Russia turned serious attention to the north Caucasus during Peter I's Persian campaigns, contesting this area with Crimean Tatars and the Ottoman empire. For most of the eighteenth century Russia struggled to build a presence here. It drew upon local Cossacks to staff forts at Kizliar and Mozdok and imported newcomers as well. In the 1720s Russia ordered 1,000 families of Don Cossacks to move to the northern Caucasus, perhaps a late step of punitive relocation after the Bulavin uprising of 1707-8. Kizliar became the hub of several groups of Cossacks called generically Terek Cossacks. In 1721 Russia put these Cossacks, as others in the empire, under the supervision ofthe College ofWar, but Russian power was lightly imposed at this point.
Russian power became more solidified here from the 1760s with success in wars against the Ottoman empire and construction of fortified lines against attack from Chechens and Karbardinians. A Caucasus Line was built in the 1760s-80s, stretching from Azov on the Black Sea southeast through Stavropol and to fortresses on the Terek River at Mozdok, from there along the left bank of the Terek to Kizliar near its mouth at the Caspian. This created a semicircular fortified line across the northern Caucasus. In 1794 to the south, paralleling the Azov-Kizliar line, a line was constructed from Ekaterinburg just west of Mozdok on the mid- Kuban River to the strait of Kerch. To staff these new lines, in the 1790s Russia moved some of the disbanded Zaporozhian Cossacks to create a Black Sea Cossack Host north of the Kuban River; Nogais disrupted in the Black Sea steppe also joined Cossack Hosts in the northern Caucasus and the Don Cossacks. These Cossacks manned garrisons, defended against attack, served as couriers and military escorts, and performed cartage, road, and bridge-building services.
Their presence provided stability for peasant in-migration that both supported these military forces and expanded Russia's imperial presence. In the 1760s Russia recruited Ossetians as settlers, awarding tax benefits for Christianization, and in the 1780s it moved some 68,000 state peasants, generally odnodvortsy, here. Forcible transfers were joined by runaway East Slavic peasants and Old Believers and, in what Thomas Barrett calls a "great reshuffling of Caucasian populations," great numbers of northern Caucasus peoples. Armenians, Georgians, Ingush, Ossetians, Chechens moved behind Russian lines to farm, raise grapes and silkworms, and to trade.
Although Russia's expansion into the Caucasus was aimed at its pivotal economic location, the area posed a persistent ethical challenge to Russia as well. Since the times of Herodotus, the Caucasus had been the source of a bustling slave trade that continued unabated as the Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman empires successively took over control of the Black Sea and its slave markets. Poor in resources, slaving provided necessary income to warrior tribes in the northern Caucasus and to Georgian princes and nobles in the south. In what Liubov d'Herlugnan calls a "ritualized" pattern of raiding and warfare, neighbors raided neighbors for slaves and cattle in seasonal campaigns, sending the booty immediately along slave routes that led to the great emporia ofCrimea. Many ofthese slaves were Christian, posing an ethical dilemma for Russia as it pushed into the Caucasus. Governors were told to shelter Christians seeking refuge from slavers, to ransom or forcibly seize any Christian slaves they encountered. With the capture of Crimea in the 1770s, its slave emporia were shut down, but markets simply moved and Russia battled the Caucasus slave trade well into the next century.
East Slavic presence in the northern Caucasus provinces in the eighteenth century joined a diverse society of peoples, cultures, and political economies. In Kizliar in the 1770s, for example, 92 percent of the population was non-Russian, and the town featured more mosques and Armenian churches than Orthodox. Different groups specialized economically: Georgians and Armenians were active in viticulture and sericulture; mountain people (Ingush, Chechen, Ossetian) provided labor or artisan work, and some practiced animal husbandry on the steppe. The Kuban valley with its black earth supported rich farming. The valley of the Terek increased in fertility as one moved upstream into black earth territory, supporting wine, vegetables, and animal husbandry at the Caspian end and field crops farther west.
As Cossacks and non-military settlers multiplied, they demanded farm labor and followed local custom in practicing indentured servitude, which existed here long after it had been outlawed in the Russian center (1718). Cossacks interacted with their surrounding societies much as the Line Cossacks did with the Kazakhs; they crossed fortified lines to trade, they adopted local technologies of farming and husbandry. Despite Russian efforts to Christianize and Russianize Cossacks in the northern Caucasus, they met relatively little success in the eighteenth century. Many who were Christian adhered to the Old Belief; others were Islamic; there was much intermarriage with native peoples. From the late eighteenth into the nineteenth century, as with Line Cossacks, Russia tried to build their identification with Russia, empire, and tsar by creating honors, banners, standards, and special imperial regiments, but Terek and Black Sea Cossacks persistently identified more with Cossack independence. They sang of Stepan Razin's rebellion and the Old Belief; they identified locally, not even regionally, let alone with the entire empire.
Russia's economic and political focus in the northern Caucasus remained Astrakhan, still a major trade center even after Orenburg diverted Silk Road trade at mid-century. Astrakhan was an urban metropolis claimed by Russia but surrounded by semi-autonomous lands of Kalmyks, Nogais, and Kazakhs. A diverse urban community, Astrakhan enjoyed populations of Armenian, Tatar, and Indian international traders, each group with its own rights, including separate judicial systems and laws (in addition to having access to Russian courts) and tax differentials, painstakingly described along with the area's flora and fauna by St. Petersburg scientist Samuel Gottlieb Gmelin in 1770. Non-elite Russian townsmen in Astrakhan paid taxes, while non-elite Tatars did not; Armenian and Indian communities paid a lump sum to avoid direct tax and services. Surrounding Astrakhan were seven Tatar towns that enjoyed tax and service privileges. Astrakhan's administrative diversity was somewhat curtailed by Catherinian reforms. Early in her reign, in the 1760s, a single court for non-Russians was established, replacing the separate courts for Armenians, Tatars, and Indians, but it functioned according to each group's native laws nevertheless. When introduced in the 1780s, the 1775 reforms created a new judicial apparatus of a lower and upper court with Russian law. These reforms also introduced the poll tax more widely for non-elite Russian residents of Astrakhan and increased taxes or service burdens on such groups as the Armenians and suburban Tatars. Outside of Astrakhan, the reforms instituted a simplified hierarchy of local courts, centered in Ekaterinburg; similar to the Kazakh border, a lower level court was also created for suits involving subjects of the Russian empire and Georgians and others beyond Russian borders. Here, native assessors and customs were used, with appeal to upper courts in Ekaterinburg using Russian law with Russian and native assessors. The state, in other words, respected local differences even while imposing the new empire-wide administrative model.
DON COSSACKS
The Don Cossacks fared better than many other semi-autonomous groups on the empire's periphery, resisting being destroyed, transformed into a mere province or merged into Russian regular army units as Zaporozhian and Iaik Cossacks were from the 1770s. Through the eighteenth century Don Cossacks had skillfully negotiated their relationship with Russia. In 1707-8, Kondratii Bulavin led Don Cossacks in a rebellion that recalled the Stepan Razin rebellion (1670-1). Impoverished Cossacks in northern Don territories rebelled against the Cossack elite that was working with Russian authorities to deport or demote them to peasant status. Having brutally suppressed a musketeer uprising in Moscow in 1698, Peter I had no mercy for another rebellion within a decade. He responded with what Brian Boeck calls a "scorched earth" policy, unlike anything Muscovite tsars had ever meted out to Cossack rebels. Over 90 percent of the population in the northern Don Cossack region was killed, their communities razed, and more than half a million acres of Don Cossack lands seized for Russian settlement. But loyal Cossacks were treated to the model that Muscovy developed in the wake of Left Bank Hetman Ivan Mazepa's defection in 1708: rewards and privileges for the loyal and Muscovite control over the appointment of hetmans and officers. Peter appointed the next Don Cossack ataman for life (the position was usually for one or two years) and thereafter Moscow required approval of ataman elections. In 1721 Russia put the Host under the administration of the Military College and created a Chancery of Elders to improve communications with Moscow and co-opt more of the Cossack elite into Russian service. At crucial moments (1718, 1723) Don Cossack leaders acquiesced to Russian demands by deposing elected atamans; in 1720 they conducted a census to register members and cut off Cossack status to newcomers, instituting a passport system. They cooperated with imperial foreign policy by respecting a fixed border with the Ottoman empire and ceasing their raiding across it. They deployed to war wherever the tsar sent them throughout the century (three Turkish wars, Polish wars) and even wars against Napoleon.