Captive Colonizers: The Role of the Prisoners of War from Poland-Lithuania and the Crimean Khanate in the Russian Subjugation of Eastern Siberia

Abstract

The article focuses on non-Russians who participated in the Russian conquest of eastern Siberia in the seventeenth century. As a result of recurrent wars fought by seventeenth-century Russia against Poland-Lithuania and the Crimean Khanate, numerous Polish-Lithuanian as well as Tatar nobles and soldiers found themselves as captives or prisoners of war in the tsar's service and willy-nilly participated in the colonial enterprize of the Russian Empire. Their numbers and role in the conquest of eastern Siberia cannot be dismissed as merely anecdotic and should perhaps be explained by their "cultural capital" that was consciously used by their new patrons: military experience and commanding skills, but also literacy and—in the case of Tatars—language competencies. While few of them later returned home after peace treaties and amnesties, and desertions to Manchu China are not unknown either, most of them took local wives, adopted Orthodox Christianity, and their offspring has gradually dissolved in the multiethnic Russian- and Yakutspeaking population of eastern Siberia.