While the state settled the heart of Siberia with difficulty, voluntary settlement proceeded apace on the southern edge of western Siberia and northern Kazakhstan
Map 4. Urals fortified lines and western Siberia postal roads, mid-eighteenth century. Modeled on a map from James H. Bater and R. A. French, Studies in Russian Historical Geography (London: Academic Press, 1983), figure 7.4.
where the wooded steppe transitioned into steppe. Through the first half of the century Russians and Middle Volga peoples had pushed into the Bashkir lands of the northern and southern Urals; by the 1740s, from there settlement moved east along the steppe border. To protect Russian settlements from Kazakh raids, defensive lines eventually carved an arc around the entire frontier (Map 4). In western Siberia in the 1740s a line was built north from Orenburg along the Iaik River to Verkhne-Iaisk (renamed Ural River and Verkhne-Uralsk after the Pug- achev rebellion). Into the 1750s this line was extended east to Omsk on the Irtysh (founded 1715); from Omsk the Irtysh line followed that river southward to Ust-Kamenogorsk (founded 1720) at the Altai mines, traversing the important trade center of Semipalatinsk (founded 1719). This fortified line opened up space for lively in-migration in the second half of the century. After the Qing empire conquered the Dzhungars east and south of the Irtysh Line in 1755-7, Russia and the Qing gradually incorporated some of their territory. By the end of the century the estimated 39,000 Tatars native to this border were outnumbered by 400,000 East Slavs. Migration into the taiga of western Siberia was aided in the 1760s by the construction north of the Irtysh line of a highway (Moscow trakt) from Tiumen to Krasnoiarsk on the upper Yenisei. The state forcibly settled peasants along the trakt to provide grain for officials (governors and their staffs, Cossacks and musketeers, clergy); other settlers followed. In 1689 Peter I had announced plans to build a road from eastern Siberia to Beijing, but construction began only in the 1730s and dragged out over decades.
East Slavic peasants who immigrated to Siberia were never enserfed, but paid poll tax and performed service as state peasants. They were not required to be conscripted, as the state was eager to populate Siberia, not deplete its population; ethnic Siberians also were not conscripted. As in the center, East Slavic peasants formed self-governing communes, reflecting the robust communal institutions of the Russian north (Pomor'e) where so many came from; other groups—townsmen, coachmen, merchants, and Cossacks—similarly lived as communes. East Slavs and other non-natives living in Siberia developed a culture distinct from the center. Here, without serfdom and landlords, far from county seats, life was free-wheeling, government unintrusive, and populations reliant on their own instincts. Neighborhoods were more ethnically and culturally diverse, and family economies were mixed as emigres learned survival strategies from native neighbors. In more isolated settlements, particularly in the far north, East Slavs often embraced native languages and cultures, particularly in Iakutia, as we have noted. But conversely, in larger East Slavic communities, "old" settlers called starozhily retained Russian customs and developed an independent character that was mythologized in subsequent centuries into an ethos of frontier freedom epitomizing "true Russianness."
THE MIDDLE VOLGA, URALS, BASHKIRIA
The Middle Volga—a stretch of the right and left bank around Kazan where forest meets steppe—witnessed dynamic population change from the sixteenth to eighteenth century. In the Middle Volga most were iasak payers—the Chuvash, Cheremis/Mari, and Votiaks/Udmurty in the forest, and the Tatars and Mordva in wooded steppe. Some did not participate in the trademark mobility of this era. The Votiaks, for example, remained by and large in their homelands of the Middle Volga and the northern Urals through the eighteenth century; the Cheremisy and Chuvash were generally stable in their lands north and south of the Volga above Kazan, with some out-migration to the southern Urals from the 1760s. But many groups scattered far and wide; in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Kazan Tatars settled in the more fertile lower Volga, northern and southern Urals, and the manufacturing area north of Kazan. By the 1790s Tatars were 14 percent of the population ofOrenburg gubernia in the southern Urals. Similarly, by mid-century only about half of the Mordva lived in their Middle Volga homeland around the Sura River south of Murom; others had emigrated to the black earth region (right bank of the Volga) and southern Urals. Many Mordva who moved into the Urals fell into dependency to Russia, Tatar, or Bashkir landlords as teptiar laborers.
Russia's colonial policy in the Middle Volga became less tolerant of diversity as the century progressed. More Russians moved in, the Middle Volga became relatively closer to the center, imperial borders were moving south and east, and the state was imposing homogenizing fiscal and social policies. By the 1740s iasak payers here lost that status and were made to pay the poll tax and give conscripts, two burdens that few other non-Slavic peoples of the empire bore. Untypically, the state also attempted forcible Christianization in the Middle Volga early in the century and again in the 1740s. Most of the Mordva, Chuvash, Cheremis, and Votiaks who converted did so only superficially, retaining animist traditions, but they gradually Russified in the process. The same superficial, forcible Christianizations took place in Siberia, among western Siberian peoples such as the Ostiaki/Khanty and Voguly/ Mansi and those in the east (Iakuts, Tunguz, Buriats, Chukchi, Koriaks).
In the Middle Volga those who resisted Christianization suffered economically. Muslim landholders (Tatars) who did not convert lost their lands and slipped into the status of single homesteaders (odnodvortsy) and eventually taxed peasants. By the end of the eighteenth century in the Middle Volga the Tatar upper class, once dominant in landholding, had been largely eliminated as a landed elite; many who stayed Muslim transitioned into a merchant and entrepreneurial class in Kazan that facilitated trade between Bashkiria, the Kazakhs, and the Russian empire. The formation of Tatar ethnic cohesion was enabled beginning in the 1760s when Catherine II reversed forcible Christianization policies against Muslims, which she did both for reasons of Enlightenment humanism and for her desire to use Tatar merchants as intermediaries in Chinese and Central Asian trade through Siberia. Tatars, from nobles to peasants, began to construct trade and cultural networks across the empire; they constituted a substantial minority in the southern Urals and northern Caucasus and a majority in the Crimean peninsula. An empire-wide Tatar cultural resurgence grew when Crimean Tatars joined the empire (1780s) and forged ties with Kazan Tatars. Non-Islamic Cheremisy (Mari) and Chuvash who did not convert to Orthodoxy tended to gravitate to Tatar Islamic culture, whether they stayed in the Middle Volga or emigrated to the Orenburg area.