protecting Russian settlers, fortifying the border against runawaysfleeing the
empire. Robust communities of Cossacks existed on the Dnieper and Don, the
Black Sea, and northern Caucasus areas, and in the Kalmyk-Kazakh steppe frontier.
Russian policy towards such Cossack Hosts, however, tightened in the eighteenth
century, more systematically curtailing their autonomies and regularizing them into
Russian military service. In 1721, for example, Russia shifted oversight for Cossack
Hosts from the College of Foreign Affairs to the College of War, a symbolic
demotion and sign of a long-term intent to regularize their service. The process
proceeded at different paces with each group. In 1774, Catherine II put her
formidable governor of the southern borderlands, Grigorii Potemkin, in charge of
all Cossack formations and irregular troops; he embarked on reforms that rever-
berated from Zaporozhia through the Hetmanate, the Don, and Iaik.
Along the fortified line south of Orenburg to the Caspian the Iaik Cossacks had
been in service to Russia since the late sixteenth century. On the one hand, Iaik
Cossacks developed in much the same way as had the Don Cossacks in the
preceding century. As population grew and their economy shifted fromfishing to
lucrative cattle and sheep husbandry, an elite of Cossack officers emerged, more
beholden to Russia. By the 1730s Russia was interfering in their affairs, in 1738
deposing an ataman; by the 1770s the Iaik Cossack hetman was appointed by
Russia and the governor-general of Orenburg oversaw the host. But such actions
chafed, and in 1772 in response to Russian efforts to regularize them as a military
unit and infringe on their practice of the Old Belief, Iaik Cossacks revolted,
slaughtering a Russian garrison and its commander. This rebellion was harshly
suppressed but within a year Iaik Cossacks took the lead in the Pugachev rebellion
in 1773–5. Russia’s response was to destroy the Iaik Host, replacing it with a newly
recruited Host under supervision of the Orenburg governor-general, surrounded by
an increased number of Russian garrisons. The names of the Host and River were
changed to Ural, and the new Ural Host was subject to a regularized model of
Cossack service that included a term (generally three years) on active duty anywhere
in the empire, seventeen years’duty in local defense, andfive more in local policing.
Thereafter the empire deployed Ural Cossacks throughout the empire, often
exceeding the three-year active duty limit.
Russia created other Cossack Hosts on the Kalmyk and Kazakh steppe as the
border prospered. Constructing in the 1730s to 1750s the fortified lines discussed
herein that stretched from the mouth of the Iaik River to the Altai mines, Russia
directed Central Asian trade to customs depots at either end of the line—Orenburg
and Semipalatinsk. Like Astrakhan, these towns became vibrant multicultural
centers of Russian, Tatar, and Bukharan merchants, home to churches and mosques.
Russia created what came to be called the“Line,”a sixteen-kilometer-wide zone of
fertile grazing land between Orenburg and the Altais exclusively for Cossacks,
closed to Kazakhs and Russian peasants (see Map 4). Recruited to staff the Line
with land grants and trade privileges, a new, multi-ethnic population of Cossacks
developed here, called variously Orenburg, Siberian, and Irtysh Cossacks. These
Hosts began life already constricted by Russian oversight, even though they
maintained self-governing autonomies and characteristic lifestyles. All manner of
Eighteenth-Century Expansion: Siberia and Steppe 95