Download or read book Russia s Steppe Frontier written by Michael Khodarkovsky and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2004-12-15 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on sources and archival materials in Russian and Turkic languages, Russia's Steppe Frontier presents a complex picture of the encounter between indigenous peoples and the Russians. It is an original and invaluable resource for understanding Russia's imperial experience. Michael Khodarkovsky is Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago.
Download or read book Beyond the Steppe Frontier written by Sören Urbansky and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-28 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive history of the Sino-Russian border, one of the longest and most important land borders in the world The Sino-Russian border, once the world’s longest land border, has received scant attention in histories about the margins of empires. Beyond the Steppe Frontier rectifies this by exploring the demarcation’s remarkable transformation—from a vaguely marked frontier in the seventeenth century to its twentieth-century incarnation as a tightly patrolled barrier girded by watchtowers, barbed wire, and border guards. Through the perspectives of locals, including railroad employees, herdsmen, and smugglers from both sides, Sören Urbansky explores the daily life of communities and their entanglements with transnational and global flows of people, commodities, and ideas. Urbansky challenges top-down interpretations by stressing the significance of the local population in supporting, and undermining, border making. Because Russian, Chinese, and native worlds are intricately interwoven, national separations largely remained invisible at the border between the two largest Eurasian empires. This overlapping and mingling came to an end only when the border gained geopolitical significance during the twentieth century. Relying on a wealth of sources culled from little-known archives from across Eurasia, Urbansky demonstrates how states succeeded in suppressing traditional borderland cultures by cutting kin, cultural, economic, and religious connections across the state perimeter, through laws, physical force, deportation, reeducation, forced assimilation, and propaganda. Beyond the Steppe Frontier sheds critical new light on a pivotal geographical periphery and expands our understanding of how borders are determined.
Download or read book Where Two Worlds Met written by Michael Khodarkovsky and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the expanding Russian empire was embroiled in a dramatic confrontation with the nomadic people known as the Kalmyks who had moved westward from Inner Asia onto the vast Caspian and Volga steppes. Drawing on an unparalleled body of Russian and Turkish sources--including chronicles, epics, travelogues, and previously unstudied Ottoman archival materials--Michael Khodarkovsky offers a fresh interpretation of this long and destructive conflict, which ended with the unruly frontier becoming another province of the Russian empire.Khodarkovsky first sketches a cultural anthropology of the Kalmyk tribes, focusing on the assumptions they brought to the interactions with one another and with the sedentary cultures they encountered. In light of this portrait of Kalmyk culture and internal politics, Khodarkovsky rereads from the Kalmyk point of view the Russian history of disputes between the two peoples. Whenever possible, he compares Ottoman accounts of these events with the Russian sources on which earlier interpretations have been based. Khodarkovsky's analysis deepens our understanding of the history of Russian expansion and establishes a new paradigm for future study of the interaction between the Russians and the non-Russian peoples of Central Asia and Transcaucasia.
Download or read book The Russian Conquest of Central Asia written by Alexander Morrison and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-10 with total page 641 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive diplomatic and military history of the Russian conquest of Central Asia, spanning the whole of the nineteenth century.
Download or read book Taming the Wild Field written by Willard Sunderland and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-10 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stretching from the tributaries of the Danube to the Urals and from the Russian forests to the Black and Caspian seas, the vast European steppe has for centuries played very different roles in the Russian imagination. To the Grand Princes of Kiev and Muscovy, it was the "wild field," a region inhabited by nomadic Turko-Mongolic peoples who repeatedly threatened the fragile Slavic settlements to the north. For the emperors and empresses of imperial Russia, it was a land of boundless economic promise and a marker of national cultural prowess. By the mid-nineteenth century the steppe, once so alien and threatening, had emerged as an essential, if complicated, symbol of Russia itself.Traversing a thousand years of the region's history, Willard Sunderland recounts the complex process of Russian expansion and colonization, stressing the way outsider settlement at once created the steppe as a region of empire and was itself constantly changing. The story is populated by a colorful array of administrators, Cossack adventurers, Orthodox missionaries, geographers, foreign entrepreneurs, peasants, and (by the late nineteenth century) tourists and conservationists. Sunderland's approach to history is comparative throughout, and his comparisons of the steppe with the North American case are especially telling.Taming the Wild Field eloquently expresses concern with the fate of the world's great grasslands, and the book ends at the beginning of the twentieth century with the initiation of a conservation movement in Russia by those appalled at the high environmental cost of expansion.
Download or read book Europe s Steppe Frontier 1500 1800 written by William H. McNeill and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011-09-23 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Europe’s Steppe Frontier, acclaimed historian William H. McNeill analyzes the process whereby the thinly occupied grasslands of southeastern Europe were incorporated into the bodies-social of three great empires: the Ottoman, the Austrian, and the Russian. McNeill benefits from a New World detachment from the bitter nationality quarrels of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century which inspired but also blinded most of the historians of the region. Moreover, the unique institutional adjustments southeastern Europeans made to the frontier challenge cast indirect light upon the peculiarities of the North American frontier experience.
Download or read book Of Religion and Empire written by Robert P. Geraci and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first to investigate the role of religious conversion in the long history of Russian state building, with geographic coverage from Poland and European Russia to the Caucasus, Central Asia, Siberia, and Alaska.
Download or read book Beyond the Steppe Frontier written by Sören Urbansky and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-12-14 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Over two thousand miles long, the boundary between Russia and China is the world's longest land border. Though sometimes considered a backwater, the border region was always of critical geopolitical importance and has a fascinating history. Not only did this border divide the two largest Eurasian empires, it was also the place where European and Asian civilizations met, where nomads and settled peoples mingled, where the imperial interests of Russia, China, and Japan clashed, and where both conflicts and gestures of friendship between the world's largest Communist regimes were staged. This book is a history of this border from the late nineteenth century until the fall of the Soviet Union. The border has undergone a remarkable transformation since the late nineteenth century. As late as the 1920s, Russian, Chinese, and native worlds were intricately interwoven in the region, and the frontier was barely regulated. By the end of the twentieth century, however, the two countries had succeeded in cutting kin, cultural, economic, and religious connections between the two sides through deportation, forced assimilation, and nationalist propaganda campaigns. Only with the collapse of the Soviet Union would China and Russia reopen the border, but even today the line between countries demarcates two distinct regions with remarkably different worldviews and cultures. Drawing on sources in seven languages, including extensive archival research, interviews, and oral histories, Urbansky stresses the significant role of the local population in supporting, or more often undermining, the two states' border-making efforts"--
Download or read book Bitter Choices written by Michael Khodarkovsky and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-10-18 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Russia’s attempt to consolidate its authority in the North Caucasus has exerted a terrible price on both sides since the mid-nineteenth century. Michael Khodarkovsky tells a concise and compelling history of the mountainous region between the Black and Caspian seas during the centuries of Russia’s long conquest (1500–1850s). The history of the region unfolds against the background of one man’s life story, Semën Atarshchikov (1807–1845). Torn between his Chechen identity and his duties as a lieutenant and translator in the Russian army, Atarshchikov defected, not once but twice, to join the mountaineers against the invading Russian troops. His was the experience more typical of Russia’s empire-building in the borderlands than the better known stories of the audacious kidnappers and valiant battles. It is a history of the North Caucasus as seen from both sides of the conflict, which continues to make this region Russia’s most violent and vulnerable frontier.
Download or read book Muscovy and the Mongols written by Donald Ostrowski and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-06-20 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A 1998 study of the impact of the Mongols on the Rus lands using a broad and extensive source base.
Download or read book Russia s Orient written by Daniel R. Brower and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1997-06-22 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From a 1994 conference (U. of California, Berkeley), Borderlands Research Group participants present their findings based on unprecedented access to the hinterlands of what is the now the CIS. Fourteen contributors provide context for the current self- deterministic ethnic turmoil in Chechyna and elsewhere far from the Kremlin, via discussions of tsarist colonial policies and historical, heartland majority attitudes toward the "ignoble savages and unfaithful subjects" (read Muslim) of Russia's diverse Orient. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Download or read book Russian Practices of Governance in Eurasia written by Gulnar T. Kendirbai and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-03-04 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyses the role of the mobility factor in the spread of Russian rule in Eurasia in the formative period of the rise of the Russian Empire and offers an examination of the interaction of Russian authorities with their nomadic partners. Demonstrating that the mobility factor strongly shaped the system of protectorate that the Russian and Qing monarchs imposed on their nomadic counterparts, the book argues that it operated as a flexible institutional framework, which enabled all sides to derive maximum benefits from a given political situation. The author establishes that interactions of Russian authorities with their Kalmyk and Qazaq counterparts during the mid-16th to the mid-19th centuries were strongly informed by the power dynamics of the Inner Asian frontier. These dynamics were marked by Russia’s rivalry with Qing Chinese and Jungar leaders to exert its influence over frontier nomadic populations. This book shows that each of these parties began to adopt key elements of existing steppe political culture. It also suggests that the different norms of governance adopted by the Russian state continued to shape its elite politics well into the 1820s and beyond. The author proposes that, by combining key elements of this culture with new practices, Russian authorities proved capable of creating innovative forms of governance that ended up shaping the very nature of the colonial Russian state itself. An important contribution to the ongoing debates pertaining to the nature of the spread of Russian rule over the numerous populations of the vast Eurasian terrains, this book will be of interest to academics working on Russian history, Central Asian/Eurasian history and political and cultural history.
Download or read book Soldiers on the Steppe written by Carol Belkin Stevens and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Soldiers on the Steppe charts the process of Russian army reform, not as reflected in laws and government edicts but rather as it was lived on the southeastern frontier of Europe.
Download or read book Colonizing Russia s Promised Land written by Aileen E. Friesen and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2020 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Colonizing Russia's Promised Land: Orthodoxy and Community on the Siberian Steppe, examines how Russian Orthodoxy acted as a basic building block for constructing Russian settler communities in current-day southern Siberia and northern Kazakhstan.
Download or read book At the Margins of Orthodoxy written by Paul W. Werth and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-31 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a period of dramatic social change, when Orthodoxy and nationalism were the twin pillars of the Russian state, how did the tsarist bureaucracy govern an expansive realm inhabited by the peoples of many nations and ethnicities professing various faiths? Did the nature of tsarist rule change over time, and did it vary from region to region? Paul W. Werth considers these large questions in his survey of imperial Russian rule in the vast Volga-Kama region. First conquered in the sixteenth century, the Volga-Kama lands were by the nineteenth century both part of the Russian heartland and resolutely "other"—the home of a mix of Slavic, Finnic, and Turkic peoples where the urge to assimilate was always counterbalanced by determined efforts to preserve cultural and religious differences. The Volga-Kama thus poses the dilemmas of empire in especially complex and telling ways. Drawing on a wide range of printed and archival sources, Werth untangles and reconstructs this complicated history, focusing on the ways in which the tsarist state and Orthodox missions used conversion in their ongoing (and regularly frustrated) efforts to transform the region's Muslim and animist populations into imperial, Orthodox citizens. He shows that the regime became less concerned with religion and more concerned with secular attributes as the marker of cultural differences, an emphasis that would change dramatically in the early years of Soviet rule.
Download or read book Warfare State and Society on the Black Sea Steppe 1500 1700 written by Brian Davies and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-04-04 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This crucial period in Russia's history has been neglected by historians, but Brian Davies' study provides an essential insight into the emergence of Russia as a great power.
Download or read book Where Two Worlds Met written by Michael Khodarkovsky and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-05 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the expanding Russian empire was embroiled in a dramatic confrontation with the nomadic people known as the Kalmyks who had moved westward from Inner Asia onto the vast Caspian and Volga steppes. Drawing on an unparalleled body of Russian and Turkish sources—including chronicles, epics, travelogues, and previously unstudied Ottoman archival materials—Michael Khodarkovsky offers a fresh interpretation of this long and destructive conflict, which ended with the unruly frontier becoming another province of the Russian empire.Khodarkovsky first sketches a cultural anthropology of the Kalmyk tribes, focusing on the assumptions they brought to the interactions with one another and with the sedentary cultures they encountered. In light of this portrait of Kalmyk culture and internal politics, Khodarkovsky rereads from the Kalmyk point of view the Russian history of disputes between the two peoples. Whenever possible, he compares Ottoman accounts of these events with the Russian sources on which earlier interpretations have been based. Khodarkovsky's analysis deepens our understanding of the history of Russian expansion and establishes a new paradigm for future study of the interaction between the Russians and the non-Russian peoples of Central Asia and Transcaucasia.
