Steppe Frontier Research Articles

The Role of Weather and the Natural-Climate Factor in the Daily Nomadic Life of the Kalmyks in the Context of Traditional Nature Utilization: Effective Frontier Practices

The article is devoted to the role of the climate factor and weather in the everyday nomadic life and history of the Kalmyks, closely linked with traditional nature management. Based on the study of published and archival materials from the State Archive of the Astrakhan Region, the State Archive of the Saratov Region, and the National Archive of the Republic of Kalmykia, the article examines the main features of the nature management system, the functioning and life of the Kalmyk nomadic society in new geographical conditions, and analyzes the processes of adaptation of nomads to the specific resources of an arid ecosystem. For the Kalmyks, who led a nomadic lifestyle in the past, nature was not only a habitat but also the basis of life. Moving in search of pastures for livestock, Kalmyk pastoralists learned to use natural resources rationally. The article shows how people tried to harness these resources through magical rites. The nomadic way of life, the economic structure, the natural landscape, and the life of the nomad cattle breeder – all predetermined the nature of magic as a whole. Special attention is paid to a system of prohibitions related to nature, land, and water. “Russia’s Steppe Frontier” is an invaluable resource for understanding the Kalmyks’ historical experience in the field of nature management.

V.G. Korolenko’s Essay “At the Cossacks” in the Discourse of Russian Orientalism

D.N. Dyusekenev. V.G. Korolenko's Essay “At the Cossacks” in the Discourse of Russian Orientalism. The article analyzes the essay by V.G. Korolenko “At the Cossacks” (1900) as a work that is directly related to the specific discourse of the “invention of the East”, in which elements of the cultures of Russia, the West and the East are typologically opposed. Based on representations of the Steppe and the way of life of Kazakh nomads in the realistic work of V.G. Korolenko there was detected one of the most important strategies of Russian orientalism of the late Empire period – self-orientalization (the formation of the “inner East” through the description of Russian territories as "eastern"). The steppe frontier is recreated by the writer with the help of ready-made orientalist constructs - stereotypical ideas about the steppe frontier of the Russian Empire, which were formed in Russian society during the period when this space was included in the orbit of Russian culture in the 18th-19th centuries. Based on the material of Korolenko's essay, the following conclusion is made: the “invention” of the Steppe in Russian Orientalism of the late imperial period is carried out due to the construction of a self-sufficient Russian identity.

Sören Urbansky. Beyond the Steppe Frontier: A History of the Sino-Russian Border.

Sören Urbansky’s title, Beyond the Steppe Frontier: A History of the Sino-Russian Border, is somewhat misleading, since the monograph’s subject is not the entire Sino-Russian border but a relatively small portion focused on the Argun river section and the communities of Manzhouli on the Chinese side and Zaibaikalsk on the Russian. Nevertheless, Urbansky’s work is a welcome addition to a growing list of recently published works on the history of the Sino-Russian encounter, such as Victor Zatsepine’s Beyond the Amur (2017) and Mark Gamsa’s Harbin: A Cross Cultural Biography (2020). Urbansky’s goal is a complete political, economic, and social history of the Argun region—a goal with mixed results. There are two primary themes in this monograph. The first is contact—personal, cultural, political, and economic—and the second is the gradual hardening of the border as these empires coalesce into two nation states with defined national identities and concerns about illicit economic, and as the book enters the twentieth century, ideological exchanges. It is the latter theme that is the monograph’s strength as the monograph progresses from loosely guarded imperial frontier to highly policed border.

Editorial

Editorial Joshua Howard The second issue of 2023 presents four research articles and one review essay. Hongling Liang explores how the “Paris group” of Chinese anarchists theorized education in their journal, the New Century, which circulated between 1907 and 1910. In contrast to contemporary educational reformers and a historiography that has linked education to nation building, the anarchists stressed a new kind of education based on scientism, the supralanguage of Esperanto, and moral enlightenment. Although Liang recognizes that the anarchists shared with practitioners of Confucianism a belief in the transformative power of education, she concludes that their cosmopolitan vision of education was significant for breaking free of existing traditions and imagining revolutionary and democratic forms through which education and learning could be implemented. Drawing on memoir literature of underground women operatives active during the Chinese Civil War, Amanda Zhang demonstrates how narratives that highlighted personal sacrifice and physical and psychological hardships were employed as an ideological tool. They refuted gender norms of the “fragile woman” prevalent during the 1940s but could also reproduce tropes of gender inequality. Above all, as part of the operatives’ political rehabilitation during the 1980s, such narratives served to affirm these women’s loyalty to the Communist Party. Emily Wilcox’s fine-grained study of a leading Japanese ballet company’s interpretation and production of The White-Haired Girl and its reception in China during a celebrated 1958 tour reveals more than just a critical missing chapter in the historical evolution of this iconic revolutionary drama. The exchanges ensuing from this instance of Sino-Japanese cultural diplomacy under Maoism, serving several purposes, were productive in multiple ways, not least as a means for audiences in China to “project international aspirations” through the “embodiment and imagination” of a Japanese “people” sharing a yearning for revolution. Zixian Liu’s attention to the material aspect of one popular brand of bedsheet in socialist China supports an argument for a method and a perspective that render visible and tangible the “endeavor to create a distinctive material culture” within the economic system of the Mao era. The Minguang “national bedsheet,” as designed, manufactured, consumed, used, and desired, evoked Maoist “values, sentiments, and ideals” during and long after this period. In his review essay, Edward Tyerman discusses three recent publications about the Sino-Russian border that examine the construction of differences across the borderland, as well as tensions between local and centralizing forces. The works include Franck Billé and Caroline Humphrey’s On the Edge: Life along the Russia-China Border, [End Page 87] Mark Gamsa’s Harbin: A Cross-Cultural Biography, and Sören Urbansky’s Beyond the Steppe Frontier: A History of the Sino-Russian Border. Daniel Asen’s review of Governing the Dead: Martyrs, Memorials, and Necrocitizenship in Modern China by Linh D. Vu is available online at Project MUSE (https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/390). Finally, Emily Wilcox is the author featured for this issue in our interview series, available at http://hstcconline.org/interviews-with-authors/. The interview includes a link for free access to her article, “Sino-Japanese Cultural Diplomacy in the 1950s: The Making and Reception of the Matsuyama Ballet’s The White-Haired Girl.” [End Page 88] Copyright © 2023 Twentieth Century China Journal, Inc

Участие калмыков в переговорах о вступлении кубанского султана Бахта-Гирея под российскую протекцию в 1727 г.

Introduction. The article scrutinizes the 1727 Kalmyk-Kuban contacts and — within the latter — the role of the rebellious Sultan Bahti Giray of Kuban to have dramatically destabilized the Russian-Ottoman steppe frontier. The recent years witness an increasing interest in Bahti Giray’s biography examined in a series of special publications. Goals. The paper aims to introduce some newly discovered data on Kalmyk-Kuban relations. Materials. The work focuses on materials from the National Archive of Kalmykia to have collected unique documents of correspondence between Kalmyk princes and South Russian authorities, as well as secret eyewitness reports on Kalmyk-Kuban contacts. Results. The article provides a detailed historical review of Kalmyk-Kuban relations as of 1727. Conclusions. In 1726–1727, Bahti Giray — after a number of misfortunes — joined another struggle for power in Kuban with the military aid of the Kalmyks. Kalmyk leaders were eager to seize the opportunity for minimizing any threats from Kuban rather than for regaining control over Yedisan and Jamboiluk Nogais. So, those were common military and political interests that brought Bahti Giray and Kalmyk chieftains together. Meanwhile, the Russian Government was worried enough by the tense situation in the Russian-Turkish frontier and sought for various means to neutralize the rebellious sultan — from political murder to proclamation of a protectorate, the latter having been welcomed by both the sultan himself and most Kalmyk princes that took an active part in the negotiation process. However, Colonel V. Beklemishev who was acting as Russia’s chief representative throughout the negotiations did fear the two parties may have initiated a political imitation but had no efficient levers to influence the situation and cancel the forthcoming Kuban campaign.

The Mufti Against the Governor: a Short Confrontation, 1790–1791

The article focuses on the religious policy of the Russian Empire in the early modern period. The aim of the research is to study the mutual relations of the governor A.A. von Peutling and Muhammedjan Khuseinov, the first mufti of Russia and the head of the Orenburg Mohammedan Spiritual Assembly at the beginning of 1790s, which influenced the religious situation on the southern and south-eastern outskirts of Russia. The base of the study is the official correspondence of A.A. von Peutling that described the place of Muslim religious institutions in the Russian system of government. The research methodology is defined by the main interpretations of the Russian religious policy, found in the literature on Islam in Russia. The author identifies the reasons and causes of the official and interpersonal conflict between the governor and the mufti as well as emphasizes the significant independence of the mufti at the beginning of 1790s on the steppe frontier. It is revealed that at that time the mufti was a more significant figure than the governor from the viewpoint of the supreme power. The author concludes that, in general, the religious policy of the Russian Empire during the examined period was invariant, but the regional specifics and subjective factors determined significant differences in its implementation in the South-East compared to the Crimea (then) and the North Caucasus (later).
 The article is addressed to experts in the fields of history of religion and politics of Russia in the 18th century, religious scholars, students, masters and postgraduates of the relevant profile.

Demic Diffusion, Diplomatic Sociability, and an Emergent Trans-National Political Culture in Tenth- and Eleventh-Century Northeast Asia

Demic Diffusion, Diplomatic Sociability, and an Emergent Trans-National Political Culture in Tenth- and Eleventh-Century Northeast Asia Nicolas Tackett An increasing volume of scholarship has examined the question of sinosteppe cultural exchange. Indeed, it is not difficult to identify elements of a common culture shared by political elites on both sides of the border. But whereas there is an extensive tradition of writing about sino-steppe culture as concerns the Tang, with its mixed Särbi-Chinese "northwestern" aristocracy, and also as concerns the Mongol Yuan, somewhat less has been written on the intervening tenth and eleventh centuries, an era dominated by the competition between the Khitan Liao, Chinese Song, and Tangut Xia states. This article will focus on three less well-known examples of trans-border diffusion dating to this intervening period: 1) the bidirectional diaspora of people from Hebei and Hedong and its impact on Song and Liao elite culture; 2) the incorporation of steppe ethnic categories into Song political discourse; and 3) the adaptation of a particular Chinese model of imperial sovereignty at multiple Eastern Eurasian courts. These examples offer an opportunity to rethink the forms, dynamics, and mechanisms of cultural diffusion across the steppe frontier. Traditional Chinese political theory imagines the civilizing sway of the imperial center as spreading out like wind over grass, to cite a well-known passage from the Analects.1 But assuming we do not ourselves believe that wind can serve as a vehicle to disseminate culture, it is necessary to come up [End Page 125] with a clearer understanding of the dynamics of cultural transmission, one that takes into account the historical particularities of tenth- and eleventh-century Northeast Asia. The Hebei-Hedong Diaspora and the Demic Diffusion of Mortuary Culture The decades following the Huang Chao Rebellion and the collapse of the Tang Dynasty were marked by very large-scale migrations of people. The best-known migrants, alluded to in countless accounts of the "Tang-Song Transition," are those who relocated to south China, thereby contributing to the great southward demographic shift of the Chinese population. But perhaps equally significant, especially in terms of their immediate impact on the politics and elite culture of the tenth and eleventh centuries, was the exodus of migrants out of Hebei and Hedong to other parts of the north. As we will see, individuals from this swathe of territory north of the Yellow River would come to play a disproportionately large role at the courts of both the Song and the Liao dynasties. One consequence of these migrations was a new metropolitan elite culture shared by both the "Chinese" Song and the "Khitan" Liao. The first large wave of migrants from Hebei and Hedong accompanied the Shatuo invasion of north China. In the final years of the Tang, the Shatuo Turk Li Keyong 李克用 (856–908) had built up a power base around Taiyuan in central Hedong. Over the course of the Later Liang Dynasty (907–923), his successor, Li Cunxu 李存勗 (884–926), expanded Shatuo control into neighboring Hebei. Whereas most of the military commanders of the emergent regime had steppe origins, the civilian administrative staff included large numbers of local Chinese. Thus, when the Shatuo invaded all of north China in 923, overthrowing the Later Liang and establishing their own new dynasty, the Later Tang, large numbers of people from Hebei and Hedong came in tow. The impact of the 923 invasion on the composition of the political elite was striking, as Wang Gungwu first noted several decades ago.2 Table 1 presents data from standard history biographies. It identifies the regions of origin of officeholders of the most important Henan-based regimes of the tenth century, [End Page 126] Click for larger view View full resolution Table 1. Region of origin of officeholders with standard history biographies (by regime) including the Five Dynasties, as well as the subsequent Song Dynasty. The data reveals a sharp increase in the representation of men from Hebei and Hedong immediately following the 923 Shatuo invasion. The fraction of officeholders from these regions continued to increase through mid-century, reaching a peak of 68% under the Later Han Dynasty. It only declined late in the century, primarily...

Эволюция целинного земледелия Северного Казахстана: детерминанты регионального развития

The agriculture of the Soviet Union, incorporated into the closed economy, significantly lagged behind the Western countries in terms of productivity and labor efficiency due to its extensive nature. Soviet mega-project – the development of virgin and fallow lands in the eastern regions of the country, was not trigger. The purpose of this project was to solve the problem of providing the population with bread. This article considers the underlying causes that led to the initially given vector of extensive development of the virgin agricultural space of Northern Kazakhstan, despite the colossal funds invested in the development of the steppe frontier. The article researches the post-Soviet institutional transformations in the agriculture of the republic, which affected, first of all, the agriculture of the grain belt. Used descriptive and research statistical tools made possible determination of the factors of the post-crisis transition of agricultural formations to the cultivation of industrial (oilseeds) crops as the most highly profitable in modern conditions. Our results showed a significant time and space dynamics of the structure of sown areas and a qualitative transformation of agriculture on the example of an integral part of the virgin frontier – North Kazakhstan region, as a result of the transition to an agrarian landscape system of land management in combination with the digitalization of the industry and the diversification of crops. Innovative and paternalistic measures of further mesoterritorial intensification of agriculture are proposed.

Slavic-Turkic Relations in the Steppe Frontier in Local Historiography in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries

This article deals with the process of the forming of a special historiography approach as Frontier one in historical science in the Russian empire in the 19– early 20th centuries and partly in the post-imperial period in the circumstances of rising national states. This was chosen for the analytical authors who represented the Frontier studies, exploring mostly Slobids’ka (Sloboda) Ukraine and Southern Ukraine, which the geographical situation influenced their history and allowed them to determine the Frontier historiography approach.

The Great Steppe Frontier of Ukraine as A Contributing Factor to the Formation of the Cossack Raids in the 16th and 17th Centuries

The article considers the influence of the Great Steppe Frontier of Ukraine substantiating that the influence of the Great Steppe Frontier of Ukraine was not a line of demarcation between West and East, nor between other aspects of human life. The result was the emergence of a frontier way of life that included local traditions and borrowed elements of other cultures. In early modern European history, the Ukrainian Frontier witnessed the political rise of the Ukrainian Cossacks. One of the manifestations of the Cossacks’ frontier life of was the tradition of prey - traditional Cossack activities aimed at collecting booty, mainly in border struggles and skirmishes with the Turks, Tatars, Nogai. The article also contains a brief analysis of historiography on the issue. It studies the formative period of Cossack raids in search of spoils. The article offers an analysis of the components of Cossack raiding activity in the studied period and hints at the influence of these activities on the Steppe Frontier of Ukraine It also emphasizes the geographical and chronological boundaries of the Great Ukrainian Steppe Frontier and their impact on the border life of Ukrainian Cossacks.

The Northwestern European Frontier of the Ottoman State: The Steppe of Budjak in the Late 18th and the Early 19th Centuries

In the last quarter of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, the territory known as the Steppe of Budjak can be considered as the last European Steppe frontier of the Ottoman state. An important component of this frontier was the policy of active colonization and the involvement of workers from neighboring countries. Such a policy was successfully pursued by the Ottoman state. As a result, various social and ethnic groups settled on the border and influenced the relations between the Ottoman and the Russian Empires. Among these groups, one of the most important was the Ukrainian Zaporozhian Cossacks, who created their own autonomous organization on the frontier – the Sich.

Beyond the Steppe Frontier: A History of the Sino-Russian Border by Sören Urbansky

Reviewed by: Beyond the Steppe Frontier: A History of the Sino-Russian Border by Sören Urbansky Camille Neufville (bio) Sören Urbansky, Beyond the Steppe Frontier: A History of the Sino-Russian Border (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020). 367 pp., ills. Bibliography. Index. ISBN: 978-0-691-18168-4. Sören Urbansky's book reconstructs the three-century-long history of the perpetually mobile Sino-Russian border, the longest land border between two of the biggest and most powerful multiethnic empires. Urbansky shows that it was never simply a boundary line, but an area that demarcated nomadic and sedentary populations, two powerful states, and later two national cultures. He speaks of the making and unmaking of the border, as, in his own words, "the evolution of the border dividing the two largest Eurasian empires entailed a gradual process of brokering: between diverse groups of the local borderland society, between the different political powers claiming sovereignty over the boundary and adjoining territories, and between political metropoles and peripheral borderland populations" (P. 2). To demonstrate how the borderland evolved, the author anchors his study in a particular place, the Argun River basin, which is divided today by the Russian Federation, the People's Republic of China (PRC), and Mongolia. [End Page 238] This vantage point allows for a truly microhistorical approach to the subject. Urbansky pays tribute to the study of societies and spaces on both sides of the border within the longue durée, interested not only in the central governments' policies regarding the border but also in policies and concerns at the local level: "The present work thus examines how central authorities tried to establish control at the state boundary and in the frontier zone and borderland, how local people strove to subvert such efforts, and how, sometimes, they became agents of state powers themselves or fell victim to its abuses" (P. 3). In doing so, the book fills a certain historiographical void. In their studies, although Sarah C. M. Paine and Bruce Elleman have largely mapped the history of Russo-Chinese diplomatic relations and thus the process of establishing and adjusting their mutual border, the social and cultural history of border regions has remained virtually unwritten.1 Urbansky's well-informed and people-centered book fills this void. The ambition to re-create the voices of borderlanders – as much through a rich iconography as through the extensive use of private sources and oral history – creates a vivid picture of what life on the borderlands once was. Urbansky's command of both Russian and Chinese allows for the astute reading of archival sources from both sides of the border. His travels to local archives in Russia testify to his deep commitment to his inquiry as well as granting readers stunning and moving descriptions of local places and people.2 The lack of a parallel study in Chinese regional archives is the result of their growing inaccessibility due, partly, to the sensitiveness of subjects such as borderlands and ethnic minorities. Urbansky compensates for this disbalance by reading newspapers, interviewing borderlanders, and consulting railway passengers statistics. In the first chapter, Urbansky takes readers through a sweeping history of the two hundred years separating the first Sino-Russian treaty of Nerchinsk (1689) and the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway (TSR), in the 1890s. He delineates three phases in Sino-Russian relations up to the twentieth [End Page 239] century, starting with the first contacts, predominantly commercial and military, followed by the delimitation of a common border – from the end of the fifteenth to the first third of the eighteenth century. The second phase, which he characterizes as a "balance of powers," opens with the 1728 treaty of Kiakhta. Following the treaty, this border town became the center of a flourishing cross-border trade. The third phase began after the Opium Wars of 1839–1842 and 1856–1860. The Russian Empire joined European powers in forcing Qing China to submit to unfair treaties. This latest phase, seen from the borderland, was also one of brutal integration of frontier territories into provincial administrative systems in both the Russian and Qing empires. The first chapter also presents the heterogeneous frontier society that included...

М.М. ПРИШВИН И КАЗАХСКАЯ СТЕПЬ: ПРОБЛЕМЫ ЭВОЛЮЦИИ РУССКОГО ОРИЕНТАЛИЗМА В ПЕРИОД ПОЗДНЕЙ ИМПЕРИИ

The article, based on the material of the Siberian Diary (1909), as well as the travelogues “Adam and Eve” (1909) and “The Black Arab” (1910), examines the features of the images of the Kazakh steppe in Mikhail Prishvin’s early works. All these texts are based on the materials of one journey, which the writer made from May to December 1909. The article attempts to understand the place of Prishvin’s steppe narrative in the discourse of Russian Orientalism in the late imperial period, when the attitude towards residents of the Asian outskirts in Russian literature underwent certain changes. The main question is whether Prishvin preserved the strategies of Russian Orientalism of the 19th century in his descriptions of the steppe and its nomadic and sedentary inhabitants, or he developed new principles for describing and inventing the inner East of Russia. Speaking about Russian Orientalism, the authors of the article proceed from the idea that this discourse is a product of an imperial culture that seeks to “discover the world” under the conditions of an imaginary division of the world into the colonizing West, the colonized East, and Russia, which is both the subject and object of colonization. Analyzing Kazakh travelogues in the context of Prishvin’s biography and works, as well as the cultural context of the colonial policy of the Russian Empire, the authors come to the conclusion that the writer does not create a special discourse about the East but continues the traditions of classical Russian literature of the 19th century. Describing the inhabitants of the steppe (Russian colonists, the imperial administration, as well as the nomadic and sedentary Turkic population), Prishvin bases on the fundamental oppositions of Russian Orientalism, which help to raise questions about Russia, the Russian character, the goals and means of the Russian expansion to the East: Russian/Asian, wild/civilized, real/imaginary. The specificity of Prishvin’s travelogues also lies in the fact that they were created at the intersection of many - scientific, journalistic, artistic, and administrative - discourses that make up Russian Orientalism. For this reason, a complex and largely contradictory position of the author is formed in the travelogues. Prishvin performs many contradictory roles: he is a humanist philosopher who sympathizes with the patriarchal world of the Kazakhs and the desire for freedom of the Russian people; he is an ethnographer scrupulously recording everything that he sees along the way; he is a romantic ready to dress up in oriental clothes and imagine the magical land of the East, which does not exist; he is an enlightened writer who observes the primitive culture and cruel customs of the Kazakhs and the Russian colonists. Prishvin made a great contribution to the design of a new evolutionary round of Russian Orientalism in the late empire: thanks to his essays of the Kazakh world, the imaginary literary map of Russia at the beginning of the 20th century received a new impetus for a detailed and multifaceted cultural development of the steppe frontier, without which a Russian person trying to determine their place in a world divided into the West and the East is already unthinkable.

Beyond the Steppe Frontier: A History of the Sino-Russian Border by Urbansky S�ren (review)

SEER, 98, 3, JULY 2020 578 between economic growth and levels of democratization (p. 508). This is a welcome addition to the teaching resources available for Russian and Eurasian history which deserves to be widely used. New College, Oxford Alexander Morrison Urbansky, Sören. Beyond the Steppe Frontier: A History of the Sino-Russian Border. Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ and Oxford, 2020. xiii + 367 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $39.95; £34.00. Focusing on the 70,000-km2 -wide Argun River basin that once united western Manchuria with Transbaikalia in Siberia, Sören Urbansky’s borderland history compellingly shows that the territory, cut in two by the international border since the early eighteenth century, needs to be studied as an entangled unit of analysis. The book is both a transnational and regional history, covering a long period spanning from the seventeenth to the late twentieth century. Its main narrative is the longue durée trajectory of the studied region from ‘an open interimperial frontier into a division of bordered lands’ (p. 2). Today, the state boundary separates provinces that are largely monolingual, with solid Russian and Han Chinese demographic majorities. Prior to the twentieth century, the cross-border region’s much smaller population was instead a cultural, religious and linguistic kaleidoscope of Cossacks, Russian Old Believers, Manchu bannermen, Buriat Mongols, Tungus and Solons. Despite the fact that the Russian archives are currently much more easily accessible than those in China, Urbansky’s command of both Russian- and Chinese-language archival and oral history sources allows him to provide a balanced and nuanced analysis of the two halves of the borderland. His shrewdly crafted and space-centred history manages to reconcile ‘empirecentered narratives with indigenous and local notions of territoriality [by embedding] the micro-history within the macro-history’ (p. 271), and by emphasizing the interplay between state agents and the autonomous agency of the borderlanders. The latter at times prompted and at times hindered the state-driven border-making processes. For long periods, zonal and lineal notions of the border coexisted, as the region was simultaneously a remote and sparsely populated ‘frontier’ and a delimited ‘borderland’ shaped by the increasing ability of imperial centres to project their power to the periphery. Modern transport infrastructures were powerful tools that connected entangled borderlands with the heartlands of the empires that shared them. The Chinese Eastern Railway, built in 1903 by REVIEWS 579 the Russians, increased the cross-border human and economic traffic and concentrated much of it on its axis. One of the book’s narrative threads follows the two railroad settlements of Zabaikalsk (previously known as Otpor) on the Russian side and of Manzhouli on the Manchurian side, from their humble beginnings as frontier settlements to their propaganda function as gateways into enemy territory following the Sino-Soviet split. The railroad made settler colonization easier for both empires. The Mongol nobleman Zorigt Baatar E. Tokhtogo (1863–1912), who violently opposed increased Han settler colonization on nomad lands and was used by the tsarist empire as a resource in inter-imperial competition, embodied ‘the type of “detachable men” that were caught between two competing empires both regarding him as their subject’ (p. 100). Rebels did make use of the border, but it was nomads, smugglers, gold diggers and marmot hunters who were the everyday border crossers. Urbansky sketches the activities of some of these actors, as well as the stories of refugees from increasingly aggressive state-building policies, especially after the onset of Stalinism. Themoretheborder‘thickened’,themoreitbecamenecessaryforindividuals to be linked to state institutions such as consulates or customs in order to smuggle goods successfully. The parallel border militarization in the USSR and Manchukuo during the 1930s, together with the demographic restructuring brought about by forced population movements, was a historical watershed that put an end to open borderlands. The elimination of ‘a cross-boundary “border culture”’ (p. 274) had a lasting legacy. When, during the 1950s, the border separated the two closely allied Communist regimes in China and the USSR, cross-border interactions among the borderlanders remained minimal. The state boundary had been firmly built not only on the...

Geiselstellungen an den russischen Kulturgrenzen in der Frühen Neuzeit

Summary Hostage-Taking and -Giving at the Cultural Borders of the Early Modern Russian Empire This paper examines practices of hostage-taking and -giving in the early-modern Russian Empire as practiced since the late 16th century in the regions of Siberia, the Far East and on the Russian Steppe frontier. The paper investigates the origins of this practice, its cross-cultural meanings and its symbolical and practical issues. The political, legal and cultural situation of indigenous hostages in the Russian frontier fortresses is discussed. The Russian hostage system is compared with practices of hostage-taking and -giving in other pre-modern cultures, such as in Ancient Rome, pre-modern China and the European Middle Ages.

The North Caucasus between the Ottoman Empire and the Tsardom of Muscovy: The Beginnings, 1552-1570

The present paper explores the hitherto unknown beginnings of the Ottoman-Russian imperial rivalry by focusing on the mid-16th-century encounter between the Ottoman Empire and the Tsardom of Muscovy over the North Caucasus, where the ambitions of these two asymmetric powers—the Ottomans being an established “super power” and the Muscovites a rising power—became entangled for the first time. This first encounter, which was the harbinger of many future engagements not only in this region but also in the broader steppe frontier around the Black Sea, was more of a “cold war” rather than a military confrontation, as both the Ottomans and the Muscovites rather preferred to establish spheres of influence and eventually their hegemony over the North Caucasus through their vassals and clients. In addition to demonstrating the Tsardom of Muscovy’s initial claims and policies over the North Caucasus, this study will shed light on the reasons of the Ottoman failure to transform their nominal claims over the region to a de facto hegemony similar to what they had established over Eastern European principalities.

Ukrainians, Cossacks, Mazepists

Viktor Brekhunenko, Kozaky na stepovomu kordoni levropy: Typolohiia kozats 'kykh spil'not XVI--pershoi polovyny XVII st. (Cossacks on Europe's Steppe Frontier: Typology of Cossack Communities in the 16th and First Half of the 17th Centuries). 504 pp. Kyiv: Natsional'na akademiia nauk Ukrainy, 2011. ISBN-13 978-9660258440. Zenon Kohut, Making Ukraine: Studies on Political Culture, Historical Narrative, and Identity. 340 pp. Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 2011. ISBN-13 978-1894865210. Tat'iana Tairova-Iakovleva, Ivan Mazepa i Rossiiskaia imperiia: Istoriia predatel 'stva (Ivan Mazepa and the Russian Empire: A Story of Betrayal). 528 pp. Moscow: Tsentrpoligraf, 2011. ISBN-13 978-5227025784. This review's title is deliberately at variance with Andreas Kappeler's 2003 article on the position of Ukrainians in the ethnic hierarchy of the Russian Empire. This informal order in Russia, as in other premodern multiethnic empires, was based on criteria of political loyalty, estate, and social and cultural affiliation. The stratification of Ukrainians made it possible to attribute them to different categories: khokhly, mostly peasants; malorossy, Russian-speaking Ukrainians loyal to the Romanov dynasty; or Mazepists (mazepintsy), those forging Ukrainian cultural and national identity. Kappeler noted that these categories were interwoven, and the position of Ukrainians in the Russian Empire was therefore extremely complex. (1) This complexity represents key subject for several recent publications about early modern Ukraine. In particular, the Cossack past, construed as historical precursor to the contemporary Ukrainian state, plays crucial role both in scholarly debates and in the national narrative. (2) The issues of loyalties, identities, and cultural, religious, and political entanglements are also of key interest, and they occupy prominent place in the studies under review here. (3) Writing in Canada, Ukraine, and Russia, the authors are acclaimed experts in early modern studies, and their new publications strengthen, advance, and sometimes revise their own earlier work. Collectively they offer broad spectrum of approaches and methodological insights and show how complex and controversial research in Ukrainian history can be. In volume encompassing 12 articles published between 1977 and 2006 and three new studies, Zenon Kohut focuses on elite culture, predominantly in the 18th century, and on identity transformations. (4) The book spans the whole modern era from the 17th through the 20th centuries. Kohut offers revisionist view on some positions and concepts declared in his previous publications and stresses that the construction of the modern Ukrainian state and began in the early modern period (xi). Working with the same sources, he emphasizes new aspects: for instance, in his reading of the famous 17th-century Kyivan Synopsis. While Kohut previously delineated the linkage between Ukraine and Russia through dynasty, religion, state structure, and ethnicity, he now refers to this text as an address to all the Slavs, not to any specific East Slavic people or nation (xii). (5) Kohut's novel emphasis on proto-nationalist and nationalist movements is linked to an acknowledgment of the multiplicity of trajectories leading from the Ruthenian to the contemporary Ukrainian nation. This variety of paths, often interwoven and complex, are the focus of Kohut's book. For the 17th and 18th centuries Kohut defines two competing state-building projects: the Hetmanate and the Russian Empire. He identifies major conflict between the idea of the centrally regulated absolutist monarchy and the notion of Little Russian rights and liberties. For Kohut these were two incompatible poles, and the clash was inevitable. In this regard, the analysis touches on the classical question of whether contemporary Ukraine can be considered a non-historical nation. …

The Russian Occupation of Beirut, 1773–1774

The brief and little known Russian occupation of the Levantine port of Beirut in 1773–1774 reveals much about the nature of Russian engagement with the Arab Middle East. Rather than passing as an insignificant episode, it instead complemented a well documented Russian desire to play an expanded role in the Levant and take advantage of Catherine II’s first war with the Ottoman empire (1768–1774) to establish forward positions in the Mediterranean. Alongside the Russian naval victory at Chesme in July 1770, Russia accepted alliance overtures from Egypt’s Mameluk governor Ali Bey, who was in rebellion against the Ottoman Sultan. In a complicated series of diplomatic and military maneuvers, Russian forces offered to aid Ali and his allies. By 1773 this process came to involve an agreement with the Druze Emir Yusuf al-Shihab, who accepted Russian protection as part of a military alliance that called for a Russian attack on Beirut in exchange for tribute. Yusuf’s inability to pay the tribute led to a prolonged Russian presence in Beirut, but the situation’s eventual resolution and the Kücük Kainardja peace treaty of 1774 led to the Russians’ departure. Despite the episode’s brevity, it nevertheless allowed for the development of pronounced Russian intentions to create favorable relationships with the peoples and leaders of the Levant. The Russian relationship with Yusuf and other local potentates, moreover, mirrored Russia’s interactions with peoples and leaders on its vast steppe frontier, indicating another axis of imperial advance.

Трудный хлеб « медведчиков » Челобитные и « распросные речи » скоморохов как исторический источнн

The article begins with a criminal case – the killing of a bear in the marketplace of Beloozero (1635-36). The plaintiff, Timofej Okladnicyn, accused the peasant Fedor Antip’ev of this aggressive act. Was Okladnicyn a simple seller of animals, a professional trainer or a bearleader? Was this aggressive act a case of sinless hooliganism, or was it Antip’ev’s intention to stress the illegal character of Okladnicyn’s job? The document gives no definitive answer to these questions.For this article, the author has collected from trials all petitions (čelobitnye) and testimonies of Muscovite minstrels (skomoroxi). The purpose is to compare the discourse of the real makers of folklore with the texts of folkloric tradition that were traditionally ascribed to skomoroxi. The most important piece is the non-published petition of bearleader Grigorij Eftifeev, which proves the historicity of exile of skomoroxi in the reign of tsar Aleksej Mixajlovič. The testimony of Grigorij Eftifeev, who was exiled not to Siberia, but to the steppe frontier of Muscovy, can shed some light on the disappearing of the skomoroxi in legal documents after 1648 – the makers of folklore got new social identities.

Michael Khodarkovsky, Bitter Choices, Loyalty and Betrayal in the Russian Conquest of the North Caucasus

Readers familiar with Michael Khodarkovsky’s two previous books on the Kalmyks and the Steppe Frontier will look forward to reading Bitter Choices. It is the story of Semen Atarshchikov, born a Chechen, who followed in his father’s footsteps to become a Cossack, an interpreter in at least two languages of North Caucasus highlanders, was sent to Petersburg to join Nicholas I’s Circassian Guard (which took part in the crushing of the Polish uprising), became an officer, returned to the North Ca...