139 Russification and the Return of Conquest31March 1897 for Chernomorsk province and 15 April for the rest of
the Caucasus, the government decreed that only “Orthodox settlers
of native Russian background” be allowed to immigrate.^84 New set-
tlers generally to the Kuban grew from 30,000 in 1870 to 800,000 by
190 0.^85 Borderland settlement was facilitated by a decree of 13 July
188 9 that reduced the restrictions of the commune upon peasant mo-
bility and then by the 6 June 1904 decree that permitted the free
movement of the subjects of the tsar throughout the empire.^86 In
places such as the North Caucasus and Kazakhstan, however, the
subjects of choice were by 1897 ethnically Russian.
Officials associated with the problems of settlement stressed that
the state needed to discriminate according to ethnic background in
the borderlands and offer greater financial support to ethnic Russians
over the many other non-Russian immigrants. This policy was “nec-
essary for the strengthening of the Russian element amid the different
and not always reliable peoples [narodnosti] in order to raise the pres-
tige of the name of Russia [and] its faith, language, and civilization in
the region.”^87 The settlement legislation issued in 1901 for the
Caucasus was a means for the regime at least to attempt to ensure
that reliable and capable Russian families populated available lands.
Thus after the departure of the Doukhobors from Kars oblast to
North America, a regulated process of settlement allowed adminis-
trators of the regime the satisfaction of knowing that in the shuffle the
oblast “lost not one Russian person.”^88 The borderlands might even
serve as a tool of assimilation within the settler community, where
“Little Russians” (Ukrainians) would become “Great Russians.”^89
The transformation of imperial policy and sentiment meant an un-
precedented preoccupation with ethnicity and Russian identity. For
conservative officials in particular, like the conservative thinkers
discussed above, Russia was losing ground in an empire of compet-
ing peoples. The state was duty bound, in their view, to protect, pre-
serve, and favour Russian tradition and culture. V.G.Butyrkin, a
member of an official commission to survey the situation of the
Cossacks, was shocked that more recent Russian settlers to the North
Caucasus were encroaching upon Cossack lands. How could
Russians conflict with their own kind in the borderlands? “Russians
are not Jews, living according to the Talmud,” he explained, “but
brothers by blood and faith.”^90 We must prevent “foreigners” (inos-
trantsy) from engaging in agriculture in Chernomorsk province,
warned Aleksei Bereznikov, the provincial governor, in 1909.^91 Who
was a “foreigner” along the Black Sea coast in 1909? The empire’s
southern borders with Ottoman Turkey and Iran had been drawn al-
most one hundred years earlier in 1828, as a result of Russian military