urban community, Astrakhan enjoyed populations of Armenian, Tatar, and Indian
international traders, each group with its own rights, including separate judicial
systems and laws (in addition to having access to Russian courts) and tax differen-
tials, painstakingly described along with the area’sflora and fauna by St. Petersburg
scientist Samuel Gottlieb Gmelin in 1770. Non-elite Russian townsmen in
Astrakhan paid taxes, while non-elite Tatars did not; Armenian and Indian com-
munities paid a lump sum to avoid direct tax and services. Surrounding Astrakhan
were seven Tatar towns that enjoyed tax and service privileges. Astrakhan’s admin-
istrative diversity was somewhat curtailed by Catherinian reforms. Early in her
reign, in the 1760s, a single court for non-Russians was established, replacing the
separate courts for Armenians, Tatars, and Indians, but it functioned according to
each group’s native laws nevertheless. When introduced in the 1780s, the 1775
reforms created a new judicial apparatus of a lower and upper court with Russian
law. These reforms also introduced the poll tax more widely for non-elite Russian
residents of Astrakhan and increased taxes or service burdens on such groups as the
Armenians and suburban Tatars. Outside of Astrakhan, the reforms instituted a
simplified hierarchy of local courts, centered in Ekaterinburg; similar to the Kazakh
border, a lower level court was also created for suits involving subjects of the
Russian empire and Georgians and others beyond Russian borders. Here, native
assessors and customs were used, with appeal to upper courts in Ekaterinburg using
Russian law with Russian and native assessors. The state, in other words, respected
local differences even while imposing the new empire-wide administrative model.
DON COSSACKS
The Don Cossacks fared better than many other semi-autonomous groups on the
empire’s periphery, resisting being destroyed, transformed into a mere province or
merged into Russian regular army units as Zaporozhian and Iaik Cossacks were
from the 1770s. Through the eighteenth century Don Cossacks had skillfully
negotiated their relationship with Russia. In 1707–8, Kondratii Bulavin led Don
Cossacks in a rebellion that recalled the Stepan Razin rebellion (1670–1). Impov-
erished Cossacks in northern Don territories rebelled against the Cossack elite that
was working with Russian authorities to deport or demote them to peasant status.
Having brutally suppressed a musketeer uprising in Moscow in 1698, Peter I had
no mercy for another rebellion within a decade. He responded with what Brian
Boeck calls a“scorched earth”policy, unlike anything Muscovite tsars had ever
meted out to Cossack rebels. Over 90 percent of the population in the northern
Don Cossack region was killed, their communities razed, and more than half a
million acres of Don Cossack lands seized for Russian settlement. But loyal
Cossacks were treated to the model that Muscovy developed in the wake of Left
Bank Hetman Ivan Mazepa’s defection in 1708: rewards and privileges for the loyal
and Muscovite control over the appointment of hetmans and officers. Peter
appointed the next Don Cossack ataman for life (the position was usually for one
or two years) and thereafter Moscow required approval of ataman elections. In
Eighteenth-Century Expansion: Siberia and Steppe 99