Nicola Di Cosmo, Allen J. Frank, and Peter B. Golden, eds., The Cambridge History of Inner Asia: The Chinggisid Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 380-91.
On the Don and other Cossacks and northern Caucasus: Thomas M. Barrett, At the Edge of the Empire: The Terek Cossacks and the North Caucasus Frontier, 1700—1860 (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1999); Brian J. Boeck, Imperial Boundaries: Cossack Communities and Empire-Building in the Age of Peter the Great (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Bruce W. Menning, "The Emergence of a Military-Administrative Elite in the Don Cossack Land, 1708-1836," in Walter McKenzie Pintner and Don Karl Rowney, eds., Russian Officialdom: The Bureaucratization of Russian Society from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 130-61; Philip Longworth, The Cossacks (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1970) and his "Transformations in Cossackdom 1650-1850," in Bela K. Kiraly and Gunther E. Rothenberg, eds., War and Society in East Central Europe, Vol. 1 (New York: Brooklyn College Press, distributed by Columbia University Press, 1979), 393-407; Willard Sunderland, Tamingthe Wild Field: Colonization and Empire on the Russian Steppe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004). On slavery: Liubov Kurtynova-D'Herlugnan, The Tsar's Abolitionists: The Slave Trade in the Caucasus and its Suppression (Leiden: Brill, 2010); Christoph Witzenrath, ed., Eurasian Slavery, Ransom and Abolition in World History, 1200-1860 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015).
On Siberia, see Andrew A. Gentes, Exile to Siberia, 1590-1822 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Christoph Witzenrath, Cossacks and the Russian Empire, 1598-1725: Manipulation, Rebellion and Expansion into Siberia (London and New York: Routledge, 2007); Willard Sunderland, "Russians into Iakuts? 'Going Native' and Problems of Russian National Identity in the Siberian North, 1870s-1914," Slavic Review 55 (1996): 806-25; Janet Hartley, Siberia: A History of the People (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014); James Forsyth, A History of the Peoples of Siberia: Russia's North Asian Colony, 1581-1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Li Narangoa and R. B. Cribb, Historical Atlas of Northeast Asia, 1590-2010: Korea, Manchuria, Mongolia, Eastern Siberia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014); Ryan Tucker Jones, Empire of Extinction: Russians and the North Pacific's Strange Beasts of the Sea, 1741-1867 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
5
Western Borderlands in the Eighteenth Century
The eighteenth century witnessed breath-taking expansion westward and south to the Black Sea, fulfilling long-standing imperial goals. Peter I accomplished major expansion on the Baltic, while Catherine II presided over major gains from the Ottoman empire and Commonwealth ofPoland-Lithuania. Although Catherine II, guided by cameralism and Enlightenment, attempted to impose some administrative standardization, this was not a century of homogeneity. Brought into the Russian empire, these lands were allowed to maintain their well-articulated political systems and social elites. Side by side with Russian central administration, law, taxation, social services, and governance continued in Livonia, the Hetmanate, Jewish communities, Magdeburg Law towns, the Duchy of Courland and lands of Right Bank Ukraine in a greatly different manner than in the center. Westward expansion more than any other demonstrates Russia's politics of difference.
TOWARDS THE BLACK SEA
By the middle of the eighteenth century the Russian empire was in a strong position to lay claim to the Black Sea steppe (Map 5). Successful against the Ottoman empire and the Crimean khanate in the first of three Turkish wars in this century (1735-9), Russia pursued a steady process of integrating these borderlands into the empire, undermining their autonomies and settling the lands with new colonists, for military and economic benefit.
The Zaporozhian Cossacks were among the first big losers. In 1709 they threw their lot in with Hetman Ivan Mazepa against Peter I and suffered in his defeat. Moscow destroyed their fortress and Zaporozhian Cossacks moved to Ottoman protection on the lower Dnieper. On the eve of the Russo-Turkish war of 1735-9, however, the Zaporozhians negotiated a return to their former territories and a semi-autonomous status under Russian control from Kyiv (1734). Russia built a third line (1731-40) to protect the new Zaporozhian Sich territory, reaching 285 km with twenty fortresses from Orel to the Northern Donets. Colonization— peasants and Cossacks from Left and Right Bank Ukraine and Russian odnodvortsy from the east—flourished behind the line. By 1762 the vast lands claimed by the Zaporozhian Cossacks, stretching from the Southern Bug to Sloboda Ukraine, were settled by 33,700 Cossacks and over 150,000 peasants. Here as in the lands of the
Map 5. Provinces of European Russia, Black Sea conquests, partitions of Poland, c. 1795. Modeled on a map from Paul R. Magocsi and Geoffrey J. Matthews, Ukraine: A Historical Atlas (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), map 16.
Hetmanate, the Cossack officer elite (starshyna) dominated the farming, livestock, and trading economy; social tensions arose between them and rank and file.
Like the Bashkirs, Zaporozhian Cossacks were politically outmaneuvered by the Russian empire, surrounded in their own lands by in-migration. In the 1750s Russia established military colonies in the northern corners of Sich lands. Organized as military regiments, Serbian, Bulgarian, Moldavian, and even Ukrainian- speaking peasants were settled as border guards and peasant settlers in New Serbia (1752) and Slaviano Serbia (1754). Border guards paid no direct taxes; state peasants here paid no poll tax but only a land tax, while serfs paid halfthat amount, although in 1776 all peasants were required to provide recruits. In 1764, Catherine II deprived New Serbia and Slaviano Serbia of most of these privileges and integrated these areas into a governor-generalship of Novorossiia (New Russia). In-migration of Ukrainians, Russians, and foreigners intensified. The Zaporozhian Cossacks were being outflanked.
Russia's victory in the 1768-74 Turkish war provided an opportunity to destroy Zaporozhia as a Cossack entity. Alarmed by waves of unrest—in Right Bank Ukraine, New Russia, and Zaporozhia in the late 1760s, the flight of the Kalmyks in 1771, revolt among the Iaik Cossacks in 1772, Bashkirs, Nogai, Iaik Cossack, and Urals peasants all supporting Pugachev 1773-5—Russia resolved to crack down on paramilitary Cossack Hosts. Even though Zaporozhians had fought loyally in the Turkish wars, in June 1775 Russian troops returning from Black Sea battlefields destroyed the Sich fortress. Much of the senior officer corps was arrested, many were exiled to Siberia; many Cossacks were relegated into Russian rank and file, while some became free farmers and around 5,000 fled to serve the Ottoman sultan, settling on the southern Danube. Lands of displaced Cossacks were distributed to Russian nobles or Ukrainian, Russian, and Serbian settlers. Some Zaporozhians returned to Russian service during the Turkish 1787-91 war, settling the Ochakov steppe near Kherson, but after victory in 1792 Russia resettled them to the Kuban to create the Black Sea Cossack Host.