Before the Crimean War the Ukrainian territories were Ukrainian only in the nationality of the peasantry, with the exception of the Left Bank, the former Hetmanate, and the Kharkov province. In these latter regions the local nobility was descended from Khmelnyts’kyi’s officers and maintained local traditions of history and a modest regionalist literature in Russian and occasionally Ukrainian. In the 1830s and 1840s, Ukrainian cultural activities of that local nobility were looked upon with favor from St. Petersburg as a counterweight to Polish political movements and a regional example of Russian uniqueness. The dominant figure in Ukrainian culture, however, came from a wholly different milieu. He was Taras Shevchenko, a serf whose talents at drawing led him to an education at the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts and liberation from serfdom. A lottery organized by Russian noblemen, with the prize being a portrait of the poet Vasilii Zhukovskii, raised enough money to buy him out of serfdom. His first volumes of poetry attracted more attention than his art, and back in Kiev he soon joined the historian Nikolai Kostomarov and other local intelligentsia who were dreaming of Slavic federalism. These dreams came to the attention of the authorities on the eve of 1848, and earned the poet a decade of exile on the shores of the Caspian Sea.
After Crimea the changes in Russian society and government policy had a sharp effect on the tiny Ukrainian intelligentsia. They began to publish a journal in St. Petersburg and involved themselves in the many activities of Russian radicals and liberals, including trying to educate the peasantry. Shevchenko returned from exile and resumed his central place in Ukrainian culture. The cultural efforts of the nascent Ukrainian intelligentsia came to a sharp stop in 1864 and 1867, when most publishing in Ukrainian became forbidden out of fear that Polish nationalists would penetrate the Ukrainian movement. In the Ukrainian cities small groups of intellectuals with a Ukrainian cultural orientation emerged, but they had little impact as yet. The cities remained firmly Russian speaking up to 1917 and after. Most university students in Kiev or Kharkov, Ukrainian or otherwise, ignored the Ukrainian movement and joined Russian radical groups or entered careers in the Russian administration or other institutions. The zemstvos, the elected local councils, were introduced into the Left Bank provinces, but their occasional forays into politics were oriented to the empire as a whole, not to specifically Ukrainian problems. Disagreements among the various layers of Russian bureaucracy over the language issue meant that some Ukrainian language books did appear, and local history and traditions were cultivated in the Russian language. Ironically the chief venue for Ukrainian history was the Archeographical Society in Kiev, which subsisted on funds from the Russian imperial military governors-general of the southwestern provinces. The main area of concern to the Russian empire was the Ukrainian movement across the border in Austrian Galicia, where electoral politics made possible a variety of Ukrainian parties, most of them not friendly to the Russian tsars. In the Russian Empire, however, the Ukrainian movement would not spread beyond the small Ukrainian intelligentsia to a larger population until the eve of the 1905 Revolution.
THE ASIATIC EMPIRE
If the European side of the empire was largely the result of territorial and strategic ambitions, the Asiatic Empire combined those same goals with a largely chimerical desire to imitate the economic success of the European colonial empires. Within that general framework, the Asiatic possessions of Russia fell into two areas, the Caucasus acquired by 1828 and Central Asia, where Russian conquest began in earnest only in the 1860s. To make matters more complex, the Crimean and Volga Tatars and the Bashkirs, conquered earlier and largely surrounded by Russian settlers, played a role both in Russian imperial rule and in the formation of native nationalism in Central Asia and elsewhere. Altogether the various Asian parts of the empire constituted about twenty-five percent of its population.
In the Caucasus Russia began to move beyond the sixteenth century boundary only at the end of the eighteenth century, annexing (rather theoretically) the North Caucasus and then Transcaucasia. Formal control was largely complete by 1828. South of the mountains the Russians established an administration based on Russian officials and the cooperation of the local Georgian and Armenian nobility. These Christian elites were integrated into the imperial nobility rather like the Baltic Germans or the Finns, and many of them played major roles in the Russian state and especially in the army up until 1917. The Azeris and other Muslims were a different story, though the Russian government was to a large extent able to coopt the Muslim clergy and other local elites after the end of the Caucasian wars.
The conquest of the Caucasus had been carried out to secure the eastern flank against the Ottomans. Commercial motives played some role in the planning, for trade with and through Iran was assumed to be a viable path to enormous profits. That idea proved to be an illusion, since Russia lacked the commercial infrastructure to make use of what was available, but that result did not become clear until the 1830s. In any case, the strategic value of the Caucasus and Transcaucasia as a southern frontier against Turkey was immense, and the Russians were not going to leave just because trade with Iran did not prove to be a bonanza. The mountain peoples of the north slopes of the Caucasus were not impressed by Russian strategic interests and liked even less the gradual penetration of Russian settlers in the adjacent lowlands. The result was war.
The Caucasian Wars of the nineteenth century fell into two fronts and two phases. One front was in the western end of the mountain range and its foothills, and the principal opponents were the Circassians, while the other front was far to the east, in Dagestan and parts of Chechnia. The wars began with the Russian attempt to build a solid line of forts to control the area in 1817, which met furious resistance both in east and west. Dagestan emerged as the main center of resistance in 1830, with Islam as its banner. The leaders were part of the Naqshbandi sufi order, which acted as the leadership group for the rebellion. The mountaineers proclaimed Shamil their imam in 1834 and for the next twenty-five years he led the struggle in Dagestan and Chechnia from his stronghold in the southern Dagestani mountains where he was born. This was a war of small units, night raids, guerilla tactics, and occasional massacres, which irritated the Russians but did not defeat them. The Russian army’s attempts to send expeditions into the mountains to defeat the insurgents were equally fruitless until the 1840s. Then they realized that the solution to their problem was not more troops or battles but the construction of roads in the mountains and particularly the cutting of pathways and cleared areas in the dense Caucasian forests. It was the axe more than the gun that gave the Russians an advantage in the Caucasian wars – new “American” axes wielded by thousands of Russian soldiers. Finally, with the end of the Crimean War, Prince Alexander Bariatinskii, the viceroy of the Caucasus, decided to put an end to it and introduced large Russian forces. Shamil had to surrender in 1859, the effective end of resistance. On the northwest slopes of the Caucasus the war with the Circassians continued intermittently until the 1860s, when the Russian government began to encourage them to migrate to Ottoman domains, leaving large areas on the western slopes of the Caucasus for Russian settlers. From then until 1917 the north Caucasus was largely quiet. Even the Sufis turned to purely religious concerns and rejected holy war, and in 1914 Russia fielded an entire cavalry division consisting of Dagestanis, Chechens, and other Caucasian mountaineers with Russian and Georgian officers and commanded by a Grand Duke. There were ten Muslim generals and 186 Muslim colonels in the Russian army in 1914, mostly Caucasians, though Muslims did not join the imperial elite in St. Petersburg. Most of the North Caucasus remained under military rule, with Russian (and often Georgian or Armenian) officers appointed to supervise the local communities where the village elders remained in power.