CURTAILING THE MIDDLE GROUND
As in the seventeenth century, Russia depended upon Cossacks on its various steppe frontiers to play the role of intermediaries, fending off nomadic attack and protecting Russian settlers, fortifying the border against runaways fleeing the empire. Robust communities of Cossacks existed on the Dnieper and Don, the Black Sea, and northern Caucasus areas, and in the Kalmyk-Kazakh steppe frontier. Russian policy towards such Cossack Hosts, however, tightened in the eighteenth century, more systematically curtailing their autonomies and regularizing them into Russian military service. In 1721, for example, Russia shifted oversight for Cossack Hosts from the College of Foreign Affairs to the College of War, a symbolic demotion and sign of a long-term intent to regularize their service. The process proceeded at different paces with each group. In 1774, Catherine II put her formidable governor of the southern borderlands, Grigorii Potemkin, in charge of all Cossack formations and irregular troops; he embarked on reforms that reverberated from Zaporozhia through the Hetmanate, the Don, and Iaik.
Along the fortified line south of Orenburg to the Caspian the Iaik Cossacks had been in service to Russia since the late sixteenth century. On the one hand, Iaik Cossacks developed in much the same way as had the Don Cossacks in the preceding century. As population grew and their economy shifted from fishing to lucrative cattle and sheep husbandry, an elite of Cossack officers emerged, more beholden to Russia. By the 1730s Russia was interfering in their affairs, in 1738 deposing an ataman; by the 1770s the Iaik Cossack hetman was appointed by Russia and the governor-general of Orenburg oversaw the host. But such actions chafed, and in 1772 in response to Russian efforts to regularize them as a military unit and infringe on their practice of the Old Belief, Iaik Cossacks revolted, slaughtering a Russian garrison and its commander. This rebellion was harshly suppressed but within a year Iaik Cossacks took the lead in the Pugachev rebellion in 1773-5. Russia's response was to destroy the Iaik Host, replacing it with a newly recruited Host under supervision of the Orenburg governor-general, surrounded by an increased number of Russian garrisons. The names of the Host and River were changed to Ural, and the new Ural Host was subject to a regularized model of Cossack service that included a term (generally three years) on active duty anywhere in the empire, seventeen years' duty in local defense, and five more in local policing. Thereafter the empire deployed Ural Cossacks throughout the empire, often exceeding the three-year active duty limit.
Russia created other Cossack Hosts on the Kalmyk and Kazakh steppe as the border prospered. Constructing in the 1730s to 1750s the fortified lines discussed herein that stretched from the mouth of the Iaik River to the Altai mines, Russia directed Central Asian trade to customs depots at either end of the line—Orenburg and Semipalatinsk. Like Astrakhan, these towns became vibrant multicultural centers ofRussian, Tatar, and Bukharan merchants, home to churches and mosques. Russia created what came to be called the "Line," a sixteen-kilometer-wide zone of fertile grazing land between Orenburg and the Altais exclusively for Cossacks, closed to Kazakhs and Russian peasants (see Map 4). Recruited to staff the Line with land grants and trade privileges, a new, multi-ethnic population of Cossacks developed here, called variously Orenburg, Siberian, and Irtysh Cossacks. These Hosts began life already constricted by Russian oversight, even though they maintained self-governing autonomies and characteristic lifestyles. All manner of people flocked to this fertile farmland: Orthodox Slavs (Russians, Ukrainians), foreign prisoners of war (Lithuanians and Swedes), native Siberian peoples (who were animist or Muslim), Kazakhs (Muslim), and Kalmyks (Buddhist).
From the 1770s Russia recruited Kazakhs of the Middle Horde into the Irtysh Line as Line Cossacks. Impoverished Kazakhs were also invited to settle deeper into Siberia, receiving grazing land in return for militia service; by 1819 more than 12,000 Kazakhs had moved into Omsk Oblast, where they joined Russian and Ukrainian peasants and adapted aspects of East Slavic life, shifting from sheep to cattle grazing, adding to their meat-based diets Russian vegetables and soups. Some became laborers for Russian peasants and Cossacks; some converted to Orthodoxy. Cultural interchange worked in the other direction as well, as Yuriy Malikov has described. Line Cossacks used Russian as a local lingua franca, but they (and their surrounding communities) also spoke Kazakh; nominally Orthodox, Cossacks mixed animism or inclined to the Old Belief. Some became enmeshed in Kazakh culture: they traded goods, they adopted Kazakh food (horse meat, kumys), sheep husbandry, clothing styles, and mounted military skills. They intermarried; they bought Kazakh children as slaves for labor, despite its illegality. In their conflicts with Kazakhs, Line Cossacks used steppe customary law, resisting Russian courts until late in the century.
Russian control of Cossack Hosts, however, only went so far. They may have been "regularized" under military control, but the state allowed them their own independent regiments and many of their long-standing autonomies. Russian control did not change essential Cossack culture. Whether in Zaporozhia, the Don, Iaik, Kuban, Terek, or the Irtysh Line, Cossacks prided themselves on their free-booting, self-governing lifestyle. Multi-ethnic, multi-religious, these paramilitary bands fought for the glory of clan and Host, not for Russia. Starting in the late eighteenth century Russia tried to shift that allegiance, to instill in Cossack Hosts across the empire a spirit of loyalty to Russia. Russia founded schools in the Don and Urals, promoted Orthodoxy and invented military honors and regalia to honor Cossack bands loyal to Russia. In 1827 Tsarevich Alexander (the future Alexander II) was proclaimed ataman of the Don, Ural, and Terek Hosts. As Cossack elites became more prosperous, more settled, and more assimilated to the imperial nobility, some bought into this identity; by mid-nineteenth century some were writing histories that recast their pasts as Russian and Orthodox from the start. By the end of the nineteenth century the myth of the Cossack as the most loyal of Russia's sons and most fervent defender of the tsar was well established, but it little resembles the Cossacks' more complex origins.
NORTHERN CAUCASUS
Although Russia coveted the northern Caucasus—a rich flatland of black earth north of the Kuban and Terek rivers—in the eighteenth century it remained, like the Kazakh steppe border, a middle ground of many indigenous groups where Russian claims to power were at best represented by Cossack intermediaries.
Already in the sixteenth century the steppe above and the valleys of the Terek and Kuban Rivers were the domain ofCossacks who generally engaged in piracy, plunder, and highway robbery, serving Russia when it suited them. They included Turks, Iranians, runaway Ukrainian and Russian peasants, and Cossacks, Dagestanis, Kalmyks, Georgians, Armenians, Ingush, Ossetians; they were animist, Muslim, Orthodox, Old Believers, and Georgian Christian. Terek Cossacks clustered around the nominally Russian fortress town of Terskii Gorod (founded 1588), whose population of perhaps 20,000 in the late seventeenth century was primarily locals, rather than Cossacks or Russians. In the sixteenth century Russia had forged alliances (Ivan IV married a Georgian princess in 1562) and even claimed control of "Georgia, Kabarda and Circassia" in the tsar's title in 1594. But Terskii Gorod's nominal Russian presence constituted no great foothold of power.