Though usually forgotten in general surveys of European colonization, the Russians were among the greatest colonizers of the Old World, eventually settling across most of the immense expanse of Northern Europe and Asia, from the Baltic and the Pacific, and from the Arctic Ocean to Central Asia. This book makes a unique contribution to our understanding of the Eurasian past by examining the policies, practices, cultural representations, and daily-life experiences of Slavic settlement in non-Russian regions of Eurasia from the time of Ivan the Terrible to the nuclear era.
The movement of tens of millions of Slavic settlers was a central component of Russian empire-building, and of the everyday life of numerous social and ethnic groups and remains a crucial regional security issue today, yet it remains relatively understudied. Peopling the Russian Periphery redresses this omission through a detailed exploration of the varied meanings and dynamics of Slavic settlement from the sixteenth century to the 1960s. Providing an account of the different approaches of settlement and expansion that were adopted in different periods of history, it includes detailed case studies of particular episodes of migration.
Written by upcoming and established experts in Russian history, with exceptional geographical and chronological breadth, this book provides a thorough examination of the history of Slavic settlement and migration from the Muscovite to the Soviet era. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of Russian history, comparative history of colonization, migration, interethnic contact, environmental history and European Imperialism.
Author(s): Nicholas Breyfogle, Abby Schrader, Willard Sunderland
Series: BASEES/Routledge Series on Russian and East European Studies
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2007
Language: English
Pages: 304
Book Cover......Page 1
Title......Page 6
Copyright......Page 7
Contents......Page 8
Illustrations......Page 11
Contributors......Page 12
Preface......Page 14
Archives and abbreviations......Page 16
Russian colonizations: An introduction......Page 18
Part I: Muscovy, expansion, and the limits of migration......Page 36
1 Claiming Siberia: Colonial possession and property holding in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries......Page 38
2 Containment vs. colonization: Muscovite approaches to settling the steppe......Page 58
3 Grant, settle, negotiate: Military servitors in the Middle Volga region......Page 78
Part II: Colonization on the Imperial Russian frontier......Page 96
4 Agriculture and the environment on the steppes in the nineteenth century......Page 98
5 The “ethic of empire” on the Siberian borderland: The peculiar case of the “rock people,” 1791–1878......Page 123
6 Resettling people, unsettling the empire: Migration and the challenge of governance, 1861–1917......Page 145
7 Progress or peril: Migrants and locals in Russian Tashkent, 1906–14......Page 165
Part III: Population politics and the Soviet experiment......Page 184
8 Acclimatization, the shifting science of settlement......Page 186
9 The aesthetic of Stalinist planning and the world of the special villages......Page 206
10 “Those who hurry to the Far East”: Readers, dreamers, and volunteers......Page 230
11 The “planet of one hundred languages”: Ethnic relations and Soviet identity in the Virgin Lands......Page 255
Part IV: Conclusions......Page 280
12 Colonizing Eurasia......Page 282
Glossary......Page 297
Index......Page 298
