Taming the Wild Field: Colonization and Empire on the Russian Steppe

Introduction

Steppe Building

For close to a thousand years, the most important fact about the relationship between the agricultural peoples of the Russian forests and the nomadic pastoralists of the southern steppes was that the forest peoples did not stay where they were. Whether they moved to farm, trade, or serve their state, in small parties or in mass relocations, at their own initiative or that of their government or lords, migrants from the forests were almost always coming to the steppe. Settling at first in the forest-steppe fringes north of the European steppe, then in Muscovite times along the rivers, and by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries along lines of forts, the migrants rapidly colonized the open steppe itself, changing everything in the process. Grasslands were replaced by fields and agricultural pasture; nomads were replaced by peasants (or turned into them); free Cossacks became the Cossack estate; and a place once considered by the Russians’ most learned spokesmen as the very antithesis of Russia became reinvented as one of its essential parts. No other originally un-Russian part of the old Russian empire was affected by the settlement of Russians and other outside migrants, and the related dynamics of Russian political and cultural appropriation, so completely for so long. This book is a study of this process, a history of how a region was created on the ground and in the imagination through the changing phenomenon of colonization itself.

The book’s coverage extends from the period of early Rus', when the Eastern Slavs first started writing about their settlements in the forest-steppe, to the late nineteenth century, when major new agricultural settlement in the European steppe region ended and the Great Siberian Migration began. Despite this broad framework, however, four-fifths of the book is devoted to a study of the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when settlement on the steppe proved most intense. With the emphasis on the period of major Russian incorporation come three basic implications. The first is that the book is indeed a study of the Russian incorporation process, and, as such, it focuses on the Russian state and its colonists. That is, it treats the colonization of the steppe largely through the minds and experiences of the colonizers rather than those of the colonized because the central story being told here, a story of appropriation, was one in which the colonizers’ terms ultimately prevailed. If frontiers are middle grounds, appropriation is a mutual business practiced by both natives and strangers, and power by itself is too crude an instrument for measuring all the subtleties that make up cultural interaction, it is still true that middle grounds (as frontiers) invariably close, that all sides do not come out ahead in the equation, and that traditionally the one with the most guns, germs, and steel has been able to appropriate the other in ways that bring more drastic consequences.¹ Though it took centuries, and was never predetermined, Eastern Slavic agricultural society, with its greater aggregate wealth and larger population, eventually overtook and then eclipsed steppe nomadism; the agents of centralized state power eventually outgunned or bought out the independent men of the frontier; and the spirit of the nation eventually insisted on claiming the nation’s empty spaces. This book begins with times when outsiders and natives were either broadly equal in their ability to affect the other or when the natives’ power was greater, but it ultimately emphasizes the way that outsiders made the natives’ region their own. This does not deny the history or agency of the steppe peoples or diminish the mutuality of colonial encounters. It simply acknowledges the full enormity of the change that the coming of the outsiders entailed.

Second, my work proceeds from the recognition that the outsiders who came to the steppe were diverse and that the appropriation they carried out unfolded on multiple levels and changed over time. At once physical and symbolic, material and imagined, steppe colonization was an evolving process in which rural migrants, landlords, land speculators, gentlemen travelers, poets, scholars, and bureaucrats all played their necessary roles. In other words, my work begins with the premise that the steppe was appropriated not merely through the physical occupation of its land, the displacement or reorganization of its traditional inhabitants, the elaboration of official settlement programs, or as a result of being claimed by or for the Russian imaginaire, but rather through the effects of all these factors. It mattered a great deal that even as a varied constituency of plebeian colonists were moving onto the steppe, the region, its native inhabitants, its new residents, and colonization itself were being continuously invented and reinvented in the plans, fears, and dreams of Russia’s rulers and learned observers. These two planes of experience—steppe and colonization, fact and image—were sometimes contradictory and frequently out of synch, but they were always related, each with its own consequences for the transformation of the region.

Third, my approach stresses the history of steppe colonization as a story of Russian imperialism, with imperialism defined in behavioral terms as the process . . . of establishing or maintaining an empire and empire defined, in turn, as the effective control, whether formal or informal, of a subordinate society by an imperial [one].² The steppe belonged to other peoples before governing Russians ultimately took it over and established and maintained it as part of their empire. The projection of Russian power onto the steppe was thus, in a very basic sense, a matter of imperialism, one no less obvious for having taken place across a continent rather than across oceans and for involving others who were well known rather than peoples and things never heard of, seen, or dreamed of before.³ Yet, for all this, the Russian colonization of the steppe has rarely been interpreted as a deliberate story of imperialist expansion, especially by Russians but also by Western specialists who have—to varying degrees—followed their cue.⁴ Instead, the movement of Slavs and other migrants into the steppe and other agricultural peripheries, such as Siberia, has been viewed as a matter of resettlement (pereselenie), spreading out (rasselenie), or internal colonization (vnutrenniaia kolonizatsiia, an adaptation of the Germans’ innere Kolonisation, seized on by late imperial Russian observers looking for a suitable analogy for the Russian process). Similarly, peasant colonization has generally been approached from the perspective of agricultural and demographic expansion rather than from that of empire; and the imposition of Russian power and Russian norms on peripheral territories and peoples, while undeniably involving cases of conquest and expropriation, has been characterized as a process of incorporation and economic development—both ideas contained within the Russian term osvoenie, which means, literally, the making of something other into one’s own. The question of empire in colonization is thus either elided altogether or, more commonly, treated as a natural process, part of Russia’s supposedly natural national development. Much as in China, where it is more common to see Qing expansion as a process of unification rather than conquest, or in the United States, where visions of a Turnerian frontier (a zone of ‘free’ land and opportunity) are still more powerful than notions of La Frontera (borderlands . . . of trade, violence, conquest, and cultural exchange), the proposition that Russian colonization was imperialist sounds at best unusual.⁵ Colonization, as the historian Vasilii Kliuchevskii famously put it, is the basic fact of Russian history, but it has rarely been interrogated as a basic fact of Russian imperialism.⁶

Taming the Wild Field emphasizes the imperialism in colonization, though this approach necessarily means highlighting what it is about the process that has allowed it to appear so unimperialist. Indeed, the ambiguities of Russian colonization were striking and persistent, and nowhere was this more obvious than on the steppe. The representatives of the Muscovite tsars conquered and encroached on parts of the grasslands but did not seek to appropriate them in any comprehensive manner; the imperial agents of St. Petersburg, by contrast, loudly claimed the entire region in the name of science, utility, European-style colonialism, and the Russian way, but they never declared or treated the steppe as a clear-cut colony and for a long time preferred foreign to Russian colonists. Similarly, the coming of ordinary Russians, foreigners, and other migrants led to the expropriation of native lands and the eventual end of nomadism and the Cossack frontier—all effects comparable to the consequences of imperialism in European settler colonies—yet the migrants’ arrival on the Russian plains did not give rise to a settler society in which stratification [was] based more on race and ethnicity than on socioeconomic class. Indeed, until the end of the tsarist era (and beyond) the state displayed the same colonial paternalism toward its own Russian commoners that it displayed toward its officially colonized non-Russian aliens, some of whom themselves doubled as colonizers.⁷ Furthermore, for longer than was the case in Western or Central Europe, Russia’s internal expansion (the intensification of settlement and the reorganization of society) and external expansion (colonial conquest and immigration) proceeded together and were almost impossible to disentangle.⁸ The colonization of the steppe, as a result, reflected and produced a particularly complicated kind of imperialism, one in which empire building, state building, society building, and nation building (real and imagined, of Russians and others) invariably intertwined. Uncovering and explaining this process is the central purpose of my story.

The setting for the story is the western end of the great Eurasian steppe belt, also known as the Ponto-Caspian steppe, a vast area that once fell within the limits of so-called European Russia but today is divided between Moldova, Ukraine, the Russian Federation, and Kazakhstan.⁹ The region’s limit to the north is the front edge of the Russian forests, which bends gently upward, running west to east, from central Ukraine to the Central Urals; in the south, the foothills of the Caucasus and the northern shores of the Black and Caspian Seas; in the west, the Danube River; and in the east, the Ural River up to roughly the town of Orenburg. Along its northern edge on the border with the Russian and Ukrainian forests and in the south near the Caucasus, the region is marked by a transition zone of forest-steppe: stands of woods interspersed with prairie. Around the western Caspian, and between the Lower Volga and the Lower Ural Rivers, the region edges toward desert and is characterized, accordingly, by another intermediary zone, the desert-steppe, consisting largely of salt flats and low-lying shrubs. Around the time of the first millennium, A.D., the environment that fell between these edges and transition zones—the steppe proper or the open steppe—was all grassland: a continuous, mostly treeless, dry (though not arid) plain, less elevated and flatter along the seas and more rolling and elevated in the northeast toward the Urals and in the south toward the Caucasus Mountains, but characterized throughout by one-to-five-foot tall drought- and frost-resistant grasses and forbs, such as fescues, oat and rye grasses, sedges, sagebrush, feather grass, and wild onion, as well as numerous varieties of seasonal wildflowers—perfumed hyacinths, scarlet tulips, valerians, irises. The steppe’s topsoils were chernozem (black-earth), in some places in the forest-steppe and much of the steppe proper up to three feet deep, with less fertile chestnut-brown and salinated soils more common as the plains approached the seashores and in the desert-steppes near the Caspian.

At this time, the only people who had successfully adapted to life on the open steppe were shamanist, Turkic-speaking, horse-riding nomadic pastoralists, who, with the exception of the more institutionalized Khazar kaganate centered in the Lower Volga and Northern Caucasus, tended to be organized into loose tribal unions.¹⁰ Though the nomads (to varying degrees) practiced vestigial or supplementary agriculture, wintering in semipermanent camps, their principal economic occupation was livestock production, which they ensured by moving between different pastures in regular seasonal migrations with their herds (horses, sheep, and, to a lesser extent, goats, cattle, and camels).¹¹ Dependent on their animals and with little surplus to spare, the nomads’ economy was always precarious, which meant that they were never self-sufficient. They raided rival nomadic tribes on the grasslands or joined them in tribal confederations to increase their herds or expand or defend their claims to pasture, water supply, and seasonal migration routes. Politics among nomadic groups was also shaped by shifting configurations of power on the eastern end of the steppe highway near China, where large steppe-based empires would form, producing migrations or invasions that displaced or incorporated the nomadic societies to the west. The formation of these eastern steppe empires was directly related to relations with the Chinese, a circumstance that points to an essential fact of steppe nomadic pastoralism: the people who practiced it were always tied to and dependent on the world of the sedentarists.¹² This was as true for the nomadic societies of the European steppe as it was for those farther east. Through either trading, raiding, military service, or royal diplomacy, the western nomads were enmeshed with the agricultural societies and empires that bordered their territories: with the Byzantines in the Pontic region, the outposts of Arab power in the North Caucasus and Transcaucasia, the Turkic-ruled states of the northern Middle East, Central Asia, and Middle Volga (Volga Bulgaria), and, to the northwest, in an area where the forest and steppe ran together, with the people eventually known as the Rus'.¹³

1 Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region (New York, 1991); Greg Dening, Possessing Tahiti, in his Performances (Chicago, 1996), p. 167; Stuart B. Schwartz, Introduction, in Schwartz (ed.), Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting, and Reflecting on the Encounters between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era (New York, 1994), p. 7; Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York, 1999); Richard J. Perry, . . . From Time Immemorial: Indigenous Peoples and State Systems (Austin, Texas, 1996), pp. 223–52.

2 Michael W. Doyle, Empires (Ithaca, N.Y., 1986), pp. 45, 30.

3 Bernal Díaz, The Conquest of New Spain (trans. J.M. Cohen) (New York, 1963), p. 214.

4 Two prominent exceptions to this general rule are Michael Khodarkovsky and An dreas Kappeler, both scholars whose works have greatly influenced this study.

5 James A. Millward, New Perspectives on the Qing Frontier, in Gail Hershatter et al. (eds.), Remapping China: Fissures in Historical Terrain (Stanford, Calif., 1996), p. 120; Millward, Beyond the Pass: Economy, Ethnicity, and Empire in Qing Central Asia, 1759–1864 (Stanford, Calif., 1998), pp. 15–16; Laura Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise: Ethnography and Cartography in Early Modern China (Chicago, 2001), pp. 25, 29; Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Adventures of the Frontier in the Twentieth Century, in her Something in the Soil: Legacies and Reckonings in the New West (New York, 2000), pp. 87–88.

6 V.O. Kliuchevskii, Sochineniia v deviati tomakh (Moscow, 1987), v. 1, p. 50.

7 David Prochaska, Making Algeria French: Colonialism in Bône, 1870–1920 (New York, 1990), pp. 9–10; Cathy Frierson, Peasant Icons: Representations of Rural People in Late Nineteenth-Century Russia (New York, 1993); Stephen p. Frank, Confronting the Domestic Other: Rural Popular Culture and Its Enemies in Fin-de-Siècle Russia, in Frankand Mark D. Steinberg (eds.), Cultures in Flux: Lower-Class Values, Practices, and Resistance in Late Imperial Russia (Princeton, N.J., 1994), pp. 74–107; Paul W. Werth, From Resistance to Subversion: Imperial Power, Indigenous Opposition, and Their Entanglement, Kritika, 2000, v. 1, n. 1, p. 22; Yanni Kotsonis, Making Peasants Backward: Agricultural Cooperatives and the Agrarian Question in Russia, 1861–1914 (New York, 1999), pp. 133–34.

8 Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Colonization, Conquest, and Cultural Change, 950–1350 (Princeton, N.J., 1993), pp. 2–3.

9 On the topography, vegetation, climate, and soil structure of the European steppe, see Robert N. Taaffe, The Geographic Setting, in Denis Sinor (ed.), The Cambridge History of Early Inner Asia (New York, 1990), pp. 30–35; John Sparks, Realms of the Russian Bear: A Natural History of Russia and the Central Asian Republics (Boston, 1992), pp. 146–53; John Massey Stuart, The Nature of Russia (New York, 1991), pp. 80–101.

10 On the steppe’s peoples prior to and around the turn of the first millennium, see Peter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples: Ethnogenesis and State-Formation in Medieval and Early Modern Eurasia and the Middle East (Wiesbaden, 1992), pp. 233–82; Golden, The Peoples of the South Russian Steppes, in Sinor (ed.), Cambridge History of Early Inner Asia, pp. 263–84; Imre Boba, Nomads, Norsemen, and Slavs: Eastern Europe in the Ninth Century (The Hague, 1967), pp. 40–43; Ia.A. Fedorov and G.S. Fedorov, Rannye tiurki na severnom Kavkaze (Moscow, 1978); S.A. Pletneva, Pechenegi, torki i polovtsy v iuzhnorusskikh stepiakh, Materialy i issledovaniia po arkheologii SSSR (Moscow and Leningrad, 1958), n. 62, pp. 151–226; and Pletneva (ed.), Stepi Evrazii v epokhu srednevekov'ia (Moscow, 1981), pp. 213–28. For a succinct discussion of the emergence of steppe pastoralism, see Nicola Di Cosmo, Ancient China and Its Enemies: The Rise of Nomadic Power in East Asian History (New York, 2002), pp. 21–43.

11 A.M. Khazanov, Characteristic Features of Nomadic Communities in the Eurasian Steppes, in Wolfgang Weissleder (ed.), The Nomadic Alternative: Modes and Models of Interaction in the African-Asian Deserts and Steppes (The Hague, 1978), pp. 119–26; Golden, Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples, pp. 3, 42. Though it treats contemporary Arab nomads, see also William Lancaster and Fidelity Lancaster, Who Are These Nomads? What Do They Do? Continuous Change or Changing Continuities? in Joseph Ginat and Anatoly M. Khazanov (eds.), Changing Nomads in a Changing World (Brighton, Eng., 1998), pp. 24–37.

12 Peter B. Golden, Nomads and Sedentary Societies in Medieval Eurasia (Washington, D.C., 1998), pp. 38–40; Anatoly Khazanov, Nomads and the Outside World (Julia Crook-enden, trans.) (2nd ed.; Madison, Wisc., 1994), pp. xxxi–xxxii passim. On relations between nomadic peoples and China on the eastern steppes, see Thomas J. Barfield, The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China (Cambridge, Mass., 1992).

13 See David Christian, Russia, Central Asia, and Mongolia, v. 1, Inner Eurasia from Pre-history to the Mongol Empire (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), pp. 245–352, 357–61.

Vid Astrakhani i karta Kaspiiskogo moria (View of Astrakhan and the Caspian Sea) (1678), from the German edition of Jan Struys’s Reisen durch Greichenland, Moscau, Tatarey . . . , reproduced in Natal'ia Borisovskaia, Starinnye gravirovannye karty i plany xv–xviii vekov (Galaxy, Moscow, 1992), p. 155.

CHAPTER ONE

Frontier Colonization

As heaven and earth beget them, men have one same heaven, but each a different earth.

Ch'iu Chün, Supplement to the Expansion of the ‘Great Learning’

THE RUS' LAND AND THE FIELD

According to the Primary Chronicle, when the first Eastern Slavs established themselves in what would become Ukraine and western Russia they settled in woods and along waterways: "So these Slavs came and settled on the Dniepr and called themselves People of the Clearings [poliane]; others called themselves People of the Trees [drevliane] because they settled in the forests; and different ones settled on the Dvina and called themselves People of the Polota [polochane], taking the name of the Polota River, which flows into the Dvina. And those Slavs who settled near Lake Ilmen' called themselves by their own name—Slavs—and they built a town and called it Novgorod [New Town]."¹ The chronicler did not indicate why the Slavs chose to settle in these environments and not others, though it was presumably because the surroundings offered fish, shellfish, berries, honey, furs, game, shelter, and fuel as well as security from enemies and opportunities for farming and trade.² Over time, as the settlers came under the rule of Rus' Varangians from beyond the sea and their rulers, centered in the wooded, riverine town of Kiev, adopted a new religion and literary language from the Greeks, the Slavs’ habitat as well as their Slavic tongue, their written law, and their wise decision to forsake the gloom of idolatry for the sunlight of the true faith became what their Kievan spokesmen saw as their defining attributes.³

Known to the Rus' as the field (pole), the grassy plains that opened up to the south of their settlements appeared completely different. In contrast to the Rus' land (rus'kaia zemlia), the field contained few freshwater lakes or trees, and its inhabitants were nomadic pastoralists who did not speak Slavic, did not farm, had no permanent homes, and had little interest in either written law or the Christian god. Instead, as the chronicler put it, they lived according to the ways of their fathers, which included such unsavory habits as shedding blood, eating carrion and prairie dogs, and sleeping with their stepmothers.⁴ Most disturbing of all, the nomads periodically raided Rus' towns and ambushed their trading parties on the Dniepr, which meant that they were not merely foul and godless but also dangerous. Kievan ecclesiastics, who began writing in the eleventh century, consequently singled out the Pechenegs, Torki (Oghuz), and especially the Polovtsy (Qipchaq, Cumans), who occupied the steppe during that time, as their country’s most heinous neighbors. Indeed their heinousness was so complete that Rus' authors did not conceive of them as members of the inhabitable world made by God (oecumene) but rather as the descendants of apocalyptic peoples (such as the Ishmaelites and the unclean tribes of Gog and Magog) whose eventual victory against the Christians would herald the end of the world.⁵ A pagan place where their meek and suffering monkish brethren were taken away to be tortured and their brave princes went to do battle with the godless armies of the Polovtsians, the plains were the Kievan literati’s ultimate wilderness: the threatening antitype to [their] ordered cosmos and the ultimate disquieting horizon of [their] medieval world.⁶

This was the world according to the churchmen. The world of day-today interaction was different. Relations between the Rus' and the nomads were in fact intimate as well as distant, and peaceful as well as hostile, with physical proximity creating its own rules of engagement. Southern Rus' settlements on the fringes of the forest-steppe could be as little as a few hours’ ride from habitual nomadic pastures and encampments. (According to one early eleventh-century account, it took two days to travel by horse from the town of Kiev to the edge of the land of the Pechenegs.)⁷ Consequently, Rus' princes and commoners went to the field to hunt bison, boar, hare, fox, and antelope or to break wild horses, while the nomads went to Rus' towns to trade, receiving honey, cloth, grain, and metal goods in exchange for horses, cattle, sheep, and hides, all of which, according to the Byzantine emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus, were much appreciated by the Rus' since none of the aforesaid animals is found in Russia.⁸ The Rus' and the nomads were also tied through the Rus'-sponsored trade from the Varangians to the Greeks, which crossed the steppe and consequently depended on the nomads’ cooperation for its success.

Whenever the Rus' refused to provide the nomads with the gifts they expected, or the nomads broke their arrangements with the Rus' by raiding Rus' towns to seize slaves and other booty, the trade suffered, but such hostilities were rarely prolonged enough to shut the trade down completely.⁹ Instead, quite the opposite occurred. The trade endured and the dependencies it created turned the nomads and the Rus' into essential players within each other’s fractious politics, with a necessary blurring of distinctions between the two sides. By the late twelfth century, Rus' princes married nomadic princesses and vice versa; alliances were formed between Rus' and Polovtsy clans against the clans of other Rus' and nomads, and no one had a monopoly on raiding. In his Testament, the Kievan prince Vladimir Monomakh relates attacking his Rus' rivals with his Polovtsy, being raided by the whole Polovtsian land as well as their Rus' allies, rescuing certain Polovtsian princes from their Polovtsian captors, and, in another instance, capturing three Polovtsian princes and some fifteen notables alive and then cut[ting] them down and throw[ing] them into the Sal'nia River.¹⁰ This was right after the prince noted that he had also "made peace with the Polovtsian princes once less than twenty times, both in my father’s day and after his death [i pri otse i bez otsa], and I gave [to them] many of my clothes and heads of stock."¹¹

The most obvious physical example of the complicated consequences of cohabitation was the stretches of earthen ramparts and palisades that the Rus' began building south of their settlements in the time of Vladimir the Great and Iaroslav the Wise. Known to subsequent Slavs as serpentine walls (zmievye valy), the intended purpose of the ramparts was to keep the nomads from raiding Rus' towns, as well as to keep the lands between the walls and the towns from being turned into nomadic pasture.¹² The defenses were also recognized as an obvious dividing line between the Rus' land and the field. As the archbishop Bruno put it, having passed through the gates in an attempt to proselytize among the nomads in 1008, on one side of the ramparts lay the territory of Prince Vladimir while on the other was the land of his enemy . . . the Pechenegs . . . the most evil of pagans.¹³ Yet if the walls were intended as an ordering concept, their practical impact was at best disorderly.¹⁴ They never stopped either the Rus' or the nomads from crossing into each other’s territory when political or economic objectives required it (that is, neither party saw the ramparts as an obstacle to an offensive strategy), and because various Rus' rulers made use of nomadic allies as border guards and servitors, the defenses ultimately brought the Rus' and the nomads together as much as they kept them apart.¹⁵ The walls were not part of a deliberate policy to colonize the land behind them nor were they used as a springboard for taking over the field, since the rulers of Rus' conceived of their dominion in terms of the peoples that render Rus' tribute rather than in terms of territorial possession.¹⁶ And in any case, taking over the steppe was not a realistic proposition. Even if the Rus', as the beneficiaries of an agricultural economy, were in a position to depend less on the nomads than the nomads depended on them, neither the field nor the Rus' land could overwhelm the other with convincing military superiority.¹⁷

THE WILD FIELD AND THE TSARDOM

This rough parity collapsed in 1223 when the Rus' and their Polovtsy allies were routed by an army of unknown peoples (iazytsi neznaeme) on the steppe near the Kalka River.¹⁸ The unknown peoples turned out to be the Mongols, who, some twenty years later, leading one of the largest steppe confederations ever assembled, destroyed Kiev and turned the Rus' into tributaries. This fact at once solidified the Rus' ecclesiastics’ loathing of the field (identified now with these godless Moabites called Tatars) and completely changed Rus' politics.¹⁹ The nomads were now in charge, so much so that the khans of the Golden Horde gradually began settling into a stationary capital on the Lower Volga.²⁰ Kiev was eclipsed, and the obscure principality of Moscow, much further north and deeper within the woods, gradually became the new center of the Rus' lands. As Moscow rose, its princes paid the tribute to the khans, gave them hostages, and were alternatively obedient and rebellious as circumstances allowed. Once the Horde began to unravel, Moscow maintained similarly complicated relations with its fellow successor states, the Turko-Mongolic and Islamicized khanates of Kazan, Crimea, and Astrakhan. Muscovite rulers fought with the khanates over Tatar raiding and slave-taking, took sides in their internal politics, and made claims to patrimonial entitlement. But they also sent embassies seeking friendship and love, recruited Tatar servitors, and engaged in a good deal of commerce. Long-distance merchantmen like Afanasii Nikitin of Tver' shuttled goods between Muscovy and the Derbent Sea—the Sea of Khvalinsk and the Black Sea—the Istanbul Sea, while Muscovite nobles, or boyars, yearly exchanged furs, cloth, and walrus tusks for thousands of horses from their Nogay (Mangyt) friends and brothers on the Volga steppes.²¹ In other words, the familiar realpolitik continued. Conflict with people the churchmen called evil beasts and godless creatures, now all the more heinous for having adopted Islam, did not preclude cooperation, and not even growing commitments to Orthodox messianism could eclipse the worldly pursuits of stability and profit.²²

This remained the case even after the armies of Ivan IV conquered the town of Kazan in 1552. Pragmatism in relations with the steppe continued, only now the presumption was that Moscow alone should be in charge. During the next four years, the men of Ivan Vasil'evich subju-gated the rest of Kazan’s territory, and in the summer of 1556, with the aid and encouragement of their allies among the Nogays, they seized the poorly defended entrepot of Astrakhan at the mouth of the Volga and chased out the independent Astrakhan tsar, replacing him with a Nogay khan obedient to Moscow.²³ Next, the leaders of the Bashkir (Bashkort) clans, former tributaries of Kazan and the Nogays in the Southern Urals, beat [their] foreheads and agreed to submit to Muscovite rule in the 1550s. So, too, did the khanate of Sibir' (later conquered outright by Moscow in 1581). Using Astrakhan as a base, the tsar’s men then pushed around the western end of the Caspian and into the Northern Caucasus, building scattered forts and insisting on the fealty of local princes.²⁴ Of course, even as the Muscovites gathered these remnants of the former Horde, they could not and did not even try for a full sweep by acquiring the Crimea or the north Pontic steppe, inhabited by the Nogay Lesser Horde, who were vassals of the Crimeans. Instead, the Crimeans, themselves vassals of the Ottomans, joined a Turkish-led and ultimately ill-fated expedition against Astrakhan in 1569. Then, two years later,