children were killed, sent to hard labor, or enrolled in infantry service around the
empire. This is estimated at 12–14 percent of the Bashkir population. In the ruins
of revolt, Russia imposed tighter controls over Bashkir self-government and organ-
ized Bashkiria as a new province (Orenburg). In 1743 the city of Orenburg was
named a preferred customs depot for Siberian commerce, shifting caravan trade to
it from Astrakhan. Thereafter Russia systematically worked to undermine Bashkir
autonomies and impose Russian control, using a variety of populationist, military,
and bureaucratic strategies.
Not only were the Bashkirs surrounded in their own homeland by defensive lines;
they were also being surrounded by non-Bashkir migrants. To guard the new lines, a
Host of Orenburg Cossacks was created in 1742 and settlement of the Orenburg
territory was promoted. Settlers were forcibly moved or lured here with privileges of
land and serfs: retired Russian gentry, converted Kalmyks and Dzhungars, Ukrainian
and Russian peasants,odnodvortsy(petty landholders) from the Hetmanate and
Sloboda Ukraine, Polish noblemen from recently captured Polotsk. Voluntary
in-migration proceeded as well. State peasants,odnodvortsy, and runaway serfs
moved in, as did Tatars, Chuvash, and Mordva from the Middle Volga and northern
Bashkiria. Tatar merchants from Kazan and Bukharan merchants from Central Asia
were lured to Orenburg by trade privileges. Russian landlords moved in; from 1649
they had been prohibited from buying Bashkir land, but they purchased or seized it
anyway, as is recounted in Sergei Aksakov’s semi-literary memoir of his grandfather’s
settling in Bashkiria in hisFamily Chronicletrilogy (1858).
By the mid-1740s more than 50,000 East Slavic settlers had moved into Bashkir
land and almost an equal number in the next few decades as the pace quickened. By
the end of the eighteenth century, Bashkiria’s population had risen 64 percent and
it was ethnically diverse, home to Bashkirs, Russians, Tatars, Chuvash, Cheremis,
Votiaks, Mordva, and Bukharans. Orenburg was a primarily ethnic Russian city by
the end of the century. In landholding, Russian landlords outnumbered Bashkirs
and Tatars more than two to one. By the end of the eighteenth century peasant
cultivation in the northern and western parts created a vibrant export trade in
wheat, while the southern Urals remained primarily an area of pastoral nomadism
and animal husbandry (horses, sheep, cattle, goats, and camels) claimed by pastor-
alist Bashkirs, Ural Cossacks, and Kazakhs. But in-migration of settled farmers
proceeded there as well. While in 1719 Bashkirs accounted for 71 percent of the
population in their traditional homeland, by 1795 that proportion had fallen to
about 20 percent, with Russians constituting 40 percent of Bashkiria’s population.
Bashkirs suffered directly from in-migration and the increasing Russian political,
economic, and religious control. Russian religious policy exacerbated tensions.
From 1731 to 1764 a commission for conversion to Orthodoxy in the Middle
Volga and Urals pressured Muslims to convert; they found the most resistance from
Bashkirs, but pressure continued. In Bashkir statements to the Legislative Com-
mission of 1767, a prominent demand was to allow construction for more mosques
and religious schools.
Nevertheless, Bashkiria was not as integrated into the center as the Middle Volga
was in this century, and various social groups enjoyed different status. Unlike many
Eighteenth-Century Expansion: Siberia and Steppe 91