The Russian Empire 1450–1801

A word here should be said about nomads, as they play an important role in Russian history, whether as conquered subjects or riv ...

the seventeenth century, when Moscow began to be able to protect its steppe borderland more effectively. The Rus’palatinates of ...

Russian center were also moved in. At the same time a protective line was constructed from Kozlov to the Volga at Simbirsk, exte ...

BASHKIRIA Since the tenth century Bashkirs are recorded inhabiting the forested steppe east of the Volga; their traditional land ...

corruption of Russian officials. When the Bashkirs turned to the Crimean Tatars for help, the Kalmyks, caught in between Crimea ...

Russia the stability it required on the borderlands through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the early sixteenth cent ...

established fortresses to protect themselves from Nogai, Crimean Tatar, or Kalmyk raids and themselves lived the typical raiding ...

power accompanying the weakening of the Horde in the second half of the fourteenth century, the Grand Dukes of Lithuania claimed ...

the Commonwealth lived primarily in towns, but in the seventeenth century many moved with Polish gentry to Ukrainian lands to wo ...

theological polemics with their Catholic opponents. In 1632 the Polish king relented and legalized Orthodoxy again, but the prob ...

half-century of warfare known in Ukrainian history as the“Ruin,”in Polish history as the“Deluge”and in Jewish history as the“Aby ...

independent Zaporozhian Sich; thousands of Ruthenian peasants and Cossacks fled to both during decades of chaos. Right Bank Ukra ...

authored school dramas that celebrated Cossack history and Hetman Ivan Mazepa. Mazepa himself was a graduate of the Mohyla, as w ...

the Moscow patriarch (others in the Right Bank had gone to the Union). But the Kyiv metropolitan initially was guaranteed autono ...

on Russia’s historical expansion but much of their attention has been focused on the restless movement of the Russian peasant hi ...

condescending to their rude culture, keeping them trapped in an antiquated agrarian economy. Etkind and others, in highlighting ...

in Eurasian History(London, New York: Routledge, 2007), 61–77; Janet Martin,“Tatar Pomeshchiki in Muscovy 1560s–70s,”in Gyula Sz ...

York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Frank E. Sysyn,Between Poland and the Ukraine: The Dilemma of Adam Kysil, 1600– 1653 (Camb ...

4 Eighteenth-Century Expansion Siberia and Steppe Russia’s great century of empire was transformative in size and diversity. Fro ...

pushing north and east, following sables and other luxury furs. In addition, Peter I commissioned exploration into Kamchatka, al ...