Russian Practices of Governance in Eurasia

Frontier Power Dynamics, Sixteenth Century to Nineteenth Century

Gulnar T. Kendirbai

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429515729
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

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.

Part I

The Russian institution of protectorate

1 Patterns of power and authority

This chapter explores the nature of so-called shert agreements that were negotiated by Muscovite rulers with their non-Russian counterparts in the aftermath of the fall of the Golden Horde. Historians have proposed different terms for describing these relationships, including patronage, protectorate, patron–client, patron–vassal and sovereign–vassal, which tend to obscure their unique nature. The lack of clarity relating to the status of the non-Russian rulers seems to have been the main source of the existing disparity among historians.

For example, Vadim Trepavlov believes that rather than turning the non-Russian rulers into the tsar’s subjects, these relationships reflected an imbalance of power and the two sides’ actual strategic and tactical interests. In exchange for the tsar’s protection, his non-Russian vassals were expected to pay a yasak tax, provide hostages (amanat) of noble origin, participate in joint military campaigns and avoid collaboration with their patron’s enemies. As Trepavlov has explained, the vassal’s status in this setting “meant personal responsibilities of noble rulers with respect to the Muscovite tsars, personal service to the tsar, for which they were rewarded salaries”.¹ In the eighteenth century, these interactions began to unfold under the umbrella of protectorate relations, because the Russian rulers began to view their foreign partners as their subjects, despite the fact that the partners continued to consider themselves free vassals and therefore frequently violated their agreements.²

Another Russian historian, N. A. Mininkov, also describes the relationship between the Don Cossack leaders and the Muscovite state before they swore allegiance to the tsar in 1671 as a voluntary and mutually beneficial agreement between a patron and his vassals. During this period, the Muscovite state had refrained from either imposing its own administration or taxation or any other obligations on the Don Cossack rulers, who considered themselves free clients of the tsar and received payments and benefits from him for executing his specific tasks. After they swore allegiance to the tsar, the Don Cossacks began to lose their freedom and independence, because they took upon themselves certain obligations that ultimately turned them into the tsars’ subjects. In particular, they lost the right to choose their allies and their freedom to undertake independent military missions. Mininkov does not use the terms protectorate or patronage to describe this relationship’s nature either before or after the 1671 Act.³ B. B. Kochekaev and V. I. Basin, in turn, have described the relationships of the Nogai and Qazaq nobility with their Russian patrons as protectorate relationships, with elements of vassalage.⁴

Trepavlov links subjecthood status ( poddanstvo) to placing the non-Russian rulers and their populations under a common Russian legal and administrative system and the introduction of symbols of a common state and taxation.⁵ However, none of his criteria can be applied to the relationships of Kalmyk and Qazaq rulers with their Russian patrons. As Basin has shown, the act of swearing allegiance by the rulers of all four Qazaq hordes to the Russian throne did not significantly change their interactions with Russia. Throughout the major part of this period, they continued to violate their signed agreements and act as independent rulers and therefore were repeatedly asked to swear allegiance to the Russian throne. Although Basin describes these relationships in terms of protectorate, he highlights the fact that until the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Qazaq populations of all four hordes had neither paid regular taxes, participated in Russia’s military campaigns nor fulfilled any other duties in favour of the Russian state. This, however, did not prevent both sides from viewing the Qazaqs as subjects of the Russian monarchs. Basin believes that the integration of the Qazaqs into Russian imperial structures began first in the second half of the nineteenth century, after they were placed under all-imperial laws and introduced to Russian administrative-territorial principles of ruling.⁶

Brian Boeck has argued along similar lines by stating that the Don Cossacks’ oath of allegiance to the tsar in 1671 did not substantially alter the nature of their interactions with him. In addition to retaining their complete local autonomy and economic subsidies, the Don Cossacks continued to openly defy the tsar’s orders and formed temporary military alliances with his enemies. Under the pressure of limited resources and confronting its Ottoman rivals, Muscovy also refrained from imposing its will on the Don Cossacks.⁷ Within this context, Boeck has remarked that:

The whole question of the loyalty oath deserved reconsideration…. Although it was an important symbolical act there is little evidence that the oath radically changed the relationship between the Don and Moscow. Hence it would be better to examine what the oath meant to both sides.⁸

By citing frequent violations of negotiated agreements by nomadic rulers, Michael Khodarkovsky and other historians concluded that these relationships had been marred by mutual misconceptions and misrepresentations stemming from “larger structural incompatibilities between the Russian and indigenous societies”.⁹ If the Russian side perceived the negotiated agreements in terms of placing the non-Russian rulers under Russian rule, the rulers themselves viewed them as non-binding voluntary agreements, which they could abandon any time in favour of other rulers.

A closer examination of the interactions between Kalmyk and Qazaq rulers and their Russian patrons, however, suggests a more complex situation. In fact, both sides frequently violated conditions of their agreements, with the Russian side unwilling (and often unable) to render protection and military assistance, while the Kalmyk and Qazaq rulers resisted delivering their hostages and yasak. In addition, both sides invested in playing each other off by cooperating with each other’s enemies. By viewing their negotiated agreements as a mutually beneficial cooperation based on the recognition of an existing imbalance of power, both sides demonstrated their familiarity with the basic rules of doing politics in the steppe. To gain better insights into these dynamics, I will proceed with a close examination of the workings of nomadic power relations.

Nomadic power dynamics and their entanglements

During the Russian traveller and scholar Aleksei Levshin’s visit to the Qazaq Steppe in 1820–1822 he found himself puzzling over the workings of Qazaq power relations. The behaviour of both noble and ordinary Qazaq nomads seems to have undermined his idea of how societies functioned:

All neighbors of the Kirgiz-Kaisaks [Qazaqs] have been ruled by monarchical and despotic regimes, all peoples related to them have been living in slavery, worthy of pity, but they display the absence of any familiarity with the notion of subordination, they seem to have been unfamiliar even with the notions of a subject and a master. A quite curious phenomenon from the point of view of politicians!¹⁰

In Levshin’s view, the most serious flaw in Qazaq power dynamics was the dearth of strong Qazaq rulers who were capable of establishing peace and order by imposing laws on their subjects. He concluded that Qazaq power relations were chaotic. Another Russian visitor to the Qazaq Steppe, M. Krasovsky, was struck by the power of local leaders, tribal judges and elders, whose influence seemed to have far exceeded that of their overlords.¹¹

These and other accounts suggest a distinct perception of properly balanced power relations on the part of all segments of Qazaq society, one that eschewed any centralization of power under a single leader. In this setting, to be ruled was to be provided with ample opportunity for manoeuvring or free decision-making, which also entailed being treated as equals. In other words, nomadic leadership was conditional on protecting the right to make independent political decisions. Accordingly, each nobleman and his subjects invested in maintaining their right to free movement to balance power in an effective way. The customary nomadic power relations unfolded therefore as personal and non-binding relations of servitude on the basis of a tributary allegiance between a ruler and his nobility, on the one hand, and the ruling nomadic class and ordinary nomads, on the other. This had the effect of loosening the social boundaries separating nobles from commoners, including the boundaries that sustained hierarchies in the ruling nomadic class itself. Subsequently, relationships among members of the nomadic ruling class and between them and their subject populations came to unfold mainly as mutually beneficial partnerships.

Among other things, this was due largely to the relative economic independence of noble and ordinary households. Despite the strong exposure of their economies to the often-unpredictable conditions of the arid and semi-arid zones of the Eurasian Steppe, the economic well-being of the nomadic ruling class did not directly depend on income from their subjects. Members of the nomadic nobility did not practise regular taxation. Each nobleman, including the supreme ruler, lived off of his own livestock, while his subjects paid tributes in acknowledgement of their patron’s protective role. Depending on their livestock holdings, wealthy households hired commoners, usually their impoverished relatives, to graze their animals, but the job was not labour-intensive and could also be implemented by women and children.

As mentioned earlier, apart from sustaining a necessary balance in the nomads’ daily interactions with their precarious ecological and climatic conditions, the mobility factor had a straightforward impact on shaping the very workings of nomadic leadership structures. The long-distance migrations undertaken by ambitious nomads could lead to the formation of new, independent political bodies. One such pivotal movement occurred around 1459, when the Chingizid sultans Gerei and Janibek, the descendants of Juchi, Chingiz Khan’s older son, left the Ulus (domain) of Shaiban (known also as the Khanate of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of maps
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I The Russian institution of protectorate
• Part II Kalmyk–Russian protectorate relations
• Part III Placing the Qazaqs under Russia’s protection
• Part IV Between Russia and the Qing
• Part V Staying on the imperial fringe
• Index