Beyond borders, between worlds: Russian Empire and the making of the Don steppe frontier

Abstract

In 1887, Tsar Alexander III wrote to the Don Cossack military Host to congratulate it on over three hundred years of service to Russia. He highlighted the fact that in the sixteenth century the Don Host and the Russian Empire matured together. The Cossacks “began to serve Russia in a period in which her might was only being born” and the Host “with its mighty breast guarded these [imperial] boundaries and facilitated the expansion of the territories of the Russian tsardom.” The narrative of how the Don Cossacks served the rising Russian Empire is a familiar one, but the services that empire rendered to the emergence of the Don Cossacks are less familiar. The empire's role in shaping the boundaries (ethnic, juridical, territorial) of Cossack communities was no less important than the Cossacks' role in advancing imperial boundaries. While Don Cossacks indeed became bulwarks of Romanov power in a changing steppe in the era of Peter I, this imperial arrangement is all too often anachronistically projected onto earlier periods of the region's history. Few other populations in the empire could trace their ties to the tsars to a time before there was a Romanov dynasty or point to a privileged relationship with Russia that ran the entire course of its imperial history, but the view of Cossacks as loyal border guards was only created in the eighteenth century as they searched for a new role for themselves in the waning years of the steppe frontier.