Bashkirs in Imperial Discourse of Peter The First

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to consider the extent to which the policies of the government of Peter I in the Ufa province correspond to the modern ideas of imperial government. According to the concept of C. Tilly, the desire to unify legal statuses and eliminate the methods of indirect governance inevitably leads to the destruction of imperial structures. On the contrary, J. Burbank and F. Cooper note that such a policy corresponds to the Roman type of empires. In fact, the Russian authorities are switching to the Roman type of imperial government at the beginning of the 18th century. On the contrary, the pre-Petrine Russia was peculiar to the Eurasian imperial type, involving the differentiated control of different peoples. Bashkirs, who considered their citizenship to be contractual, i.e. privileged, had armed resistance to the egalitarian transformations of the beginning of the 18th century, which by 1711 led to the breakdown of subservient relations. The failure of the reforms in the Ufa province was due to the fact that they violated the principle of "protection-obedience", according to which the degree of loyalty of a given people is due to the level of its state protection. From the middle of the 16th century. up to the 40s 18th century. Bashkirs possessed a military organization of tribal militia, independent of the Russian authorities. The southeastern border was not part of the All-Russian border guard system, and the Russian authorities were forced to allow a relatively high level of autonomy for the Bashkir communities.