peopleflocked to this fertile farmland: Orthodox Slavs (Russians, Ukrainians),
foreign prisoners of war (Lithuanians and Swedes), native Siberian peoples (who
were animist or Muslim), Kazakhs (Muslim), and Kalmyks (Buddhist).
From the 1770s Russia recruited Kazakhs of the Middle Horde into the Irtysh
Line as Line Cossacks. Impoverished Kazakhs were also invited to settle deeper into
Siberia, receiving grazing land in return for militia service; by 1819 more than
12,000 Kazakhs had moved into Omsk Oblast, where they joined Russian and
Ukrainian peasants and adapted aspects of East Slavic life, shifting from sheep to
cattle grazing, adding to their meat-based diets Russian vegetables and soups. Some
became laborers for Russian peasants and Cossacks; some converted to Orthodoxy.
Cultural interchange worked in the other direction as well, as Yuriy Malikov has
described. Line Cossacks used Russian as a local lingua franca, but they (and their
surrounding communities) also spoke Kazakh; nominally Orthodox, Cossacks
mixed animism or inclined to the Old Belief. Some became enmeshed in Kazakh
culture: they traded goods, they adopted Kazakh food (horse meat,kumys), sheep
husbandry, clothing styles, and mounted military skills. They intermarried; they
bought Kazakh children as slaves for labor, despite its illegality. In their conflicts
with Kazakhs, Line Cossacks used steppe customary law, resisting Russian courts
until late in the century.
Russian control of Cossack Hosts, however, only went so far. They may have
been“regularized”under military control, but the state allowed them their own
independent regiments and many of their long-standing autonomies. Russian
control did not change essential Cossack culture. Whether in Zaporozhia, the
Don, Iaik, Kuban, Terek, or the Irtysh Line, Cossacks prided themselves on their
free-booting, self-governing lifestyle. Multi-ethnic, multi-religious, these paramili-
tary bands fought for the glory of clan and Host, not for Russia. Starting in the late
eighteenth century Russia tried to shift that allegiance, to instill in Cossack Hosts
across the empire a spirit of loyalty to Russia. Russia founded schools in the Don
and Urals, promoted Orthodoxy and invented military honors and regalia to honor
Cossack bands loyal to Russia. In 1827 Tsarevich Alexander (the future Alexander
II) was proclaimed ataman of the Don, Ural, and Terek Hosts. As Cossack elites
became more prosperous, more settled, and more assimilated to the imperial
nobility, some bought into this identity; by mid-nineteenth century some were
writing histories that recast their pasts as Russian and Orthodox from the start. By
the end of the nineteenth century the myth of the Cossack as the most loyal of
Russia’s sons and most fervent defender of the tsar was well established, but it little
resembles the Cossacks’more complex origins.
NORTHERN CAUCASUS
Although Russia coveted the northern Caucasus—a richflatland of black earth
north of the Kuban and Terek rivers—in the eighteenth century it remained, like
the Kazakh steppe border, a middle ground of many indigenous groups where
Russian claims to power were at best represented by Cossack intermediaries.
96 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801