First and foremost the cossacks were opportunists. Their sense of shared Orthodox Christian identity with the Russians mattered less than their independence and privileges. It was only after failing to form an alliance with the Ottomans and the Crimean Tatars that the cossacks approached Moscow. Realising that the support of the Zaporozhian host would mean a war with Poland-Lithuania, Moscow rebuffed Khmel'nyts'kyi and his cossacks. Yet a few years later in a momentous decision, the tsar, the Church and the boyars felt that they could no longer pass the opportunity to liberate their co-religionists from Catholic oppression and finally to acquire the lands of ancient Kievan Rus'.
In January of 1654, in the town of Pereiaslav the Zaporozhian hetman Khmel'nyts'kyi and other cossack leaders affixed their signatures to a document which the cossacks regarded as the terms of their military alliance with Russia and which Moscow considered an affirmation of the cossacks' new status as the subjects of the tsar. Such divergent understanding of their relationship inevitably led to a speedy fall-out. Two years later, in 1656, the cossacks entered an alliance with Sweden, and in 1658 chose to revert to the protection of the Polish king. But Moscow was no longer shy about its ambitions in Ukraine. The fate of Ukraine was decided in a war between Russia and Poland and the truce which the two concluded at Andrusovo in 1667. Ukraine would become divided: the left bank of the Dnieper River would come under Russian control and the right bank would remain in Polish hands.
Several other cossack revolts in the seventeenth century failed to change the status quo and to unify the cossacks again. For some time, the cossack hetmanate on the left bank of the Dnieper retained most of its privileges and sufficient autonomy. Typical incongruities of Russia's policies which were in evidence elsewhere were also present in Russia's relationship with the cossack hetmanate. While considering the occupants of the left bank to be Russian subjects, Moscow dealt with the hetmanate via the Little Russian Chancellery which was part of Russia's Foreign Office.
In many ways Moscow's relationship with the cossacks fell into a pattern of Russia's relations with the peoples elsewhere on its expanding frontiers. Like various non-Christian peoples along the Russian frontier, the cossacks too interpreted their treaty with Moscow as a military alliance with mutual obligations. They too initially were allowed autonomy which then was slowly eroded as Moscow engaged in co-opting the elites, manipulating the local rivalries and resettling those who chose to serve Russia and enrolling them in the Russian military (thus, the eastern part of the hetmanate became known as the Sloboda Ukraine and was settled with the Ukrainian cossacks who were organised into the regular regiments under the military command of the Russian governor in Belgorod). It seems that the nature of Russian autocracy allowed no exceptions, and the Russian imperial policies applied to both the non-Christians and Christians alike.
The fate of the hetmanate was likewise similar to many of its steppe neighbours. The Ukrainian hetmanate too was slowly stripped of its autonomy. By the 1720s the hetmanate was increasingly drawn into the Russian administrative and social structures, a process which was completed by the end of the eighteenth century.
The mid-Volga region
While rapidly expanding into the new areas, Russia also continued to consolidate its control in the regions conquered in the previous century. By far the most diverse and important was the middle Volga region. Here, in addition to the conquered peoples - Tatar, Bashkir, Mari, Mordva, Chuvash and Udmurt - others arrived to settle and colonise the region. By the end of the seventeenth century, not only did many towns have a sizeable Slavic population, but the countryside too was transformed by the arrival of Russian landlords and peasants and exiled Polish prisoners of war. If in the frontier regions Moscow's objectives did not go beyond the initial demands of political loyalty, in the mid- Volga region the previously vanquished population was already thoroughly integrated into the Russian administrative system. Some non-Christians were enlisted into the Russian military and occupied a special position known as the service Tatars. Other non-Christians were levied specific iasak or other payments and performed sundry state services.
The natives had several choices: to succumb to the Russian dominance, resist it or to flee further away; and they exercised all of these options. The majority of the non-Christians stayed on their ancestral lands, but their acceptance of Russian domination was hardly peaceful. Throughout the centuries the non-Christians of the Volga region together with the cossacks of Russia's southern borderlands were the main source of resistance to Moscow and its policies. The mid-Volga region was systematically rocked by both small- scale popular disturbances and large-scale uprisings. Amongnumerous peoples of the regions, the Bashkirs unquestionably took the prize and suffered the consequences of being the most rebellious subjects of the tsar.[92]
The Russian conquest and colonisation policies of the mid-Volga region also triggered a large-scale migration of the non-Christians. Some reported fleeing to avoid onerous taxation, others were fearful of forceful conversion to Christianity, whether real or rumoured. Thousands of those who fled and settled on the Bashkir lands eventually formed two social categories of registered peasants (tepter) and unregistered migrant peasants, who later became state peasants (bobyl'). In 1631-2, there were 8,355 tepter and bobyl' households residing on the Bashkir lands.[93]
While some among the native elites with the status of tarkhan had their traditional privilege of tax exemption confirmed and others were bestowed with it anew, a great number of the native population found itself labouring under the increased burden of taxation, corvee, state services and various legal restrictions. The impoverishment of the native peoples was evident in the flight of the population, numerous rebellions and a ceaseless paper trail of formal complaints to the governing Russian authorities. One desperate measure to which the natives resorted at the hard economic times was selling their children and kin into slavery to their wealthy co-religionists or the Russians.[94]
Russian policies of incremental integration of the conquered native population in the Russian Empire and their consequences were best described by the fugitive Bashkirs. In 1755, in the wake of yet another Bashkir uprising, a group of more than 1,500 Bashkir households came to seek refuge among the Kazakhs and warned them about the dangers of submitting to Russia. The fugitive Bashkirs explained that they had become Russian subjects of their own volition, had agreed to pay iasak and had provided numerous services and labour. In the beginning they too, like the Kazakhs, had been granted privileges, but then the government had begun to demand from them more than from their ancestors. Every year they were getting worse off, and now they were brought into such misery that they could not even feed themselves. Their petitions did not reach the empress, and their petitions to the governor remained unheeded. The governor forbade them to petition the empress, and seized, tortured and killed many of their people; they were no longer free in their own lands and waters. How could they live without the land? Military regiments came and ruined them; they cut their trees with the beehives, built forts and forced Bashkirs to fell trees, dig soil, cut stones, provide transportation, join the military patrols and buy salt at a higher price. Finally, the desperate Bashkirs resolved to flee, even though the Russian authorities tried to prevent them from fleeing by ordering executions of one remaining Bashkir resident for each fugitive. The Bashkirs warned that the same fate would soon befall the Kazakhs.[95]
92
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94
Ibid., pp. 132-4;
95