Until the late seventeenth century, no Russian government felt strong enough to challenge the Crimean Tatars militarily. When at length they did so, they found the obstacles formidable. The hundreds of miles of open steppe which afforded such ideal hunting ground for Nogai and Tatar cavalry were a nightmare for infantry and artillery to traverse. Unable to rely on foraging in the sun-baked plains, the Russian army had to take with it a huge supply train, whose burdens were further swollen by the fodder needed for the draught animals pulling it. A whole series of Russian campaigns failed because of these difficulties, sometimes after initial encouraging success. In 1689 Prince Vasilii Golitsyn’s troops reached the isthmus fortress of Perekop, but had to abandon the siege because they had already consumed most of their supplies. In 1696 Peter I captured the fort of Azov, but had to relinquish it some years later for similar reasons. In 1736 General Münnich actually breached the walls of Perekop but had to retire without capturing it because he had run out of food and water: the Tatars had providently burnt their granaries and poisoned their wells.18
Right up to the late eighteenth century, Russia continued to rely for its security on extended chains of forts in the steppe, connected by an elaborate system of signalling linked to reserves situated near Kiev. About a quarter of the army was stationed on or behind these fortifications to prevent cavalry raids, which it could barely manage to do even with such profligate use of manpower. The power of the service nobility over their serfs was justified mainly by the need to staff these defences.19
Eventually the Russians were able to overcome the Crimean Tatars by employing their time-honoured steppe strategy, using diplomacy and military pressure to weaken their ties with the Ottoman Empire and to entice some of their vassals, the Nogai clans. With their help the Russian army was able to break into the Crimea in 1771. It declared the khanate a Russian protectorate, and then abolished it twelve years later, incorporating the territory directly into the empire and replacing the Khan with a Russian Governor. The Tatar murzy (nobles) were absorbed into the imperial nobility, if they could furnish proof of legitimate tide, while the peasants were confirmed in their landholdings and their free status. The Muslim religious authorities were permitted to retain their endowments (waqf) and their traditional status.20
From the Russians’ viewpoint this policy was wholly successful: there was no major Tatar rising against their rule. But there was a heavy price to be paid – by the Tatars: many of them emigrated to the Ottoman Empire, leaving behind land which was occupied by incoming Russian peasants and other colonists. Gradually the Tatars became a minority in what had been their own realm. It transpired, then, that large numbers of Muslims would emigrate if they had the chance to do so rather than endure an alien Christian domination. This was to happen again later in the Caucasus, leaving a legacy of hatred and bitterness which was to render Russia’s frontier in that region a permanent source of potential weakness.
Victory in the Crimea cleared the way for the Russian armies to consolidate their growing superiority over the Ottoman Empire on the whole northern coast of the Black Sea, which they gradually asserted in a series of wars fought between the 1760s and 1790s. These conquests were of cardinal strategic and economic significance. Russia was at last able to break out of her meagre woodland and exploit in security the rich steppe lands which had so long tantalized her people. Agriculturalists were able to make incomparably more productive use of them than slave-traders, and during the nineteenth century the grain grown there became the commercial mainstay of the empire. [See Part 2, Chapter 3]
CAUCASUS Domination of the Volga basin and of the Pontic steppes inevitably involved Russia in the politics of the Trans-Caucasus, for reasons which General Rostislav Fadeev outlined in the 1850s.
Domination on the Black and Caspian Seas, or in extremity the neutrality of those seas, is a vital interest for the whole southern half of Russia, from the Oka to the Crimea, the area where the principal strength of the empire, material and personal, is more and more concentrated … If Russia’s horizons ended on the snowy summits of the Caucasus range, then the whole western half of the Asian continent would be outside our sphere of influence and, given the present impotence of Turkey and Persia, would not long wait for another master.21
The Caucasus mountain range and its hinterland constituted very different terrain from the steppes but posed analogous problems of turbulence and power vacuum on Russia’s borders, aggravated in this case by the presence of Persia and the Ottoman Empire, and behind them Britain, hovering in the background, always ready to intervene. The region was a bewildering patchwork of tiny ethnic groups, often confined to single valleys or clusters of valleys, divided from each other by high mountain walls. The indigenous peoples were staunch in the Islamic faith, jealous of their tribal independence and their pastoral way of life.
Beyond the Caucasus range, in the basins of the Rion and Kura/Araxes rivers and the hills around them, lived two of the oldest Christian peoples in the world, the Georgians and the Armenians. The Georgians were largely a people of peasants and landed nobles, Orthodox by religion, organized till the late eighteenth century in a kingdom which was a loose confederation of principalities, wedged between the Persian and Ottoman Empires. The Armenians, by contrast, were traders, artisans and professional people of the Gregorian monophysite faith; they had had their own kingdom in the middle ages, but by the eighteenth century most lived in the Ottoman Empire, where they enjoyed a tolerably secure, if subordinate status as a recognized millet (a self-governing ethnic or religious community). Some were subjects of the various khans of the Persian Empire. Intermingled among them in the lower Kura basin and along the Caspian Sea were also Azeris, Shia Muslims whose religion inclined them towards Persia while their language was close to Turkish.
With their territories the object of contention between two Muslim empires, it was natural that the Georgians and Armenians should both look to Orthodox Russia as a potential protector. As early as 1556, when Muscovy was first established on the borders of the Caspian Sea, the east Georgian kingdom of Kakhetia sent envoys to consult about the possibility of becoming a protectorate.22
However, it was not for more than two centuries that Russia, at last controlling the north coast of the Black Sea and the Kuban’ steppes, was able to intervene decisively in Transcaucasian affairs. It was motivated to do so by the fear, later articulated by Fadeev, that otherwise the region, already unstable, would become the base of operation for another power, Asiatic or conceivably even European, to threaten the newly acquired steppes. Every time there was war with the Ottoman Empire, the Caucasus became an additional front, and even in peacetime the raids of the hill tribesmen constantly endangered the productive agricultural settlements establishing themselves on the Kuban’ plains to the north. Well before the end of the eighteenth century Russia constructed a line of forts along the Terek river, which annoyed the neighbouring Kabardinian chiefs.
This was the motive which impelled Russia in 1783 to offer protection of Georgia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity in return for acknowledgement of overlordship. Georgia got a bad bargain, for within two decades its separate kingdom had been abolished, and its royal family banished, yet effective Russian protection had not been forthcoming when its capital city, Tbilisi, was sacked by the Persians in 1795.
All the same, the Georgian people survived, and were able during the nineteenth century to develop a sense of nationhood in reasonably stable circumstances – something which might not have been possible had Russia never intervened. For the Russian masters themselves, the experience of dealing with Siberian and steppe peoples was largely misleading when handling a long-established and cultured people like the Georgians. Proud of their distinctive traditions, they were not content gradually to lose their identity in an Asian-style