Closing Gaps or Digging Holes?: Linking Imperial Frontiers in the 18th and 19th Centuries

Abstract

Michael Khodarkovsky, Bitter Choices: Loyalty and Betrayal in Russian Conquest of North Caucasus, xiii + 200 pp. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011. ISBN-13 978-0801449727. $35.00. Yuriy Malikov, Tsars, Cossacks, and Nomads: The Formation of a Borderland Culture in Northern Kazakhstan in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. 321 pp. Berlin: Klaus Schwarz, 2011. ISBN-13 978-3879973958. 39.80 [euro]. Valerii Evgen'evich Vozgrin, Istoriia krymskikh tatar: Ocherki etnicheskoi istorii korennogo naseleniia Kryma (History of Crimean Tatars: Essays in Ethnic History of Crimea's Indigenous Population), 2 (4 vols. altogether). 938 pp. Simferopol': Krymuchpedgiz, 2013. ISBN-13 978-9663545691. The books brought together in this review offer diverse accounts of interactions of Russian Empire with peoples of peripheries who eventually became Russian subjects during 18th and 19th centuries. Each represents an important and ambitious contribution to debates in various regional subfields in history of imperial borderlands. In recent decades, historians have made great advances in broadening purview from an excessive focus on centers of power in St. Petersburg and Moscow to study events and processes in provinces and peripheries of growing empire. The books considered here study parts of what Michael Khodarkovsky calls perennial frontier (7)--that is, steppes north of Black Sea, North Caucasus, and what is now Kazakhstan, much of which was long an area contested by neighboring empires. Since appearance of these books, many of regions and issues they treat have become focal points of international conflict, which only underscores their significance. Until 19th century, however, these areas were never of sufficient strategic value to justify huge budgetary and human losses that Russians accepted before finally turning them into integral parts of empire by 1860s. The authors also cover history of semiperipheral and often independent entities such as Crimean Khanate or Derbent, which comprised large swaths of steppe and mountain frontier. The authors adopt varied, to some extent opposite approaches, mostly inspired by cultural history and anthropology. Yuriy Malikov openly challenges Michael Khodarkovsky's earlier work on imperial frontier, arguing against his contention that the Russian and nomadic civilizations constituted 'two different worlds,' which 'continued to stand apart long after their initial encounter' (1) Khodarkovsky, meanwhile, takes up this challenge and restates his view that two worlds of Russia and steppe--the world of highly centralized empire-state and indigenous, kinship-based societies with rudimentary political organizations--were structurally incompatible. He allows for continuous learning processes by both while underscoring that each side projected upon [the] other its own values and expectations (13). Malikov and Khodarkovsky thus arrive at diametrically opposite conclusions. To Malikov, the ability to become a man in between cultures was a prerequisite for an individual's success in Russian borderlands (294). By contrast, Khodarkovsky argues that his protagonist, Cossack officer Semen Atarshchikov, a man proficient in idioms and cultures of both sides of North Caucasus border, never got a chance to fully establish himself. Rather, he maintained his position as a translator and cultural mediator fostering loyalties to tsar and local people just beyond fortified line to end, and his back-and-forth between them proved to be his undoing. This is mainly why Khodarkovsky has chosen Atarshchikov's biographical materials as basis of his book: he has aimed to write a previously unavailable history of three centuries of North Caucasus under Russian rule. The book comprises whole ethnic mosaic of this divisive region, which would be challenging to most attentive student without biographical framing narrative provided by Atarshchikov's roaming life. …