Bashkirs, 94,000 East Slavic peasants, 60,000 nobles, 10,000 retired soldiers, and
49,000 Cossack troops. Thus the Bashkirs clung to their traditional military status
and lands through the eighteenth century, even while being increasingly surround-
ed and integrated into Russian imperial life.
KALMYKS AND KAZAKHS
The defensive lines that stretched from the mouth of the Iaik on the Caspian more
than 3,000 km to Ust-Kamenogorsk on the Irtysh defined Russia’s border with
steppe peoples with whom Russia painstakingly worked to create stable relations
and eventually dominance. The process advanced but was not concluded in the
eighteenth century, and this border also became a quintessential middle ground.
Bands of Cossacks helped in securing this border, presenting problems of their
own. Russia’s goals moving into the Caspian steppe were much the same as
approaching the Black Sea steppe with fortified lines in the previous century: to
protect against raids, to open up fertile land for peasant farming and to prevent
runaway serfs fromfleeing.
Relations with the Kalmyks were volatile and tragic in this century. They
inhabited the Volga’s left bank and had been in tenuous treaty relationship with
Russia since 1655. Michael Khodarkovsky has written eloquently of the misunder-
standings and intentional misinterpretations by which Russia manipulated their
interactions and tightened control; the Kalmyks in turn kept their options open,
revolting, raiding, and occasionally allying with Crimean or Nogai neighbors
against Russia. By 1718 Russia had completed the Tsaritsyn fortified line, linking
the Don and Volga, depriving Kalmyks of access to their grazing lands to the north,
and boxing them in an increasingly small swath of steppe, surrounded by hostile
Don Cossacks, Nogais, and Kazakhs. In the 1720s Russia used significant military
force to subdue the Kalmyks, sparking internal disarray that worked to Russia’s
advantage. Russia began to intervene in their affairs; in 1741 Kalmyks cooperated
in compiling a legal handbook for disputes between Kalmyks and Russians, based
heavily on Russian practice and norms.
The Kalmyk steppe land, like Bashkiria, saw aggressive in-migration of Russian
and Ukrainian peasants: by 1764 Kalmyks constituted only 67 percent of the
population, by 1795 only 48 percent. By the 1760s Russia was interfering in
Kalmyk self-government, supervising the elections of officials and demanding
more military service; Russian in-migrants were seizing grazing lands. Thus, in
January 1771 when the Qing empire invited the Kalmyks to settle in Mongolia,
about two-thirds embarked on a mass exodus. Failing to stop them, Russian troops
incited Kazakhs to harass the Kalmyks; other nomad tribes continued attacking
them across Central Asia and thousands died on the journey. In angry response,
Russia abolished the Kalmyk khanate and placed those Kalmyks who remained
under the jurisdiction of the governor in Astrakhan. When the 1775 administrative
reforms were brought here in the 1780s, local native courts were created, accom-
modating the Kalmyks. Decimated in number and power, Kalmyks on the Volga
Eighteenth-Century Expansion: Siberia and Steppe 93