The Russian Empire 1450–1801

(Marvins-Underground-K-12) #1

overseas colonies with European emigrants. Catherine II was as aggressively popu-
lationist as her European counterparts. Starting in 1762 Russia advertised across
Europe, offering land, freedom from taxation for up to thirty years, freedom from
conscription, loans, guarantees of religious freedom, and self-government. Those
who intended to found manufactories were even allowed to purchase serfs. Since
larger European states banned Russian agents, refused to publish their manifestos,
and forbade their people to emigrate, most of the applicants came from the free
cities and states of southern and western Germany. Up to 30,000 Germans arrived
between 1762 and 1775, settling in seven or eight colonies on the west bank of the
lower Volga around Saratov; many were Moravian Brothers, called in Russia the
Herrnhuters. Groups of Mennonites moved into Zaporozhian lands on the lower
Dnieper in the 1770s. Aided by unigeniture in inheritance (compared to Russian
peasants’traditional partible inheritance), exempt from military service, billeting,
and direct taxation for many years, these German farmers prospered. Thousands of
other foreigners—Bulgarians, Greeks, Romanians, and others—flowed in as well.
By thefirst decade of the nineteenth century, government sponsorship of foreign
immigration was curtailed as expensive and unnecessary; subsidies were ended in



  1. When in 1780 administrative reforms came to Saratov gubernia where the
    bulk of the German colonists lived and to other southern borderlands, colonists’
    language and customs were preserved in lower level courts.
    Between 1782 and 1795 the Black Sea steppe accounted for over 56 percent of
    new settlers in the empire, particularly picking up after the end of the Turkish war
    in 1792. Novorossiia was divided into the Kherson (from the Dniester eastward
    past the Bug) and Ekaterinoslav (extending east to the Don Cossack lands)
    gubernii. Settlers came from all directions. In addition to Mennonites, Moldavians
    moved eastward to settle the Ochakov steppe between the Dniester and Bug;
    peasants moved south from Left Bank and Sloboda Ukraine; Russiansfled serfdom
    or were moved by their landlords from the overpopulated center; Old Believers
    were invited to return from abroad to settle this steppe. Throughout such settle-
    ment serfdom was the exception; immigrants received privileges as colonists or the
    status of state peasants. These, plus a steady influx of Ukrainian peasants, increased
    the population of Novorossiia exponentially from the 1760s.
    Russia’s last major acquisition in the steppe was the Crimean khanate, the most
    politically articulated and successful of the successor states of the Mongol Horde.
    Crimean Tatars were Turkic-speaking, Islamic descendants of steppe nomads who
    had long established themselves as a landed elite on the Crimean peninsula and
    Black Sea steppe. Their Chinggisid heritage elevated their status: while they
    accepted vassalage to the Ottoman empire, they insisted on sovereign superiority
    to both the Muscovite and Polish-Lithuanian states, successfully demanding tribute
    from them well into the eighteenth century. The Crimean khan of the Chinggisid
    Girey clan ruled, with a large elite of clans of respected lineage (mirzyand beys),
    over a multi-ethnic, urbanized society on the peninsula, with Greek, Armenian,
    and Jewish merchants in Caffa and other major cities. The Crimean steppe and
    peninsula supported nomadic pastoralism, farming, viticulture, livestock, and arts
    and crafts; slaves were used as well as a range of peasant labor. Although 1769 is


114 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801

Free download pdf