The 1775 administrative reforms, introduced in 1781, helped to draw Bashkirs into loyal service to Russia. The existing large Orenburg gubernia was subdivided to create a new gubernia in the heart of Bashkiria at Ufa with twelve districts (uezdy); both were put under the authority of a governor-general. As in European Russia, land courts for the elites, upper civil and criminal courts, and the new courts of equity were introduced at Ufa and Orenburg, with elected native assessors from Bashkir villages and other communities at high and local levels. Lower courts (raspravy) for Bashkirs, state peasants, and other native peoples were created in ten districts that used Sharia law and other native customs. One effect of this structure was to undermine the power of Bashkir elites. The reform's police and judicial organs were generally staffed with Russian and Bashkir military officers, there being few Russian landholders in the area (only five of twelve districts had sufficient presence to need noble land courts).
Another way in which Russia tried to co-opt the native populations of Bashkiria was the creation in Ufa in 1788 of the Orenburg Muslim Spiritual Assembly, a senior Muslim religious official (mufti) and a council to act as liaison between Russia and the Muslim community. The Spiritual Assembly had jurisdiction over Muslims across the empire, theoretically, from the Middle Volga and Urals to Siberia and the steppe as well as European Russia. The Mufti and his Assembly were charged with overseeing Muslim marriage, divorce, inheritance, and administrative issues, as well as promoting loyalty to state and dynasty. The Authority defined Muslim law, provided oversight of Islamic educational institutions, and standardized the appointment of mullahs and religious teachers; the Russian state paid for building new mosques and madrasas in Ufa and Orenburg provinces. With this reform, Russia gained administrative access to the Bashkir community and shaped the terms of imperial interaction with the Muslims of the empire.
Finally, Russia, as it did elsewhere, used military administration to co-opt and create loyal servitors. In 1798 a Bashkir-Meshcheriak Host was assembled under Russian military supervision, a primarily Muslim Cossack-style adjunct to the Russian army. The Bashkir territory was divided into Bashkir and Meshcheriak cantons for recruitment; their role, along with the Orenburg Cossacks, was to maintain the fortified lines, serving two-year stints. The Orenburg to Verkhne-iaisk line paid a salary of 10-20 rubles a year, the more volatile Siberian line to the east yielded 30-50 rubles a year. In 1767 in Orenburg province there were 195,000
Bashkirs, 94,000 East Slavic peasants, 60,000 nobles, 10,000 retired soldiers, and 49,000 Cossack troops. Thus the Bashkirs clung to their traditional military status and lands through the eighteenth century, even while being increasingly surrounded and integrated into Russian imperial life.
KALMYKS AND KAZAKHS
The defensive lines that stretched from the mouth of the Iaik on the Caspian more than 3,000 km to Ust-Kamenogorsk on the Irtysh defined Russia's border with steppe peoples with whom Russia painstakingly worked to create stable relations and eventually dominance. The process advanced but was not concluded in the eighteenth century, and this border also became a quintessential middle ground. Bands of Cossacks helped in securing this border, presenting problems of their own. Russia's goals moving into the Caspian steppe were much the same as approaching the Black Sea steppe with fortified lines in the previous century: to protect against raids, to open up fertile land for peasant farming and to prevent runaway serfs from fleeing.
Relations with the Kalmyks were volatile and tragic in this century. They inhabited the Volga's left bank and had been in tenuous treaty relationship with Russia since 1655. Michael Khodarkovsky has written eloquently of the misunderstandings and intentional misinterpretations by which Russia manipulated their interactions and tightened control; the Kalmyks in turn kept their options open, revolting, raiding, and occasionally allying with Crimean or Nogai neighbors against Russia. By 1718 Russia had completed the Tsaritsyn fortified line, linking the Don and Volga, depriving Kalmyks of access to their grazing lands to the north, and boxing them in an increasingly small swath of steppe, surrounded by hostile Don Cossacks, Nogais, and Kazakhs. In the 1720s Russia used significant military force to subdue the Kalmyks, sparking internal disarray that worked to Russia's advantage. Russia began to intervene in their affairs; in 1741 Kalmyks cooperated in compiling a legal handbook for disputes between Kalmyks and Russians, based heavily on Russian practice and norms.
The Kalmyk steppe land, like Bashkiria, saw aggressive in-migration of Russian and Ukrainian peasants: by 1764 Kalmyks constituted only 67 percent of the population, by 1795 only 48 percent. By the 1760s Russia was interfering in Kalmyk self-government, supervising the elections of officials and demanding more military service; Russian in-migrants were seizing grazing lands. Thus, in January 1771 when the Qing empire invited the Kalmyks to settle in Mongolia, about two-thirds embarked on a mass exodus. Failing to stop them, Russian troops incited Kazakhs to harass the Kalmyks; other nomad tribes continued attacking them across Central Asia and thousands died on the journey. In angry response, Russia abolished the Kalmyk khanate and placed those Kalmyks who remained under the jurisdiction of the governor in Astrakhan. When the 1775 administrative reforms were brought here in the 1780s, local native courts were created, accommodating the Kalmyks. Decimated in number and power, Kalmyks on the Volga retained their nomadic life style and status as iasak people well into the nineteenth century.
Russia was less able to subdue the Kazakhs in the eighteenth century. As Russia sought to safeguard caravan traffic across the Central Asian steppe into western Siberia, the most pressing challenge it faced was Kazakh attack. Pushed by the Dzhungars in the first third of the eighteenth century, two groups of Kazakhs moved from Central Asia into the Caspian steppe. In 1731 the Small Horde, which had taken up the left bank steppe of the Iaik between the Caspian and Urals, created a treaty alliance with Russia, as did the Middle Horde in 1740 (it had settled the steppe south of western Siberia).
As they began to interact with the Russian empire, Kazakhs presented a classic Central Asian nomadic society. They were Turkic speakers, Islamic since the time of the Mongol empire. Their religious practice, however, was syncretic. Nomadic, they did not maintain mosques and Islamic schools; they did not learn Arabic; their Muslim practice was complemented by shamanistic rituals around cults of ancestors and animism, revering spirits of sun and moon, earth and animals, fire and water. Typical of nomadic peoples, they practiced oral tradition, preserving clan genealogies and martial achievements in epics that celebrated the perils and traditions of nomadic life. They practiced typical steppe nomadism, moving from summer to winter pastures in regular circuits, described in Chapter 3. Kazakhs grazed sheep, goats, horses, and, in the south, camels, subsisting on a traditional diet of milk products, mutton, and horse meat; they were renowned as falconers.
Treaties established only a tenuous stability between the Kazakhs and Russia, generally honored in the breach. Many Kazakhs participated with rebellious Iaik Cossacks and Bashkirs in the Pugachev rebellion (1773-5); in 1791-4 a Kazakh rebellion broke out against Russian in-migration whose unrest simmered well into the next century. Russia constantly renegotiated relations with the Kazakhs, often foiled by the intrinsic disunity of the widespread Kazakh tribes. The Small Horde fell under Russian control somewhat earlier than did the Middle Horde. When Catherine II's administrative reforms were brought to the steppe frontier in the 1780s, Kazakh lands were still not a part of the empire. But a court was created in Orenburg in 1784 to mediate disputes between subjects of the Russian empire and Kazakhs of the Small Horde, with six elected representatives from each side. It used Russian law but heeded natives' concerns. Russia also tried to abolish the Small Horde's khan-based government, which efforts met with the same opposition that similar meddling had sparked among the Kalmyks. Russia backed down, allowing the Small Horde to keep its khanate, but asserting more oversight. The Middle Horde remained outside of formal structures of Russian control such as governor- generalships into the nineteenth century.