often cited as the last major Crimean Tatar raid into the southern borderlands of
Russia, Crimean slave emporia continued to be populated with captives from the
Caucasus. Russian conquest abolished slavery and closed down Crimea’s slave
markets, but the trade continued to be a scourge on Russia’s southern borders
well into the nineteenth century.
Russia established a protectorate over the Crimean khanate in 1774 after a brutal
campaign in which cities were razed and thousands killed. Initially Russia allowed the
last Girey khan, Sahin, to endure under watchful eye, but his machinations forced
Russia to take direct control in 1783. Despite being in the midst of standardizing
administrative reforms, here Catherine II maintained a politics of difference. In the
newly named Tauride province the rights, tax privileges, and landownership of the
Tatar elites and other groups (Greeks, Wallachians, Armenians) were affirmed.
Islamic schools and courts were maintained. Crimean Tatars were exempted from
the poll tax and conscription. Confessional rights of Islam were affirmed with the
creation in 1791 of the Tauride Muslim Spiritual Authority. Like the Orenburg
Muslim Spiritual Authority created in 1788 for the Middle Volga and Urals, the
Tauride Authority was intended as a supervisory body over institutions of the faith
and as a liaison with Russia. In the Crimea it was particularly charged to monitor
itinerant Islamic mullahs suspected of rousing up pro-Ottoman sympathies. As in
Orenburg, the Tauride Authority was headed by a newly created senior hierarch
(mufti) and religious hierarchy where none had existed before.
Despite these many pragmatic accommodations, the area’s population suffered
tremendous out-migration from the 1780s. Even before annexation in 1783,
Russia moved most of the peninsula’s Christian urban population of Armenians
and Greeks (over 30,000 people) to towns on the Azov Sea and most of the Nogai
Tatars to the Kuban steppe to form a Cossack Host; at the same time over 200,000
Tatars left for the Ottoman empire. Tatar out-migration continued at the time of
annexation and after the Turkish war of 1787–92, when thousands more left,
alienated by Russian steps during the war to disarm Crimean Tatars. Kelly O’Neill
argues that the process of“integrating”Crimea into the Russian empire proceeded
somewhat differently here than elsewhere in the empire because of Crimean Tatars’
close identification with their co-religionists in the Ottoman empire; proximity and
cultural connection meant that many simply did not make the effort to join the
Russian imperial nobility, as Cossacks, Baltic Germans, Georgians, Poles, and
others had done. Those who did stay, however, strove to preserve their political
dominance. When the 1785 Charter to the Nobility came to Crimea, the Tatar
mirzaelite was initially equated with the Russian nobility and their landholding
rights affirmed regardless of wealth. Initially nearly 5,000 members of themirza
elite enrolled as“nobles”in their local associations. When Russian policy across the
empire tightened up on standards of proof, in part to keep the numbers of non-
Russian elites (Ukrainian, German, Polish, Crimean) from overtaking Russians,
officials took a second look. By the 1820s, the number ofmirzafamilies officially
granted noble status had been restricted to fewer than 100.
Still, Tatars dominated in the peninsula. Initially Russia created a model of civil
and administrative rule by native intermediaries in the Crimean Land Government,
Western Borderlands in the Eighteenth Century 115