Russia’s imperial expansion eastward and into the steppe required“middle
ground”intermediaries to accomplish the task of control. Local tribes were con-
quered and co-opted, Cossacks were recruited and granted degrees of autonomy,
native communities retained economic and political privileges. In the eighteenth
century the state tried to move Cossack Hosts under more direct military control,
but they remained irregular regiments in the overall army, with enduring auton-
omies. At the same time Russia encouraged, or directly participated in, the
movement of East Slavs into these borderlands. Over the eighteenth century
these lands were still highly diverse in strategies of imperial control, but becoming
more integrated into the whole.
For population statistics see B. N. Mironov and Ben Eklof,The Social History of Imperial
Russia, 1700– 1917 (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2000). V. M. Kabuzan has pub-
lished in Russian a series of demographic studies from the eighteenth to twentieth
centuries; they include studies of Novorossiia, the Far East, and Crimea, as well as studies
of German and Moldavian settlements. His most general works survey all the peoples of
the empire:Narody Rossii v XVIII veke. Chislennost’i etnicheskii sostav(Moscow: Nauka,
1990) andEmigratsiia i reemigratsiia v Rossii v XVIII–nachale XX veka(Moscow: Nauka,
1998).
Broad approaches to Russia’s multi-ethnic empire: Andreas Kappeler,The Russian Empire:
A Multiethnic History, trans. Alfred Clayton (Harlow: Longman, 2001); John W. Slocum,
“Who, and When, Were theInorodtsy? The Evolution of the Category of‘Aliens’in
Imperial Russia,”Russian Review57 (1998): 173–90; Judith Pallot and Denis J. B. Shaw,
Landscape and Settlement in Romanov Russia, 1613– 1917 (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1990).
On Russia’s foreign policy and expansion: John LeDonne,The Russian Empire and the
World, 1700–1917: The Geopolitics of Expansion and Containment(New York: Oxford
University Press, 1997) andThe Grand Strategy of the Russian Empire, 1650– 1831 (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
On expansion into Urals and Caspian steppe: Michael Khodarkovsky,Russia’s Steppe
Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500– 1800 (Bloomington and Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press, 2002); Yuriy Malikov,Tsars, Cossacks, and Nomads: The
Formation of a Borderland Culture in Northern Kazakhstan in the 18th and 19th Centuries
(Berlin: KS, Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 2011); Martha Brill Olcott,The Kazakhs(Stanford,
Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, Stanford University, 1986); Alton Donnelly,“The
Mobile Steppe Frontier: The Russian Conquest and Colonization of Bashkiria and
Kazakhstan to 1850,”in Michael Rywkin, ed.,Russian Colonial Expansion to 1917
(London: Mansell, 1988), 189–207; Alton S. Donnelly,The Russian Conquest of Bashkiria,
1552 – 1740 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1968). A Russian account
provides great detail on the conquest of Bashkiria: N. N. Petrukhintsev,Vnutrennaia
politika Anny Ioannovny (1730–1740)(Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2014). Scientific travel
account: Samuel Gottlieb Gmelin,Astrakhan Anno 1770: Its History, Geography, Popu-
lation, Trade, Flora, Fauna and Fisheries, trans. and ed. Willem M. Floor (Washington,
DC: Mage Publishers, 2013). The third volume of Sergei Aksakov’sFamily Chronicle
trilogy (1856–8), entitled“Childhood Years of Grandson Bagrov,”is a memoir of
Russian settlement in Bashkiria. On the Islamic renaissance of late eighteenth century,
see Allen J. Frank,“Russia and the Peoples of the Volga-Ural region: 1600–1850,”in
Eighteenth-Century Expansion: Siberia and Steppe 101