Russian Expansion under Catherine the Great 25the eastern Caucasus. While hope of agricultural and commercial de-
velopment was a factor in Russia's acquisition of the Crimea and the
north coast of the Black Sea, the primary concern was with the Turk-
ish threat to Russian security. Siberia had been treated like a colony
ever since it was made part of the Russian Empire. Catherine once
made the telling remark that she considered it Russia's "India, Mexi-
co, or Peru."^6 However, she did not pursue a very assertive policy in
this region. The same applies to the northwest coast of the Pacific
and trade with China even though she was interested in the economic
opportunities to be had in both places.
The initial motive for Catherine's involvement in the northern
marches of Iran was a traditional strategic one—the strengthening of
Russia's military position against the Ottoman Empire. In the early
1770s, during Catherine's first war with the Porte, the Russian army
used Georgia as a base of operations for attacks on Turkish strong-
holds in the western Caucasus. The Ottoman victory over the Rus-
sians in this campaign left Catherine wary of repeating the experiment.
In any event, the Pugachev Rebellion (1773-1774), the first partition
of Poland (1772), and the development of territory on the north coast
of the Black Sea acquired by the Treaty of Kuchuk Kainarja (1774)
preoccupied Catherine until the end of the decade. She still counted
the Muslim khanates of the eastern Caucasus among the shah's do-
mains even though this was a time when political power in Iran was
fragmented and there was no shah. While she retained a general inter-
est in the strategic uses of Georgia and adjoining territories, she stu-
diously refrained from taking actions in the Caucasus that might pro-
voke the Ottomans at the time of her second war against them (1787-
1792) or her 1796 Iranian campaign.
At the same time, the "colonialist" factor became increasingly im-
portant and led Catherine to an aggressive policy. Although there
were some commercial ties and a few diplomatic exchanges between
Russia and the Iranian borderlands in the Caucasus during Catherine's
reign, there were no steady communications and travel between the
two remained hazardous. There was no corps of marchwardens who
had known the inhabitants of the Iranian borderlands through gener-
ations of contact and had gradually extended Russian authority over
them, as happened elsewhere on the empire's eastern frontier. When
the Russian government turned its attention to northern Iran, it viewed
that area in light of the prevailing attitudes of the westernized Rus-
sian elite.
The Russian aristocracy of Catherine's reign was very different from
what it had been under Peter the Great, when a westernized life-style