical Analysis of the Great Tatar Emigration of 1860–1861,” CMRS, 2001, v. 41, n. 1, pp. 79–108.

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“our wonderful Russian element.”)51 The government also facilitated the removal of Muslims through intentional inaction. A case in point was the departure of the Nogays of the Molochnye Vody area of Tauris Province, which began in late 1859 and lasted into 1860. (The Tauris Dukhobors had lived in this same area prior to their deportation.) As the governorgeneral of New Russia wrote in a secret dispatch to the Tauris governor in February 1860, “The minister of State Domains, in agreement with my views on the matter, advises against inhibiting the Nogays from resettling to Turkey, certain of the fact that, like the Crimean Tatars, they themselves will later seek to come back to their homeland.”52 Officials, consequently, did nothing, almost all of the area’s fifty thousand Nogays left for Ottoman Dobrudja in an “emigration the likes of which we have never seen before,” and, despite the minister’s certainties, almost none returned.53 As a result, according to a State Domains inspector, over nine hundred thousand desiatinas of state land in the northern districts of Tauris became “available for settlement by Russian and foreign colonists.” By spring 1862, well over one thousand households of Russian, Ukrainian, and Bulgarian settlers were moved in to occupy the vacated territory, with many settling directly “in the Nogays’ homes, which they have managed to turn into quite pleasant habitations.”54 These resettlements in support of ethnic cleansing55 were among the first official resettlements of the post-Emancipation era. The Emancipa51 Cited in P.P. Korolenko, Pereselenie kazakov za Kuban': Russkaia kolonizatsiia na zapadnom Kavkaze (Ekaterinodar', 1910), p. 322. On Bariatinskii in the Caucasus and his views on colonization in this period, see Alfred J. Rieber, The Politics of Autocracy: Letters of Alexander II to A.I. Bariatinskii, 1857–1864 (The Hague, 1966), pp. 60–77. 52 RGIA, f. 651, op. 1, d. 469, l. 1. 53 The quoted phrase is from A.U., “O zaselenie Kryma novymi poselentsami,” Russkii vestnik, 1866, v. 63 (May), p. 258. On the Nogay exodus from the Molochnye Vody area, see A.A. Sergeev, “Ukhod Tavricheskikh Nogaitsev v Turtsiiu v 1860 godu,” ITUAK, 1913, v. 49, pp. 178–222; and L.N. Cherenkov, “Tavricheskie Nogaitsy (poslednii kochevoi narod prichernomorskoi etnokontaktnoi zony),” in Etnokontaktnye zony v evropeiskoi chasti SSSR (geografiia, dinamika, metody izucheniia) (Moscow, 1989), pp. 51–52. 54 A.F. Giune, “Zaselenie novorossiiskogo kraia v 1862 godu,” ZhMGI, 1863, v. 84, p. 230, and v. 82, 1863, pp. 476–77. In all, between 1858 and 1862, the ministry calculated that 17,680 male souls (4,480 peasant households) were resettled from ten provinces to different parts of Tauris following the Crimean Tatar and Nogay emigrations. See Istoricheskoe obozrenie piatidesiatiletnei deiatel 'nosti ministerstva gosudarstvennykh imushchestv, 1837–1887, v. 2, pt. 2, p. 31. 55 This was not the term used at the time, but the state’s actions otherwise fit the definition. Terry Martin, for example, applies the term to the nineteenth-century antecedents of Soviet practices. See his “The Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing,” JMH, 1998, v. 70, n. 4, p. 818, n. 19. For an argument on the distinctive mechanics and horror of ethnic cleansing in the twentieth-century, see Norman M. Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), pp. 5–11.

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tion itself, however, had nothing to do with them or with resettlement more generally. Instead the beginning of the “era of reforms” marked a turn toward a much dimmer view of resettlement as a tool of agricultural policy. Having concluded that “the further development of [Russia’s] strength and might” required liberating the serfs, the Tsar Liberator and his councilors also determined that it would be better for the noble economy in the center and for social order in general if the newly liberated serfs stayed in place.56 (The specter of Pugachev was still the first thing Russia’s hierarchs saw when they contemplated unfettered peasant movement.) Consequently, the Emancipation Edict freed the serfs from their lords but bound them to their “temporary obligations,” communes, and redemption payments. Articles 130 through 134 of the manifesto placed considerable bureaucratic and financial hurdles in the way of any “peasant wishing to take leave of his commune.” The decree that emancipated the state peasants from the Ministry of State Domains in January 1866 did the same. And in December 1866 all state credits for all peasant migrants were discontinued, with special “temporary loans” to be allotted in only the neediest cases.57 The terms of the 1843 decree were thus effectively scrapped and a twenty-year period began during which resettlement, when encouraged at all, was governed by limited measures dealing with special cases rather than by a comprehensive resettlement law. Kiselev left State Domains to become ambassador to Paris in 1856, and the men who replaced him, as well as the new leadership at the Ministry of the Interior, were simply not interested in a resettlement agenda. As the Finance ministry official Fedor Terner wrote some time later, “After 1861 . . . the very topic of resettlement became suspect: it was the sort of issue that a trustworthy conservative did not get involved with.”58 This shift seriously reduced legal migration to the steppe, though it did not stop it, nor did it put an end to “willful” movement. In the 1860s, 31,000 migrants moved to Orenburg, 102,000 moved to New Russia, and 73,000 56 See Alexander’s remarks on this score in “Rech' Aleksandra II v gosudarstvennom sovete 28 ianvaria 1861 g.,” in V.A. Fedorov (ed.), Konets krepostnichestva v Rossii: dokumenty, pis'ma, memuary, stat'i (Moscow, 1994), pp. 193–94. 57 PSZ, ser. 2, v. 36, n. 36657 (1861), pp. 160–61; PSZ, ser. 2, v. 41, n. 43987 (1866), pp. 397–98; Fr.-X. Coquin, La Sibérie: Peuplement et colonisation paysanne au xixe siècle (Paris, 1969), pp. 223–32; Donald W. Treadgold, The Great Siberian Migration: Government and Peasant in Resettlement from Emancipation to the First World War (Princeton, N.J., 1957), pp. 67–69; Edward H. Judge, “Peasant Resettlement and Social Control in Late Imperial Russia,” in Edward H. Judge and James Y. Simms Jr. (ed.), Modernization and Revolution: Dilemmas of Progress in Late Imperial Russia; Essays in Honor of Arthur P. Mendel (New York, 1992), pp. 75–76; A.A. Kaufman, Pereselenie i kolonizatsiia (St. Petersburg, 1905), pp. 16–19. 58 F.G. Terner, Gosudarstvo i zemlevladenie (St. Petersburg, 1901), v. 2, p. 120.

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moved to the North Caucasus, some with government permission but most as newly emancipated, land-hungry “illegals.”59 On the whole, steppe nobles and governors were not happy with this turn of events. For one thing, in contrast to their counterparts in the center, trustworthy conservatives in the south wanted to see more resettlement rather than less so that they could increase their rent revenues, reduce their labor costs, or simply be able to bring in the harvest. As the governor-general of New Russia noted in a dispatch to the minister of the Interior in 1867, the most pressing problem with his territory remained “the insufficient supply of workers and the lack of population in the region compared to the supply of land. We have years here when due to insufficient people there is no one to bring in the hay and the grain.”60 For another, they favored legalizing the presence of illegals that were already in their provinces because the precarious condition of these migrants, most of whom were “without land, without rights, and without any obvious means of existence,”61 posed an immediate threat to the local social order while sending them back to repair the social order of the interior seemed impossible. Such was the pro-resettlement reasoning used by Orenburg Governor-General Nikolai Kryzhanovskii, for example, who also argued that increasing migration levels would serve an obvious national purpose. As his office suggested in a communication to the Ministry of the Interior in late 1867, “Peasants of all categories” should be permitted to resettle to Orenburg so as to “advance the development of the region and . . . its settlement by the Russian element.”62 The implication here and in other missives from Orenburg was that the increased presence of this particular “element” would lead the Bashkirs more rapidly to sedentarization “not by force but naturally, by their own inclination”; it would also increase overall agricultural productivity, reduce the generally “alien” feel of the region, and better integrate it with “Russia.” This reasoning did not persuade St. Petersburg, however. In the end, the central ministries remained hostile to promoting large-scale resettlement throughout the 1860s, regardless of the good things that their men in the periphery had to say about it. A partial retreat from the strictest limitations on resettlement (at the urging of governors in Samara, Ufa, and Orenburg) occurred in 1868, but so many migrants turned up in those provinces that the Ministry of the Interior effectively retired the milder regulations within a month, and the most it proved willing to do was to legalize the presence of 59 Bruk and Kabuzan, “Migratsiia naseleniia v Rossii v xviii–nachale xx veka,” pp. 51–52. 60 RGIA, f. 1291, op. 53 (1867), d. 280, l. 2(b). 61 This was the way migrants in Orenburg were described by the region’s governorgeneral in the late 1860s. Cited in D.P. Samorodov, Russkoe krest'ianskoe pereselenie v Bashkiriiu v poreformennyi period 60–90–e gg. xix v. (Sterlitamak, 1996), p. 82. 62 GAOO, f. 13, op. 1, d. 62, l. 40.

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illegals in particular cases, keeping an otherwise tight lid on the distribution of state lands for settlement.63 St. Petersburg was more flexible when it came to nonstate lands, but even so the general antiresettlement stance prevailed. In 1869 a special Interior ministry commission raised the possibility of permitting future resettlements on private as well as state-owned land, but the suggestions went unadopted.64 In that same year the government lifted the long-standing ban on the sale of Bashkir lands in Orenburg, prompting the most outrageous run yet on Bashkir property by nobles, merchants, “entrepreneurs,” and state officials; but it did nothing to encourage largescale peasant settlement in Bashkiria, despite Kryzhanovskii’s repeated pleadings. In fact, the minister of State Domains made it clear to the governor in 1870 that St. Peterburg’s preference was for “colonization (kolonizatsiia) of sparsely populated places to occur gradually, correctly, and successfully,” avoiding any deviation from the current rules that might encourage the migration of “a great flood of people whose accommodation on the land at one time would be exceedingly difficult.”65 In other words, the government’s principal misgivings about resettlement turned on questions of pace and scale. Fearing that too many peasants resettling too quickly would cause too much social disorder, the center characteristically overreacted and devised regulations that made legal migration of any sort all but impossible. At the same time, the government persisted in seeing resettlement as the exclusive prerogative of the state, and it remained convinced, as the minister implicitly suggested, that managing the process continued to require the most reliable sort of demographic and territorial data. Indeed, this particular principle of the old Kiselev system was alive and well and even growing stronger, if only because the data to support it was multiplying rapidly. There were now demographic maps and tables to reveal population densities district by district; “ethnographic maps” to display, as Petr Keppen put it, the “systematic distribution of tribes”; “lists of populated places” to itemize the country’s towns and villages down to the tiniest settlements; and soil and climatic charts to describe varieties of ground, temperature, and precipitation.66 Positivist empiricists with the General Staff, Imperial Russian

63 Samorodov, Russkoe krest'ianskoe pereselenie, pp. 83–84. 64 Ibid., pp. 84–85. 65 GAOO, f. 6, op. 8, d. 190, l. 84. 66 See, for example, A. Bushen (ed.), Statisticheskie tablitsy rossiiskoi imperii, vol. 2,

Nalichnoe naselenie imperii za 1858 god (St. Petersburg, 1863), pp. 158–85 passim; Spisok inorodtsev evropeiskoi Rossii, s pokazaniem gubernii v kotorykh oni nakhodiatsia (St. Petersburg, 1852); Petr Keppen, Ob etnograficheskoi karte evropeiskoi Rossii (2nd. ed.; St. Petersburg, 1853), p. 19; Spiski naselennykh mest rossiiskoi imperii (St. Petersburg, 1861–1885); Materialy dlia geografii i statistiki Rossii, sobrannye ofitserami general 'nogo shtaba (St. Petersburg, 1859–1868), 25 vols.; K. Veselovskii, O klimate Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1857).

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Geographic Society, Central Statistical Committee, and Naval Ministry (among other institutions) culled information from across the empire, all of which paid some kind of “scientific” attention to the nexus of population and territory and confirmed by doing so that shaping the relationship between the two was a scientific affair best left to the state and its experts. This was the spirit, for example, that infused the Kuma-Manych Expedition inaugurated in 1859 by the Ministry of State Domains to determine with greater scientific certainty “the extent to which the vast territory now provided to the Kalmyk people might by put to the greater use of the state,” and it informed other colonization investigations as well.67 By the late 1860s, the explorer Nikolai Przheval'skii was appealing from the distant banks of the Southern Ussurii for the pursuit of what he called “correct colonization [pravil'naia kolonizatsiia], defined by the findings of science and experience.”68 The word that Przheval'skii used for colonization was itself a sign of the times. Although the act of peasants moving (or being moved) to the borderlands in the 1860s continued to be known as resettlement (pereselenie), it was now not uncommon for state officials to refer to what the peasants and the state were doing in the borderlands as colonization (kolonizatsiia), with all the related terms applying as well. Thus Russian “resettlers” might now also double as “colonists” (kolonisty) in official correspondence. A special “Chronicle of Colonization” in the Journal of the Ministry of State Domains could report on colonization as a matter of both foreign labor immigration and internal peasant migration. And Apollon Skal'kovskii, prolific chronicler of the south and Vorontsov’s former underling in Odessa, could describe the New Russian Territory in the pages of the central government gazette as “the greatest colony of the Russian people” (glavneishaia koloniia russkogo naroda), clearly implying that a colony had become more than just an enclave of foreigners, a distant un-Russian territory, or a Russian military or commercial outpost.69 Vladimir Dal', former Orenburg official and inveterate collector of the Russian word, defined kolonist in his Dictionary of the Contemporary Great-Russian Language (1863–66) as a “settler from another land” (poselenets iz drugoi zemli) but also as an “agricultural resettler” (pereselenets, zanimaiushchiisia zemledeliem), leaving the impression that Russian peasants could certainly be considered colonists in their own country as long as they had moved to 67 Kalmytskaia step' astrakhanskoi gubernii po izsledovaniiam Kumo-Manychskoi ekspeditsii, v. 1, p. 1. 68 N.M. Przheval'skii, Puteshestvie v usuriiskom krae 1867–1869 gg. (Moscow, 1947), p. 34. 69 “Khronika kolonizatsii,” ZhMGI, 1862, v. 80 (May), smes', pp. 18–40, and 1862, v. 81 (Sept.), smes', pp. 10–40; A. Skal'kovskii, “Geograficheskaia i etnograficheskaia terminologiia novorossiiskogo kraia,” Severnaia pochta, 1868, n. 194, p. 775.

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“Karta Evropeiskoi Rossii s oboznacheniem srednykh urozhaev khleba po 10–letnei slozhnosti” (Map of European Russia showing average grain harvests over a ten-year period), from Khoziastvenno-statisticheskii atlas Evropeiskoi Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1852). Reproduced in A. V. Postnikov, Karty zemel' rossiiskikh: Ocherk istorii geograficheskogo izucheniia I kartografirovaniia otechestva (Nash Dom-L’Age d’Homme, Moscow, 1996), p. 141, n. 101.

Taming the Wild Field

their current land from another one.70 The new equivalency of colonist and settler was further confirmed by a special state commission appointed in 1867 to review the status of “foreign colonists.” Convinced that names were indeed important, the commission suggested that foreigners in this category should now be called “settlers” (poseliane) rather than “colonists,” because the two terms meant the same thing and the former had the advantage of “better agreeing . . . with the government’s objective of creating a uniform peasant estate.”71 Apparently unable to settle for “settler” alone, the commission ultimately endorsed the more exact, though somewhat less concise, “settler-proprietors (former foreign colonists)” (poseliane-sobstvenniki [byvshie kolonisty]). The broader implications of officialdom’s new vocabulary were not entirely clear, however. On the one hand, all the talk of Russian colonists and colonies readily suggested that the heretofore largely unstated imperial connotations of resettlement/colonization had become more explicit. That this would have occurred by the 1860s was not particularly surprising. Russia’s “era of reforms” was also an age of expanding empire, both at home and abroad, and with Russian armies blasting their way into Central Asia and the Caucasus (“our Russian Algeria”) and the Russian flag newly raised over the Amur (“a Siberian Mississippi”), what could be more natural than to use the terms that every other civilized country used for this sort of thing?72 On the other hand, Russian colonization—with the exception of the Cossacks dispatched to serve as border guards on the new frontiers of Turkestan and the Far East—remained very much an agricultural question, which is to say that it continued to be understood as a matter of peasants and the rural economy. Even if peasants could now be both resettlers and colonists, they were still first and foremost peasants whose experience naturally seemed to draw the emphasis to issues of acreage, manure, plow types, and irrigation systems. Indeed, precisely because borderland colonization persisted in being agricultural resettlement, it also persisted in appearing easily as domestic as it did imperial, if not more so, and the many seeming paradoxes of the equation did not go away. Skal'kovskii, for example, even while racing to declare New Russia the greatest colony of the Russian people, proceeded to describe, apparently without the slightest sense of contradiction, the “names of the twenty 70 V.I. Dal', Tolkovyi slovar zhivogo velikorusskogo iazyka (2nd ed., St. Petersburg, 1881; reprint: Moscow, 1956) v. 2, p. 140. 71 RGIA, f. 1181, op. 1 (1870), d. 71, l. 77. See also Ingeborg Fleishhauer, Die Deutschen im Zarenreich: Zwei Jahrhunderte deutsch-russische Kulturgemeinschaft (Stuttgart, 1986), pp. 282–83. 72 A. Kochetov, “Arabo-frantsuzskie shkoly v Alzhirii,” ZhMNP, 1869, v. 142 (March), p. 91; Mark Bassin, Imperial Visions: Nationalist Imagination and Geographical Expansion in the Russian Far East, 1840–1865 (New York, 1999), pp. 143–73.

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languages and peoples” whose histories had left their mark on the region’s “geographical and ethnographical terminology.”73 Not surprisingly, such conceptual ambiguities had little effect on life on the steppe, which was changing anyway, both because of and despite government design. In keeping with the standardizing urges of the Great Reforms, foreign colonists on the Volga and in New Russia lost not only their former designation but also their special administration and many (though not all) of their prior privileges.74 Germans, Tatars, Molokans, and others once exempt were told to begin serving in the imperial army; and a similar concern with diminishing particularism applied to the Cossacks, whose distinctions as an estate seemed to some reformers to have outlived their usefulness.75 With the broader changes in politics and economy during the reform period, Kalmyks began to pay their tent tax in rubles rather than in kind; merchants, industrialists, and other “Russian subjects who [were] not members of the military estate” began to buy land within Cossack territories; and seasonal hands (otkhodniki) from provinces such as Khar'kov, Poltava, and Penza began coming in huge numbers to toil in export-oriented wheat fields from New Russia to the Kuban' and Samara.76 By the close of the 1860s, there were well-established opera houses in Odessa and Piatigorsk; universities in Khar'kov and Odessa; railroad lines connecting Moscow (“the heart of the empire”) with Odessa and Rostov; steamship service on the Volga; mud spas in Astrakhan' koumiss clinics for consumptive Peterburgers and Muscovites near Samara and in the steppe beyond; “large public squares, orderly streets, a theater, [and] a nice city park and boulevard” in Stavropol' and even fancy shops and a “decent” central avenue in the otherwise (apparently) “boring” and “ugly” outpost of Orenburg.77 Although part of Bessarabia re73 Skal'kovskii, “Geograficheskaia i etnograficheskaia terminologiia novorossiiskogo kraia,” p. 776. 74 Andreas Kappeler, “Die deutsche Minderheit im Rahmen des russischen Vielvölkerreiches,” in Dittmar Dahlmann and Ralph Tuchtenhagen (eds.), Zwischen Reform und Revolution: Die Deutschen an der Wolga, 1860–1917 (Essen, 1994), p. 21; Brandes, Von den Zaren adoptiert, pp. 348–60; PSZ, ser. 2, n. 49705 (1871), pp. 818–19. 75 Robert H. McNeal, Tsar and Cossack, 1855–1914 (Basingstoke, Eng., 1987), pp. 27–36; Shane O’Rourke, Warriors and Peasants: The Don Cossacks in Late Imperial Russia (Basingstoke, Eng., 2000), p. 42. 76 A.M. Anfimov (ed.), Krest'ianstvo Severnogo Kavkaza i Dona v period kapitalizma (Rostov on Don, 1990), p. 44; T.A. Nevskaia and S.A. Chekmenev, Stavropol'skie krest'iane: Ocherki khoziaistva, kul 'tury i byta (Mineral'nye vody, 1994), pp. 15–16; Timothy Mixter, “The Hiring Market as Workers’ Turf: Migrant Agricultural Laborers and the Mobilization of Collective Action in the Steppe Grainbelt of European Russia, 1853–1913,” in Esther Kingston-Mann and Timothy Mixter (eds.), Peasant Economy, Culture, and Politics of European Russia, 1800–1921 (Princeton, N.J., 1991), pp. 294–95. 77 Boris Derevianko, Odesskii teatr opery i baleta (Odessa, 1990) (pamphlet, no page numbers); Piatigorsk v istoricheskikh dokumentakh 1803–1917 gg. (Stavropol', 1985),

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verted to the Ottomans following the Crimean War, the government by 1874 saw the rest of Bessarabia and the New Russian Territory as “ordinary” enough that they no longer needed to be organized as a special territorial unit with a governor-generalship; and just a few years prior to this, in another display of the times, the traditional and lyrical name of the Don Cossack administration, the Land of the Don Host (Zemlia Voiska Donskogo), was retired in favor of the less evocative though more nationally consistent Don Host Oblast.78 The steppe, it seemed, was becoming more like Russia, though this view naturally depended entirely on how one defined “Russia” and “the steppe” and who was doing the defining.

The Pioneers and the Public Between 1855 and 1857, the Naval Ministry dispatched a handful of literarily inclined university students and junior government officials to the south as part of a broad imperial initiative to collect information on “those residents [of the empire] who make their living by fishing and the maritime trades.” Fascinated with “the people” (narod) and inspired by the expectation that they would draw “lively impressions . . . from the deep well of Russian life,” most of the young authors threw themselves into the study of regional history, learned local idioms or the necessary alien languages, grew their beards long, dressed in common garb, and often went to great lengths to obtain information from otherwise reluctant peasant “informants.”79 They also rarely refrained from uncovering the nation’s character or potential in whatever they were seeing. N. N. Filippov, for example, read the persevering settlers he discovered on the Azov shore as full proof that “the Great Russian can indeed adapt to any surn. 73, p. 155; A. Skal'kovskii, “O napravlenii zheleznykh dorog v Novoi Rossii,” Ekonomicheskii zhurnal, 1858, n. 11, p. 230; J.N. Westwood, A History of Russian Railways (London, 1964), pp. 60–61; I. Kretovich, “Don, Kavkaz i Krym (iz putevykh vospominanii),” VE, 1868, n. 6, p. 725; N.V. Postnikov, O kumyse, ego svoistvakh i deistvii na chelovecheskii organizm (Samara, 1873), pp. 9–12; M. Mikhailov, Orenburgskie pis'ma dlia zhelaiushchikh oznakomit'sia s Orenburgom, Orskom, Troitskom, Fortom Aleksandrovskim i dorogoiu chrez Kirgizskuiu step' do forta No. 1 (St. Petersburg, 1866), pp. 24, 30, 39. 78 A.V. Remnev, “General-gubernatorskaia vlast' v xix stoletii: K probleme organizatsii regional 'nogo upravleniia rossiiskoi imperii,” in P.I. Savelev (ed.), Imperskii stroi Rossii v regional 'nom izmerenii (xix–nachalo xx veka) (Moscow, 1997), p. 56; O’Rourke, Warriors and Peasants, p. 43. 79 S.V. Maksimov, “Literaturnaia ekspeditsiia (po arkhivnym dokumentam i lichnym vospominaniiam),” Russkaia mysls', 1890, v. 11, n. 2, pp. 17–26, 29; A.N. Pypin, Istoriia russkoi etnografii (St. Petersburg, 1891), v. 2, pp. 55–61; S.A. Tokarev, Istoriia russkoi etnografii (dooktiabrskii period) (Moscow, 1966), pp. 232–33; Catherine Black Clay, “Ethos and Empire: The Ethnographic Expedition of the Imperial Russian Naval Ministry, 1855–1862” (Ph.D. diss., University of Oregon, 1989), pp. 1–87.

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roundings”; while A. F. Pisemskii traipsed across “deserts” near the Caspian conjuring thoughts of “the great work and settlement” needed to “bring them to life.”80 One of the most ardent of the ministry’s investigators was the soon-to-be professional itinerant Sergei Vasil'evich Maksimov who, though originally sent to the north in 1856, traveled to the south on his own in 1858 and promptly began reporting on the bustling settlements and impressive “kingdom of wheat” that he found stretching from Little Russia to the Volga.81 A short time later, clearly taken with colonization, Maksimov composed a historical study of “Russian resettlements” for the ministry journal and was so impressed with the pioneering he saw on a trip to the Amur that he pronounced the Russian peasant “a colonist par excellence” (kolonist po preimushchestvu): “The Russian man, tempered by the multiple hardships imposed by his climate and daily life, has no fear of the cold; he needs no comfort.”82 That “writers of daily life” like the Navy’s reporters would locate the nation in colonization and on the steppe made perfect sense and was not the least bit unusual. By the 1850s, Francis Parkman had already colorfully described the “great western movement” of migrants headed for California and Oregon, and William Cullen Bryant had already declared that “the speech of England” had no name for the prairies of Illinois, “these . . . the gardens of the Desert, these the unshorn fields, boundless and beautiful.”83 British boosters on the plains of Canada had already shut their eyes and imagined “the prospect of a wilderness peopled,” while farther south Domingo Sarmiento, without actually traveling to the pampas, had already confidently proclaimed that “the limitless plain” (llanura sin límites) was precisely what gave “a certain Asiatic tinge to the life of the interior” of the Argentine Republic.84 Between the 1830s and the 1870s, gauchos began to symbolize the Argentinean nation (for worse and then for better); Australia stopped being seen as a “land of convicts and kangaroos” and became depicted as “the land of the emigrant”; Dutch and British his80 N. Filippov, Poezdka po beregam azovskogo moria letom 1856 goda (St. Petersburg, 1857), p. 113; and A. Pisemskii, “Putevye ocherki,” Morskoi sbornik, 1857, v. 27, n. 2, p. 238. 81 S.V. Maksimov, “Kul' khleba i ego pokhozhdeniia,” in his Izbrannye proizvedeniia v dvukh tomakh (Moscow, 1987), v. 1, pp. 389, 387. 82 S. Maksimov, “Ocherk russkikh pereselenii v poslednie poltara veka,” Morskoi sbornik, 1861, v. 54, n. 8, pp. 189–234; and Maksimov, Na vostoke: Poezdka na Amur (v 1860–1861 godakh); dorozhnye zametki i vospominaniia (St. Petersburg, 1864), pp. 306, 287. 83 Francis Parkman, The Oregon Trail (E.N. Feltskog, ed.) (1849; reprint: Madison, Wisc., 1969), p. 3; William Cullen Bryant, “The Prairies,” in Alison Hawthorne Deming (ed.), Poetry of the American West: A Columbia Anthology (New York, 1996), p. 16. Bryant, a Massachusetts man, wrote his poem after visiting Illinois in 1832. 84 Gerald Friesen, The Canadian Prairies: A History (Lincoln, Neb., 1984), p. 104; Domingo F. Sarmiento, Facundo o civilización y barbarie (Barcelona, 1985), p. 26.

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torians differed on particulars but agreed that Cape history was “a narrative of civilization rather than dispossession”; and American Manifest Destiny—that is, “our right . . . to overspread the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government”—finally became a term after having already long existed as an idea.85 Russia’s “literary ethnographers,” it turns out, were merely holding their own in the far-flung international hunt for nationally meaningful colonists and frontiers that had already been under way for quite some time. They were also not the only subjects of the tsar involved in doing this sort of thing. In the middle decades of the century, the steppe and its residents continued to draw the intellectual attention of a broad variety of educated sojourners and local specialists. There were Russian archeologists, climatologists, naturalists, and orientalists; Russian and “Southern Russian” belletrists, folklorists, and historians; exiled radicals who took advantage of their exile to study “the people” and (to a lesser extent) “local aliens”; missionaries who went among the Kalmyks to spread the Word of God; gentlemen travelers who searched for colorful vignettes and profound reflection (“In the midst of such vast plains . . . I came to ponder what wise and noble work could be done here.”); and responsible local citizens like the men of the Imperial Agricultural Society of Southern Russia, who invested their energies in the encouragement of tree planting and rational animal husbandry and generally defined themselves in terms of “their zealous . . . attachment to the common good.”86 The members of this diverse public had little in common except for their sense of distinction (either cheered or lamented) from the peasantry (that is, “the people,” the nonpublic) and a shared presumption, fully in keeping with the broader tenor of the times, that writing about the steppe or its residents naturally invited a certain amount of national reflection. The rendering of the region thus continued to involve an exploration of the identities, antitheses, shortcomings, and possibilities of the nation, though, building on the precedent of the earlier part of the century, the rendering itself was far from straightforward. One reason for this was that the physical impression of the plains re85 Richard W. Slatta, Gauchos and the Vanishing Frontier (Lincoln, Neb., 1992), pp. 180–92; Richard White, Inventing Australia: Images and Identity, 1688–1980 (Sydney, 1981), p. 29; Andrew Bank, “The Great Debate and the Origins of South African Historiography,” Journal of African History, 1997, v. 38, n. 2, p. 279; William Earl Weeks, Building the Continental Empire: American Expansion from the Revolution to the Civil War (Chicago, 1996), pp. 110–11. 86 Citations from Anatole de Démidoff, Voyage dans la Russie méridionale et la Crimée par la Hongrie, la Valachie et la Moldavie (Paris, 1854), p. 252; and Otchet o deistviiakh imperatorskogo obshchestva sel'skogo khoziaistva iuzhnoi Rossii v prodolzhenie dvadtsatipiatiletnego ego sushestvovaniia (Odessa, 1855), p. 5.

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mained varied and contradictory. The map of the steppe on the mind of the observer could still be dreary or lyrical, oppressive or liberating. If some observers spoke of boredom, mosquitoes, terrifying snowstorms, desolate “peoplelessness” (bezliud'e), disturbing wildness, and forlorn roads “brought into being neither by commerce nor popular need but by the command of the tsar,” others wrote of a landscape “where everything smells of abundance,” where “the wholesome, sweet, nurturing [summer] air [was] healthier even than that of the forests,” and where young Romantics could throw off their cares and feel the exhilaration of nature.87 As Mikhail Lermontov’s Pechorin noted after a day of ennui, “When I reached home, I got on my horse and galloped out into the steppe. I love galloping through long grass on a fiery horse, with the desert wind in my face. . . . Whatever sorrow weighs on the heart, whatever anxiety troubles the mind, it vanishes in a moment.”88 Assessments of the physical impact of settlement were similarly diverse, reflecting the region’s varied patterns of colonization. Some itinerants, like the official spokesman for the commune August von Haxthausen, were impressed enough with the advances of settlement along the Lower Volga in the 1840s to declare that “large continuous steppes [in this region] no longer exist,” while others, like the perspicacious ethnographer Pavel Nebol'sin, went all the way to the Volga delta a few years later and came to the conclusion that agricultural settlement was virtually nonexistent: “Wherever you cast your gaze, all you see is a flat, untended, sad, monotonous, and naked steppe.”89 The traditional inhabitants of the steppe continued to produce mixed impressions as well. Cossacks remained at once lackluster agriculturalists and glorified warriors. Furthermore, some (specifically the former Zaporozhians) were still Little Russian/Southern Russian to “the offspring of Little Russia,” such as Panteleimon Kulish, who were now “thirsting more ardently than before for self-knowledge [samopoznanie],” while others appeared obviously Great Russian to Great Russians like Dal', whose rendering of a hardy, elemental Ural Cossack figured alongside portraits 87 Taras Shevchenko, Avtobiografiia, Dnevnik (Kiev, 1988), p. 60; G. Spasskii, “Genichesk i Arabatskaia strelka,” ZOOID, 1848, v. 2, p. 279; A. Filonov, Ocherki Dona (St. Petersburg, 1859), p. 35; M. Mikhailov, Orenburgskie pis'ma, pp. 1–2; A. Leopol'dov, Statisticheskoe opisanie saratovskoi gubernii (St. Petersburg, 1839), p. 27; A.I. Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh (Moscow, 1954), v. 2, p. 263; A.I. Levitov, “Stepnye vyselki,” in his Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow, 1884), v. 1, p. 416; A.K. Tolstoi, “Ty znaesh krai gde vse obil'em dyshit,” Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii v dvukh tomakh (Leningrad, 1984), v. 1, p. 53; S.M. Aksakov, Zapiski ruzheinogo okhotnika orenburgskoi gubernii (Moscow, 1953), p. 139. 88 M.Yu. Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time (New York, 1966), p. 112. 89 August von Haxthausen, The Russian Empire, Its People, Institutions, and Resources (London, 1856), v. 1, p. 358; Pavel Nebol'sin, Ocherki volzhskogo nizovia (St. Petersburg, 1852), p. 2.

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of other Russian “types” in a book proudly devoted to providing “the truest possible descriptions of . . . Russian . . . customs, habits, mysteries [prichud'], and idiosyncracies [strannostei].”90 Reflecting some of the ambiguities of the situation, Gogol', the most influential Cossack image-maker of his time, managed to depict his Zaporozhians as “half-Tatar, half-Polish” frontiersmen, who, though undeniably Ukrainian, still somehow managed to display “Russian tenderness,” “Russian bravery,” and a propensity for “gallivanting recklessly, drinking, and carousing as only a Russian knows how.”91 Nomads, of course, did not provoke this sort of national indeterminacy. To the educated Russians who described them, they remained the ultimate outsiders and continued to be either exoticized as “gentle sons of nature” or, more commonly after the 1840s, treated as the archetypes of a less inspiring sort of un-Russian backwardness. The change in views over time could be slight at best. In the dark days of Official Nationality, an anonymous author in the Orenburg Provincial News ended his largely unflattering summation of the “Bashkir character” with the conclusion that Bashkirs “are quite inclined to strong drink and brigandage.” In the heady days of the Great Reforms another investigator of local life described the Bashkirs of eastern Samara Province as “deceitful, faithless in their promises, simple-minded . . . distinguished by their ignorance and arrogance . . . and, of course, as an Asiatic people, inclined to thievery.”92 Other commentators were more balanced—that is, they recognized that nomadic peoples possessed some positive traits along with obvious negative ones—but overall the view was still dim. Even the protopopulist “writers of everyday life” of the 1850s—who believed passionately in the new methodology of participant observation, knew that all cultures had their virtues, and were inclined to sympathize with their subjects—continued to presume that nomads were “half-savages or almost simply savages.”93 In other words, much as before, the embrace of cultural relativism did not imply the rejection of hierarchy but rather its reinforcement. There was simply no question that nomadism remained backward and deficient, just as there was no question that nomads with any sense of their own self90 P. Kulish, Zapiski o iuzhnoi Rusi (St. Petersburg, 1856), v. 1, P.v.; V.I. Dal' [Kazak luganskii], “Ural'skii kazak,” in Nashi, spisannye s natury russkimi (St. Petersburg, 1841), pp. 157–77. 91 Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, The Cossack Hero in Russian Literature: A Study in Cultural Mythology (Madison, Wis., 1992), pp. 43–46. 92 “Istoriko-etnograficheskii ocherk Bashkirtsev,” OGV, 1845, n. 35, neoff. ch., p. 390; A. Ignatovich, “Bashkirskaia Burzianskaia volost',” Arkhiv istoricheskikh i prakticheskikh svedenii, otnosiashchikhsia do Rossii, 1863, v. 5, p. 47. 93 P. Nebol'sin, Ocherki volzhskogo nizovia, p. 12. Nebol'sin states his favorable view of the participant observer method and his appreciation for the Kalmyks most clearly in Ocherki byta kalmykov khoshoutovskogo ulusa (St. Petersburg, 1852), pp. 1–2.

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interest should be inclined to change their ways. As the official I. F. Blaramberg noted in his recollections of his time in Orenburg, “It is indeed difficult for anyone who has not lived [among the Bashkirs] to understand why in the world they would not take maximum advantage of their wonderful, fertile, and thick black earth soil.”94 Even when it was not particularly germane, Russian observers almost always made a point of commenting on how at least some nomads—though not always successfully—had begun “the transition toward agriculture and the sedentary life.” Yet if this specific socioeconomic transition was still ongoing, by the 1850s there was little doubt that a larger change had already occurred. No Russian describer of the steppes could fail to see that the fearsome nomads of lore were no more. Once “rebellious,” the wolves of the steppe were now “tame”; once fiercely independent, they were now “obedient, patient, and submissive to the authorities.”95 As Skal'kovskii wrote in 1850, “The Nogays [of New Russia] are today so few in number and so unimpressive in their appearance . . . that it is hard to believe that these are the same frightening hordes that once terrorized the states of Slavdom.”96 The domestication of the nomads met with a certain regret from wistful Romantics, but the prevailing view was a more self-contented recognition that this change was part of the natural order of things and, more pointedly, fully understandable given the arrival of the Russians and the deepening of their influence. The seminary instructor Vasilii Zefirov’s thumbnail characterization of the Bashkirs was typical: Their rebellious will has been submitted to law; their limitless liberty has been contained within the bounds of civility [grazhdanstvennost']; their wandering life is changing to sedentism; and interaction with Russians has softened the coarseness of [their] character.97

As Zefirov’s remark implied, Russia’s mission of civilization among the nomads in the mid-nineteenth century was still understood exclusively in terms of Russification (that is, the adoption of Russian things as well as Russian ways), and Russification itself continued to require active Russian involvement. Though it was true that observers of differing backgrounds and political sympathies had by now developed quite different views about 94 I.F. Blaramberg, Vospominaniia (Moscow, 1978), p. 209. Blaramberg served in the Orenburg region in the 1840s. 95 V.M. Cheremshanskii, Opisanie orenburgskoi gubernii v khoziaistvenno-statisticheskom, etnograficheskom i promyshlennom otnosheniiakh (Ufa, 1859), p. 131; “Istoriko-etnograficheskii ocherk Bashkirtsev,” p. 389; N. Kazantsev, Opisanie Bashkirtsev (St. Petersburg, 1866), p. 29. 96 A. Skal'kovskii, Opyt statisticheskogo opisaniia novorossiiskogo kraia (Odessa, 1850), v. 1, p. 295. 97 V. Z-f-r-v, “Vzgliad na semeinyi byt Bashkir,” OGV, 1851, n. 3, neoff. ch., p. 8.

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“Kalmyks” from Gustav-Fedor Khristianovich Pauli, Peuples de Russie (1862). Reproduced in Kostium narodov Rossii v grafike 18–20 vekov (USSR Cultural Advertising Bureau, USSR Ministry of Culture, Moscow, 1990), p. 54.

Reformist Colonization

the proper path to Russian-style progress—Should one pursue Orthodoxy and the Russian language at the same time? Orthodoxy and alien languages first, then Russian later? Agriculture now and culture eventually?—there was no question of allowing the nomads to gravitate to Russianness on their own.98 Even the populist intellectuals of the 1860s who scorned the likelihood of any sort of progress under the tsarist state nonetheless nourished a deep “faith in the limitless possibilities of directed social change,” if the change took place under the direction of the right sort of people—that is, people like themselves.99 As the radical N. Flerovskii (V.V. Vervi) concluded, after spending most of 1863 as an exile in Astrakhan and observing the exploitation suffered by ordinary Kalmyks, “The management of [these nomads] should not be overseen by government officials concerned only with putting in their hours and drawing their salary but rather by people who truly care about the merging of the nationalities.”100 But nomads—whether understood as victims of official neglect or as beneficiaries of civilization or some combination of both—were not the primary focus for most of the steppe’s educated observers. That honor remained with the colonists themselves, that is, primarily with the Russian and Ukrainian peasants who made up the majority of settlers in most areas and whose varied fates and qualities seemed especially compelling to the empire’s commentators. Like the Naval Ministry’s expeditionaries, casual travelers and State Domains commentators on the steppe made a habit of checking off the supposed distinctions of the Russian settler, good and bad (both adaptability and laziness were commonly noted, for example); while priests and various other local foot soldiers of metropolitan and provincial societies and statistical committees took notes on local customs and foundation legends and composed settlement descriptions.101 In the settler98 On the varied questions and disagreements surrounding questions of assimilation in the “East” in the Great Reforms period, see Yuri Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North (Ithaca, N. Y., 1994), pp. 113–29; Werth, At the Margins of Orthodoxy, pp. 124–46; Robert P. Geraci, Window on the East: National and Imperial Identities in Late Tsarist Russia (Ithaca, N.Y., 2001), pp. 9–10, 343–51 passim; Charles Robert Steinwedel, “Invisible Threads of Empire: State, Religion, and Ethnicity in Tsarist Bashkiria, 1773–1917” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1999), pp. 109–22, 128–31. 99 Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors, p. 117. 100 N. Flerovskii, Polozhenie rabochego klassa v Rossii (1869; reprint: Moscow, 1938), p. 149. 101 See, for example, Iu. Vitte, “O sel'skom khoziaistve v khersonskoi, tavricheskoi i ekaterinoslavskoi guberniiakh,” ZhMGI, 1844, v. 13, otd. 2, p. 59; A. Arkhipov, “Zamechaniia o pereselentsakh iz vnutrennykh gubernii Rossii v kavkazskuiu oblast',” ZhMGI, 1845, v. 14, otd. 4, pp. 63, 65; “Obzor sovremennogo sostoianiia Orenburgskoi gubernii v geograficheskom i statisticheskom otnoshenii: Buguruslanskii uezd,” OGV, 1848, n. 52, pp. 365–68; Nebol'sin, Ocherki volzhskogo nizovia, p. 17; “Selo Elkhovka,” SamGV, 1856, n. 7, pp. 33–34; “Selo Timoshevka,” TGV, 1862, n. 41, pp. 349–53; “Sele-

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heroes of protopopulist novelists like D.V. Grigorovich and G.P. Danil'evskii, one found pioneer-style pluck and the hardships of the road; in drier “statistical and ethnographical descriptions” of the sort that proliferated in the 1850s and 1860s the picture tended to be somewhat less evocative.102 Yet regardless of the judgments or genre, the colonist usually received a great deal of attention. And why not? By the 1840s, educated Russians—and not just the radicals—were increasingly likely to believe that the “true source of nationality” had a great deal to do with “the people.” And by the early 1860s, society’s preoccupation with “the details of the life” of the common man had reached the point, according to the writer Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, where literature itself assumed “an ethnographic aspect.”103 The peasant settler was simply a representative of “the people” who had picked up and moved. The colonist was simply the nation in motion. It followed from this that any evidence of national persistence among the colonists was especially appreciated. A writer for the Don Host Statistical Committee, for example, proudly reported in 1867 that Russian peasants who had moved to the region fifty years earlier had “retained their Great Russian quality. Neither the close proximity of the Cossack element nor the considerable surrounding presence of Little Russians was enough to blot out their [Great Russian] dress, language, and customs.”104 A Ukrainian traveler likewise reported being pleasantly surprised by three Ukrainian Cossacks he met in Orenburg in 1861 who had not only not forgotten their native tongue but even spoke it perfectly, “without mangling it as is so frequently the case with our countrymen in Ukraine who live among Russians or Poles.”105 (The fact that the three settlers admitted that they “lived on their own, apart from the Russians,” apparently did nothing to diminish their linguistic achievement.) Even when attributes of nationality passed without extensive commentary, observers tended to note at a minimum that colonists on the steppe were nie Kazach'i Lageri,” TGV, 1863, n. 1, pp. 7–8, and n. 3, pp. 17–18; “Selo Rubanovka,” TGV, 1863, n. 4, p. 22; “Selenie Petropavlovka,” TGV, 1863, n. 9, pp. 47–48; “Selo Andreevka,” TGV, 1864, n. 41, pp. 251–52; A. Zashchuk, “Etnografiia Bessarabskoi oblasti,” ZOOID, 1860, v. 5, p. 508. 102 D.V. Grigorovich, Pereselentsy; roman iz narodnogo byta (Moscow, 1957); G.P. Danilevskii, “Beglye v Novorosii,” in his Sochineniia (7th ed.; St. Petersburg, 1893). Grigorovich’s and Danilevskii’s novels first appeared in 1855–56 and 1862–63, respectively. 103 Nathaniel Knight, “Ethnicity, Nationality, and the Masses: Narodnost' and Modernity in Imperial Russia,” in David L. Hoffmann and Yanni Kotsonis (eds), Russian Modernity: Politics, Knowledge, and Practices (Basingstoke, Eng., 2000) p. 59; N. Sokolov, “Tvorchestvo F.M. Reshetnikova,” in F.M. Reshetnikov, Izbrannye proizvedeniia (Moscow, 1956), v. 1, p. xiv. 104 A.A. Karasev, “Donskie krest'iane,” Trudy donskogo-voiskogo statisticheskogo komiteta, 1867, v. 1, p. 82. 105 P.O. Efimenko, “O Malorossiianakh v orenburgskoi gubernii,” Osnova: Iuzhnorusskii literaturno-nauchnyi sbornik, 1861, n. 9, p. 190.

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identical to peasants in the provinces they came from, which itself was a way of saying that the nation, in its provincial diversities, was reproducing itself in the borderlands.106 The nation’s claiming of the steppe was not just a matter of the present, however. It was also a matter of history, which continued to be interpreted largely as it had been before. From the vantage point of the mid-nineteenth century, the historical steppe was still the domain of “Asiatics,” Russia/Rus' was still Europe, and one of “main factors” of the latter’s long history, as Sergei Solov'ev put it, remained the “constant struggle with the steppe barbarians,” a struggle that began as a rough standoff between the Rus' and the nomads, passed through a period of nomadic domination, and then concluded with a definitive Russian advance: “Beginning with the close of the fourteenth century, Europe, as represented by Russia, gains the advantage [and thus] the northwestern, European part of the Great [Eurasian] Plain starts to expand at the expense of the southeastern, Asian part.”107 If there was something new to the general interpretation of Russian-steppe relations, it was less in the broad strokes than in the terms of analysis. Solov'ev, for example, embraced geographical determinism to explain the making of “Russian state territory” (russkaia gosudarstvennaia oblast' ). Afanasii Shchapov and Nikolai (Mykola) Kostomarov, for their part, turned to folklore and ethnography, because “the goal of history is the study of people and life.”108 Followers of the “state school” (better described as practitioners of “political history”) emphasized the importance of the state and the virtues of centralization. The “federalists” championed “the people” and the “regional element,” in particular, the antistate, anticenter, rebellious “regional ele106 N. Gersevanov, Voennoe statisticheskoe obozrenie rossiiskoi imperii, v. 11, pt. 2, Tavricheskaia guberniia (St. Petersburg, 1849), p. 93; Cheremshanskii, Opisanie orenburgskoi gubernii, p. 203; Spisok naselennykh mest samarskoi gubernii po svedeniiam na 1859 god (St. Petersburg, 1864), p. xxxi; “Kratkoe istoriko-statisticheskoe obozrenie tavricheskoi gubernii,” Pamiatnaia kniga tavricheskoi gubernii (Simferopol', 1867), p. 197. 107 S.M. Solov'ev, Sochineniia v vosemnadtsati knigakh (Moscow, 1988), bk. 1, v. 1–2, p. 57. 108 Ibid., p. 56; S.M. Solov'ev, “O vlianii prirody russkoi gosudarstvennoi oblasti na ee istoriiu,” OZ, 1850, v. 69, n. 2, pp. 229–44; N. Kostomarov, “Ob otnoshenii russkoi istorii k geografii i etnografii (lektsiia, chitannaia v geograficheskom obshchestve, 10–ogo marta 1863 g.),” Zapiski imperatorskogo russkogo geograficheskogo obshchestva, 1863, bk. 2, p. 95. For overviews of Kostomarov and Shchapov, see Abbott Gleason, Young Russia: The Genesis of Russian Radicalism in the 1860s (Chicago, 1980), pp. 180–225; Thomas Prymak, “Mykola Kostomarov as a Historian,” in Thomas Sanders (ed), The Historiography of Imperial Russia: The Profession and Writing of History in a Multinational State (Armonk, N.Y., 1999), pp. 332–43; and Dimitri von Mohrenschildt, Towards a United States of Russia: Plans and Projects of Federal Reconstruction of Russia in the Nineteenth Century (Rutherford, N.J., 1981), pp. 46–84. For the most insightful examination of Solov'ev’s work in this context, see Mark Bassin, “Turner, Solov'ev, and the ‘Frontier Hypothesis’: The Nationalist Signification of Open Spaces,” JMH, 1993, v. 65, n. 3, pp. 473–511.

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ment.”109 These differences made for heated polemics—Kostomarov’s fervent Ukrainian populism and apparent idealization of “Southern Rus'” greatly perturbed some of his Great Russian critics, for example—but the acrimony did little to promote consideration of the steppe on its own terms. Instead, much as before, the steppe’s past remained meaningful only in terms of the nation, with the nation identified either with the state and the center or with “the people” and the regions. Still, something noteworthy did emerge from this academic conversation that would later change a great deal: colonization for the first time began to be broadly acknowledged as a defining leitmotif of Russian national history. Indeed, the importance of colonization as a national theme, while casually recognized before, now became a point on which almost every scholar could agree. Konstantin Kavelin, for example, objected to Solov'ev’s overemphasis on geography but concurred with him that “the settlement of European and Asian Russia by the Russian tribe . . . represents one of the most important determining factors of [the country’s] domestic history.”110 Federalists likewise disagreed with Kavelin and Solov'ev about the primacy of the state, but agreed with their appreciation of colonization’s epic importance. As Kazan University professor S.V. Eshevskii noted in the late 1850s, “The spreading of the Russian tribe at the expense of other nationalities is a matter of world-historical significance. Not only did it lead to the physical increase of the Russian nation, not only did it expand its material capacities, it also ensured the victory of European civilization over the East.”111 In 1863, Shchapov, a proud Siberian and former student of Eshevskii’s, drank from the magic cup of manifest destiny and went still further, projecting the prior achievements of Russian colonization into an even more glorious future: “We should move East. Yes, behind the dark masses of the Russian people, the various Eastern peoples conquered by Russia are moving to meet the new millennium and are awaiting the benefits of European civilization. Europe has been waiting a long time for us to unite the East and West in order to found the future great family of humanity. The ancient historical-geographical ties of Russia and the East demand it.”112 109 Gary M. Hamburg, “Inventing the ‘State School’ of Historians, 1840–1995,” in Sanders (ed.), Historiography of Imperial Russia, pp. 98–117; von Mohrenschildt, Towards a United States of Russia, pp. 46–47 passim; Gleason, Young Russia, pp. 196–200. 110 K.D. Kavelin, Sobranie sochinenii (St. Petersburg, 1897), v. 1, cols. 422–23, 570–71. 111 S.V. Eshevskii, “Russkaia kolonizatsiia severovostochnogo kraia,” VE, 1866, v. 1, p. 216. On Eshevskii’s influence on Shchapov, see Gleason, Young Russia, pp. 190–91. 112 A. Shchapov, “Novaia era” [1863], in his Sobranie sochinenii: Dopolnitel'nyi tom k izdaniiu 1905–1908 gg. (Irkutsk, 1937), p. 17. The quoted passage also appears in von Mohrenshildt, Towards a United States of Russia, p. 72. On the messianic thematics that were a common element in Russian visions of Asian expansion in the mid-nineteenth century, see Bassin, Imperial Visions, pp. 119–27, 143–73.

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Yet for all the agreement on colonization’s messianic importance and its newly enshrined place within the national historical narrative, perhaps most striking was the ambiguity that had begun to surround the question. No matter what one said about it, the “spreading” of the Russians no longer seemed quite as straightforward as it had appeared as recently as Karamzin’s time. In fact, the continuing and diversifying preoccupation with nationality, the expansion of the public sphere, and the expansion of the empire that took place in the reform era all combined to bring attention to the complexities of the issue. Thus, although scholars were quick to agree that the Russians were adaptive colonizers and that their colonization was inherently more “natural” and “tolerant” than that of their European counterparts (this was a favorite theme), it was not clear in every instance whether they had colonized their own country or someone else’s or whether their colonization had changed them more than it had changed the aliens (or, conversely, whether it had changed the aliens much at all). It was likewise unclear whether the genius of colonization lay more with the people or with the government, whether Great Russian and Little Russian colonization were the same thing, and even whether the Russians’ long history of colonizing had been a uniformly good thing for their national character.113 After all, was it true, as Solov'ev contended, that the Russians’ habit of colonizing had produced an unfortunate condition of “semisettledness” (poluosedlost') that in turn helped to perpetuate persistent moral laxity and laziness? Or was K.N. Bestuzhev-Riumin right to argue the opposite—that “the Russian man’s irrepressible urge [to colonize]” was precisely what lent him “his great significance?”114 All this had predictably paradoxical consequences when it came to understanding the steppe as a zone of colonization and as a natural region. Even as educated Russians made much of the coming of the nation to the plains, they did not stop paying attention to and even reveling in the remarkable ethnic variety of the region. Even as they grumbled (increasingly by the 1860s) about the excessive privileges and “isolated life” of German colonists, they praised their industriousness and cultural forti113 For a variety of questions about (and concerns over) colonization between the 1850s and the early 1870s, see I. Berezin, “Metropoliia i kolonii,” OZ, 1858, v. 117, n. 3, pp. 81–89; v. 117, n. 5, pp. 349–70; and v. 118, n. 5, pp. 74–115; L.S. Sukhodol 'skii, “Rasprostranenie khristianstva v predelakh orenburgskogo kraia v xviii stoletii,” OGV, 1859, n. 4, p. 26; Kavelin, Sobranie sochinenii, cols. 613–14; and A.P. Shchapov, “Istorikogeograficheskie i etnologicheskie zametki o sibirskom naselenii,” 1872, in his Sobranie sochinenii, p. 86. 114 Bassin, “Turner, Solov'ev, and the ‘Frontier Hypothesis,’ ”, p. 500; K.N. Bestuzhev-Riumin, “O kolonizatsii veliko-russkogo plemeni,” ZhMNP, 1867, pt. 134, p. 784. Bassin translates Solov'ev’s term poluosedlost' as “quasi-settlement.” The translation here is my own.

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tude. Even as they acknowledged the steppe as a natural milieu distinct from the “forest” and comparable to the world’s other grasslands, they continued to point out its multiple internal variations. And even as they imagined the need for future settlement in the region, they raised the first persistent concerns about deforestation and the depletion of natural resources. The statistician Ivan Shtukenberg, for example, noted in 1857 that “settlement on the former deserts that now make up the territory of Stavropol' Province . . . has not yet reached its fullest potential”; yet six pages later he cautioned that the riparian groves of the area were all but gone: “Now all one sees are the bare remnants of woods that were fully green forty years ago. . . . In Stavropol' Province today there is simply no building timber left.”115 By the late 1850s and 1860s, such concerns began to carry the first hints of an environmental nostalgia that would grow stronger over the rest of the century, though even nostalgia did not mean a rejection of settlement as much as a lament that settlement was not being practiced more carefully. Thus local residents could take pride, as did one New Russian old-timer in 1859, in the fact that “cities and villages had risen up and the face of the steppes had begun to change” while at the same time idealizing the primal abundance of yesteryear and warning that if the current generation did not stop overgrazing, overcutting, and overplowing “our descendants will not be thankful.”116 The steppe’s relationship to the rest of Russia also remained somewhat less than fully defined. Although Skal'kovskii referred to New Russia as a colony in 1868, the term remained rare as a general referent for either the New Russian provinces or the European steppe in the Great Reforms period and was much more likely (though still hardly routine) to appear in regard to Siberia, Central Asia, or the Caucasus, all three of which seemed somehow more differentiated from “the metropole.”117 At the same time, the steppe was very clearly not considered part of the so-called Russian interior (vnutrennaia Rossiia), also known as “essential Russia” (korennaia Rossiia) or “central Russia” (tsentral'naia Rossiia), which by the mid-nineteenth century was identified as a shifting cluster of core provinces that 115 Shtukenberg, Opisanie stavropol'skoi gubernii s zemleiu Chernomorskikh kazakov, pp. 1, 7. For other contemporary expressions of concern about growing pressure on the steppe environment, see Barrett, At the Edge of Empire, p. 65; and A.A. Pushkarenko et al., Okhrana prirody v oblasti voiska donskogo (Rostov on Don, 2000), p. 95. 116 V.P. Skarzhinskii, “Pervye i poslednie zadushevnye mechty novorossiiskogo starozhila,” in I. Palimpsestov (comp.), Sbornik statei o sel'skom khoziaistve iuga Rossii izvlechennykh iz zapisok imperatorskogo obshchestva sel'skogo khoziaistva iuzhnoi Rossii s 1830 po 1868 god (Odessa, 1868), p. 773. 117 See, for example, the uses of the term in Berezin, “Metropoliia i kolonii,” v. 118, n. 5, pp. 101–15.

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had the good fortune to represent “the heart of the empire, the true foundation of her greatness, the genuine homeland of the Russian people . . . [and] the repository of all the wealth obtained through the accomplishments of education, industry, and domestic trade.”118 Instead, the steppe region amounted to one of the spokes emanating from the “great circle” of the heartland.119 It remained a part of “European Russia” but not its primary part, a peculiar periphery (okraina), at once of Russia and yet distinct from it at the same time. Educated Russians from the center could not help but run into these long-standing dualities when they traveled to the region and often found themselves especially perplexed by the imprint they had made on the ordinary folk, who otherwise seemed such clear exemplars of the nation. A certain Baron Biuler noted in 1846, for example, that even though it was clear that Russians exerted a “strong moral influence . . . in the faraway territory” of Astrakhan, some of the Russian commoners he met in the region saw things quite differently: To pass the time on my way to Astrakhan town, I would ask the coachmen whether they were from the area and they usually replied: “No, I’m not from around here. I’m from Russia.” “How’s that, from Russia?” “Yes, that’s right sir, I’m from Tambov (or some other such province).” “But isn’t this province as much a part of Russia as your own?” “Come again, sir? The same sort of province you say? But how’s that? Here you’ve got nothing but Tatars and Kalmyks.”120

The young graduate Filonov was similarly perplexed when he took a tour through the Don country a decade later: This is now my third day on the steppes and the third day that I find myself possessed by one and the same thought. You stop at a Cossack settlement [stanitsa] and people immediately start asking you: “So how are things back there in Rus'?” Amazing! It’s as if the Cossacks don’t think of themselves as Russians, even as entire Cossack regiments are busily protecting Russia. They 118 Cited in Leonid Gorizontov, “ ‘Velikii krug’ vnutrennei Rossii: Iadro imperii v predstavleniiakh xix veka” (unpublished paper, 2001), p. 13. The cited passage appears in a work by the statistician Konstantin Arsen'ev from 1848. For other mid-nineteenthcentury renderings of the steppe as a region that seemed in various ways distinct from the Russian interior, see the works of “economic geography” reviewed in B.A. Val'skaia, “Obzor opytov raionirovaniia Rossii s kontsa xviii v. po 1861 g.,” Voprosy geografii, 1950, v. 17, pp. 165–94. 119 Gorizontov, “ ‘Velikii krug’ vnutrennei Rossii,” pp. 13, 15–16. 120 F.A. Biuler, “Kochuiushchie i osedlo-zhivushchie v astrakhanskoi gubernii inorodtsy: Ikh istoriia i nastoiashchii byt,” OZ, 1846, v. 47, p. 9.

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Strange indeed, though there was more strangeness to come. 121 Filonov, Ocherki Dona, pp. 3–4.

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“Privet iz Astrakhani” (Hello from Astrakhan!) Reprint of postcard, late nineteenth to early twentieth century, from the archive of Khadzhi Abdully Dubina.

Chapter Five

“Correct Colonization” Now I possess and am possessed of the land where I would be, And the curve of half Earth’s generous breast shall soothe and ravish me! Rudyard Kipling, “The Prairie”

Colonizing Capacities and the Russian Element The word “imperialism” made its debut in British politics in the 1870s. Just twenty years later, however, according to the critic J. A. Hobson, it could be heard “on everybody’s lips” and had become the widely accepted term of choice to describe “the most powerful movement . . . of the Western world.”1 If a new term was required, it was because the “movement” it described was indeed new. The Europeans had long laid claim to far-flung territories, but in the late nineteenth century, aided by the tools and products of industrialization, high capitalism, and science, their ability to conquer, occupy, and otherwise impose themselves on the world increased dramatically. Agents of European business ran rubber from the Amazon and tea from Ceylon; emissaries of European religion took their god to Zululand and New Zealand; and soldiers and servitors of European capitals fanned out to claim colonies from Indochina to the Cameroons. In the new Age of Empire, there was no question, it seemed, that “Europeans would invent, finance, and command” while “Africans and Asians would acculturate, labor, and obey.” Even if certain imperialists like the young Winston Churchill acknowledged that there was a gap between “the wonderful cloudland of aspiration” and “the ugly scaffolding of attempt and achievement,” the imperialism of the day still seemed a necessary and justified reflection of Europe’s higher condition.2 As 1 Cited in E.J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875–1914 (New York, 1987), p. 60. 2 Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of

Western Dominance (Ithaca, N.Y., 1989), p. 271; V.G. Kiernan, Imperialism and Its Contradictions (New York, 1995), p. 103.

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the French economist Paul Leroy-Beaulieu wrote in 1874: “Emigration, that is, the acquisition of a new territory, of a virgin country . . . is a matter of instinct, one that occurs at all stages of social development; colonization [colonisation] [by contrast] is a matter of reflection bound by rules that can only emanate from the most advanced societies. Savages and barbarians will emigrate periodically—even often. . . . Only civilized peoples truly colonize.”3 Russia’s ruling imperialists were no less convinced of their superior status, but their views of colonization were necessarily more complicated. If Continental commentators such as Leroy-Beaulieu could sing abstractly about colonization as “the expansive force of a people, its reproductive power, its extension and multiplication across space, and the submission of the universe . . . to its language, customs, ideas, and laws,”4 members of the Russian government had to acknowledge that colonization in their country was largely premised on peasant resettlement, and permitting too much of the latter still seemed unwise. The broadly negative position on large-scale movement that prevailed in high places in the 1860s thus continued into the early-to-mid 1870s. Limited resettlement was permitted in specific instances, but the law of the land remained the Emancipation Edict whose practical effect, in the words of a later government report, was “to deny the right to resettle to most of the peasant population.”5 Yet much as before, prohibitions and threats of fines or the exile of illegal resettlement “inciters” to Siberia did little to dissuade needy and/or hopeful peasants from moving. Indeed, by the close of the 1870s, the combined pressures of rising population, rising land prices, and rising “land hunger” in the center produced such a surge of illegal migration that some high state officials began to reconsider their antiresettlement stance. Even the tsar’s most conservative servants started to recognize that massive rural migration was prompted more by “extreme need” than simple “willfulness,” that “prohibitive measures” alone would never stop the flow, and that, consequently, the government was better off doing what it could to “actively supervise resettlement affairs.”6 In 1881, reflecting this change in view, new “temporary regulations” on resettlement went into effect. Then, after a protracted process of drafting and redrafting by varied commissions of high officials and “knowledgeable people,” a permanent resettlement law was issued on July 13, 1889.7 3 Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, De la colonisation chez les peuples modernes (Paris, 1874), p. i. 4 Ibid., p. 605. 5 RGIA, f. 391, op. 2, d. 613, l. 11. 6 Ibid., ll. 11(b)–12. 7 On resettlement policy in the 1870s and 1880s, see A.A. Kaufman, Pereselenie i kolo-

nizatsiia (St. Petersburg, 1905), pp. 22–43; Sel'skokhoziaistvennoe vedomstvo za 75 let ego deiatel'nosti (1837–1912 g.g.) (Petrograd, 1914), pp. 60–63; Donald W. Treadgold, The

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The law of 1889 was the first general decree on resettlement since 1843, and as such it marked a turning point. While “voluntary resettlement . . . by rural residents and townspeople” was still to occur only “with the prior approval of the ministers of the Interior and of State Domains,” the new law at least made plain that resettlement was permissible and that petitioners with “reasons . . . meriting attention” were entitled to rent or receive state land and benefit from varying incentives and forms of assistance.8 The new law was thus proof that St. Petersburg had begun to conclude anew that it would be best for “social order” to let at least some peasants move rather than to require all of them to stay in place.9 It was also proof that the active pursuit of borderland settlement and population redistribution had once again become a pressing state interest. Though recognition of a relatively unrestricted right to resettle would not come until 1904–06, the law of 1889 put an end to the era of the broad discouragement of movement. Henceforth resettlement might be shut down occasionally in certain regions when things appeared to get out of hand, but overall it would be encouraged, and encouraged openly, even boldly. In 1893, the Committee on the Siberian Railway created a special subcommittee “to assist in the establishment of settlers” in “Asiatic Russia.” Then in 1896, the Ministry of the Interior opened the Resettlement Administration (pereselencheskoe upravlenie)—the closest thing the tsars ever produced to a general colonial office—to coordinate resettlement within the empire as a whole.10 In March 1895, the members of the Siberian Railway Great Siberian Migration: Government and Peasant in Resettlement from Emancipation to the First World War (Princeton, N.J., 1957), pp. 67–81; E.M. Brusnikin, “Pereselencheskaia politika tsarizma v kontse xix veka,” VI, 1965, n. 1, pp. 28–33; François-Xavier Coquin, La Sibérie: Peuplement et immigration paysanne au xixè siècle (Paris, 1969), pp. 349–89; and M.E. Simonova, “Pereselencheskii vopros v agrarnoi politike samoderzhaviia v kontse xix–nachale xx v.,” Ezhegodnik po agrarnoi istorii vostochnoi Evropy (Moscow, 1970), pp. 424–28. 8 PSZ, ser. 3, v. 9, n. 6198 (1889), pp. 535–38. Terms varied depending on where settlers were going. State assistance for migrants was greater in “Asiatic Russia” than European Russia. Additionally, in European Russia, migrants were required to rent state land for six to twelve years before receiving title to a permanent allotment. In “Asiatic Russia,” permanent allotment was to be granted immediately. As a rule, the term “Asiatic Russia” connoted Siberia, Transcaucasia, the Kazakh steppe (Stepnoi Krai), and Turkestan, though, of these territories, the provisions of the 1889 law extended only to Western Siberia and parts of the Kazakh steppe. The law was applied to the other areas a few years later. See Sel'skokhoziaistvennoe vedomstvo za 75 let ego deiatel'nosti, p. 64. 9 Edward H. Judge, “Peasant Resettlement and Social Control in Late Imperial Russia,” in Judge and James Y. Simms Jr. (eds.), Modernization and Revolution: Dilemmas of Progress in Late Imperial Russia; Essays in Honor of Arthur P. Mendel (New York, 1992), p. 76. 10 For the decrees creating these bodies, see Sbornik uzakonenii i rasporiazhenii o pereselenii (St. Petersburg, 1901), pp. 1–4. The first head of the Resettlement Administration was V.I. Gippius, and his assistant was A.V. Krivoshein, the future minister of Agri-

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Committee neatly encapsulated the new thinking on the question that had come to prevail in high circles by the end of the century: “There is no reason to look on peasant resettlement with special trepidation. Government action should instead be taken to ensure that it becomes better coordinated and acquires a more correct aspect.”11 The government’s newly resurrected resettlement enthusiasm focused overwhelmingly on the east. By the late 1880s, the Great Siberian Migration had begun. By the early 1890s it was intensifying as a result of the opening of the Trans-Siberian Railway. And by 1900, it had become massive enough to turn “Russia beyond the Urals” into the empire’s leading zone for new agricultural settlement. The consequences for the European steppe were historic. With the Siberian surge, the south was knocked from its long-held perch of colonizing preeminence, never to regain it again, either before or after 1917. For all that, the region’s slippage did not signal an end to new colonization. In fact, before migration rates dropped off precipitously in the early twentieth century, settlement on the steppe increased, with more incoming settlers than in any comparable preceding period. In the 1870s, Kuban' Oblast was the single most intensely settled region in the empire, with Stavropol' and parts of New Russia not far behind. In all, between 1871 and 1896, even as “Asiatic Russia” rose steadily in favor, the European steppes received over half (52.43 percent) of the empire’s colonists—that is, roughly two million people.12 In Orenburg in 1888, local correspondents told of peasants stopping short of Siberia and “wandering around the province . . . in massive numbers” looking for land.13 And in 1884 officials in the Northern Caucasus described Stavropol' as being all but overrun by illegal settlers, known in the region as “outlanders” (inogorodnye).14 By the time of the all-empire census in culture. In 1905, the administration was transferred from the Ministry of the Interior to the Ministry of Agriculture and Land Management. Treadgold, Great Siberian Migration, pp. 121, 129–30; V.I. Chernoivanov, Poltara veka agrarnykh problem: Sel'skokhoziaistvennoe vedomstvo Rossii v litsakh, 1837–1991 (Moscow, 1999), pp. 108–9. 11 RGIA, f. 391, op. 2, d. 613, l. 31. On resettlement policy in the 1890s, see Treadgold, Great Siberian Migration, pp. 107–30; Coquin, La Sibérie, pp. 460–94; Simonova, “Pereselencheskii vopros v agrarnoi politike samoderzhaviia,” pp. 428–34; T.V. Tikhonov, “Pereselencheskaia politika tsarskogo pravitel'stva v 1892–1897 godakh,” Istoriia SSSR, 1977, n. 1, pp. 109–21; and Boris Ananich et al. (eds.), Krizis samoderzhaviia v Rossii, 1894–1917 (Leningrad, 1984), pp. 47–49. 12 V.M. Kabuzan, Naselenie Severnogo Kavkaza v xix–x vekakh: Etnostatisticheskoe issledovanie (St. Petersburg, 1996), p. 96; Kabuzan, Russkie v mire: Dinamika chislennosti i rasseleniia, 1719–1989; formirovanie etnicheskikh i politicheskikh granits russkogo naroda (St. Petersburg, 1996), table 31, p. 320. 13 “Pereselencheskoe dvizhenie,” Orenburgskii listok, 1888, n. 6, p. 3. 14 RGIA, f. 1291, op. 53 (1884), ll. 17–19(b). I have borrowed this translation of the term inogorodnye from Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, 1914–1921 (Cambridge, Mass., 2002), p. 10.

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1897, despite the fact that Siberia was now far and away the leading center of colonization, and the steppe itself was losing migrants to the east, enough new settlement was still occurring on the European plains for observers to remark that the south’s population was “growing many times faster than [that of] the interior” and that European Russia’s “demographic center of gravity” was “shifting ever more toward the steppe zone.”15 The profile of the population moving to the steppe had changed little since mid-century. It consisted overwhelmingly of peasants from central Russian, Ukrainian, and northern/central Volga provinces, most of whom continued to move illegally or semilegally (even after the law of 1889) and almost all of whom were hoping to escape high rent payments, bad harvests, and/or poor land allotments while looking to find a better life in the form of a bigger and more fertile piece of ground. Such was the case of Vasilii Pertsov and Egor Kazakov, two former state peasants from Nizhnii Novgorod Province who petitioned the minister of the Interior in the name of their households in 1871: We two poor families draw our living from a rather small plot of land of poor quality in the village of Borisovka that provides us but one-half year’s worth of grain in a good harvest year and at other times one-third or less. Because of this we experience great hardship and cannot feed our families and meet our daily needs. It is worst of all in times of poor harvests when we must work to the last of our strength and spend all that we have to buy grain at inflated prices, such that we have nothing left to render our state taxes or the dues to our commune. It is this dire situation that has forced us to seek a new place to live, wherever it may be, on open state lands, and so we have found such a place in the village [sel'tso] of Podstepkin, Iagodinskaia County, Stavropol' District, Samara Province, which has state woods . . . and all amenities available for our accommodation.16

Peasants in parties like those of the Pertsovs and Kazakovs moved by foot, oxcart, barge, raft, and by the end of the 1870s increasingly by river steamboat and railroad car, traveling on the latter with their horses and carts (if they had them) at reduced “migrant rates.” On the road, migrants were led by scouts (khodoki) and aided by representatives (poverennye). Once they reached the steppe, many enrolled in existing villages or Cossack settlements, paying for “documents of admittance” (priemnye prigovory) and land (sometimes purchased but more often rented) with cash and/or buckets of vodka. The stress in these arrangements tended to fall on the practical, 15 V. Mikhailovskii, “Fakty i tsifry iz russkoi deistvitel'snosti: Naselenie Rossii po pervoi vseobshchei perepisi,” Novoe slovo, 1897, v. 2, n. 9, p. 108. 16 RGIA, f. 1291, op. 53 (1871), d. 151, l. 1.

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with communal admittance predicated on good behavior and new responsibilities balanced by access to resources. The assembly of one Cossack settlement in the Kuban' wrote the following in its decision in 1883 to admit the household of the “outlander” Elisei Popov from Voronezh: Recognizing that peasant Popov already lives in our stanitsa and is of good conduct, we the assembled do hereby fully agree that [he] and his family, consisting of a wife and two daughters, be accepted and registered within our community with rights of inheritance for all coming time. And to this we add that if Popov is permitted to enroll in the Cossack estate, then he shall be given land in the same measure as we receive it from the common stanitsa holding.17

Enrollment agreements of this sort worked only in certain situations. If villages did not exist in the vicinity, were not welcoming, or did not have room, incoming migrants were forced to eke out a precarious existence as unwanted squatters or to found new settlements, with the land either provided by the government or purchased with loans through the Peasant Land Bank (founded in 1882) and its provincial affiliates. (In nomadic areas, migrants frequently struck deals to rent “alien” land.) In the early going, regardless of whose land they settled on, the new arrivals commonly lived in dugouts or hastily assembled shacks, boarded with “old residents” if there were any, hired themselves out as laborers—sometimes for years—to make ends meet, searched for better lands if they did not like what they found on arrival, or gave up and returned home if things became too desperate. Yet even with the challenges, most stayed for the simple reason that things seemed better in their new environs. The basic rationale for popular movement to the steppe that had prevailed for centuries thus remained in place. Or at least, this was how many of the migrants told it. As the settler Stepan Stepanov wrote from Samara to his kin in Riazan' in 1876: My dear brothers, if you can live where you are without great hardship, then live there, but . . . if things have gotten still worse than before, then come over here to join us. . . . Here life is possible. There is much land and pasture, and, thanks be to God, the grain grows well.18

Satisfied settlers were undoubtedly appreciated by state officials, but settlers of all sorts posed problems. Much as before large numbers of mi17 Cited in M.M. Gromyko, Mir russkoi derevni (Moscow, 1991), p. 258. 18 N.N. Grigor'ev, Pereselenie krest'ian Riazanskoi gubernii (Moscow, 1885), p. 173. See

also Willard Sunderland, “Peasant Pioneering: Russian Settlers Describe Colonization and the Eastern Frontier, 1880s–1910,” JSH, 2001, v. 24, n. 3, pp. 895–922.

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grants left without permission, traveled with insufficient resources, ended up where they were not supposed to go, and arrived without the “documentation” required to receive state land (that is, “certificates of release” [uvol'nitel'nye prigovory] issued by their home communes). They drove up land prices by arriving in massive numbers, argued over land, timber, and water with neighboring “old residents,” Cossacks, and nomads, and, depending on circumstances, fell ill or died in unusually high concentrations. It was not always easy to tell who was an illegal settler and who was simply coming to the region “looking for work on a temporary passport.” It was not even wise to assume that settlers knew where they were going. The governor of Stavropol' observed, for example, that the migrants he found traversing “in all possible directions” across his territory frequently announced that they were looking for “places and geographical terms that simply do not exist in Stavropol' Province.”19 The by now familiar disconnect between resettlement procedures and resettlement realities thus persisted. As the frustrated governor of Ekaterinoslav put it in 1884, “The willful and incorrect resettlement of peasants completely contradicts the conditions set forth by law.”20 And yet as far as Russia’s chief executives were concerned, the law was still the issue and it still had to be enforced. Indeed, the government’s abiding response to the persistent confusions of resettlement in the late nineteenth century was to insist on trying to reduce them through still greater bureaucracy and an even more rigorously scientific approach to the alignment of population and territory. Now, more than ever, the goal was something that high officials and their sympathizers in the public referred to as “correct colonization” (pravil'naia kolonizatsiia)—that is, an orderly, scientized, systematic process in which peasant migrants left with appropriate resources and reasonable expectations, went just where they were told, moved in just the right numbers, settled on just the right amount of land, and did their obedient best to improve their livelihood and advance “the state’s interest.” The management of colonization along these lines naturally required data, and data there was. The “temporary regulations” of 1881 ordered the opening of a “resettlement office” on the Volga (first at Batraki, then moved to Syzran') to allow for settler assistance and settler monitoring. And the law of 1889 required economic data to be compiled on all settlerpetitioners and their communes.21 By the late 1890s, migrants passing out of European Russia into Siberia were required to register and provide 19 RGIA, f. 1291, op. 53 (1884), d. 8, ll. 19–19(b). 20 RGIA, f. 1291, op. 53 (1884), d. 8, l. 38. 21 Treadgold, Great Siberian Migration, p. 76; Coquin, La Sibérie, pp. 351–52; RGIA, f.

1291, op. 53 (1881), d. 10, ll. 7–9; Sbornik uzakonenii i rasporiazhenii o pereselenii, p. 18.

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agents of the Resettlement Administration with their names, the number in their household, their original place of residence, their estate or former peasant category (serf, state, or crown), and their reasons for leaving. (Some forms also asked for data on nationality [national'nost'].)22 In the same years, “medical-sanitary inspections” were initiated at Syzran' because of reports of deaths from infectious disease on the Samara-Zlatoust railway.23 Throughout the period, data on land and the migrant economy continued to be compiled by the ministries, the governors’ offices, and new institutions such as the Peasant Land Bank. The norm in every case remained one of exacting numerical thoroughness. In his survey of the status of five settler households in Orenburg District in 1888, the dutiful representative of the Orenburg branch of the Peasant Land Bank, I. S. Peich, noted that the households in question lived in structures of an average value of 52 rubles, possessed an average of 2.2 horses, 1.2 cows, and 5.4 head of “small stock,” had left home with an average of 215 rubles (the poorest with 75 and the richest with 500), and had put down a combined total of 100 rubles—“that is, 3.2 percent of the purchase price”—for 228 desiatinas and 770 sazheny of land from a certain Commander Kachurin. (The bank loaned them the rest.) Peich also stated how many desiatinas each household had under plow, how many had been set aside for haying, how many puds of harvested grain had been collected “per desiatina sown,” and whether the peasants were registered and had paid their taxes.24 If some statisticians focused on the means of migrants, others divided the empire into “donor regions” and “receiver regions” and explained resettlement as a phenomenon “produced by the concentration of population in quantities that exceed the capacity of the country.”25 Indeed, as colonization continued to be scientized, the need to determine colonizing capacity—that is, to identify how many agricultural people could be supported within a given territory—became increasingly important, and the terminology of capacity itself became routine. By century’s end, ex22 For an example of a form from 1899, see RGIA, f. 391, op. 2, d. 553, l. 30. On nationality appearing in a questionnaire from Ufa province in 1895, see Charles Steinwedel, “Making Social Groups One Person at a Time: The Identification of Individuals by Estate, Religious Confession, and Ethnicity in Late Imperial Russia,” in Jane Caplan and John Torpey (eds.), Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World (Princeton, N.J., 2001), p. 79. 23 RGIA, f. 391, op. 2, d. 550, ll. 33–34. 24 RGIA, f. 592, op. 1, d. 585, ll. 2–3(b). One pud equals approximately thirty-six pounds. 25 Mikhailovskii, “Fakty i tsifry iz russkoi deistvitel'snosti,” p. 109; “Naselenie Evropeiskoi Rossii v zavisimosti ot prichin, obuslovliaiushchikh raspredelenii naseleniia imperii,” Statisticheskii vremennik rossiiskoi imperii (St. Petersburg, 1871), v. 1, p. 129.

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pressions such as “colonizing strength” (kolonizatsionnaia sila), “colonization reserve” (kolonizatsionnyi zapas), “colonization fund” (kolonizatsionnyi fond), and “colonization area” (kolonizatsionnaia ploshchad') regularly appeared in ministerial reports. At the same time, a variety of official and semiofficial commentators ranked provinces in terms of their population density. They noted that the empire’s “agricultural center” was “overpopulated” while borderland areas were “far below their limit,” and they generally called for “the correct redistribution of [the state’s] population” as a necessary step toward “correct progress.”26 One of the age’s more notable proponents of colonization as a tool for creating demographic-territorial balance was the “pragmatic liberal” Prince Aleksandr Illarionovich Vasil'chikov. A zemstvo man with high government connections, the prince was also something of a political economist, who commented frequently on colonization’s virtues as a force for domestic reorganization. “Resettlement,” he averred, “is a means for attaining the gradual equalization of land holdings and the correct distribution of population.” Moreover: “In times of agrarian social crisis, [the adoption of] a broad-based and correct system of colonization is the only salvation.”27 This sort of “correct colonization” had been around before. Indeed, it was simply the restatement of an old Enlightenment-era idea in the new language of late nineteenth-century science and planning. But there was one important difference: colonization in Vasil'chikov’s time was not only meant to be scientific and programmatic, it was also expected to be national; or, more precisely, the men organizing and commenting on it were now more sensitive to the relationship between colonization and nationality than had previously been the case. This was only to be expected. Prompted in part by the great awakening of the Great Reforms and in part 26 See, for example, RGIA, f. 396, op. 4, d. 1379, ll. 13(b), 15–15(b); Iu.E. Ianson, Sravnitel'naia statistika Rossii i zapadno-evropeiskikh gosudarstv, vol. 1, Territoriia i naselenie (St. Petersburg, 1878), p. 36; Svod statisticheskikh materialov kasaiushchikhsia ekonomicheskogo polozheniia sel'skogo naseleniia evropeiskoi Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1894), pp. xl–xli; “Naselenie evropeiskoi Rossii,” p. 141; A.P., “O plane gosudarstvennogo razseleniia,” RV, 1891, v. 213, n. 4, pp. 230–44; M.V. Neruchev, Russkoe zemlevladenie i zemledelie (Moscow, 1877), pp. 8–9; V.I. Chaslavskii, “Zemledel'cheskii otkhozhie promysli v sviazi s pereseleniem krest'ian,” Sbornik gosudarstvennykh znanii, 1875, v. 2, p. 210; Kolonizatsiia Sibiri v sviazi s obshchim pereselencheskim voprosom (St. Petersburg, 1900), p. i. For broader echoes of this approach in different settlement zones, see Willard Sunderland, “The ‘Colonization Question’: Visions of Colonization in Late Imperial Russia,” JfGO, 2000, v. 48, n. 2, pp. 218–19. 27 A.I. Vasil'chikov, Zemlevladenie i zemledelie v Rossii i drugikh evropeiskikh gosudarstvakh (St. Petersburg, 1881), v. 2, pp. 321, 387. For other recommendations concerning “correct colonization,” see his Sel'skii byt i sel'skoe khoziaistvo v Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1881), p. 135. The reference to Vasil'chikov as a “pragmatic liberal” is drawn from Nathan Smith, “Vasil'chikov, Aleksandr Illarionovich,” in Joseph Wieczynski (ed.), MERSH (Gulf Breeze, Fla., 1986), v. 41, p. 201.

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by the emergence of other peoples’ nationalisms (both at home and abroad), Russian nationalism was now on the rise. Matters had definitively moved on from the collection of national sayings and recipes to the mobilization of national commitment, and so, at once threatened and inspired, the public and the government put out the call. Conservative nationalists championed the “civilizing” of “the East” while urging the Russification of just about everyone. Pan-Slavic conservative nationalists excitedly supported Russian imperial expansion in the Balkans in order to wage “the terrible, bloody, final battle of Slavdom with Islam.” Liberal nationalists voiced concerns about conservative nationalists (Pan-Slavic or otherwise), though without rejecting in the least the imperial idea or even necessarily the premise of Russification. Even antistate, anticapitalist, propeasant populists were not without their support for the Russian national way.28 The nationalisms of the age thus varied, but the important thing was that most of the members of the government-public nexus were now indeed nationalists of one variety or another. The only apparent internationalists still to be found were the socialists, but they were extremely few before the very end of the century and almost completely irrelevant to the mainstream political discussion.29 With the theme of the nation so prevalent in public discourse and so central to government policy, the national meanings and functions of colonization understandably came to be stressed to an unprecedented degree. Thus banal official reports on settlement in the borderlands that once carried generic references to “resettlers” now referred instead to “Russian resettlers,” “Russian colonists,” “Russian people,” or the “Russian element.” In other cases, nationality was addressed directly. For example, at different points between the mid-1860s and the turn of the century, the governors and the ministries observed that it was essential to keep “Rus28 These categories are oversimplified, though they reflect the basic divisions. On state policy and varieties of Russian nationalism and nationality in the late ninetenth century, see Aleksei Miller, “Russifikatsii: Klassifitsirovat' i poniat',” Ab Imperio, 2002, n. 2, pp. 142–43 passim; Theodore Weeks, “Slavdom, Civilization, Russification: Comments on Russia’s World-Historical Mission, 1861–1878,” Ab Imperio, 2002, n. 2, p. 242; Paul W. Werth, At the Margins of Orthodoxy: Mission, Governance, and Confessional Politics in Russia’s Volga-Kama Region, 1827–1905 (Ithaca, N.Y., 2002), pp. 134–40; Robert P. Geraci, Window on the East: National and Imperial Identities in Late Tsarist Russia (Ithaca, N.Y., 2001), pp. 9, 11–12 passim; Geoffrey Hosking, “Empire and Nation-Building in Late Imperial Russia,” in Hosking and Robert Service (eds.), Russian Nationalism, Past and Present (Basingstoke, Eng., 1998), pp. 19–34; Andreas Kappeler, Russland als Vielvölkerreich: Entstehung, Geschichte, Zerfall (Munich, 1992), pp. 207–29; and Kappeler, “Einleitung,” in Kappeler (ed.), Die Russen: Ihr Nationalbewusstsein in Geschichte und Gegenwart (Cologne, 1990), p. 9. 29 As internationalists in a time of nationalism, Russian socialists resembled their Western comrades. See Martin Malia, Russia under Western Eyes: From the Bronze Horseman to the Lenin Mausoleum (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), p. 190.

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sian people” from resettling from the Western Territory and equally important to get them to resettle to places like the former Kingdom of Poland (“the Vistula Territory”), the Kazakh steppe, and the Caucasus.30 As the head of the Land Division of the Ministry of the Interior wrote to the minister of Finance in 1896, “The Interior ministry . . . cannot but devote special attention to the Caucasus, which because of its lack of sufficient population offers every attraction for the expansion of colonization [kolonizatsiia] and whose settlement [zaselenie] with members of the Russian element represents an outcome of undeniable value to the state’s interest.”31 The state’s interest even required that some areas, such as Black Sea Province on the Western Caucasus littoral, be settled “exclusively with persons of Russian origin,” in order to make sure that it became home to “a concentrated base of Russian people that would be able to extend their Russian influence to the native population.”32 And what was wrong with this sort of thinking? Why shouldn’t Russians alone settle these areas? Even the far from jingoistic Prince Vasil'chikov in 1881 saw no reason why the empire’s land reserves should be “wasted on foreign colonists [and] half-savage aliens” when there were plenty of Russian people who needed the acreage.33 The government did not establish a Russians-only policy on the European steppe. There were no special national restrictions for the region as a whole, not least because it was still not treated as a single coherent entity. The general qualifications for resettlement that applied remained essentially economic.34 Yet for all this, it was clear that the overwhelming share of settlers headed for the steppe would continue to be “Russians”— that is, Great Russians, Little Russians, and White Russians, all of whom 30 See, for example, L.E. Gorizontov, Paradoksy imperskoi politiki: Poliaki v Rossii i russkie v Pol'she (Moscow, 1999), pp. 136–44; A.I. Miller, “Ukrainskii vopros” v politike vlastei i russkom obshchestvennom mnenii (vtoraia polovina xix v.) (St. Petersburg, 2000), p. 193; RGIA, f. 384, op. 12, d. 218, ll. 2(b)–3; Virginia Martin, Law and Custom in the Steppe: The Kazakhs of the Middle Horde and Russian Colonialism in the Nineteenth Century (Richmond, Eng., 2001), p. 42; RGIA, f. 385, op. 16, d. 8721, ll. 2–3; RGIA, f. 1291, op. 53 (1881), d. 17, ll. 47–47(b); Sbornik uzakonenii i rasporiazhenii o pereselenii, pp. 65, 226–37; Austin Jersild, Orientalism and Empire: North Caucasus Mountain Peoples and the Georgian Frontier, 1845–1917 (Montreal, 2002), pp. 138–39. 31 RGIA, f. 391, op. 2, d. 195, ll. 3–3(b). 32 RGIA, f. 391, op. 2, d. 240, ll. 15(b)–16. 33 Vasil'chikov, Zemlevladenie i zemledelie v Rossii i drugikh evropeiskikh gosudarstvakh, p. 321. 34 No single amount of acreage per capita was used to define a land shortage because shortages were recognized as being highly locally variable. The government considered additional “negative economic factors” to include lack of easy access to paid migrant work or craft production as well as the lack of available lands for rent. See the remarks of Minister of Interior Dmitri Tol'stoi in a circular from 1883: RGIA, f. 1291, op. 53 (1881), d. 17, l. 21(b).

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were considered Russian by the government.35 Thus the settlement of Jewish farmers in New Russia, halted by decree in 1866, was never resumed; and the program to settle German “model farmers” in Jewish villages was terminated in 1872.36 New immigration from Germany to the steppe all but ceased. Indeed, even though some Germans already living in the south resettled to the Northern Caucasus, the Don, and Orenburg, more Germans were now leaving the steppe than migrating to it. Between the 1870s and the 1890s, at least fifty thousand Mennonites and other Germans from the Volga and the Black Sea regions emigrated to the United States, Canada, Brazil, and Argentina, fleeing the combined effects of the new conscription law of 1874, growing land pressure, and rising prices in colonist areas, while following the urges of religious restlessness and expectations of a better life overseas.37 (As one German “migration song” put it, “Come, brothers, we’re off! / Our papers are already done / Let’s set out for Brazilian places / Where winter never comes.”)38 For their part, Bulgarians and other non-Russians in Ottoman Bessarabia found themselves once again on tsarist soil when the region reverted to Russian control after 1878, but even these were former foreigners and “aliens” reclaimed by the empire rather than new ones invited to come in. Indeed, in an age of Russian nationalism, the tsar’s officials tended to see settlement by other “nations,” “peoples,” and “tribes” (national'nosti, 35 Miller, “Ukrainskii vopros”, pp. 37–38; Theodore R. Weeks, Nation and State in Late Imperial Russia: Nationalism and Russification on the Western Frontier, 1863–1914 (DeKalb, Ill., 1996), p. 46. 36 Istoricheskoe obozrenie piatidesiatiletnei deiatel'nosti ministerstva gosudarstvennykh immushchestv, 1837–1887 (St. Petersburg, 1888), v. 2, pp. 203, 200; V.N. Nikitin, Evrei-zemledel'tsy: Istoricheskoe, zakonodatel'noe, administrativnoe i bytove polozhenie kolonii so vremeni ikh voznikoveniia do nashikh dnei, 1807–1887 (St. Petersburg, 1887), pp. 571, 577. 37 James W. Long, From Privileged to Dispossessed: The Volga Germans, 1860–1917 (Lincoln, Neb., 1988), pp. 120–21; James Urry, None But Saints: The Transformation of Mennonite Life in Russia, 1789–1889 (Winnipeg, 1989), pp. 219–41; Vladimir M. Kabuzan, “Die deutsche Bevölkerung im Russischen Reich, 1796–1917: Zusammensetzung, Verteilung, Bevölkerungsanteil,” in Ingeborg Fleischhauer and Hugo H. Jedig (eds.), Die Deutschen in der UdSSR in Geschichte und Gegenwart: Ein internationaler Beitrag zur deutsch-sowjetischen Verständigung (Baden-Baden, 1990), p. 71; Kabuzan, Emigratsiia i reemigratsiia v Rossii v xviii–nachale xx veka (Moscow, 1998), p. 145. On new German settlement to the steppe in the late nineteenth century, see E.V. Chesnok, “Nemetskie kolonii oblasti voiska Donskogo,” and I.I. Alekseenko, “Istoriia i problemy rossiiskikh nemtsev na Kubani,” in Rossiiskie nemtsy na Donu, Kavkaze i Volge: Materialy rossiisko-germanskoi nauchnoi konferentsii Anapa, 22–26 sentiabria 1994 g. (Moscow, 1995), pp. 79–98 and 55–58, respectively. 38 The German (in dialect form) reads: “Kommt, ihr Gebrüder, wir wollen ziechen / Unser Schein ist schon geschrieben/Ziechen auf dem Brasilischen Ort / Weil es gibt kein Winter dort!” Cited in Timothy J. Kloberdanz, “Die Auswanderung nach Amerika und ihre Auswirkung auf Identität und Weltanschauung der Wolgadeutschen in Rußland,” in Dittmar Dahlmann and Ralph Tuchtenhagen (eds.), Zwischen Reform und Revolution: Die Deutschen an der Wolga, 1860–1917 (Essen, 1994), p. 175.

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narody, plemena) in altogether dimmer terms. Germans offered perhaps the most striking example of the change in tone. If at mid-century, one still heard mostly only good things about them in official circles, by the 1870s the “German element” as a whole had become problematic enough to become the subject of a “question”—the “German question”—and German colonists in New Russia had become numerous, well-off, and aggressive enough in their land buying to be perceived as a “threat.”39 Governors in Kherson and Tauris openly worried that their provinces were home to too many Germans who were acquiring too much land “at the expense of the Russian settlements”; and Minister of the Interior Dmitrii Tol'stoi openly cheered the decision to deny Germans the right to apply for loans from the Peasant Land Bank in the early 1880s, reasoning that this would “advance [the cause of] Russification by increasing peasant landholdings” while counteracting “the expansion of the colonists.”40 Attitudes toward Jewish settlers also sharpened. It was now common for government and nongovernment conservatives, regardless of the nature or extent of their “Judeophobia,” to take the Jewish colonies’ apparently lackluster farming as final proof that Jews were congenitally incapable of performing “the demanding but honest work of the agriculturalist.”41 It was also now routine to suggest that past government policy toward these seemingly irredeemable farmers had been far too generous. One case in point: In early May 1881, Slavic peasants in two districts in Ekaterinoslav descended “in droves” on four neighboring Jewish colonies, looting everything and beating anyone they could find. The Interior ministry official who reported on the pogroms to his superiors managed to make the events sound, if not ac39 Ingeborg Fleischhauer, Die Deutschen im Zarenreich: Zwei Jahrhunderte deutsch-russische Kulturgemeinschaft (Stuttgart, 1986), pp. 329–57; Detlef Brandes, “Zur ‘friedlichen Eroberung’ Südrußlands durch die deutschen Kolonisten,” in Fleischhauer and Jedig (eds.), Die Deutschen in der UdSSR in Geschichte und Gegenwart, pp. 117–41; and Terry Martin, “The German Question in Russia, 1848–1996,” RH, 1991, v. 18, n. 4, pp. 373–434. 40 Cited in Sergei Zhuk, “The Ukrainian Periphery of the European Reformation: ‘Charter Groups’ of Colonization and Religious Awakening on the Southern Ukrainian Frontier, 1780s–1890s” (unpublished paper); Long, From Privileged to Dispossessed, p. 126. 41 I.V. Kankrin, Evreiskie zemledel'cheskie kolonii aleksandrovskogo uezda ekaterinoslavskoi gubernii (Ekaterinoslav, 1893), p. 248. See also Ministerstvo vnutrennykh del: Istoricheskii ocherk (St. Petersburg, 1901), p. 29; and K. Sluchevskii, “Evreiskie kolonii,” RV, 1890, v. 207, p. 201. On varieties of “Judeophobia” within late imperial conservativism, official and beyond, see John Doyle Klier, Imperial Russia’s Jewish Question, 1855–1881 (New York, 1995), pp. 384–416. One should note that the Jewish colonies in the south and the potential for Jewish agriculture in Russia in general had clear defenders in the public sphere as well. See, for example, Nikitin, Evrei zemledel'tsy, pp. xiii–xiv; “Evrei-zemledel'tsy,” Ekonomicheskii zhurnal, 1886, n. 4, pp. 25–26; P. Liakub, “Sud'by evreiskikh zemledel'cheskikh kolonii,” Russkoe bogatstvo, 1889, n. 10, pp. 194–95; and B. Ben-Vid, O metodakh evreiskoi kolonizatsii (St. Petersburg, 1899), pp. 7–8.

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“Volga Scenes, Samara, View from the Volga.” Historical postcard, 1910s. Reproduced in Russkii gorod na pochtovoi otkrytke kontsa xix–nachala xx veka (Russkaia Kniga, Moscow, 1997), p. 199.

ceptable, at least understandable. As he put it, “It was the obvious historic preference shown to Jews and Germans over the native Russian peasant population [in the allocation of land] that provided malefactors [among the peasants] with the basis for provoking these troubles and disturbances.”42 By comparison with Germans and Jews, Greeks, Armenians, and Bulgarians tended to meet with far less government pessimism or disapproval, but their colonizing, too, lost most of its remaining official luster. Colonization of a general sort was no longer attractive. It had to be “Russian colonization” (russkaia kolonizatsiia). In Bessarabia, this kind of colonization was needed to counteract “Romanianization” at the hands of local “Moldovans.”43 In Orenburg, it was simply to be expected because, as one official put it in the late 1880s, “the region had always served in the 42 RGIA, f. 381, op. 46, d. 117, ll. 82(b)–83. 43 P.N. Batiushkov, Bessarabia: Istoricheskoe opisanie (St. Petersburg, 1892), pp. 172,

127. “Moldovan” was the term used in imperial demographic materials for the Romanian-speaking population of Bessarabia, though the close relationship between Moldovans and Romanians (even the former’s identity as the latter) tended to be accepted as a given. According to the 1897 census, Moldovans constituted 47.6 percent of the oblast population, while Great Russians and Little Russians (including “Ruthenians”) together represented less than 28 percent. See Charles King, The Moldovans: Romania, Russia, and the Politics of Culture (Stanford, Calif., 2000), pp. 26–27, 24.

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past and will continue to serve in the future as a place for the colonization of Russian working people.”44 Of course, the priorities of Russian colonization were not the same in all areas of the steppe at all times because the concentration of different ethnic groups varied considerably. In Stavropol', for example, “Russians” by the 1890s accounted for over 90 percent of the population, and consequently the Ministry of Agriculture and State Domains (founded in 1893 as a new and expanded version of Kiselev’s original ministry) determined that there was little cause to worry about bolstering the local “Russian element” with additional colonists.45 Yet even coming to this conclusion naturally presumed a certain attention to the question of Russian nationality. In fact, the same ministry official who argued that there was no need to encourage new Russian resettlement in Stavropol' proposed allocating state land to the hundreds of thousands of illegal and unregistered “outlanders” who were already there. The overwhelming share of these illegals, the official pointed out in passing, were also “Russian.”46 Ironically, however, the general increase in official support for Russian colonization did not translate into unambiguous enthusiasm for the Russian colonist. Officials still tended to characterize Cossacks as inadequate agricultural colonizers; Russian “sectarians” were still good farmers but potentially unreliable and “dangerous fanatics.”47 More important, the Orthodox Russian peasant, who had been the centerpiece of the government’s resettlement program since early in the century, remained far from perfect. As before, the peasant’s position at the top of the colonizing hierarchy did not depend on the state’s unquestioning respect for his Russian nationality but on the fact that he was simply the most obvious candidate. Crowded into the “agricultural center,” burdened in the best of times with backward agriculture, and afflicted in the worst by harvest failure and famine, the muzhik always seemed to need more land—land that the empire, in its borderlands, could still afford to give. Russian official and semiofficial observers were thus quick to reiterate the peasant colonist’s positive national attributes—hardiness, adaptability, a tolerant acceptance of and talent for assimilating native peoples. But they also 44 RGIA, f. 391, op. 1, d. 57, l. 331. 45 RGIA, f. 391, op. 2, d. 195, ll. 51(b)–52. The “Russians” that the ministry was

counting here included a large share of Ukrainians. According to the 1897 census, Russians made up 55.25 percent and Ukrainians 36.62 percent of Stavropol's population. See T.A. Nevskaia and S.A. Chekmenev, Stavropol'skie krest'iane: Ocherki khoziaistva, kul'tury i byta (Mineral'nye vody, 1994), p. 19. 46 RGIA, f. 391, op. 2, d. 195, ll. 52–53. The official made substantially the same observations about Kuban Oblast as well. 47 Nicholas B. Breyfogle, “Heretics and Colonizers: Religious Dissent and Russian Colonization of Transcaucasia, 1830–1890” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1998), pp. 204–5; Sunderland, “The ‘Colonization Question,’ ” p. 223.

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readily cataloged his failings—laziness, drunkenness, fatalism, lack of inventiveness, lack of discipline, an apparent inability to stay in one place, a habit of embarking on things “without thinking” (na avos' ), and so much openness to non-Russian peoples that it seemed just as likely for “aliens” to “nativize” him as it was for him to Russify them.48 The ambivalence surrounding the peasant’s colonizing talents that had begun to appear in the Great Reforms era thus grew stronger as the century wore on, and prevailing views within officialdom remained at best mixed. While “knowledgeable people” advising the Ministry of the Interior in the 1880s favored treating resettlement as a right and recognizing the peasant settler as a would-be rational actor,49 the bureaucrats in charge continued to see him more as a pitiable unfortunate, a backward bumpkin, or a devious miscreant. In any case, his redeeming qualities were few. The governor of Stavropol' expressed something of the majority opinion in a reference in 1900 to the settler representatives who relentlessly besieged his office with requests for land even after they had been repeatedly told that it was no longer available: These [peasants] either belong to that category of people who are so pigheaded that they refuse to listen to anything and . . . stubbornly persist in trying to get what they want; or, what is more likely, they are knowingly exploiting the naive hopes of their followers in order to line their own pockets.50

Of course, whether conniving or merely persistent, Russian settlers on the steppe did at least possess one unambiguously positive trait that was much appreciated by the government: they were not nomadic pastoralists. In fact, their presence tended to be greeted as a generally commendable antidote to nomadism. By the late nineteenth century, settlement on or near nomadic pastures and migration routes was much less common because practicing nomads themselves were fewer. Wherever such settlement did occur, however—in particular in the Northern Caucasus and Orenburg—officialdom’s prevailing sympathies were clear. The “rights” of “nomadic alien peoples” were to be protected up to a point, but the accommodation between peasants and nomads was expected to work largely in the former’s favor, because the latter were deemed to be fundamentally less productive and in any case had more land than they needed. Thus, 48 For more on these issues, see Sunderland, “The ‘Colonization Question,’ ” pp. 223–24, 227–29; and Sunderland, “Russians into Iakuts? ‘Going Native’ and Problems of Russian National Identity in the Siberian North, 1870s–1914,” SR, 1996, v. 55, n. 4, pp. 806–25. 49 See, for example, the summary of suggestions provided in RGIA, f. 396, op. 1, d. 524, l. 12(b). 50 RGIA, f. 391, op. 2, d. 190, l. 210(b).

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throughout the 1870s Bashkirs continued to be allowed to sell areas “the size of Belgium” for a pittance to businessmen, officials, and well-to-do peasants. Other Bashkir lands were conveniently designated as “reserve holdings” (zapasnye dachi) and distributed at equally low cost to well-connected officials, while still others were simply occupied by peasant squatters who stayed on as a result of official apathy or corruption.51 (The great rush on Bashkir land began to ebb only after an 1882 decree.) On the Lower Volga, the 1860s and 1870s saw new efforts to develop irrigation and settle roads passing through Kalmyk territory; and in Stavropol', despite some disagreements over principle and even more over particulars, incoming peasants were often allowed by the 1890s to buy or otherwise permanently occupy “excess” nomadic land.52 (The renting of Nogay and Turkmen land in the province at this point was already routine.) The consequences for nomadic herding showed up in contradictory ways: Populations of nomadic peoples grew (though in some cases barely and in any case not at rates comparable to that of the empire’s sedentary population). At the same time, the amount of land owned or provided to nomads generally decreased and herd sizes fluctuated, some increasing, some precipitously declining, depending on the animal and the region.53 The government’s reasoning in deciding to reduce nomad lands was straightforward. As the supreme commander for Civilian Affairs in the Caucasus wrote to the minister of the Interior in 1894 in reference to the semisedentary and apparently “completely useless” Nogays of Novogrigor'ev District, “There is no reason to expect these former nomads to ever become true farmers. . . . Yet if the land currently set aside for their use were to be redesignated as state land, it could be provided instead to landless Russian peasants . . . whose need for land is great.”54 Indeed, fifteen years earlier, motivated by much the same kind of thinking, the governor of Stavropol' had dispatched an agronomist to analyze the steppes of the 51 Charles Robert Steinwedel, “Invisible Threads of Empire: State, Religion, and Ethnicity in Tsarist Bashkiria, 1773–1917” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1999), pp. 97–98, 102–4; D.P. Samorodov, Russkoe krest'ianskoe pereselenie v Bashkiriiu v poreformennyi period 60–90-e gg. xix v. (Sterlitamak, 1996), pp. 108–32, 168–235; K.F. Usmanov, Razvitie kapitalizma i sel'skogo khoziaistva v Bashkirii v poreformennyi period: 60–90e gody xix v. (Moscow, 1981), pp. 45–54; N.V. Remezov, Ocherki iz zhizni dikoi Bashkirii; byl' v skazochnoi strane (2nd ed., abbr.; Moscow, 1889), pp. 63–68, 263–64, 269–79. 52 On Kalmyk initiatives, see RGIA, f. 381, op. 46, d. 117, ll. 108–109(b); f. 381, op. 46, d. 102, ll. 16–21; Ocherki istorii Kalmytskoi ASSR: Dooktiabrskii period (Moscow, 1967), p. 298. On the issue of whether to allow settlers to occupy “excess” nomadic land in the Northern Caucasus, see the examples in RGIA, f. 391, op. 2, d. 195, ll. 32(b)–33; and f. 396, op. 1, d. 531, ll. 7–7(b). 53 Ocherki istorii kalmytskoi ASSR, pp. 259, 264–65; R.Z. Ianguzin, Khoziaistvo bashkir dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii (Ufa, 1989), pp. 132–70; Samorodov, Russkoe krest'ianskoe pereselenie, pp. 242–43. 54 RGIA, f. 391, op. 2, d. 190, l. 5.

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nomads to see “how suitable [they were] for the establishment of Russian villages.”55 Then, too, there was the extra bonus of spreading progress. A senior official in the Ministry of Agriculture and State Domains argued in 1896 that Stavropol' officials should not hesitate to settle Russian migrants on “excess land” taken from Turkmen tribes as this was a way “to assimilate [these] currently isolated and half-savage nomads.” As the official saw it, the Russians represented the “cultured element,” the Turkmen the “uncultured” one. It thus stood to reason (as it had for the preceding two hundred years) that more land for the former and less for the latter amounted to a practical good that would help to push the nomads more quickly “toward the sedentary way of life.”56 Backward Russian peasants were thus not so backward that they couldn’t also appear progressive, at least in relation to still more backward nomads. There was a paradox in this, of course, but then again it was a longstanding one, and one much in keeping with the state’s broader approach to colonization, which itself remained paradoxical or at the very least less than straightforward. On the one hand, colonization continued to be approached, now quite openly, as a matter of imposing or consolidating Russian power in the empire’s non-Russian borderlands. On the other hand, it remained intimately tied to what were increasingly referred to as the “peasant question” and the “land question,” both of which were centered on the Russian “interior” and were not usually posed as imperial concerns. The semantics of the issue could also prompt questions. Inquiring minds on the Special Commission to Draft an Agenda for the Development of the Caucasian Black Sea Coast, for example, wondered whether “resettlement” (pereselenie), which focused on “the large-scale relocation of excess population to open lands with the purpose of improving the welfare of the settler,” was the same as “settlement” (zaselenie), which focused on “the development of the territory where the relocation [was] occurring.” Or was it perhaps more correct, as some thought, to see these operations and the terms behind them as essentially intertwined—that is to say, as “two sides of a single idea”?57 Most commission members, it turned out, sided with the latter view, which they confirmed by stating the obvious: “The movement by a group of individuals from one place to another leads 55 The agronomist’s report is summarized in I. Bentkovskii, Statistika naselennykh mest i pozemel'noi sobstvennosti v stavropol'skoi gubernii (Stavropol', 1881), pp. xv–xviii. For an abridged published version, see P. Kuz'min, “K voprosu naskol'ko prigodny stepi inorodtsev stavropol'skoi gubernii dlia ustroistva russkikh poselenii,” Kavkaz, 1879, n. 200, pp. 1–2; n. 201, pp. 1–2; n. 204, pp. 1–2; and n. 205, pp. 1–2. 56 RGIA, f. 391, op. 2, d. 17, ll. 6–6(b). 57 RGIA, f. 391, op. 2, d. 240, ll. 14–14(b).

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at one and the same time to the resettlement of these individuals and to the settlement of the place where they are settling.”58 If the distinction between these particular terms seemed clear enough, other cases were less transparent. The word “colonization” (kolonizatsiia), for example, became a commonplace in the last decades of the century, routinely appearing alongside the older “resettlement” in both official and unofficial Russian writing. Thus one could now read of “resettlement and colonization,” of “resettlement as colonization,” and even of something called simply “resettlement colonization” (pereselencheskaia kolonizatsiia).59 Nevertheless, the relationship between resettling and colonizing remained unclear. Were the two activities synonymous or sequential? Was the one purely agricultural, the other broadly developmental? The former domestic, the latter colonial? For Aleksandr Kaufman, statistician, prolific student of colonization, and periodic employee of the Resettlement Administration, “resettlement” represented the rough equivalent of “the German term innere Kolonisation” and signified “the relocation of an agricultural population within the borders of a state in order to settle new, uninhabited, or sparsely inhabited areas.” As such, Kaufman concluded, resettlement was a “distinctively Russian phenomenon,” whose only real counterpart was not “European colonization,” which amounted for the most part to “emigration” overseas, but rather the “westward movement of population” in the United States, which was “analogous in character [to the Russian movement], though even grander in scale.”60 The scholar, explorer, and senior official Petr Semenov-Tian-Shanskii, however, saw things somewhat differently. For him, Russian resettlement to Siberia and “the ‘black-earth’ spaces of the Sarmatian plain” was, in fact, completely comparable to European migration overseas because both were part of the grander “colonizing movement of the European race.”61 Indeed, Semenov’s definition of Russian and European “colonization” as “the flow of excess population onto remaining open land” sounded for all the world like Kaufman’s definition of Russian and Amer58 RGIA, f. 391, op. 2, d. 240, l. 14(b). These issues were discussed by the commission in the spring of 1897. Emphasis added. 59 For one use of this expression, see A.I. Dmitr'ev-Mamonov, Putevoditel' po Turkestanu i sredne-aziatskoi zheleznoi dorogi s istoricheskim ocherkom sooruzheniia i eksploatatsii zakaspiiskoi voennoi zheleznoi dorogi i ocherkom sooruzheniia orenburg-tashkentskoi zheleznoi dorogi (St. Petersburg, 1903), p. 399. 60 A.A. Kaufman, “Pereseleniia,” in F.A. Brokgauz and I.A. Efron (eds.), Entsiklopedicheskii slovar' (St. Petersburg, 1998,) v. 23, p. 265. For a broadly comparable definition of “resettlement,” see also “Pereseleniia v Rossii,” in S.N. Iuzhakov (ed.), Bol'shaia entsiklopediia (St. Petersburg, 1904), v. 15, p. 35. 61 P.P. Semenov, “Znachenie Rossii v kolonizatsionnom dvizhenii Evropeiskikh narodov,” IIRGO, 1892, v. 28, n. 4, pp. 358, 353.

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ican “resettlement,” making would-be distinctions between the two terms at best debatable.62 Nowhere were the conceptual complexities of “resettlement colonization” more on view than on the shelves of the Resettlement Administration library in St. Petersburg. At the turn of the century, the library’s holdings included the collected laws of the empire, statistical surveys of interior and borderland provinces, soil maps, ethnographic maps, zemstvo agronomical manuals, and numerous publications relating to both internal and external European colonization, such as the proceedings of the Deutsche colonial-gesellschaft für Südwest Afrika, A. Nugenberg’s Innere Kolonisation in Nordwesten Deutschland, Louis Pauliat’s La Politique coloniale sous l’ancien régime, as well as Leroy-Beaulieu’s De la colonisation chez les peuples modernes.63 A visitor to the intellectual headquarters of Russian colonization on the eve of the twentieth century would thus have been able to read about Russian peasant farming in Tambov and Tomsk and about European colonial domination in Namibia and New France. He would have been able to assume that Russian actions in Stavropol' were fundamentally comparable to what the Prussians had done long before in the Baltic or what the British were still pursuing in India. That such disparate subjects appeared relevant to the Russian experience seemed natural enough, even if the imperialism that linked them remained hard to define.

The Dwindling Prairie and the Growing Borderland Even as educated Russians might wonder whether they were colonizing or resettling, the transformation of the steppe continued apace. New railroads now connected Tsaritsyn and the Baltic (1871), Voronezh and Rostov (1876), Samara and Orenburg (1877), and Vladikavkaz and Stavropol' (1897). Steam-powered flour mills appeared at New Russian junction towns. Learned societies, stock exchanges, banks, and libraries opened in once sleepy places like Samara, Saratov, Ekaterinodar, and Astrakhan', and by the end of the century approximately a thousand new buildings a year—including one immense, ornate, electrically illuminated opera house—were going up in Odessa.64 At the same time, of course, much 62 Ibid., p. 368. 63 RGIA, f. 391, op. 2, d. 290, ll. 3–14(b) passim. 64 J.N. Westwood, A History of Russian Railways (London, 1964), pp. 61, 302–3; A.M.

Solov'eva, Zheleznodorozhnyi transport Rossii v vtoroi polovine xix v. (Moscow, 1975), pp. 296–97; Urry, None But Saints, p. 236; and V.N. Semenov and N.N. Semenov, Saratov kupecheskii (Saratov, 1995), pp. 221, 232; Istoriia samarskogo Povolzh'ia s drevneishikh vremen do nashikh dnei: Vtoraia polovina xix–nachalo xx veka (Moscow, 2000), pp. 41–42, 59–66; Irina I. Komarova (comp.), A Guide to Russian Learned Societies (New York, 2000),

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stayed the same. Human boat-towers continued to trudge along regional towpaths (as the painter Ilya Repin recorded in his famous Volga Barge Haulers [1870–1873]); grain elevators and mechanical reapers remained all but invisible relative to oxcarts and wooden plows; and zemstvos, while active in most of the region’s provinces by the mid-1860s and 1870s, did not open in Orenburg, Astrakhan', or Stavropol' until the 1910s and lasted only briefly in the Don Cossack territory.65 And yet, who could deny that distances were shrinking, nomads were changing, and domestication was on the rise? By the 1870s, towns all across the south were mere minutes from St. Petersburg (and one another) by telegraph. By 1881, yet another of the region’s governor-generalships—that of Orenburg—had been closed. (The only supragubernatorial post remaining was that of the viceroy of the Caucasus, whose bailiwick included the North Caucasian provinces.) By 1892, Kalmyk commoners had been emancipated from their lords and granted “the same individual rights guaranteed by law to all free rural residents,” and by 1900 it seemed clear to all that “Bashkirs in the steppe districts [of Orenburg were] . . . gradually beginning to gravitate . . . to farming.”66 A few years earlier, the first tourist groups began arriving in the region, signaling the start of the late-imperial age of leisure. As a result, sightseeing in the Crimea (“the jewel of the Black Sea”) and Odessa (“the capital of the South”) spawned a local vacation industry, while Volga cruises (“useful for . . . both body and soul”) were “packaged” to include visits to the river’s “best hotels and accommodations.”67 The koumiss cure, embraced as an antidote for a variety of “wasting illnesses,” also thrived. As one medpp. 327–29, 639. The new opera house in Odessa, completed in 1887, replaced the original that burned down in 1873. See Patricia Herlihy, “Commerce and Architecture in Late Imperial Russia,” in William Craft Brumfield et al. (eds.), Commerce in Russian Urban Culture, 1861–1914 (Washington, D.C., 2001), pp. 185–86; Herlihy, Odessa: A History, 1794–1914 (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), p. 266. 65 Kermit E. McKenzie, “Zemstvo Organization and Role within the Administrative Structure,” in Terence Emmons and Wayne S. Vucinich (eds.), The Zemstvo in Russia: An Experiment in Local Self-Government (New York, 1982), pp. 33–34, 66. The first major experiment with grain elevators in the south was in Odessa around 1890. Herlihy, Odessa, p. 208. 66 Steinwedel, “Invisible Threads of Empire,” p. 108; Ocherki po istorii kalmytskoi ASSR, p. 306; Ianguzin, Khoziaistvo bashkir dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii, p. 161. 67 Putnik (N. Lender), Chernoe more i Kavkaz: Ocherki iuzhnago moria i iuga Rossii (2nd ed.; St. Petersburg, 1904), p. 29; Povolzh'e, Priural'e i lechebnye stepi: Puti soobshcheniia, zamechatel'nye mestnosti i osobennosti kraia, gorno-zavodskie, lechebnye, promyshlennye, istoricheskie i dr. (St. Petersburg, 1896), p. 3; G.P. Demidov, Illiustrirovannyi putevoditel' po Volge 1903 g. (ot Tveri do Astrakhani) (9th ed.; Nizhnii Novgorod, 1903), appendix, pp. iii–vii; Louise McReynolds, Russia at Play: Leisure Activities at the End of the Tsarist Era (Ithaca, N.Y., 2003), pp. 166–67, 174–75, 180. On the rise of mountaineering and outdoor activities clubs in the Crimea and the Black Sea region more generally in the fin-de-siècle period, see G.P. Dolzhenko, Istoriia turizma v dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii i SSSR (Rostov-onDon, 1988), pp. 20–33.

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ical writer observed early in the new century, ‘With every passing year, the number of visitors to the koumiss stations [kumysniki] rises and rises. At the start of each new season, people now ask themselves: Where should we go for koumiss?”68 That increasing numbers of sickly middle-class city dwellers would choose to travel to the steppe to drink the traditional beverage of pastoral nomads at precisely the time that nomadism itself was eroding was, of course, ironic but not terribly surprising. The nomadic steppe was mostly gone, but that only made it all the more appealing for educated Russians to imagine and safer to claim. Indeed, as the nineteenth century came to its end, rapid changes in urbanization and mechanization intensified veneration for progress even while (paradoxically) deepening the longing for “lost civilizations” and “the slower rhythms of the past.” Nostalgia became pervasive, and “memory began to take form as a self-conscious phenomenon.”69 Modern people on the world’s frontiers, for example, now realized that Indians and Aborigines had to be recorded before they “vanished,” that pioneer stories had to be told in order “to rescue and preserve some of the doings of the common people,” and that the Wild West had to be captured and turned into a show precisely because “the frontier . . . was dead.”70 In Russia, and on the steppe, time also seemed to be racing inexorably forward, and reactions were similar. Ethnographers noted matter-of-factly the all but inevitable “extinction” of the Bashkirs and worried about having time to record the “old ways” (starina) of the Volga that were so “quickly disappearing.” Priests, statisticians, school inspectors, and travelers collected the tales of settler oldtimers and contemporary eyewitnesses and composed the histories of 68 V.N. Zolotnitskii, Putevoditel' po kumysolechebnym mestam: Podrobnoe opisanie kumysolechebnykh sanatorii, zavedenii i drugikh mest samarskoi, ufimskoi i orenburgskoi gubernii, a takzhe i nekotorykh drugikh (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1910), p. vii. See also D.A. Karrik, O kumyse i ego upotreblenii v legochnoi chakhotke i drugikh iznuritel'nykh bolezniiakh (2nd ed.; St. Petersburg, 1903). For one American’s entertaining description of a visit to a “kumys sanatorium” near Samara, see Isabel F. Hapgood, Russian Rambles (Boston, 1895; reprint: New York, 1970), pp. 293–99. 69 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York, 2001), p. 16; Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York, 1991), p. 100; Matt K. Matsuda, The Memory of the Modern (New York, 1996), p. 5 passim. 70 Sherry L. Smith, Reimagining Indians: Native Americans through Anglo Eyes, 1880–1940 (New York, 2000), p. 5 passim; Russell McGregor, Imagined Destinies: Aboriginal Australians and the Doomed Race Theory, 1880–1939 (Carlton, Australia, 1997), pp. 1–18, 48–59; Lee Clark Mitchell, Witness to a Vanishing America: The Nineteenth-Century Response (Princeton, N.J., 1981), p. 75; Richard White, “Frederick Jackson Turner and Buffalo Bill,” in James R. Grossman (ed.), The Frontier in American Culture: An Exhibition at the Newberry Library, August 26, 1994—January 7, 1995 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1994), pp. 45–46.

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local villages “to assist in the study of the region.”71 Across the plains, proud subjects of the tsar (ethnic Russians and otherwise) celebrated the centennials, bicentennials, and tercentenaries of their towns and provinces, marking the events with obelisks, parades, congratulatory telegrams, and jubilee publications.72 To appreciate the effects of time one had only to look at the physical aspect of the land itself, and in this, too, long-standing pride in the achievements and potential of progress had now begun to mix with recurrent expressions of loss. On the one hand, it was still easy to find statisticians who celebrated the region’s inexorably rising numbers of steeltipped plows, harvested bushels, livestock, schools, churches, and resident “Russians.”73 Indeed, it was still relatively easy to find full-blown steppe-building optimists who continued to imagine virtually limitless possibilities for agriculture and population.74 This was truest for the Northern Caucasus region, which emerged in the late 1800s as the Rus71 See V. Florinskii, “Bashkiriia i bashkiry: Putevye zametki,” VE, 1874, v. 9, n. 12, p. 762; S.G. Rybakov, “Ocherk byta i sovremennogo sostoianiia inorodtsev Urala,” Nabliudatel', 1895, n. 7, p. 272; Narody Rossii: Zhivopisnyi al'bom (St. Petersburg, 1877), p. 310; A.N. Pypin, “Volga i Kiev,” VE, 1885, v. 4, n. 7, p. 193; D.I. Evarnitskii, “Zhizn' zaporozhskikh kozakov po razskazu sovremennika-ochevidtsa,” KS, 1883, v. 7, pp. 497–510; and A. Tvalchrelidze (comp.), Stavropol'skaia guberniia v statisticheskom, geograficheskom, istoricheskom i sel'sko-khoziaistvennom otnosheniiakh (Stavropol', 1897; reprint: Stavropol', 1991), foreword, no page number indicated. For additional examples of village histories/summaries based in part on old-timer stories, see I. S-v, “Selo Vodianoe,” SarGV, 1891, n. 44; Ia. Vdovin, “Selo Romanovka,” SarGV, 1896, n. 17; A. Bubnov, “Selo Raguli, stavropol'skoi gubernii, novogrigor'evskogo uezda,” SMDOMIPK, 1893, v. 16, pp. 223–24; I. Nevskii, “Selo Pokrovka orenburgskogo uezda,” OEV, 1898, n. 3, pp. 102–10, and n. 4, pp. 138–48; A. Pinegin, “Selo Arkhangel'skoe orenburgskogo uezda,” OEV, 1898, n. 6, pp. 206–14, and n. 7, pp. 250–55; I. Nevskii, “Selo Romanovka orenburgskogo uezda,” OEV, 1898, n. 12, pp. 478–88, n. 13, pp. 529–36, and n. 14/15, pp. 586–91; Nevskii, “Selo Slonovka orenburgskogo uezda,” OEV, 1898, n. 17, pp. 658–63, n. 18, pp. 688–96, and n. 19, pp. 738–47. 72 Urry, None But Saints, pp. 265–67; D.H. Epp, Die Chortitzer Mennoniten: Versuch einer Darstellung des Entwicklungsganges derselben (Odessa, 1889); Trekhvekovaia godovshchina goroda Samary (Samara, 1887); V.A. Iakovlev, K istorii Khadzhibeia (1789–1795): K stoletiiu zavoevaniia Khadzhibeia (Odessa, 1889); V. Kh. Kondaraki, V pamiat' stoletiia Kryma (Moscow, 1883); P.P. Korolenko, Dvukhsotletie kubanskogo kazach'ego voiska, 1696–1896: Istoricheskii ocherk (Ekaterinodar, 1896); S. Pisarev, Trekhsotletie terskogo kazach'ego voiska, 1577–1877: Ko dniu iubileinogo prazdnovaniia 3–ogo oktiabria 1881 g. (Vladikavkaz, 1881); N.A. Gurvich, Ufimskii iubileinyi sbornik v pamiat' prazdnovaniia trekhsotletnego iubileia goroda Ufy (Ufa, 1887); N. Ardashev, K 100–letnomu iubileiu orenburgskoi gubernii (Orenburg, 1897). 73 For one exemplary representative of this genre, see M.V. Orlov, “Kubanskaia oblast' v otnosheniiakh ekonomicheskom, torgovom, promyshlennom, uchebnom i t.d. teper' i 25 let tomu nazad,” Kubanskii sbornik, 1900, v. 6, pp. 255–63. 74 M.N. Annenkov, “Sredniaia Aziia i ee prigodnost' dlia vodvoreniia v nei russkoi kolonizatsii,” IIRGO, 1889, v. 25, p. 278; “Ekonomicheskaia budushchnost' iuga Rossii,” OZ, 1870, p. 279.

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“The N. T. Gusarov Koumiss Station” (Orenburg Province). Historical postcard, early 1900s. Reproduced in Russkii gorod na pochtovoi otkrytke kontsa xix–nachala xx veka (Russkaia Kniga, Moscow, 1997), p. 125.

sian public’s latest (and last) dreamland of settlement on the European steppe. Visiting Stavropol' in the late 1880s, for example, the professional traveler Evgenii Markov concluded that “the vast . . . unbounded plains” before him were “barely touched”—so untouched in fact that they could easily accommodate the populations of “whole districts [in the interior] currently suffocating from land shortages, poverty, [and] overcrowding.”75 For his part, the itinerant chronicler of “resettlement adventures” F. Voroponov was so stirred by the Kuban’s remaining potential for colonization in 1891 that he even heard the “spacious . . . almost virgin” steppe whispering to him as he rode across it: “I still have the means to feed many people and transform myself and give rise to the most varied characters [samye raznobraznye tipy], becoming a living extension of the body of the Russian interior. What lies in store for me in the future? As of yet, I cannot tell.”76 Despite hopeful reveries of this sort, however, there was no denying that pessimism and regret had now begun to rival optimism and anticipa75 Evgenii Markov, Ocherki Kavkaza: Kartiny kavkazskoi zhizni, prirody i istorii (3rd ed.; St. Petersburg and Moscow, 1913), p. 38. The first edition of Markov’s work appeared in 1887. 76 F. Voroponov, “Kavkazskii prostor,” Severnyi vestnik, 1891, n. 1, otd. 2, p. 20.

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tion. Local investigators and litterateurs recorded the nostalgia of Cossacks and peasants who recalled long-lost days of more fish, more trees, and bigger harvests, while local nobles bemoaned what seemed to be the interconnected fading of privilege and abundance. “How upsetting!” wrote Viktor Vasil'chikov (a relation of the prince mentioned earlier) in 1876 after visiting a family estate in Saratov once known for its bumper crops. “The once virgin lands are all plowed out now, our free labor has gone away . . . and good harvests occur only rarely. . . . God only knows how much longer these steppes of ours are fated to be praised for their abundance and revered as the breadbasket of Europe.”77 Scientists tended to agree. Topsoils all across the region were gone or eroding, gullies were growing ever deeper and more numerous, and woodlands had all but disappeared. “In sum,” wrote a geological surveyor in 1886 about Stavropol' Province, “this rich agricultural territory is headed for decline. . . . The hastiness of the fathers who chose to improve their lot by plundering the offerings of nature has now come back to haunt their children and grandchildren. . . . Climatic conditions are steadily transforming this country into an arid, uninhabitable plain.”78 After the great drought and famine that affected parts of the steppe in 1890–91, the vision of the future grew bleaker still, particularly among scientists and some of their ministerial patrons. If extensive agricultural settlement had once seemed an economic panacea, it was now an environmental problem; and “man, the geological actor,”79 it turned out, was acting terribly. In Stavropol' Province a prominent commentator ruefully predicted that settlers would probably go on chopping down protected woodlands “until the last tree falls in our forests.” In Kherson and Poltava, a local agronomist warned that deep plowing, if allowed to go unchecked, would lead to complete desertification. And a handbook of the Black Sea steppes published by the Society to Promote Technical Learning singled out human mismanagement as “quite often the primary factor” behind the dangerous proliferation of gullies.80 When he passed across the “bar77 V.I. Vasil'chikov, “Chernozem i ego budushchnost',” OZ, 1876, v. 224, n. 2, otd. 2, pp. 167–68, 169. For examples of Cossack and peasant remembrances of former abundance, see Tvalchrelidze (comp.), Stavropol'skaia guberniia, pp. 321, 559; A.I. Ertel', Zapiski stepniaka (Moscow, 1989), p. 26; and Shane O’Rourke, Warriors and Peasants: The Don Cossacks in Late Imperial Russia (Basingstoke, Eng., 2000), p. 67. 78 D.L. Ivanov, “Vliianie russkoi kolonizatsii na prirodu stavropol'skogo kraia,” IIRGO, 1886, v. 22, n. 3, p. 252. The sequence of the first two sentences is reversed in the original. 79 Ibid., p. 228. 80 I. Bentkovskii, “O lesakh v predelakh byvshei kavkazskoi a nyne stavropol'skoi gubernii,” StGV, 1876, n. 2, p. 5; A.A. Izmailovskii, Kak vysokhla nasha step': Predvaritel'noe soobshchenie o rezul'tatakh issledovanii vlazhnosti pochvy v poltavskoi gubernii 1886–1893 g. (Poltava, 1893), pp. 1–2; N. Dilevskaia, Chernomorskie stepi (Moscow, 1905), p. 4.

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ren, boring, and sun-scorched steppe” near the Azov Sea in 1901, the ethnographer N. Derzhavin was concerned primarily with the life of local Bulgarian colonists, but even he could not refrain from environmental commentary, noting that wherever he looked there was not a “single blade of green grass, not a single tree”: It is indeed hard to believe what people say about these Azov steppes, that not long ago [they] were still covered with a thick carpet of shrubs and tall grasses that sheltered a myriad of wild geese, ducks, and other animals. . . . Yes, she [that is, the steppe] has known a difficult life. She has seen her fair share of hardship over the years.81

Of all the voices in this chorus of scientific alarm, the most prominent was that of the soil expert and professor of mineralogy Vasilii Vasil'evich Dokuchaev. A priest’s son from Smolensk who trained as a seminarian before finding his calling in the natural sciences, Dokuchaev taught in St. Petersburg and Khar'kov. He regularly ranged around European Russia on soil-testing expeditions, composed prize-winning soil maps of the empire, founded the Soil Research Office within the Ministry of Agriculture in 1895, and was widely acknowledged as his age’s foremost authority on the black-earth soil type—what he referred to as the “emperor of the soils” (tsar' pochv). An early environmentalist with close ties to the international community of concerned “earth scientists,” Dokuchaev’s views of the state of the steppe were also predictably dire. In the early 1890s, writing as head of a government expedition charged to evaluate the region’s ecology, he concluded that “man’s impact on the natural world of the steppe” had been calamitous, that it had produced ruinous consequences both for local agriculture and the local ecology, and that the only remedy for this dismal situation was preservation based on the combined efforts of state and science: In order to restore the steppe wherever possible to its original state; in order to ensure the beneficial effects of virgin grass cover on surface and subterranean water supply; in order to forestall wholesale de-grassification . . . ; in order to keep an entire slew of native animals and plants from falling victim forever to the struggle with man; indeed, in order to preserve this primal steppe world for posterity for all time, the state should set aside . . . an area of virgin steppe land as a nature preserve. . . . And if a permanent scientific center were to be established [there], one could rest assured that the investment

81 N. Derzhavin, “U Bolgar v tavricheskoi gubernii,” Etnograficheskoe obozrenie, 1901, v. 12, n. 4, p. 52.

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The goal was thus the rehabilitation of a lost, prehuman landscape and its transformation into a domain of practical scientific study. As Dokuchaev mused in a work that later became a classic of Russian environmental science, “What must these steppes have looked like before they were mowed for hay, before they were burned off as brush, before they became crowded with herds of domesticated animals?”83 Dokuchaev’s brand of scientific-Romantic environmentalism was not unique. Other Russians, following the Germans and the Swiss, were starting to talk about preserving “monuments of nature” (Naturdenkmal) and “landscape protection” (Landschaftspflege); they, too, had read the American George Perkins Marsh’s influential indictments (translated into Russian in 1866) of humankind’s wanton destruction and careless mismanagement of “nature’s largesse.”84 Indeed, even before Dokuchaev made his call for the restoration of the plains, a dedicated admirer of zoos and botanical gardens and large-scale sheep rancher named Friedrich FalzFein in 1889 began setting aside “virgin steppe” from his estate at Askania Nova near Perekop, Tauris Province, to establish what became the country’s first nature preserve. In 1898, this “friend of the animals . . . friend of plants and especially of flowers” added more land to the refuge along with a nature center, a telegraph station, a clinic, a library, an arboretum, and a botanical garden. By the early 1900s, Askania Nova had grown into a sprawling scientific and tourist enterprise with a one hundred–person staff, 344 species of birds, and 58 varieties of mammals, including European bison, eland antelopes, ostriches, nandus, and Przewalski horses.85 In the mid-1890s, as Falz-Fein was developing his domain, the Ministry of Agriculture and State Domains granted Dokuchaev three “experimental 82 V.V. Dokuchaev, Trudy ekspeditsii, sniariazhennoi lesnym departamentom pod rukovodstvom prof. V.V. Dokuchaeva, s atlasom i chertezhei (St. Petersburg, 1895), pp. 23–25. See also V.E. Boreiko, Istoriia zapovednogo dela v Ukraine (Kiev, 1995), p. 8. On Dokuchaev’s life and career, see V.A. Esakov, “Vasilii Vasil'evich Dokuchaev, 1846–1903,” in Boreiko (ed.), Tvortsy otechestvennoi nauki i geografii (Moscow, 1996), pp. 259–71; and L.A. Chebotareva, “Vasilii Vasil'evich Dokuchaev, 1846–1903: Biograficheskii ocherk,” in V.V. Dokuchaev, Sochineniia (Moscow, 1961), v. 9, pp. 49–153. 83 V.V. Dokuchaev, “Nashi stepi: Prezhde i teper',” in his Izbrannye trudy (Moscow, 1949), p. 382. This work was originally published as a booklet in 1892. 84 Douglas R. Weiner, Models of Nature: Ecology, Conservation, and Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia (1988; reprint: Pittsburgh, Pa., 2000), pp. 10–15, 8. For a concise description of Marsh’s views and their impact, see Max Oelschlaeger, The Idea of Wilderness: From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology (New Haven, Conn., 1991), pp. 107–8. 85 Boreiko, Istoriia zapovednogo dela v Ukraine, p. 17; Woldemar von Falz-Fein, Askania Nova: Das Tierparadies; ein Buch des Gedenkens und der Gedanken (Neudamm, 1930), pp. 87, 88–141.

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tracts” (opytnye uchastki) of unplowed and ungrazed steppe in Kherson, Khar'kov, and Voronezh, one of which was later passed to the oversight of the environmentally conscious St. Petersburg Society of Naturalists. In 1900, a sympathetic landowner in Kherson Province further increased Dokuchaev’s protected acreage with land of his own.86 Steppe preservationism was thus on the rise at the end of the century, though this did not presuppose a rejection of either agriculture or settlement. Rather, the goal was the attainment of what would later be called “sustainable development.” As the climatologist Aleksandr Ivanovich Voeikov argued in 1892, there was still every reason to promote colonization in “our rich borderland regions”—one simply had to be careful to take measures “to prevent the degradation in climatic and other natural conditions that colonization so often entails.”87 But what exactly was the steppe that needed to be both preserved and developed? As it turned out, answers to this question also became more complicated—or, depending on one’s perspective, more precise—than before. On the one hand, it was now a matter of course to recognize à la Humboldt that Russia’s steppe had a great deal in common with the pampas, prairies, savannahs, and llanos of other world regions. On the other hand, it was also clear—and becoming clearer—that the steppe was not just one grassland but several. Dokuchaev’s work in particular helped to enshrine the view, building over the preceding decades, that Russia’s Eurasian habitat was made up of five major environmental zones (“natural regions”), stacked north to south and running horizontally from west to east, with “transitional regions” running between them. In this schema the European steppe was a plain with three constituent bands: a strip of “wooded steppe” (or “pre-steppe”) that ran to the north, a broad band of “feather-grass black-earth steppe” in the middle, and a zone of “wormwood-salt flat steppe” (polynno-solonchakovaia step' ) toward the southeast along the Caspian.88 In 1897, one of Dokuchaev’s students, G. I. Tanfil'ev, proposed an even more variegated schema, subdividing European Russia’s “region of the steppes” (oblast' stepei) into four parts: “the black-earth 86 Weiner, Models of Nature, p. 16; Boreiko, Istoriia zapovednogo dela v Ukraine, pp. 14–15. 87 The environmentally sensitive colonization being imagined here was to take place in Asian Russia, but the basic idea applied just as readily to new colonization on the European steppe. See A.I. Voeikov, “Klimat i narodnoe khoziaistvo [Rossii],” in Voeikov, Vozdeistvie cheloveka na prirodu: Izbrannye stat'i (V.V. Pokshishevskii, ed.) (Moscow, 1949), p. 126. For an overview of the scientific study of steppe ecology at the end of the century, see David Moon, “Agricultural Settlement and Environmental Change on the Open Steppes of Southeastern European Russia in the Nineteenth Century” (unpublished paper), pp. 20–25. 88 Dokuchaev, “Nashi stepi,” pp. 325–26. See also Esakov, “Vasilii Vasil'evich Dokuchaev, 1846–1903,” p. 267.

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zone,” “the prehistoric steppes,” “the alpine black-earth steppes,” and “the region of steppe lakes, salt flats, and salinated black earth,” with each of these subregions marked in turn by its own diversities of soil and vegetation.89 After all, as the author noted, referring to the biggest of the zones, “the band of the black-earth steppes can hardly be considered uniform in all of its parts.”90 Thus the physical variation of the steppe first cataloged for science by eighteenth-century scholars and “physical expeditionaries” had now become all the more scienticized and, as a consequence, all the more variegated—so variegated, in fact, that single definitions were daunting and generalizations unreliable. An early twentieth-century edition of Dal’s dictionary, for example, defined a “steppe” as “a treeless and usually waterless waste (pustosh' ) of enormous size, a desert (pustynia),” but the “botanical geographer” S. I. Korzhinskii, writing in an encyclopedia entry in the same period, insisted on greater precision: “Deserts and steppes do not differ sharply from each other, and the terms are often used interchangeably in everyday speech, but theoretically speaking, the two concepts need to be clearly separated.”91 Indeed, the exacting Tanfil'ev seemed to torture himself as he crafted his own geophysical definition of a steppe, first taking two pages to explain all the difficulties inherent in the very idea of proposing a single definition of a steppe as a “geographical concept” and then concluding with the following cautious generalization: “In its natural state, a steppe is a more or less flat, treeless, nonflooding space that is characterized by a more or less uniform covering of sod consisting of a more or less dark-colored layer of topsoil with a subsoil low in carbonates and dissolved salts.”92 The steppes that varied in soil, flora, and climate also differed widely in population density, economic profile, and ethnic concentration, and, consequently, in these matters, as well, coherent classification proved dif89 These subregions are indicated on Tanfil'ev’s Karta fizikogeograficheskikh oblastei evropeiskoi Rossii. The broader “region of the steppes,” which included these subregions, covered the plains north of the Black Sea and in the Northern Caucasus, but did not extend to the Astrakhan' steppe, which was indicated on the map as belonging to a different natural region altogether: “the region of Aralo-Caspian deserts, sands, and salt marshes.” 90 G.I. Tanfil'ev, Fiziko-geograficheskie oblasti Evropeiskoi Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1897), p. 8. This book accompanies the map cited in the previous note. 91 Vladimir Dal', Tolkovyi slovar' zhivogo velikorusskogo iazyka (1903–9; reprint: Moscow, 1994), v. 4, p. 530; S. Korzhinskii, “Stepi,” in Brokgauz and Efron (eds.), Entsiklopedicheskii slovar', v. 31a, p. 598. On Korzhinskii, see G.I. Dokhman, Istoriia geobotaniki v Rossii (Moscow, 1973), pp. 94–100. 92 G.I. Tanfil'ev, “Chto takoe step'?,” Pochvovedenie, 1900, n. 2, pp. 137–39. Emphasis added.

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ficult. Some statisticians subdivided the provinces of the European steppe into the New Russian Region, the Don Region, the Caspian Region, the Trans-Volga Black-Earth Region, and the Caucasus Region; others added the Trans-Ural Region and the provinces of the wooded-steppe. Veniamin Semenov-Tian-Shanskii’s authoritative compendia on the regions of the empire, which began appearing in 1899, provided a similarly fragmented picture. And color-coded ethnographic maps of European Russia revealed that while “Little Russians” were concentrated in New Russian provinces along with a smaller number of “Great Russians” and pockets of Germans, Tatars, and Jews, barely any Russians of any sort lived on the Caspian and “Great Russians” almost exclusively populated the Northern Caucasus.93 The plains were, in fact, so diverse in so many ways that one might legitimately wonder whether they constituted a coherent region at all. Indeed, one of the few factors that seemed to provide a distinctive unity to the steppe had nothing to do (at least directly) with soil types, economics, or culture but instead with the height of local men. In 1889, after a scrupulous review of conscription records, the anthropologistethnographer Dmitrii Anuchin concluded that young recruits from steppe areas tended to be one-to-three centimeters taller than their peers in the interior or Middle Volga provinces, a fact that then supported his proposition of the following anthropological maxim: “Height in European Russia will be greater in those areas where there are either few or no forests . . . and smaller in regions that are relatively more forested.”94 (Anuchin did not exactly explain how a lack of trees translated into taller men, however.) Settling on a single definition or even a single term to describe the steppe’s relationship to Russia was no easier. The liberal M. N. Annenkov referred to New Russia as a “marvelous colony carved out of Russia itself,” while the Marxist V.I. Lenin designated “the south and southeast of European Russia” along with the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Siberia as “colonies of Russian capital.”95 For their part, other commentators re93 See, for example, V.P. Semenov-Tian-Shanskii, Rossiia: Polnoe geograficheskoe opisanie nashego otechestva (St. Petersburg, 1899–1913), vols. 5, 6, 7, 14; A.F. Rittikh, Etnograficheskaia karta Evropeiskoi Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1875); and M. Koialovich, Etnograficheskaia karta russkogo naroda v evropeiskoi Rossii i Avstrii, s pokazaniem plemennykh ego podrazdelenii na velikorossov, malorossov i belorossov (2nd ed.; 1884). 94 D.N. Anuchin, “O geograficheskom raspredeleniem rosta muzhskogo naseleniia Rossii po dannym vseobshchei voinskoi povinnosti v imperii za 1874–1883 gg., sravnitel'no s raspredeleniem rosta v drugikh stranakh,” Zaspiski imperatorskogo russkogo geograficheskogo obshchestva po otdeleniiu statistiki, 1889, v. 7, p. 91. 95 Annenkov, “Sredniaia Aziia i ee prigodnost' dlia vodvoreniia v nei russkoi kolonizatsii,” p. 278; V.I. Lenin, “Eshche k voprosu o teorii realizatsii,” (1899) in his Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (5th ed.; Moscow, 1958), v. 4, p. 86.

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ferred to New Russia, Samara, and Orenburg as “borderlands” (okrainy), used the term “colony” simply to mean an individual settlement or trading post, or suggested that at best only the empire’s Asian possessions might be considered “colonial territories”—though even they did not amount to colonies “in the strict internationally accepted sense of the term.”96 Much of this terminological indeterminacy stemmed from the fact that both “colony” and “borderland” remained names with varied implications that were used by different contemporaries to different effects. Was a colony a territory that was wrongfully seized and exploited or simply an outlying area removed from and subordinate to “the metropole”? Could colonies be possessed overland or did they have to be held overseas? Was a borderland more a matter of geographical location or of ethnocultural diversity? Depending on how one answered these questions, the steppe might appear either as a colony, a borderland, or as some combination of the two. It might also be neither. If in the mid-nineteenth century “the center” had been a relatively stable category and the steppe region had clearly appeared to lie outside of it, by the very late nineteenth century even this seemingly routine assumption was uncertain. State commissions established between 1899 and 1902 to review what ministers and “experts from the public” called “the impoverishment of the center” included steppe provinces such as Saratov, Samara, Orenburg, and the Don Host Oblast within their purview; and the very idea of “the center” and “the core” (iadro)—once limited to the peripheries of Moscow—was increasingly stretched to coincide with European Russia as a whole.97 In fact, as early as the 1870s, scholars such as Iu. E. Ianson and Petr Semenov-Tian-Shanskii affirmed that the “black-earth steppe” represented part of “the center of Russian life” and contributed to the very “foundation of the power of the state.”98 The literary, artistic, and historical plains were likewise central to notions of Russianness. The steppe’s landscape could still appear depressingly monotonous or bucolically beautiful; it could still inspire mediocre poets to ecstatic poetry or impressionable travelers to shivers of imagined historical reminiscence, but, whatever its effects, it was by now most as96 For references to southern and southeastern areas as “borderlands,” see, for example, D.L. Mordovtsev, “O kul'turnykh priznakakh russkogo naroda,” OZ, 1876, v. 224, n. 1, p. 103 (Samara Province); and F. Shcherbina, “Beglye i krepostnye v Chernomorii,” KS, 1883, v. 6, p. 233 (“Southern-Russian borderlands”). On the use of the word “colony” to mean outpost or settlement: I. Lopulesku, “Russkaia koloniia v Dobrudzhe,” KS, 1898, v. 24, pp. 117–54; “Koloniia v Indian-Teritori,” OZ, 1875, v. 221, n. 8, pp. 286–324; and V. Grigor'ev, “Ob otnosheniiakh mezhdu kochevymi narodami i osedlymi gosudarstvami,” ZhMNP, 1875, pt. 178, p. 26. 97 Leonid Gorizontov, “ ‘Velikii krug’ vnutrennei Rossii: Iadro imperii v predstavleniiakh xix veka” (unpublished paper, 2002). 98 Ianson, Sravnitel'naia statistika Rossii, v. 1, p. 32.

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suredly “Russian.”99 The steppes, wrote the zoologist-turned-art-critic N.P. Vagner in 1873, were “those plains that [gave] rise to the Russian’s bogatyr-like bravery, and Russia’s passionate, unbounded sympathy.”100 They also apparently left their mark on Russian song, Russian cuisine, Russian language, the Russian tradition of freedom (vol'nost'), and more generally on what the country’s preeminent historian, Vasilii Kliuchevskii, called “the construction of the life and mental world of the Russian person.”101 By the 1880s, Anton Chekhov had rendered “The Steppe” as a thoroughly Russian backdrop to an ordinary Russian journey; Aleksandr Borodin had transformed the Polovtsian dances into evocative Russian music; and Viktor Vasnetsov had used his oils to revive the south as “the field,” the foreboding plain of yore where legendary Russian warriors once again clashed in battle with nomads or stood vigilant guard over the national well-being. As Vasnetsov wrote, describing his famous work “The Legendary Knights” (Bogatyri) (1898), “In my painting. . . . Dobrynia [Nikitich], Il'ia [Muromets], and Alesha Popovich have headed out on patrol and are surveying the field—Is the enemy out there? Is anyone in trouble?”102 By century’s end, Maxim Gorky, lyrical chronicler of the nation’s lower depths, peopled his southern stories with “Russian” vagabonds, migrants, stevedores, grifters, and thieves.103 If the steppe seemed so clearly “Russian” by Gorky’s day, it was because of the region’s long heritage of Russian colonization—that is, its long exposure to a process that Kliuchevskii now identified in his famous lectures as “the basic fact of Russian history.”104 “The history of Russia,” the great historian averred, “is the history of a country that colonizes itself.”105 In fact, well before Kliuchevskii’s lectures were first published in 1904, the emphasis on the centrality of colonization that had emerged in the work of his teacher Sergei Solov'ev had crystallized into a broadly accepted historical truth. And even less renowned historians anticipated some of the 99 For a few examples of steppe-inspired poetry and historical reveries, see A. Barykova, “V stepi,” OZ, 1880, v. 250, n. 5 (May), p. 276; A.M. Fedorov, “V Bashkirskoi stepi,” in Bashkiriia v russkoi literature (Ufa, 1965), v. 3, pp. 38–39; and V. Iu. Krupianskaia (ed. and comp.), Pevets Volgi D.N. Sadovnikov: Izbrannye proizvedeniia i zapisi (Kuibyshev, 1940), pp. 52–53 passim. 100 N.P. Vagner, “Peizazh i ego znachenie v zhivopisi,” VE, 1873, v. 8, n. 4, p. 761. See also Christopher Ely, This Meager Nature: Landscape and National Identity in Imperial Russia (DeKalb, Ill., 2002), p. 211. 101 V.O. Kliuchevskii, Sochineniia v deviati tomakh (Moscow, 1987), v. 1, p. 82. 102 Cited in A. Vereshchagina, Khudozhnik, vremia, istoriia: Ocherki russkoi istoricheskoi zhivopisi xviii–nachala xx veka (Leningrad, 1973), p. 72. 103 On Gorky’s southern tales, such as “Makar Chudra” (1892), “Chelkash” (1894), and “In the Steppe” (1897), see Barry P. Scherr, Maxim Gorky (Boston, 1988), pp. 21–36. 104 Kliuchevskii, Sochineniia v deviati tomakh, v. 1, p. 49. Emphasis added. 105 Ibid., p. 50.

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Viktor Vasnetsov, Bogatyri (The Legendary Knights) (1898). State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow.

perfect aphorisms to come. Among them was the historian P. A. Sokolovskii, who had this to say in 1878: “Peasant resettlement was a basic characteristic of life in ancient Russia. . . . The history of ancient Russia is the history of a country that colonizes itself. Indeed, this great colonizing effort, which unfolded across the enormous spaces of the East European plain, endured for centuries, and still continues to this day, represents one of the great triumphs in the history of Man’s epic struggle with Nature.”106

And Sokolovskii’s work was only an early example. By the 1880s, with resettlement rising in the empire, the volume of writing on the history of colonization rose as well, and the “great colonizing effort” of the national past acquired the status of a bona fide historical subject. It became the kind of subject that merited its own books, that needed to be quantified, broken down into composite categories (“government-sponsored colonization,” “popular colonization,” “foreign colonization,” “forced colonization,” “ecclesiastical-monastic colonization,” and so on), provided 106 P.A. Sokolovskii, Ekonomicheskii byt zemledel'cheskogo naseleniia Rossii i kolonizatsiia iugovostochnykh stepei pred krepostnym pravom (St. Petersburg, 1878), p. 161.

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with a basic chronological narrative, and even given a hero or two (Potemkin and Kiselev were perhaps the most prominent).107 Much as before, Russian writers on the history of colonization continued reflexively to compare their country’s experience to that of other European states, especially in the treatment of indigenous peoples—and usually with predictably favorable results. Many Russian authors insisted that Russian colonization—unlike that of the Spanish or English—had never done any harm to alien peoples; and even more open-minded scholars tended to stress the positive by underscoring that whatever the Russians might have done the Europeans had done much worse. One historian, for example, while admitting that the native peoples of Siberia had indeed suffered “unfortunate consequences” as a result of the coming of the Russians, explained this as the inevitable outcome of “contact between so-called cultured and uncultured tribes” and noted that the problems in any case “fell far short of the scale on which they occurred in other extra-European countries.”108 As for the history of steppe colonization, historical assessments were unequivocal. There might be problems with soil erosion, inefficient agriculture, or waves of impoverished migrants in the present, but the advent of the “Russian” presence in the past had been an unmitigated good. Early settlers on the plains—peasants and Cossacks alike—were portrayed as stalwart and successful “pioneers” victimized by “predatory” steppe peoples; the “emergence of civic life” in the Samara region was described as “unthinkable prior to the firm establishment of the power of the Muscovite tsars”; the transfer of the Zaporozhians to the Kuban' in the late Catherinian period appeared “an indisputably great event in the history of the spread of Russian influence in the Northern Caucasus”; and the consolidation of Russian rule over the Orenburg area earlier in the eighteenth century was touted as “without doubt one of the most significant achievements that human society has ever accomplished in the pursuit of 107 For a few examples of historical studies of colonization, see N. Firsov, Inorodcheskoe naselenie prezhnego kazanskogo tsarstva v Novoi Rossii do 1762 goda i kolonizatsii zakamskikh zemel' v eto vremia (Kazan', 1869); G.I. Peretiatkovich, Povolzh'e v xv i xvi vekakh: Ocherki iz istorii kraia i ego kolonizatsii (Moscow, 1877) I. Bentkovskii, Zaselenie Chernomorii s 1792 po 1825 god (Ekaterinodar, 1880); G.I. Peretiatkovich, Povolzh'e v xvii i nachale xviii veka (ocherki iz istorii kraia) (Odessa, 1882); N. Serpovskii, Pereseleniia v Rossii v drevnee i novoe vremia i ikh znachenie v khoziaistve strany (Iaroslavl', 1885); D.I. Bagalei, Materialy dlia istorii kolonizatsii i byta stepnoi okrainy moskovskogo gosudarstva (khar'kovskoi i otchasti kurskoi i voronezhskoi gubernii) v xvi–xviii stoletii (Khar'kov, 1886–90), 2 vols.; D.I. Bagalei, Ocherki po istorii kolonizatsii stepnoi okrainy moskovskogo gosudarstva (Moscow, 1887); P.N. Butsinskii, Zaselenie Sibiri i byt ee pervykh nasel'nikov (Khar'kov, 1889); Iu. Got'e, Zamoskovnyi krai v xvii veke (Moscow, 1906), pp. 270–71. 108 E.E. Zamyslovskii, “Zaniatie russkimi Sibiri,” ZhMNP, 1882, v. 223, p. 244. See also Sunderland, “The ‘Colonization Question,’ ” p. 221.

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progress.”109 Russia’s historical triumph over the steppe peoples remained proof of national prowess and uniqueness. The orientalist Vasilii Vasil'evich Grigor'ev, convinced that no European nation could understand Asia better than his own (“Who,” he asked rhetorically, “is closer to Asia than us?”), was also convinced that no other nation had been able to obtain so complete a victory over its nomadic tormentors, those “predatory sons of the steppe.” As he noted in 1875, “So it is Russia alone that holds the honor of achieving total dominion over the nomads. Of all the sedentary peoples in the history of the world, we alone have managed to force the nomads under our power not only to submit [to our laws] but also to pay taxes.”110 Of course, just who the “we” was in the history of Russian colonization remained complicated, and attention to the differences between Russian and Ukrainian settlement, which had first emerged around mid-century, did not disappear. Dmitrii Bagalei (Dmytro Bahalii) stressed the distinction between the supposedly free and “enterprising” settlement of “Little Russians” as opposed to the state-directed and “unenterprising” movement of “Great Russians.” Georgii Peretiatkovich noted that “as colonists Little Russians were no worse than the Great Russians, and some local commanders [in Orenburg] actually favored them . . . in some respects.” Still other Ukrainian writers with populist leanings stressed the special contributions of the Zaporozhians to the colonization of New Russia.111 Yet even such expressions of pride from scholars with Ukrainian sympathies did not translate into arguments for Ukrainian national exclusivity. 109 Sokolovskii, Ekonomicheskii byt zemledel'cheskogo naseleniia Rossii, pp. 161–62; F. Starikov, Istoriko-statisticheskii ocherk orenburgskogo kazach'ego voiska s prilozheniem stati o domashnem byte orenburgskikh kazakov, risunkov s znamen i karty (Orenburg, 1891), p. 4; P.P. Korolenko, Chernomortsy (St. Petersburg, 1874), pp. 36, 58; P. Avdeev, Istoricheskaia zapiska ob orenburgskom kazach'em voiske ([1873]; Orenburg, 1904), pp. 8, 31; SemenovTian-Shanskii, Rossiia, v. 6, p. 155; D.I. Bagalei, “Kolonizatsiia Novorossiiskogo kraia i pervye shagi ego po puti kul'tury (istoricheskii etiud),” KS, 1889, v. 25 (April), p. 27; “Selo Pokoinoe, Stavropol'skoi gubernii, Novogrigor'evskogo uezda,” SMDOMIPK, 1897, v. 23, pp. 254–61; Peretiatkovich, Povolzh'e v xvii i nachale xviii veka, pp. i–ii; Trekhvekovaia godovshchina goroda Samary, p. 1; Bentkovskii, Zaselenie Chernomorii s 1792 po 1825 god, p. 3; Firsov, Inorodcheskoe naselenie, p. 242. 110 Grigor'ev, “Ob otnosheniiakh mezhdu kochevymi narodami i osedlymi gosudarstvami,” pp. 26, 15. Grigor'ev’s reflection on the Russians’ special ability to understand Asian cultures appears in Nathaniel Knight, “Grigor'ev in Orenburg, 1851–1862: Russian Orientalism in the Service of Empire?” SR, 2000, v. 59, n. 1, p. 79. 111 Bagalei, Ocherki po istorii kolonizatsii stepnoi okrainy moskovskogo gosudarstva, pp. 568, 131–32; Denis J.B. Shaw, “Southern Frontiers of Muscovy, 1550–1700,” in James H. Bater and R.A. French (eds.), Studies in Russian Historical Geography (New York, 1983), v. 1, pp. 117–18; G.N. Peretiatkovich, “Malorossiiane v orenburgskom krae pri nachale ego zaseleniia,” Trudy IV arkheologicheskogo s''ezda v Odesse (1884 g.) (Odessa, 1888), v. 2, p. 396; Terry Martin, “The Empire’s New Frontiers: New Russia’s Path from Frontier to Okraina, 1774–1920,” RH, 1992, v. 19, n. 1/4, pp. 194–96.

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The ethnographically inclined Bagalei, for example, was critical of the Russian government’s excessive generosity to German colonists as well as its enserfment of the Ukrainian peasantry, but he still found virtue in a common East Slavic colonization effort and even in the ethnic diversity of settlers more generally, Slavs and non-Slavs alike. In fact, in his sweeping history of New Russian colonization (1889), he went so far as to argue that the rapid pace of the region’s development was the direct consequence of its multiethnic character: “One nationality [narodnost'] developed one aspect of [the region’s] culture, others others.”112 Bagalei’s attention to the importance of national and regional cultures in the past was a reflection of the ethnographic orientation of his times. In the south as well as in other parts of the empire, the mid-century ethnographic boomlet symbolized by the founding of the Russian Geographical Society had by the end of century turned into a full-fledged boom. Literary amateurs had begun ceding ground to increasingly self-conscious professionals well versed in the literature of their Western counterparts. And the study of various sorts of “Russians” was continuing and diversifying alongside the increased study of non-Russian “others.”113 The southwest branch of the Russian Geographical Society was opened in Kiev in 1872–73; the Orenburg branch opened in 1868. By the 1890s there were regional ethnographic publications across the steppe zone. Ethnographic materials abounded as well in other central and regional publications, such as the Kievan Past (Kievskaia starina), which published over five hundred ethnographic articles and notes between 1882 and 1906.114 Studies of the south’s residents—Slavic peasants, nomads, Germans, or Greeks, to name just a few—tended to be broadly similar in content, with the focus falling on the sayings, songs, farming practices, material culture, dress, speech, religious beliefs, and/or customary law that made up “daily life” (byt). Like the ethnography of earlier “gentlemen travelers” and litterateurs, the ethnography of the more stridently scientific fin-de-siècle observers remained focused on documenting and describing difference, 112 Bagalei, “Kolonizatsiia Novorossiiskogo kraia i pervye shagi ego po puti kul'tury,” KS, v. 25 ( July), p. 144. For a contrasting argument stressing the importance of conflict in claims to the colonizing history of New Russia by the late nineteenth century, see Martin, “Empire’s New Frontiers,” pp. 198, 200. 113 For an overview of these developments, see the pertinent chapters in S.A. Tokarev, Istorii russkoi etnografii (dooktiabrskii period) (Moscow, 1966). 114 Many of these entries related to Little Russians in New Russia, Bessarabia, and the Kuban'. Tokarev, Istorii russkoi etnografii, p. 401. The southwest branch in Kiev only operated for a few years. On the opening of the Kiev and Orenburg branches, see L.S. Berg, Vsesoiuznoe geograficheskoe obshchestvo za sto let (Moscow and Leningrad, 1946), pp. 200, 159; P.P. Semenov-Tian-Shanskii), Istoriia poluvekovoi deiatel'nosti russkogo geograficheskogo obshchestva, 1845–1895 (St. Petersburg, 1896), v. 1, pp. 175–76, and v. 2, pp. 488–89.

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though description and documentation to some no longer seemed enough. As one of the field’s most prominent spokesmen put it in 1889, “Ethnography cannot be a science of mere description. Its ultimate objective must be to explain and interpret the facts of popular life and the mutual interrelations and geographical distribution of tribes” (plemena).115 What to do about these varied “tribes,” in particular the nomads of the steppe, remained a complicated matter. On the one hand, in an age permeated by the presumptions of social Darwinism, numerous educated Russians fully expected that nomads would “die out” (vymirat'), the regrettably necessary victims of a universal struggle for existence between higher and lower cultures.116 Consequently, there was no need to change the nomads because the relentless march of societal evolution would inevitably erase them on its own. On the other hand, proponents of an active civilizing mission contended that while physical extinction might well occur, cultural assimilation was nonetheless preferable, and thus the question remained: What kind of cultural assimilation? Indeed, it was still far from clear what kind of Russianness to inculcate in the nomads and through which methods, at what pace, and in what order. Was it enough for nonRussians to know some Russian but otherwise use their own languages in social life (“unassimilated bilinguality”)? Or did they need to speak Russian more than their native tongues (“assimilated bilingualism”)? Did they have to convert to Orthodoxy and become “Russian,” or was it sufficient to be generally obedient, pay taxes, and demonstrate what the educator-missionary Nikolai Il'minskii termed “Russian sympathies”?117 These questions, it turned out, were all the more difficult to resolve because the nomads, now all the more studied, appeared all the more diverse. Kalmyks, for example, considered ignorant but gentle due to their Lamaism, seemed to be good candidates for eventual conversion and full assimilation into Russian culture. As the orientalist Vasilii Smirnov put it in the early 1880s, giving voice to a prevailing view, the Kalmyks “are an admittedly savage people, but they are nonetheless physically fit, capable of good work, disinclined toward fanaticism, as yet morally untainted, and tend to get along quite well with Russian people.” “Give them schools,” he 115 D.N. Anuchin, “O zadachakh russkoi etnografii (neskol'ko spravok i obshchikh zamechanii),” Etnograficheskoe obozrenie, 1889, n. 1, p. 28. 116 See, for example, Vasil'chikov, Zemlevladenie i zemledelie v Rossii i drugikh evropeiskikh gosudarstvakh, v. 2, p. 358; Rybakov, “Ocherk byta i sovremennogo sostoianiia inorodtsev Urala,” p. 27; Florinskii, “Bashkiriia i bashkiry,” p. 762; Narody Rossii, p. 310; N.A. Krasheninnikov, Ugasaiushchaia Bashkiriia (Moscow, 1907). 117 Steinwedel, “Invisible Threads of Empire,” pp. 108–22; Werth, At the Margins of Orthodoxy, pp. 133–46, 259; Geraci, Window on the East, p. 9 passim; Wayne Dowler, Classroom and Empire: The Politics of Schooling Russia’s Eastern Nationalities, 1860–1917 (Montreal, 2001), pp. 8–20 passim.

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added, “and Kalmyk boys will adjust quite quickly to a new way of life.”118 By contrast, Russian administrators were inclined to view Muslim Bashkirs (even if considered “superficial” in their devotion to the creed) as inherently more suspect. They did not even contemplate converting them to Orthodoxy and tended to see their full assimilation into Russian culture as all but inconceivable in the near term. Indeed, in the 1870s, tsarist hierarchs such as Minister of Education Dmitrii Tol'stoi were less concerned about turning Bashkirs into Russians than making sure that they did not become Tatars. Tatarization appeared to be rising, and Tatars were “of all peoples, the most alien to Russians.”119 Given such complexities, St. Petersburg and the Russian public did not embrace a consistent policy of antinomadic culture building beyond generally favoring the reduction of nomadic pasture, encouraging agriculture, and attempting to integrate nomads into “all-Russian” institutions and expose them to “Russian ways.” By the end of the century, nomadism as a way of life was undeniably declining on the European steppe, but this was not because of any coherent vision of assimilation on the part of St. Petersburg or its local representatives. The decline could not be attributed to the unblemished achievements of more plebeian bearers of Russian culture either. Indeed, by the late nineteenth century, despite a widespread image of the Russian peasant as colonizer extraordinaire, the deficiencies that peasants brought to the cultural arena were abundantly clear. Social investigators in New Russia still asked why it was that “almost all Mennonite settlers are if not rich at least quite well-off, when our Russian peasant of the Russian south is often so poor.” In the forest-steppe of Bashkiria, a local correspondent, dismayed by the ample evidence of horse-thieving, deceit, dirt, and bickering that he saw in Russian villages, still wondered: “What good can possibly come . . . from colonizers like these?”120 The ethnographer N. Kharuzin, writing in 1894, openly doubted the claim that the “Russian colonizer” (russkii kolonizator) possessed a consistent national knack for assimilating non-Russian “aliens,” even peoples who were decidedly less “cultured.”

118 V.D. Smirnov, “Po voprosu o shkol'nom obrazovanii inorodtsev-musul'man,” ZhMNP, 1882, v. 222 ( July), pp. 1, 2. 119 Cited in Dowler, Classroom and Empire, p. 137. On official approaches to the prospect of Bashkir assimilation, see Steinwedel, “The Invisible Threads of Empire,” pp. 114–15. 120 N.K. Kalageorgi and V.M. Borisov, Ekskursiia na reku Molochnuiu: Opyt sel'skokhoziaistvennogo i ekonomicheskogo issledovaniia iuzhnorusskikh khoziaistv; khoziaistva russkikh zemlevladel'tsev, zemlevladel'tsev menonitov i kolonistov menonitov i liuteran (St. Petersburg, 1878), v. 1, p. 1; M. V-, “O kolonizatsii Bashkirskikh zemel',” Ural, 1897, n. 175, p. 2.

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Steppe nomads, he argued, validated his skepticism because, despite extensive contact with Russians over centuries, groups like the Kalmyks still clung to their “national particularities” and showed “only the barest evidence of Russian influence.”121 Even those observers who were otherwise convinced that a special assimilating power coursed through the veins of the Russian colonist recognized a need to do better. As one articulate spokesman of Russian messianism put it: We spread Orthodoxy among [the aliens], assimilating them to the Russian nationality; we lead them to a sedentary life by gradually introducing them to the ways of agriculture, transforming the deserts of Siberia and the sands of Central Asia into fields and plantations. But as long as we continue to fail to develop in ourselves a higher moral and intellectual culture we will remain unable to civilize the East as fully as we should.122

Not surprisingly, very little if any of this mattered to the rural people living in the local worlds that colonization created. Established residents and newcomers interacted according to patterns defined more by popular traditions and local conditions of settlement than by state decrees, civilizing missions, or supposedly universal “laws” of societal evolution. Rules of cohabitation tended to be particular rather than general, and the implications of shared ethnicity or religion were unpredictable. Mennonites in Saratov reportedly preferred Orthodox Russians to German Lutherans, yet Mennonites in Tauris tended to disdain their peasant neighbors. Russian field hands in one German colony in the Kuban' liked working for their German employers (“The Germans let you work at your own pace, feed you well, and pay up without any take-backs”), while Russian peasants near another Kuban' colony despised their German neighbors and were constantly embroiled with them in “slander, misunderstanding, argument, and fist-fighting.”123 In Orenburg Province, certain Bashkir landowners (Bashkiry-votchinniki), forcibly relocated from “good lands” to poorer ones by the provincial governor, were “reduced to ruin,” while other Bashkirs profited from increased migration by stealing horses from

121 N. Kharuzin, “K voprosu ob assimiliatsionnoi sposobnosti russkogo naroda,” Etnograficheskoe obozrenie, 1894, n. 4, p. 61. 122 D.A. Korsakov, Ob istoricheskom znachenii postupatel'nogo dvizheniia velikorusskogo plemeni na vostok (Kazan, 1889), p. 49. 123 A.A. Kaufman, Po novym mestam (St. Petersburg, 1905), pp. 186, 190; Urry, None But Saints, p. 274; N. Kirichenko, “God u nemetskikh kolonistov: Opisanie kolonii Eigenfel'd, kavkazskogo otdela, kubanskoi oblasti,” Kubanskii sbornik, 1900, v. 6, p. 21; L. Rozenberg, “Nemetskaia koloniia Semenovka, kubanskoi oblasti, kavkazskogo otdela,” SMDOMIPK, 1900, v. 27, pp. 166–67.

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newly arrived settlers.124 During the vulnerable early period of settlement, bonds of culture, even of kin, were no guarantee of good treatment. Exploitation could come at the hands of “others,” but it could come just as easily from one’s own. In the late 1880s, the populist writer Gleb Uspenskii recorded the following exchange with migrants in Orenburg who had been deceived by members of their own collective (tovarichestvo) into buying poor quality land: “But your representatives saw the land and said that ‘it was exactly what you wanted,’ didn’t they?” “Well, we only believed the three [representatives] because they were the ones who started the collective. . . . If one of our people [nash brat] says he likes [the land] . . . and goes around all the time waving a survey map with official seals on it and so forth, talking all the time about the map, of course, why wouldn’t we believe him? We’re not from around here [My zdes' chuzhie]; we don’t know how to buy [land] or where to look for it; we don’t have the money to send out scouts of our own, and here we’ve got these people saying they’ll take care of everything, and they’re just ordinary sinners like the rest of us, regular peasants [muzhiki].” [ . . . ] “When did [these representatives] leave the collective?” “Well, they never even spent a day here. They gave us the bill of sale and the deed . . . and disappeared. We waited for them the first day, then the next, then we start hearing that one of them is working on the railway, the other working in town. And what do we do? We move out here and get ourselves into a fine mess [seli na meli]. . . . Two years of bad harvests, and now we’re in debt up to our ears!125

This was a familiar story, and indeed much stayed the same in the way colonization unfolded. As the great age of settlement on the European steppe entered its twilight, the process itself remained an impossible amalgam of possibility and misery, planning and confusion, altruism and exploitation. Impressions of what was unfolding, not surprisingly, also remained contradictory. Concerned voices within the region’s educated classes lamented that “society” was not doing enough to alleviate the hunger, poor medical care, and religious needs of settlers in Orenburg and Stavropol', called for more members of “the cultured element” to move to Terek Oblast in order to take up the “interests of the local Rus124 Of course, this could be dangerous business. When one Bashkir horse thief was caught in the act, his peasant captors “tied him up, dragged him out to the steppe, and burned him alive.” A. Zhakmon, “Pereselentsy na vostochnykh okrainakh,” Russkaia mysl', 1886 (September), v. 9, pp. 35, 37. 125 G.I. Uspenskii, “Ot Orenburga do Ufy,” in his Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow, 1952), v. 11, pp. 189–90.

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sian resettler population,” and noted that the British government spent ten to twenty times more on Irish emigrants departing their country than the Russian state spent on its “internal resettlers.”126 At the same time, other voices emphasized panoramas of dynamism, contentment, and possibility, describing bustling towns full of happy, prospering people and relaying the hopeful pronouncements of peasant scouts (“Just take a look at the land that I found for [my followers]! I had to put in a lot of work and trouble, but still. Things are going to be good here!”).127 In the Southern Urals, Russian colonization, one commentator related, had replaced “the gypsy-like encampments of Bashkirs” with “farms . . . hamlets, villages, and even large settlements with Orthodox churches.” In the Kuban', colonization was an elemental, progressive force: “Today [this region] is witnessing the building of a new, harmonious, and peaceful civic life. The internal reorganization and rearrangement of colonizing elements and forms has begun.”128 Although new colonization on the steppe carried on as the century reached its close, it was nonetheless clear that the heyday of colonization in the region was over. By 1900, though increased settlement in relatively unpopulated parts of the Northern Caucasus and Orenburg had its champions, new agricultural migration to the rest of the south had all but stopped. Everyone agreed—foreigners and Russians alike—that Siberia had emerged as the empire’s latest and most obviously “young territory, poised for growth and full of the seeds of life.”129 Indeed, by contrast, the European steppe seemed old, or at least older, because it had more Slavs, more agriculture, more towns, fewer remaining open and easily colonizable spaces, and seemed more a part of “Russia,” even if its connections to the latter were at times difficult to define. This, in fact, was the central 126 Ia. Abramov, “Pereseleniia i chasnaia initiativa (pis'mo s Severnogo Kavkaza),” in Put-doroga: Nauchno-literaturnyi sbornik v pol'zu obshchestva dlia vpomoshchestvovaniia nuzhdaiushchimsia pereselentsam (St. Petersburg, 1893), pp. 362–75; “K voprosu o nuzhdakh pereselentsev Severnogo Kavkaza,” Severnyi Kavkaz, 1887, n. 50, p. 3; “Pereselencheskoe dvizhenie,” Orenburgskii listok, 1888, n. 6, p. 3; G.M., “K voprosu o pereselentsakh,” Kavkazskie eparkhial'nye vedomosti, 1881, v. 9, n. 20, p. 717; A.A. Kaufman (comp.), Svod mestnykh komitetov po Kavkazu, oblasti voiska Donskogo, Sibiri i stepnomu kraiu i Turkestanu (St. Petersburg, 1904), p. 456; Ivan Ianzhul, “Chto delaiut anglichane dlia svoikh pereselentsev?” in Put-doroga, pp. 14–37. 127 Dilevskaia, Chernomorskie stepi, pp. 126–27; F. Voroponov, “K pereselentsam: Iz putevykh zametok,” VE, 1887, v. 22, n. 7, p. 375. 128 M. Vozhev, “Putevye ocherki (iz zhizni v Bashkirii),” Ural, 1897, n. 158, p. 1; F. Shcherbina, “Kolonizatsiia kubanskoi oblasti,” KS, 1883, v. 7, p. 545. 129 Cited in N.M. Iadrintsev, Sibir kak koloniia: K iubileiu trekhsotletiia; sovremennoe polozhenie Sibiri, ee nuzhdy i potrebnosti, ee proshloe i budushchee (St. Petersburg, 1882), p. 442. For foreign echoes of this idea, see, for example, Claudius Aulagnon, La Sibérie économique (Paris, 1901), p. 4; and Otto Auhagen, Zur Besiedlung Sibiriens (Berlin, 1902), p. 8.

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complexity of the colonization of the steppe and of the Russians’ broader practice of innere Kolonisation. The long historical migration sponsored by the Russians turned the steppe into an extension of their country, but it did so by creating a new region that managed to be at once similar to “Russia” (variously defined) and distinct from it, a region whose creation, because of its territorial contiguity, seemed as much the result of the organic growth of the nation as of the willed expansion of the empire. The end to large-scale agricultural migration that coincided with the arrival of the twentieth century did not resolve the matter; it merely meant that the future of Russia’s European steppe would be that of an “ordinary” borderland rather than that of a region defined by the special problems and possibilities of ongoing colonization. It was no doubt fitting that the end of the steppe’s great age of agricultural migration coincided with the passing of its greatest chronicler, the prolific scholar Apollon Aleksandrovich Skal'kovskii. Born to a noble family in Kiev Province in 1808, Skal'kovskii graduated with a law degree from Moscow University and in 1828 was sent to Odessa to serve in the chancellery of General-Governor Vorontsov, who promptly put him to work documenting the history of his vast domain. The governor’s new assistant then stayed on to make his life in Odessa. Over the next seven decades he produced an avalanche of articles, book-length studies, and even novels “in the manner of Walter Scott” on the “geography, ethnography, statistics, and history” of his adopted region. He helped to found the Odessa Society of History and Antiquities (1839) and New Russia University (1868), and made numerous tours through the region’s towns and settlements to collect documents, many of which—to the frustration of later researchers—he insisted on keeping in his own apartment.130 By the time of his death in 1898, he was hailed as “the Nestor of New Russia,” “venerable historian of Zaporozh'e,” and “a living archive” on the history of Odessa— the man whose works, more than anyone else’s, had provided “the New Russia Territory . . . with its own literature and historiography.”131 He had also borne personal witness to the region’s striking changes. Less than halfway through his lifetime, he wrote that he had seen how “a foreign, isolated steppe, home to hostile Tatar hordes and rebellious bands of Cos130 See the extensive biography in A. Markevich, “A.A. Skal'kovskii,” ZOOID, 1900, v. 22, pt. 4, pp. 23–42. See also V.M. Khmar'skii, Z istoriï rozvitku arkheografiï na Pivdni Ukraïni: Apollon Skal'kovs'kii (Odessa, 1998). 131 “A.A. Skal'kovskii,” ZhMNP, 1899, v. 321, n. 2, p. 84; “Apollon Aleksandrovich Skal'kovskii (po povodu devianostoletiia ego zhizni),” KS, 1898, v. 60, p. 150; “A.A. Skal'kovskii,” Istoricheskii vestnik, 1899, n. 1, p. 775; Markevich, “A.A. Skal'kovskii,” p. 23. Skal'kovskii’s standing has hardly diminished over the years. In 1998, he was described as “the Herodotus of New Russia, the first historian of Odessa, the Cossack Nestor” and “one of the significant pioneers of archeographic research in Southern Ukraine.” See Khmar'skii, Z istoriï rozvitku arkheografiï na Pivdni Ukraïni, p. 166.

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sacks” was transformed into a territory “of gigantic achievements unheard of in other parts of Russia and unknown even in the states of Europe. They say that America has done even more, has made even greater strides of this sort. That may be. But all of that is so far away from us . . . that we can be quite pleased with what we have right here before our eyes.”132 By the end of Skal'kovskii’s days, further colonization had brought even greater changes to the south, though the pleasure that one took from the transformation had everything to do with where one stood and what one was looking for. 132 A. Skal'kovskii, “Sravnitel'nyi vzgliad na Ochakovskuiu oblast' v 1790 i 1840 godakh,” ZOOID, 1844, v. 1, pp. 257–58.

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“Stantsiia Abdulino, Main Street” (Samara Province). Historical postcard, early 1900s. Reproduced in Russkii gorod no pochtovoi otkrytke konstsa xix–nachala xx veka (Russkaia Kniga, Moscow, 1997), p. 125.

Conclusion Steppe Building and Steppe Destroying All is visible and all elusive, all is near and can’t be touched Octavio Paz, “Entre Irse y Quedarse”

The great grasslands of southern European Russia provided the platform for the Russians’ earliest and most influential encounters with otherness and their longest-running theater of expansion and agricultural colonization. This book has been a study of how these two realities unfolded together over the course of close to one thousand years, influencing each other and creating an imperial region in the process. From the seemingly most alien of wildernesses to a touchstone of the nation, from a frontier zone of nomads and Cossacks to an imperial realm of farmers and bureaucrats, from a world of Turko-Mongolic cultures to a universe of Slavicdominated multiethnicity, the steppe was gradually but persistently transformed into the opposite of what it was when it entered Russia’s recorded history. Indeed, it was so thoroughly colonized by Russians and other outsiders and their economic and cultural practices that it evolved as Russia’s most invisible and, in that sense, most successful imperial possession. By the dawn of the twentieth century, the steppe had been so profoundly transformed by Russian imperialism that it was difficult for contemporaries to determine whether it constituted a borderland, a colony, or Russia itself. Rural migration and settlement were central to this transformation, and they too were varied and changing. Depending on time and place, the colonization process could be hesitant or intense; “popular” or state-directed; driven by want or ordered by fiat; Russian, foreign, “alien,” or “sectarian.” Some nomads and Cossacks resisted the arrival of the migrants and their government; others adjusted themselves to the new limitations and possibilities and acted accordingly. As for the migrants themselves, most came to the steppe in the hopes of finding practical economic and 223

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social improvements over what they had known at home—from more and better land to fewer lords and officials. By contrast, the statesmen and educated onlookers who organized and studied colonization tended to stress objectives that were grander, or at least more general. To them, the process was about defending the state’s frontiers, developing the state’s economy, improving the “savages,” improving the settlers, evoking the nation, advancing Orthodoxy, and increasing, controlling, and redistributing the imperial population. Colonization, it was assumed, was a tool to do all these things. Properly executed and fully supervised, it was considered to be the provider of order and security, the engine of progress and enlightenment. That realities on the steppe repeatedly contradicted these plans and mythologies did not diminish the latter’s importance, because both the real and the imagined mattered equally as colonization unfolded. Indeed, the two were deeply intertwined and mutually influential, with statesmen, scholars, litterateurs, natives, “resettlers,” and sundry other colonizers all playing their irreplaceable parts in the steppe’s material and symbolic creation. In fact, the creative work of region building produced not one steppe but several, each with a particular set of meanings and appearances that then changed over time. To the Rus' of Kiev and Moscow, the grasslands represented an intimidating “wild field” and an unruly and costly—if also in ways useful and lucrative—frontier. To the descendants of the Rus' who ruled from St. Petersburg, the region became a well-tended “garden” for displaying Russia’s attainment of progress and civilization, a dreadful “desert” where Romantic souls could contemplate the Infinite, an evocative locus of the nation’s cultural specialness and economic potential, and eventually, by the latter part of the nineteenth century, an equally evocative symbol of the country’s environmental missteps, economic limitations, and national anxieties. In each of its guises, the region was repeatedly subdivided, categorized, and recategorized, the definitions of its peoples, boundaries, natural landscapes, and relationship to “Russia” constantly shifting. The one constant that shaped the region throughout was outsider colonization, either the lack of it or its massive presence. Indeed, as the scale and direction of colonization changed over the centuries, so did the steppe, and vice versa. The region and the process were thus joined, each responding to the other’s permutations. As a group of American historians have pointed out, regions are inherently “complex and unstable constructions, generated by constantly evolving systems of government, economy, migration, event, and culture.”1 This was as true of the steppe as of anywhere else. 1 Edward L. Ayers et al. (eds.), All Over the Map: Rethinking American Regions (Baltimore, Md., 1996), p. 4.

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As colonization made and remade the region, inevitably much was lost. Once Russian power permanently gained the advantage in the late eighteenth century, most of the steppe’s nomadic peoples either chose to stop their “wandering,” were forced to do so by their new rulers, or took their nomadism elsewhere. The once “open” Cossack frontier “closed,” while Cossack autonomy retreated. Increasing multitudes of agricultural colonists mowed down the feather grass, plowed up the topsoils, cut down the riverside woodlands, and drove off or shot down the saiga herds. Even accepting that the natural world is never unchanging, that nomads as well as sedentarists leave their mark on the land, that some of the former would have “settled down” regardless of Russian involvement, and that few Cossacks were as “free” as their mythologists made them out to be, the elimination of old ways and environments that flowed from Russian-sponsored mass migration was nonetheless an enormous change. By the time the European steppe lost its position as Russia’s premier colonization zone in the late nineteenth century, the dismantling of the old steppe world had been proceeding in fits and starts for close to three centuries. The destruction was not in all cases intentional or well-organized. It was more evident on some parts of the steppe than on others. It was even viewed by certain Russians with growing regret and wistfulness; but the effects were palpable all the same. Such changes were far from unique. Other European colonizers and their descendants did much the same thing to the world’s other grasslands in the modern period. On prairies and pampas one saw the same transformation of old plains into new countries “without history,” the same replacement of nomadism with sedentary agriculture. On velds as well as llanos the same sorts of new regional societies emerged, defined everywhere by similar contrasts of wealth, liberty, and power for some and poverty, dependency, and exclusion for others. Indeed, the commonalities of colonization from one plain to the next are such that to ignore Russia’s relation to the comparative context is to miss an essential part of the story. After all, in the final analysis, how different was Potemkin, architect of the Russian south, from Jefferson, architect of the American West? How far removed was the Russian Cossack from the New World gaucho or métis? Didn’t educated Russians view Kalmyks and Bashkirs as dimly as the Argentineans viewed the Indian tribes of the pampas or the Germans the Herero cattle herders of Namibia? Weren’t steppe conservationists in Ekaterinoslav fundamentally similar to prairie conservationists in Kansas or Illinois? There were important differences to be sure, but not enough to separate Russia from the international pattern. Yet if the arc of Russia’s steppe colonization offers parallels to experiences elsewhere it also provides a window on Russia itself. To say that 225

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tsarist Russia was an empire is hardly controversial because the tsars themselves embraced the term and most educated Russians exulted in its (to them) noteworthy implications.2 Nevertheless, the empire that the Russians so relished was full of disguises, contradictions, and ambiguities, and nowhere was this more evident than in the practices and attitudes surrounding steppe colonization. The organizers of colonization saw nomads as inferior, but they did not think particularly highly of peasant colonists. Depending on circumstances, peasant colonists had conflicts with nomads but were easily as wary of state officials. In poems and travelogues, the steppe landscape could appear at once alien and Russian. Yet in tsarist decrees the region as a whole was never declared a colony, even though its parallels to other colonies were at times demonstrably implied. (Although Russian leaders generally “refused to conceive of Russia as a colonial empire,”3 they did not necessarily always resent the suggestion.) By the era of the Great Reforms both state officials and the educated public had begun to suggest linkages between Russian “resettlement” and Russian “colonization,” even at times conflating the two terms; but it was still far from clear whether this meant that the Russian case had more in common with innere Kolonisation or overseas colonialism. When all was said and done, when Russian colonists reached the steppe, unpacked their carts, and staked out their villages, were they engaged in the apparently natural occupation of vacant or underutilized land or in the projection and consolidation of imperial power? The answer to this question could vary depending on one’s time and perspective, but most Russians in most eras chose the first explanation. Indeed, one of the enduring characteristics of Russian settlement was the tendency on the part of both the settlers and their supporters to ignore or downplay the imperialist dimensions of the colonization process. Peasant colonists, generally speaking, did not articulate visions of settlement that were based on notions of national, religious, or civilizational superiority and entitlement. Even the more privileged Russians who did embrace such visions rarely saw colonization on the steppe as an instance of purposeful imperial expansion. Conquest and the incorporation of territory was one thing; the migration of peasants was another. The former was empire building; the latter, more often than not, was considered a question of population redistribution and agriculture. The absence of natural barriers that clearly distinguished the steppe from “Russia,” the relative proximity of the region to the center, its seemingly abundant supply of “open” 2 Dominic Lieven, “Russia as Empire: A Comparative Perspective,” in Geoffrey Hosking (ed.), Reinterpreting Russia (New York, 1999), p. 18. 3 Michael Khodarkovsky, Russia’s Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500–1800 (Bloomington, Ind., 2002), p. 229.

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land suitable for farming or stock raising, and the lack of state organization and relative sparseness of its indigenous inhabitants all combined to make Russian migration to the south—once nomadic military superiority was overcome—relatively easy to undertake and just as easy to interpret as an elemental, organic process. Even in the late nineteenth-century Age of Empire, when educated Russians were more inclined than ever to assert their membership in a select club of world-ruling imperialists, they tended to present their “diffusion” into the steppe and across Eurasia as a national rather than an imperial saga and to stress the mostly (as they saw it) favorable contrasts between their histories of settlement and those of other colonizing peoples. Vasilii Kliuchevskii, the most prominent historian of his day and the scholar whose work did the most to assure colonization’s enduring importance as a defining leitmotif of Russian history, wrote tellingly that the Russians’ long history of transcontinental migration consisted of their “hopping like birds from territory to territory, abandoning their old homes and settling in new ones.”4 What, one wonders, could possibly be imperialist about that? The inclination to view steppe colonization as a popular, natural, and mostly gentle movement that unfolded within an empire but was not itself imperialist was the product of myth, of wishful thinking, and of the Russian elite’s complicated imperial-national identity. At the same time, this interpretation was, to a point at least, understandable. The steppe’s most obviously colonized peoples—the nomads—lost much of their land and all of their autonomy, but they were not driven into reservations or eradicated as were their counterparts in other imperial domains. Most retained their language and religion, and some remained nomadic. For their part, the empire’s most numerous and emblematic colonizers—the Russian peasants—enjoyed far fewer privileges than foreign colonists and were in fact no less subaltern than the native subalterns they were supposedly colonizing. In general, Russian colonization was neither purely ethnically Russian nor even exclusively Orthodox, and the vast share of colonists were overwhelmingly rural people, which made it easier to view colonization as a peasant question rather than an imperial one. Finally, the Russian statesmen who ultimately succeeded in imposing their rule on the steppe acted in the service of a state they called an empire (imperiia), but their political strategies in the region stressed military security, centralization, and administrative integration with the “core” rather than the maintenance of a territorially distinct and exploitable periphery. In other words, Russia’s mode of power on the steppe was premised on patterns of state building and incorporation that were easily as characteristic of the making of unitary states as of empires, a circumstance that 4 V.O. Kliuchevskii, Sochineniia v deviati tomakh (Moscow, 1987), v. 1, p. 50.

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only further blurred the imperialist aspect of the colonization process. Ruling Russians certainly recognized that settlement on the steppe was helping to build and consolidate their empire, but because it was perennially hard to determine where “Russia” stopped and “empire” began, their tendency to ignore the imperialist aspect of their actions was perhaps only to be expected. To be expected perhaps, but revealing nonetheless. If it is correct to claim that imperial power is constituted as much in “cultural formulations” as in “the actual geographical possession of land” and the domination of “lesser peoples,” then it follows that it matters a great deal both how empires rule and how they represent that rule.5 Indeed, the imperialists knew this long before today’s cultural historians. The Roman conqueror Agricola disdained the Britons as “barbarians,” but “when he had done enough to inspire fear, he tried the effect of clemency and showed them the attractions of peace”;6 and other imperial peoples have always done the same, ruling their supposedly inferior subjects through alternating displays of force and enticement, gentleness and arrogance. To convince themselves of the rightness of their actions, imperialists have tended to draw strength from what Joseph Conrad euphemistically called “the idea.”7 God, the nation, civilization, race, communism, and, more recently, “the free market” have all served their purpose in this regard, though some imperialists have ignored the open allusion to ideology and justified the imposition of their power by making it seem that it was not being imposed at all. In characterizing their colonizing history as a process of agricultural development and population distribution rather than of empire building, the Russians, whether fully conscious of doing so or not, forged a myth that justified their migration to and occupation of the plains. This is the cultural logic of the most effective sort of empire builders, those who know that to rule best over other peoples’ lands, one has to start by re-creating them as one’s own, in image as well as in fact, in the mind as well as on the ground. Although the Soviet era would bring new changes to the European steppe, the essential work of Russian appropriation had been completed by around 1900 when the massive agricultural colonization of the region came to a close. By this time, it was clear that the grasslands north of the Black and Caspian Seas belonged to the outsiders who had colonized them, reinvented them, and so naturalized their possession that it seemed hard to believe that the plains could ever have belonged to anyone else. 5 Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York, 1993), pp. 9–11, 78. 6 Tacitus, The Agricola and the Germania (New York, 1970), p. 72. 7 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (New York, 1971), p. 7.

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Note on Archival Sources

This study draws on a wide range of sources, all of which appear in the footnotes. A complete citation for each published source is provided in the first mention of the source in the individual chapters, and I hope that interested readers can use these citations to obtain a fair impression of the book’s published source base. Conveying a full sense of the archival documentation that supports Taming the Wild Field is virtually impossible in footnotes, however, because archival citations typically offer no information about the individual sources themselves. To compensate for this, here is a description of the principal archival collections and types of archival sources that I consulted, as well as some comments on their relative importance in shaping the book. Documents on the history of the colonization and development of the steppe region can be found in numerous central and regional archives located in three countries that once were part of the tsarist empire: the Russian Federation, Ukraine, and Moldova. Given the challenge of working in all the potentially pertinent archives in these three countries, I limited my research to the most important central repositories and a selection of regional ones that I judged to be either broadly representative or especially valuable given the themes of the book. In Russia, I worked in the Russian State Historical Archive (RGIA) in St. Petersburg; the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts (RGADA) and the Russian State Military-Historical Archive (RGVIA) in Moscow; the State Archive of the Orenburg Region (GAOO) in Orenburg; and the Central State Historical Archive of the Republic of Bashkortostan (TsGIARB) in Ufa. In Ukraine, I worked in the State Archive of the Odessa Region (DAOO) in Odessa and the State Archive of the Crimean Region (DAKO) in Simferopil'. I did not conduct 229

Taming the Wild Field

research in Moldovan archives. Although many of the archives I visited contain holdings spanning several centuries, the archival documents cited in Taming the Wild Field pertain almost exclusively to the period from the 1760s to just prior to 1905. For the Catherinian period (roughly the last four decades of the eighteenth century), I drew most of my archival sources from RGADA in Moscow, where I concentrated on materials in the collections of the Office of the Senate (f. 248), Science, Literature, and Art (f. 17), Domestic Administration (Vnutrenee upravlenie) (f. 16), Military Affairs (f. 20), and Caucasian Affairs (f. 23). The sources within these holdings include the correspondence of southern governors, reports by southward-bound expeditionaries and inspectors, and miscellaneous project proposals and petitions concerning steppe development and settlement submitted to the empress and the central colleges by serf owners and aspiring entrepreneurs. I also made use of late eighteenth-century materials held at RGVIA, especially those pertaining to the mapping, surveying, and military administration of southern areas, and the less extensive eighteenthcentury documents in RGIA. Although these late eighteenth-century sources are rich and revealing, overall they tend to be less complete than those of the following century, when the ministries were established, the empire’s central and regional bureaucracy expanded and became more systematized, and colonization in the steppe region increased. Reflecting this, by far the greatest number of archival sources used for this study pertain to the nineteenth century and very early 1900s. RGIA in St. Petersburg contains the single largest selection of resettlement-related materials, housed principally in pertinent fondy within the vast collections of the Ministry of the Interior (f. 1285, 1287), the Ministry of Finance (f. 379), the Ministry of State Domains (f. 383, 384, 385), the Ministry of Agriculture (the late nineteenth-century successor to State Domains) (f. 396), and the Resettlement Administration (f. 391). Departments within these agencies acted as central nodes in the government’s evolving resettlement system, and consequently their resettlement-related materials are extremely diverse. One finds in these holdings petitions submitted by state peasants wishing to resettle; high-level correspondence concerning state resettlement legislation and policy; village and land surveys and demographic statistics submitted by provincial evaluators; files on land disputes between settlers and native communities; appeals, reports, and programs for resettlement submitted to the center by provincial governors; and materials relating to the administration of steppe nomads, foreign colonists, and Cossacks. By and large, the nineteenth-century resettlement materials that I found in archives in Odessa, Simferopil', Orenburg, and Ufa were similar to those I examined in the central ministerial holdings in St. Petersburg. 230

Note on Archival Sources

Indeed, one revelation since the collapse of the USSR for Western historians of imperial Russia is that the regional archives that were formerly all but off-limits to Westerners, and therefore surrounded with an aura of special significance—or at the very least heightened curiosity—are not, in fact, appreciably different from archives in the center. That is, access to the regions has given Western historians more material to study state and society in prerevolutionary Russia, but it has not provided obvious documentary evidence that would lead to wholesale reinterpretations. Russia’s nineteenth-century government was highly centralized, and much of what the “viceroys of the tsar” saw as their business in their provinces was relayed to their superiors in St. Petersburg, who then relayed it back to them, and so on and so forth. Not surprisingly, the system produced enormous duplication and redundancy. This was certainly the case with the government’s would-be management of colonization. As a result, one usually finds the same sorts of files, and in many instances, the very same cases, reproduced in both central and regional repositories. The administrations (upravleniia) and personal offices (kantseliarii) of the provincial governors, the single most valuable holdings for the study of resettlement in the regions, predictably contained many of the same files covering the same issues that I examined in St. Petersburg: governors’ reports on resettlement, investigations of land disputes and the rural economy, land survey materials, and petitions to the governor’s office from colonists and indigenous inhabitants concerning varied matters from muggings to marriages. (The provincial governors’ holdings for the regional archives I consulted are the following: DAKO, f. 26 and 27; DAOO, f. 1; TsGIARB, f. I-1 and I-2; GAOO, f. 6 and 11.) Yet research in the regional archives is nonetheless necessary, not least because it changes one’s perspective. Working from the vantage point of the old steppe provinces as opposed to the imperial centers of Petersburg and Moscow, one perceives the empire differently. The center seems far away; the region looks more like a world unto itself. One can still follow the lines of high imperial policy emanating from the capital, but one also sees more clearly the diversities and complexities of regional life and the frequent disconnect between regional realities and metropolitan expectations. For all their similarity to those of the center, the holdings of regional archives are also distinct in important respects. While the southern governors and their subordinates relayed a great deal to their superiors in the north, not everything was passed on, and what remained in the region is often revealing. Governors writing to St. Petersburg usually chose to summarize reports submitted to them by local officials rather than reproduce them in full. They created generalizations and discarded vignettes, aimed for clarity and smoothed over contradiction. The excised passages and margin notes in their drafts reveal what they thought best to leave out 231

Taming the Wild Field

or to rephrase when communicating with the center. Many files were initiated and matters investigated at the local level that simply seemed too minor to report to St. Petersburg. Consequently, in a variety of ways the documents one finds in the regional archives—local crime reports, local statistical surveys, local petitions, letters from the governor edited or never sent—offer greater detail on the day-to-day life of settler and native communities while at the same time disclosing more of the particulars of the confusion that so often characterized the government’s colonization work. The additional color and contingency that one uncovers in regional documentation thus reveals just as much as documentation from the center. Both were essential for this book.

232

Index

Academy of Sciences, 52, 66 Akkerman, 98, 118 Albanians, 74 Amur River, 158, 161 Annenkov, M.N., 207 Aral Sea, 16 Argentina, 161 Armenians, 67, 74, 143, 190 Askania Nova, 204 Astrakhan, 15–16 administration in, 60 cultural development in 42, 159, 196 Kalmyks in, 63, 104, 146 military importance of, 16, 26 resettlement in, 49, 77 revolts in, 36 types of settlers in, 84, 133 Australia, 161 Ayuki Khan, 27 Azov construction projects in, 43 descriptions of, 36, 56, 64, 87, 102 forts in, 41, 59 peoples in, 102–3 Azov Sea, 150, 203 baranets-melon, 18, 20 Bashkiria, 47 fortifications in, 41, 46 population of, 48 religious conversion in, 21, 22, 48 types of settlers in, 30, 31, 77, 93 Bashkirs, 40, 46, 77, 94, 104 and Cossacks, 146

descriptions of, 63, 93, 98, 101, 164, 199, 218 land sales, 154–55, 192–93, 217 in Orenburg, 74 religious conversion of, 48 revolts by, 58, 148 sedentarization of, 146–47, 197, 215 in seventeenth century, 26, 27, 36, 48 in sixteenth century, 16, 22 Beketov, Nikita, 84 Belev, 24 Belgorod, 24, 25 Belorussia, 120, 121 Berdiansk, 150 Bessarabia, 108, 149, 159–60 annexation of, 97 descriptions of, 99, 110 resettlement in, 128 as Russian oblast', 107 types of settlers to, 98, 126, 188, 190 Black Sea, 69, 90, 187 Black Sea region borders of, 56, 65 Cossacks in, 75, 129 geographic descriptions of, 66, 102 leading colonization of, 52, 56–57, 92, 94, 187 maps of, 37 Nogays in, 60 Slavs in, 38 Boltin, Ivan, 68, 69 Borodin, Aleksandr, 209 British, 75 Bruno, Archbishop, 14

233

Index Bryant, William Cullen, 161 Bucak Nogays, 98 Bulgarians, 83, 143, 144, 152, 188, 190 Canada, 161 Caspian Sea, 36, 90 Catholics, 74, 115, 125 Caucasus, Northern agriculture in, 88, 200 change of names in, 65 Cossacks in, 92, 149 early inhabitants of, 6 geography of, 108 military importance of, 75, 90, 108, 112 Nogays in, 102, 193 runaway serfs in, 76 settlement to, 74, 110, 141, 154, 218 types of settlers in, 77, 102, 104, 144, 180 Caucasus Province, 75, 88, 103, 128, 132 Census of 1897, 180, 181 Chekhov, Anton, 209 Cherkassk, 91 China, Qing expansion, 4 Chinese defensive walls, 25, 25n56 Chuvash, 76, 77, 126 College of Foreign Affairs, 63 colonization as a civilizing mission, 61, 79, 94, 102, 214 comparisons with America, 78, 89 comparisons with Europe, 17–18, 47, 71, 78–79, 211 comparison with the West, generally, 45–46, 61–62, 70, 89 definitions of, 88, 156, 158, 194 and enlightenment theory, 105, 185 and foreigners, 73, 74, 86, 90, 115–16, 125, 143, 158, 188, 189, 190 historical interpretations of, 4, 106, 169, 171, 209, 211 and illegal migration, 30, 86, 138, 139, 154, 178 incentives for, 73, 74, 86, 87, 90, 116, 142 interpretations of, 3, 81, 40, 155–56, 158, 62 land allocation and administration, 87, 111, 138, 139, 183, 187 and language, 67, 104, 214 and mapping, 37, 48, 52, 65, 88 and military concerns, 51, 75, 76, 130, 131 in mythology and symbolism, 67–68, 70, 70n59, 94–95, 99, 113, 170 name changes in, 68, 69, 70 as a national theme, 98, 141, 170, 183, 185–86, 209

234

numbers involved in, 31, 37, 42, 47, 113, 114n56, 153 and religious conversion, 20–21, 45, 48, 60, 104, 214–15 and romantic ideology, 105 and science, 36, 48, 156, 184–85 and tutelage, 115, 118, 129, 137. See also resettlement; entries for individual areas Cornies, Johann, 118, 42 Corsicans, 74 Cossacks autonomy of, 36, 107, 225 Black Sea region, 75 and creation of new Hosts, 59, 114, 160 Don. See Don Cossacks Greben, 92 illegal immigration to hosts, 30, 90–91, 92, 114 Khoper Host, 75 loyalty to tsar, 29 military importance of, 43, 48, 50, 58, 59, 150 and nomads, 102, 103 nonstate, 28 North Caucasus Host, 114 Orenburg Host, 114 relationship with peasants, 91, 133, 149, 225 revolts by, 31, 57, 58, 75 Russification of 61, 62 scholarly and popular descriptions of, 40, 62, 67, 99, 101, 105, 163, 191 Ukrainian, 168 Ural. See Ural Cossacks Volga. See Volga Host Yaik, 36, 57, 58. See also Zaporozhians Crimea, 69, 75, 81, 107 annexation of peninsula, 56 change of names in, 69 colonial status of, 110 commercial ventures with Russia, 74 imams in, 60 independent status of, 56 Islamic Khanate of, 15 Muscovite campaigns against, 32 Russian settlement of, 50, 80, 81 Russo-Ottoman War of 1735–39, 50 Crimeans, 16, 17, 27, 50, 56 Crimean War, 148, 149, 151, 160 Cumans, 12 Dal', Vladimir, 156 Danil'evskii, G.P., 168 Danubian principalities, 97 Decembrists, 108

Index defensive lines, 14, 24, 30, 41, 47, 48, 59, 59n16, 112 Derbent Sea, 15 Diderot, 78 Dneprovsk, 92 Dniepr River, 12, 23, 32, 117 Dniestr, 56 Dokuchaev, Vasilii Vasil'evich, 203, 204, 205 Don Cossacks administration of, 36, 65, 107 and agriculture, 197 name changes, 160 and outsider settlement, 31, 90, 91 resettlement of, 43 uprisings of, 31 women, 92 Don River, 23, 31, 37, 41, 42, 52 Don Volga Canal 41 Dukhobors, 122, 151 Dvina River, 11 Ekaterinodar, 69, 196 Ekaterinoslav, 69, 82, 110, 130, 142, 144, 183, 189 emancipation of the serfs, 152–53 Enlightenment ideology, 64, 105, 165, 185 Eshevskii, S.V., 170 experimental farms, 142–43 Finns, 102 forest-steppe, 1, 5, 13 Free Economic Society, 66 French people, 74 frontier theory, 4, 162, 199 Genghis Khan, 38 Georgi, Johann, 95 Georgians, 74 Germans, 74, 83, 115–16, 145, 159, 188–89, 190 Gogol', Nikolai, 163 Golden Horde, 15, 15n20 Golitsyn, Vasilii, 32 Great Horde, 27 Great Reforms, 185, 192 “Great Russians,” 67, 160, 207, 212 Orthodox, 45 peasants, 163, 168 people included in, 105–6, 171, 187 Greeks, 74, 115, 143, 190 Grigorovich, D.V., 168 Guardianship Committee for Foreign Settlers, 118, 120, 121, 125, 144 Gypsies, 122, 123, 130 Hakluyt, 21 Hobson, J.A., 177

Holy Synod, 107 Humboldt, Alexander von, 100 Iaroslav the Wise, 14 illnesses, 32, 90, 132, 149, 150 199 Ilmen, Lake, 11 Jewish colonists categorized as aliens, 102 descriptions of, 118, 120, 121, 122, 126–27, 190–91 migration to Russia, 74, 114 migration within Russia, 120, 121, 144–45 Polish, 91 restrictions on settlement, 73, 126, 146 Journal of the Ministry of State Domains, 156 Jungaria, 27, 57 Kabarda, 142 Kabardian people, 74 Kalka River, 15 Kalmyks administration of, 49, 107 emancipation of, 197 ethnographic descriptions of, 39, 40, 50, 63, 166, 214–15 exodus from Russia, 57, 59 fighting among, 27 independent status of, 27 Lamaist Buddhists, 27 relations with state settlers, 93 religious converts, 49, 52, 147, 150 sedentarization of, 63, 102, 104, 156 taxes paid, 159 Kama River, 22, 46 Kavelin, Konstantin, 170 Kazakhs, 46, 63, 74, 101, 122, 123 Kazakhstan, 5 Kazakh steppe, 187 Kazan, 15, 16, 28, 49 Kerch, 99 Khar'kov, 159 Khazar Kaganate, 6 Kherson administration of, 144 crowding in, 142, 202 foreign settlers in, 189 Jewish settlement in, 110, 120 Military Governor of, 97 name given to, 70 peasants in, 125 Khortitsa Island, 117 Kiev, 11, 13, 15, 42 Kirilov, Ivan, 40, 46, 47, 48, 52

235

Index Kiselev, Pavel, 137–38, 140, 141, 143, 153, 155, 191 Kizliar, 59 Kliuchevskii, Vasilii, 4, 209 Kochubei, Viktor, 116, 120, 123, 125 Kolomna, 26 koumiss, 197, 199 Kozlov, 29 Kuban', 56, 75, 91, 1159, 180 Kursk, 133, 139 landlords. See nobles Legislative Commission of 1767, 82 Lenin, V.I., 207 Lepekhin, Ivan, 63 Levshin, Aleksei, 101–2 Lithuania, 120 “Little Russia,” 41, 110, 161 “Little Russians,” 157, 207 Cossacks, 40, 48, 62, 129 definition of, 105–6, 168, 171, 187 descriptions of, 76, 94, 163, 212 and language, 67 Orthodox, 45 Lutheran Colonists, 115 Manifest Destiny, 162 Maris, 76, 114, 126 Mennonites, 87, 115, 117, 121, 123, 127, 143, 145, 188 military settlement, generally, 75, 76, 130–31. See also individual area entries militias, 47 Ministry of Agriculture, 86 Ministry of Agriculture and State Domains, 191 Ministry of State Domains, 86, 130, 137, 138, 141, 143, 146, 153, 156 Ministry of Finance, 127 Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 107 Ministry of Interior, 107, 127, 154, 179, 187, 192 Mishar, 48, 93 Moldavians, 74, 107, 130, 143 Molochnaia River, 118 Molochnye Vody, 117, 118, 152 Molokans, 122, 159 Mongols, 15, 68 Monomakh, Vladimir, 13 Mordvins, 48, 76, 77, 114, 126 Moscow, 15, 25, 26, 29, 32, 159 Mozdok, 90 Münnich, Marshal, 50 musketeers, 29, 36 Muslims, 36, 45, 60, 76, 107, 126–27, 148, 151, 152

236

Napoleon Bonaparte, 97, 105, 106 Native Americans, 78 Naval Ministry, 160 New Russia administration in, 122, 125, 128, 144, 154 colonial status of, 89, 94, 110, 156, 172 creation of, 69–70 early use of term, 47 foreign settlers in, 74, 77, 91, 115, 144, 159, 188 geography of, 108, 114, 207 illegal migration to, 86 incentives to settle in, 87, 124 Jewish settlers in, 146, 188 military settlement of, 75 provinces in, 73 New Serbia, 51, 73 New Spain, 17 Nikolaev, 75, 110 nobles autonomy in regards to serfs, 83 and emancipation of serfs, 154 fewer numbers of on steppe, 112 illegal enserfment of peasants, 91 inclusions of ethnic elites among, 59 and renting land, 84 resettlement of serfs, 43, 73, 76, 123 treatment of serfs, 83, 84 Nogay administration of, 10, 103 in Azov area, 60, 102, 103 descriptions of, 64, 101, 146, 165, 193 exodus of, 152 and the Great Horde, 22, 27 and the Lesser Horde, 16 and military service, 26 and raiding, 17, 24 sedentarization of, 50, 103, 118, 146 nomads administration of, 59–60 and Cossacks, 62, 102 descriptions of, 19, 27, 39, 40, 62, 67–68, 98, 164, 167 early history of, 6, 12–13 and education, 103, 104, 146 gifts to, 36 land use, 28, 31, 62, 63, 79, 103–4, 193 and Mongols,15 as Noble Savage, 40, 63–64 and Orthodoxy, 39 population estimates, 38, 148, 193 relations with settlers, 26–27, 93, 97, 133, 134, 193, 199 religious conversion of, 40, 60 Russification of, 60, 164–65, 214–15 and science, 9

Index sedentarization of, 62, 63, 64, 102–3, 146, 147, 165, 194, 225 Novgorod, 11 Novogrigor'ev District, 193 Novovitebsk, 145 Odessa, 69, 99, 108, 159, 196, 197 Oghuz, 12 Oka River, 24, 25, 26 Old Believers, 30, 31, 45, 74, 76, 114, 130 Orel, 149 Orenburg, 5, 47, 94, 99, 111, 184 Cossacks in, 11, 146 geographical descriptions of, 108, 165 military importance of, 48, 108, 112 Muslim settlers in, 76, 107 numbers of settlers in, 153, 180 resettlement to, 128, 131–32, 154 sale of land in, 93 state peasants in, 77 Orenburg Expedition, 46, 49 Or River, 46 Ossetian people, 74 Ottomans, 21, 50, 51, 56, 97, 151 pagans, 30 Pale of Jewish Settlement, 110 Pallas, Peter Simon, 81 Parkman, Francis, 161 Peasant Land Bank, 182, 184, 189 Pechenegs, 12, 13 Penza, 159 Perovskii, Vasilii, 112 Persia, 42, 43 Piatigorsk, 159 pogroms, 189 Poles, 29, 31, 41, 74, 102, 108 Polota River, 11 Polovtsy, 12, 13, 15, 38 Poltava, 159, 202 Pontic Steppe 70 Ponto Caspian Steppe, 5 Potemkin, Grigorii, 75, 88, 94 Primary Chronicle, 11 Protestants, 74 Prut River, 97 Przheval'skii, Nikolai, 156 Pugachev, 69, 153 Pugachev Uprising, 57–58 Pushkin, Aleksandr, 98, 108 Qing Emperor, 57 Qipchaq, 12 Repin, Ilya, 197 resettlement administration of, 155, 179, 180, 184

comparison to Europe and America, 195–96 forced, 150–51, 152, 155 laws pertaining to, 139, 140, 178, 179 official views of, 87, 194, 195–96 Riazan', 24, 31 Romantic ideology, 99, 101–2, 105 Rostov, 159, 165 Rousseau, 39 Rout of Mamay, 106 Rus', 8, 11, 12–13, 15, 24, 70, 105, 169 Russian Geographical Society, 213 Russo-Ottoman Treaty of Constantinople, 17 Russo-Ottoman War 1735–39, 50 Russo-Turkish War of 1768–74, 56 Sal'nia River, 13 Saltykov, Fedor, 41 Samara, 49, 154, 159, 163, 182, 196 Samara River, 48 Samara-Zlatoust Railway, 184 Samoilov, A.N., 70 Saratov, 18, 74, 77, 92, 128, 133 Saratov Province, 49 Sarmiento, Domingo, 161 School of Cadets, 66 Scots, 74, 115 Serbia, 51 Serbs, 74 serfs, 29, 77, 81, 82–83 emancipation of, 153 formal codification of practice, 30 private, 114 resettlement of, 43, 73, 76, 83–84, 123 runaways, 76, 84, 86, 148 Serpukhov, 26 Sevastopol', 109 Siberia, 19, 70, 79, 102, 121, 133, 141, 180 Siberian Railway Committee, 179 Sibir', khanate of, 16 Simbirsk Province, 142 Simferopol', 69 Skal'kovskii, Apollon Aleksandrovich, 106, 156, 158, 165, 172, 219 Slaviansk, 70 Slavs, 11, 28, 30, 38, 40, 51, 110, 126, 213 Smolensk, 124, 125 social Darwinism, 214 Solov'ev, Sergei, 169, 170, 171 Sonnenfels, Joseph, 72 State Domains. See Ministry of State Domains state peasants, 77, 84, 104, 114, 121, 192 danger of enserfment, 91 illnesses of, 149, 150 incentives to settle, 87, 88, 124, 129, 140

237

Index state peasants (cont.) land holdings, 81, 128, 143, 150, 189 petitions to government, 127 poverty, 129, 130, 133 problems with moving, 91, 123, 124, 144, 181 relations with foreigners, 75, 83 relations with natives, 93 and resettlement, 88, 123–25, 127, 128, 155 runaways, 76, 148 standardization of migration, 139–40 welfare of, 115, 137, 138 Stavropol' development of, 159, 193 foreign colonists in, 74 founding of, 49 Kalmyks in, 147, 148 natural resources in, 172, 201, 202 nomads in, 146 settlers to, 133, 180, 183, 191 Steppe administration in, 107, 110 definitions of, 34, 34n86, 71n60, 206, 208 depletion of resources in, 172, 202, 203, 205, 206 cultural development, 159, 196, 197, 199, 200 early peoples of, 6, 12 early population of, 45 as an “empty place,” 29, 53, 70 foreign tourists in, 197 geographical boundaries of, 5, 52, 65, 141, 172–73, 206, 207 geographic descriptions of, 6, 32, 108, 112, 113, 142, 163, 205, 214 inhabitants of, 52, 67, 80, 163, 181, 197, 209, 214, 215, 216 land ownership in, 28–29, 149 languages in, 214 local politics and autonomy, 29, 59, 60, 107, 184 mapping of, 80 Muscovite settlement of, 29 in popular writing, 100, 101, 104–05, 162, 209, 217 Russification of, 186 strategic importance of, 42, 110, 112 uprisings in, 31, 36, 58. See also entries for individual areas Sumarokov, Pavel, 117 Sviazhsk, 77 Swedes, 74 Taganrog, 43, 44 Tambov, 30, 108, 150

238

Tatars, 15, 159, 215 and Cossacks, 48 descriptions of, 30, 67 movement in Russia, 76–77, 93, 114, 126 in Orenburg, 76, 77 and raids, 26, 29 Tatishchev, Vasilii, 37, 38, 39, 49, 50, 52 Tauris Oblast, 107 Tauris Province, 82, 103, 110, 117, 122, 142 Teptiars, 77, 93 Terek River, 23, 26, 42, 43, 75 Tetiushev, 18 Tobol'sk Province, 73 Torki, 12 Transcaucasia, 8 Trans-Kama Line 47, 48 Trans-Siberian Railway, 180 tsars and tsarinas Aleksei, 29 Alexander I, 65, 83, 108, 115 Anna, 40, 46, 47 Catherine, 55, 58, 60, 61, 64, 67–68, 74, 79, 82, 88 Elizabeth, 51, 60 Ivan IV, 16, 22 Nicholas, 107, 111, 131, 137 Paul, 65, 83, 115 Peter the Great, 35, 36, 37, 39, 40–43, 45, 59 Tsaritsyn, 87, 90, 196 Tula, 24, 25 Turkestan, 158 Turkey, 42 Turks, 58, 75, 97 Turnerian frontier, 4 Tver', 15 Udmurts, 114 Ufa, 48, 154 Ukraine, 41. See also “Little Russia” Ukrainian Hetmanate, 59 Ukrainians, 77, 129, 152, 168. See also “Little Russians” Ural Host, 69, 90, 96, 163 Ural region, 9, 52, 58, 7, 90, 102, 114, 218 Ural River, 69, 90 Uralsk, 69 Varangians, 13 Vasil'chikov, Aleksandr Illarionovich, 185, 187 Vasnetsov, Viktor, 209, 210 Vladikavkaz, 69, 196 Vladimir the Great, 14 “Volga Barge Haulers,” painting of, 197 Volga (Lower Volga region)

Index Cossacks in, 75, 82, 90 defensive lines in, 41 descriptions of, 40, 66, 91, 100, 163, 183 development in, 42, 183, 193 early inhabitants of, 6 geography of, 108 and Golden Horde, 15 Kalmyks in, 27, 28 nomads in, 21, 22 peasant rebellions in, 36, 57, 58 settlement to, 17, 49, 74, 77, 82, 87, 110, 114, 141 types of settlers in, 77 Volga (Middle Volga region) peoples of, 30, 207 Tatars in 76, 126 types of settlers in, 77, 93, 102 Volga River, 21, 22, 32, 57, 147, 183 Voronezh, 24, 28, 43, 108, 127, 196

Vorontsov, Mikhail, 144, 156 Voznesensk, 70 Walachians, 74, 143 women, 92, 129 Yaik Host, 36, 57, 58, 69 Yaik River, 23, 26, 27, 46, 48, 57, 69 Yaitsk, 69 Zaporozhians, 23, 56 areas of settlement, 23 and Black Sea Cossacks, 75 descriptions of, 41, 62, 164 elimination of name, 69 incentives to settle, 87 migrants from Turkey, 51 revolt against Poles, 29, 31 Zubov Platon, 91

239