Southern Ural. However, between 1773 and 1775 Bashkirs and Volga Tatars again were among the most important supporters of the Pugachev uprising. Simultaneously Russian pressure on the Kalmyks increased, and in 1771 more than 100,000 Kalmyks moved eastward, though only a small part of them reached their ancient homeland in western Mongolia.
While during the first half of the eighteenth century tsarist nationalities policies in the East became more repressive, in the Baltic provinces of Livonia and Estonia, conquered in 1710, Peter the Great continued to apply the traditional policy of preservation of the status quo and of cooperation with foreign elites. The privileges and corporate rights of the Baltic German landowners and townsmen were guaranteed, as were the Lutheran Church and the German language in administration and justice. The German Baltic nobles were co-opted into the imperial nobility and served the tsar as military officers, administrators, diplomats, and scholars. The Baltic provinces with their Central European structures and their educated upper class even constituted a model for a Westernized Russia.
Catherine II (r. 1762-1796) furthered the administrative homogeneity of the empire and curtailed the autonomy of the Baltic provinces, but her successors again guaranteed the traditional rights and privileges of the Baltic Germans. Catherine also abolished the autonomy of the Ukrainian Het-manate and destroyed the host of the formerly independent Zaporozhian Cossacks on the lower Dnieper. Russia had begun to integrate the Het-manate into the empire after the alliance of Het-man Ivan Mazepa with the Swedish king Charles XII, defeated by the Russians at Poltava in 1709. Nonetheless the tsars continued to cooperate with the loyal Cossack elite, which became a landowning nobility and in 1785 was partially co-opted into the imperial nobility. After a century of Ukrainization of Russian culture through graduates of the Kievan Mohyla Academy, Ukrainian culture was Russified from the end of the eighteenth century. After the victory against the Ottoman Empire in 1774, the subjugation of the Khanate of Crimea in 1783, and the annexation of the steppe regions north of the Black Sea, Russia no longer required the military skills of Ukrainian Cossacks. The former Hetmanate was now integrated into the administration, social structure, and culture of Russia. The fertile Southern steppe was first colonized by privileged German and Orthodox South Slav settlers, and in the following decades by Ukrainian and Russian peasants.
The three partitions of Poland (1772-1795) brought large numbers of Poles, Ukrainians, Be-lorussians, Jews, and Lithuanians under tsarist rule. After having abolished the political structure of the nobles’ republic and incorporated the large territory into the imperial administration, Catherine II followed the traditional pattern of cooperation with loyal non-Russian elites. She co-opted many of the numerous loyal Polish nobles into the imperial elite and confirmed their landholdings (with many Ukrainian, Belorussian, and Lithuanian serfs) and their social privileges. She granted self-administration to the towns and recognized the Roman Catholic Church and the Polish language. The tolerance of enlightened absolutism, however, did not apply to the Uniate Church, which was officially dissolved in 1839.
After 1772 Russia had to deal with a great number of Jews for the first time in its history. In the first years the politics of enlightened absolutism proclaimed tolerance and granted equality to the Jews, who were incorporated into the estates of townspeople. But from the 1780s on, and especially from 1804, the Jews of Russia faced discrimination. They were allowed to settle only in the so-called pale of Jewish settlement in the west of the empire and had to pay double taxes. Under Nicholas I (r. 1825-1855) the Jews lost other former rights.
In 1815 the Congress of Vienna established a Kingdom of Poland, often referred to as Congress Poland, which embraced the central provinces of former Poland-Lithuania and was united with the Russian Empire. The new hereditary king of Poland, Tsar Alexander I (r. 1801-1825), granted the kingdom a constitution that was the most liberal in Europe at the time, an almost complete autonomy with a separate army and self-government and a guarantee for the Polish language and the Catholic
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religion. These were unusual concessions that are explained by the international situation, the striving for independence of many Poles, and a possible role of the kingdom as a model for reforms in Russia. However, conflicts soon arose between the Russian government and Polish nobles who aimed at restoring the old kingdom of Poland-Lithuania. The Polish uprising of November 1830 and the following war with Russia put an end to the Kingdom of Poland. After the defeat of the Poles, Russia gave up cooperation with the “traitorous” Poles and integrated Poland into Russian administration.
In 1809 and 1812, respectively, Finland and Bessarabia were annexed by Russia. The Grand Duchy of Finland was granted a great measure of autonomy through guarantees of the status quo, the Lutheran religion, and the rights and privileges of the population. The Swedish nobility of Finland was co-opted into the imperial nobility, and many of its members served in the Russian army and navy. In contrast to the Polish nobility, they remained loyal to the tsar during the nineteenth century and maintained their social position within the empire. The large autonomy Finland was granted for the first time in 1809 laid the groundwork for the creation of a Finnish nation-state. Bessarabia, the territory between Dniester and Pruth, annexed in 1812 from the Ottoman Empire, was also guaranteed wide autonomy, which, however, was considerably curtailed in 1828. Although St. Petersburg co-opted the Romanian elite into the imperial nobility, the legal and administrative status quo of the former Ottoman province did not fit into the Westernized model of rule in Russia.
In its western peripheries, the tsarist government had to deal with societies that were influenced by the Renaissance, Catholicism, and Protestantism, and by Western legal systems and traditions of estates and urban and regional autonomy-societies that were usually more advanced in terms of education and economic development than the Russians. The empire profited from the special skills of its subjects; for instance, of the Baltic Germans, Poles, and Finns in the army, navy, and bureaucracy; of the Jews and Armenians in trade; and of all of them in education and scholarship.
As pressure on non-Russians in the West became greater under Catherine II, the repressive policy toward non-Christians in the East was lifted, and Russia again looked for cooperation with Muslim elites. Volga Tatar and Crimean Tatar aristocrats were co-opted into the nobility, and Catherine II tried to use Volga Tatar merchants and mullahs as mediators in the relations with Kazakhstan and Central Asia. She also created special religious administrations for the Muslims of the empire.
The conquest of the Caucasus region in the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century brought new Muslim and Christian groups under Tsarist rule. The Muslim khanates and Georgian kingdoms lost their political self- government and were integrated into the administrative structures of the empire. After the final annexation of southern Caucasia in 1828, Russia began to cooperate with its elites. Many of the very numerous Georgian and Muslim aristocrats were co-opted into the imperial nobility, and the Armenian merchants into the urban estates. So the social and economic status quo was respected. While the autocephaly of the Georgian Orthodox Church was abolished, the privileges of the Armenian Gregorian Church and the (mostly Shiite) Muslims were guaranteed. The mountaineers (gortsy) of the Caucasus rose up against tsarist rule and under Imam Shamil fought a holy war of more than thirty years against Russia. The tsarist armies that fought the Caucasian wars with great brutality succeeded only in 1864 “pacifying” the ethnic groups of Dagestan, the Chechens, and the Circassians. Hundreds of thousands of Caucasians were killed or forced to emigrate to the Ottoman Empire. After the conquest of the North Caucasus, the Russian government respected the religious and social status quo and cooperated with loyal non- Russian Muslim elites. On the other hand the government promoted Russian and Ukrainian colonization in the northern Caucasus, which became a source for new conflicts.
The evolutionist thinking of the European Enlightenment led to a new classification of peoples according to their alleged degree of civilization. Non-sedentary ethnic groups were regarded as inferior subjects, and they were combined in the new legal estate category of inorodtsy (aliens, allogenes) in 1822. During the first half of the nineteenth century most Siberian indigenes and the recently subjugated Kazakh nomads were integrated into the category of inorodtsy. They retained their social organization, their belief systems, and certain rights of local autonomy, but were second-class subjects only. After the military conquest of Central Asia from the 1860s to the 1880s, other Muslim nomads (Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Turkmen), as well as the sedentary Muslims of its south, were integrated into the estate of inorodtsy (here called tuzemtsy). Here, for the first time, the tsarist government did not accept sedentary foreign aristocrats and mer1021
NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST
chants as equals. In Central Asia, Russia followed a policy of noninterference, and the Muslim population
