to construct and settle the fortified line around Sloboda Ukraine. They were the
ancestors ofodnodvortsy, border troops who jealously guarded their ancestral status of
serf-owning Muscovite gentry, but who fell into taxed status over the eighteenth
century (discussed in Chapter 17). They were joined in this borderland in the 1740s
by families of Sloboda Ukraine Cossacks forcibly moved to the border near Bakhmut
where military colonies were established in the next decade.
Cossacks were particularly malleable resources, no longer so able to preserve an
independent lifestyle outside the reach of state power. Throughout the eighteenth
century, Russia abolished, co-opted, or reshaped Cossack Hosts in the Black Sea
steppe and southern Urals and created new ones. As we saw in Chapter 4, in the
1770s and 1790s remnants of the Zaporozhian Cossacks and Nogai nomads were
moved to the Kuban to create a Black Sea Host, while Russia was at the same time
supporting the formation of Hosts to the east in the northern Caucasus—in the
1770s, for example, Don and Volga Cossacks were moved to staff the northern
Caucasus fortress of Mozdok. After the Pugachev rebellion (1773–5), the Iaik
Cossacks were renamed and reined in as the Ural Cossacks. In the 1790s regiments
from the overpopulated Don Cossack Host were resettled in the Terek river valley
and Orenburg line, prompting, however, in 1792–4 a brief and harshly suppressed
revolt of those unwilling to move.
In addition to forcible movement, throughout the century the state also encour-
aged population movement with material incentives. Foreigners were welcomed: as
we saw in Chapter 5, in the 1750s Empress Elizabeth imported Serbians and other
foreigners to new military colonies south of Left Bank and Sloboda Ukraine, and
Catherine II recruited up to 30,000 German settlers to the Volga and Serb,
Moldavian, Wallachian, Bulgarian, and Polish migrants to the Black Sea steppe
and even Crimea. Foreign migrants were offered land, tax breaks, food provisions,
and guarantees of religious and administrative autonomy. The state offered similar
(but lesser) incentives to East Slavs—state peasants,odnodvortsy, retired and dis-
abled soldiers, Cossacks, and even Old Believers—to relocate to the borders as
garrison troops. In the 1730s and 1740s they were directed to the Middle Volga, in
the 1760s to the Siberian line in the southern Urals and to the Astrakhan steppe, by
the 1780s to the northern Caucasus. In 1781 the state ordered governors of
provinces affected by land shortages to identify state peasants suitable to be
moved to empty steppe lands; they were to be offered tax relief for a few years.
A bit past our period, in 1805 the state embarked on a more systematic program of
moving state peasants from the center (Smolensk) and from overcrowded black
earth areas (Poltava, Kursk, Chernigov provinces) to Novorossiia, supported by tax
breaks and government assistance in settling.
MAPS AND CENSUSES
As we saw in Chapter 7, in the late seventeenth century the state intensified
“surveillance”of the empire’s human and natural resources, particularly regarding
taxation. Before Peter I introduced the poll tax, household censuses listed only rural
336 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801