Already in the sixteenth century the steppe above and the valleys of the Terek and
Kuban Rivers were the domain of Cossacks who generally engaged in piracy, plunder,
and highway robbery, serving Russia when it suited them. They included Turks,
Iranians, runaway Ukrainian and Russian peasants, and Cossacks, Dagestanis,
Kalmyks, Georgians, Armenians, Ingush, Ossetians; they were animist, Muslim,
Orthodox, Old Believers, and Georgian Christian. Terek Cossacks clustered around
the nominally Russian fortress town of Terskii Gorod (founded 1588), whose
population of perhaps 20,000 in the late seventeenth century was primarily locals,
rather than Cossacks or Russians. In the sixteenth century Russia had forged alliances
(Ivan IV married a Georgian princess in 1562) and even claimed control of“Georgia,
Kabarda and Circassia”in the tsar’s title in 1594. But Terskii Gorod’snominal
Russian presence constituted no great foothold of power.
Russia turned serious attention to the north Caucasus during Peter I’s Persian
campaigns, contesting this area with Crimean Tatars and the Ottoman empire. For
most of the eighteenth century Russia struggled to build a presence here. It drew
upon local Cossacks to staff forts at Kizliar and Mozdok and imported newcomers
as well. In the 1720s Russia ordered 1,000 families of Don Cossacks to move to the
northern Caucasus, perhaps a late step of punitive relocation after the Bulavin
uprising of 1707–8. Kizliar became the hub of several groups of Cossacks called
generically Terek Cossacks. In 1721 Russia put these Cossacks, as others in the
empire, under the supervision of the College of War, but Russian power was lightly
imposed at this point.
Russian power became more solidified here from the 1760s with success in wars
against the Ottoman empire and construction of fortified lines against attack from
Chechens and Karbardinians. A Caucasus Line was built in the 1760s–80s,
stretching from Azov on the Black Sea southeast through Stavropol and to fortresses
on the Terek River at Mozdok, from there along the left bank of the Terek to
Kizliar near its mouth at the Caspian. This created a semicircular fortified line
across the northern Caucasus. In 1794 to the south, paralleling the Azov–Kizliar
line, a line was constructed from Ekaterinburg just west of Mozdok on the mid-
Kuban River to the strait of Kerch. To staff these new lines, in the 1790s Russia
moved some of the disbanded Zaporozhian Cossacks to create a Black Sea Cossack
Host north of the Kuban River; Nogais disrupted in the Black Sea steppe also
joined Cossack Hosts in the northern Caucasus and the Don Cossacks. These
Cossacks manned garrisons, defended against attack, served as couriers and military
escorts, and performed cartage, road, and bridge-building services.
Their presence provided stability for peasant in-migration that both supported
these military forces and expanded Russia’s imperial presence. In the 1760s Russia
recruited Ossetians as settlers, awarding tax benefits for Christianization, and in the
1780s it moved some 68,000 state peasants, generallyodnodvortsy, here. Forcible
transfers were joined by runaway East Slavic peasants and Old Believers and, in
what Thomas Barrett calls a“great reshuffling of Caucasian populations,”great
numbers of northern Caucasus peoples. Armenians, Georgians, Ingush, Ossetians,
Chechens moved behind Russian lines to farm, raise grapes and silkworms,
and to trade.
Eighteenth-Century Expansion: Siberia and Steppe 97