The Russian Empire 1450–1801

(Marvins-Underground-K-12) #1

eighteenth century. In the Middle Volga most wereiasakpayers—the Chuvash,
Cheremis/Mari, and Votiaks/Udmurty in the forest, and the Tatars and Mordva in
wooded steppe. Some did not participate in the trademark mobility of this era. The
Votiaks, for example, remained by and large in their homelands of the Middle
Volga and the northern Urals through the eighteenth century; the Cheremisy and
Chuvash were generally stable in their lands north and south of the Volga above
Kazan, with some out-migration to the southern Urals from the 1760s. But many
groups scattered far and wide; in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Kazan
Tatars settled in the more fertile lower Volga, northern and southern Urals, and the
manufacturing area north of Kazan. By the 1790s Tatars were 14 percent of the
population of Orenburg gubernia in the southern Urals. Similarly, by mid-century
only about half of the Mordva lived in their Middle Volga homeland around the
Sura River south of Murom; others had emigrated to the black earth region (right
bank of the Volga) and southern Urals. Many Mordva who moved into the Urals
fell into dependency to Russia, Tatar, or Bashkir landlords asteptiarlaborers.
Russia’s colonial policy in the Middle Volga became less tolerant of diversity as
the century progressed. More Russians moved in, the Middle Volga became rela-
tively closer to the center, imperial borders were moving south and east, and the state
was imposing homogenizingfiscal and social policies. By the 1740siasakpayers here
lost that status and were made to pay the poll tax and give conscripts, two burdens
that few other non-Slavic peoples of the empire bore. Untypically, the state also
attempted forcible Christianization in the Middle Volga early in the century and
again in the 1740s. Most of the Mordva, Chuvash, Cheremis, and Votiaks who
converted did so only superficially, retaining animist traditions, but they gradually
Russified in the process. The same superficial, forcible Christianizations took place
in Siberia, among western Siberian peoples such as the Ostiaki/Khanty and Voguly/
Mansi and those in the east (Iakuts, Tunguz, Buriats, Chukchi, Koriaks).
In the Middle Volga those who resisted Christianization suffered economically.
Muslim landholders (Tatars) who did not convert lost their lands and slipped into
the status of single homesteaders (odnodvortsy) and eventually taxed peasants. By
the end of the eighteenth century in the Middle Volga the Tatar upper class, once
dominant in landholding, had been largely eliminated as a landed elite; many who
stayed Muslim transitioned into a merchant and entrepreneurial class in Kazan that
facilitated trade between Bashkiria, the Kazakhs, and the Russian empire. The
formation of Tatar ethnic cohesion was enabled beginning in the 1760s when
Catherine II reversed forcible Christianization policies against Muslims, which she
did both for reasons of Enlightenment humanism and for her desire to use Tatar
merchants as intermediaries in Chinese and Central Asian trade through Siberia.
Tatars, from nobles to peasants, began to construct trade and cultural networks
across the empire; they constituted a substantial minority in the southern Urals and
northern Caucasus and a majority in the Crimean peninsula. An empire-wide Tatar
cultural resurgence grew when Crimean Tatars joined the empire (1780s) and
forged ties with Kazan Tatars. Non-Islamic Cheremisy (Mari) and Chuvash who
did not convert to Orthodoxy tended to gravitate to Tatar Islamic culture, whether
they stayed in the Middle Volga or emigrated to the Orenburg area.


Eighteenth-Century Expansion: Siberia and Steppe 89
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