Nicholas Breyfogle - Peopling the Russian Periphery: Borderland Colonization in Eurasian History

Peopling the Russian Periphery

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. It remains a crucial regional security issue today, yet is 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 to settlement and expansion that were adopted in different periods of history, it includes detailed case studies of particular episodes of migration.

Written by up and coming and established experts in Russian history, and 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.

Nicholas B. Breyfogle is Associate Professor of History at The Ohio State University. He is the author of Heretics and Colonizers: Forging Russias Empire in the South Caucasus, which received the 2006 Outstanding Publication Award from the Ohio Academy of History.

Abby Schrader is Associate Professor of History at Franklin and Marshall College. She is the author of Languages of the Lash: Corporal Punishment and Identity in Imperial Russia.

Willard Sunderland is Associate Professor of History at the University of Cincinnati. He is the author of Taming the Wild Field: Colonization and Empire on the Russian Steppe.

BASEES/Routledge series on Russian and East European studies

Series editor:

Richard Sakwa, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Kent

Editorial Committee:

Julian Cooper, Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University of Birmingham

Terry Cox, Department of Central and East European Studies, University of Glasgow

Rosalind Marsh, Department of European Studies and Modern Languages, University of Bath

David Moon, Department of History, University of Durham

Hilary Pilkington, Department of Sociology, University of Warwick Stephen White, Department of Politics, University of Glasgow

Founding Editorial Committee Member:

George Blazyca, Centre for Contemporary European Studies, University of Paisley

This series is published on behalf of BASEES (the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies). The series comprises original, high-quality, research-level work by both new and established scholars on all aspects of Russian, Soviet, post-Soviet and East European Studies in humanities and social science subjects.

1 Ukraines Foreign and Security 6 Policy, 19912000

Roman Wolczuk

Dostoevsky and the Idea of Russianness

Sarah Hudspith

2 Political Parties in the Russian 7

Performing Russia Folk Regions Revival and Russian Identity

Derek S. Hutcheson

3 Local Communities and Post-8 Communist Transformation

Laura J. Olson

Russian Transformations

Edited by Leo McCann

Edited by Simon Smith

4 Repression and Resistance in Communist Europe

J.C. Sharman

5 Political Elites and the New Russia

Anton Steen

9 Soviet Music and Society under Lenin and Stalin

The baton and sickle

Edited by Neil Edmunds

10 State Building in Ukraine

The Ukranian parliament, 19902003

Sarah Whitmore

11 Defending Human Rights in Russia

Sergei Kovalyov, dissident and human rights commissioner, 19692003

Emma Gilligan

12 Small-Town Russia

Postcommunist livelihoods and identities: a portrait of the intelligentsia in Achit, Bednodemyanovsk and Zubtsov, 19992000

Anne White

13 Russian Society and the Orthodox Church Religion in Russia after communism

Zoe Knox

14 Russian Literary Culture in the Camera Age

The word as image

Stephen Hutchings

15 Between Stalin and Hitler

Class war and race war on the Dvina, 19406

Geoffrey Swain

16 Literature in Post-Communist Russia and Eastern Europe The Russian, Czech and Slovak fiction of the changes 198898 Rajendra A. Chitnis

17 Soviet Dissent and Russias Transition to Democracy Dissident legacies

Robert Horvath

18 Russian and Soviet Film Adaptations of Literature, 19002001 Screening the word

Edited by Stephen Hutchings and Anat Vernitski

19 Russia as a Great Power

Dimensions of security under Putin

Edited by Jakob Hedenskog, Vilhelm Konnander, Bertil Nygren, Ingmar Oldberg and

Christer Pursiainen

20 Katyn and the Soviet Massacre of 1940

Truth, justice and memory

George Sanford

21 Conscience, Dissent and Reform in Soviet Russia

Philip Boobbyer

22 The Limits of Russian Democratisation

Emergency powers and states of emergency

Alexander N. Domrin

23 The Dilemmas of Destalinisation

A social and cultural history of reform in the Khrushchev Era Edited by Polly Jones

24 News Media and Power in Russia

Olessia Koltsova

25 Post-Soviet Civil Society

Democratization in Russia and the Baltic states

Anders Uhlin

26 The Collapse of Communist Power in Poland

Jacqueline Hayden

27 Television, Democracy and Elections in Russia

Sarah Oates

28 Russian Constitutionalism

Historical and contemporary development

Andrey N. Medushevsky

29 Late Stalinist Russia

Society between reconstruction and reinvention

Edited by Juliane Frst

30 The Transformation of Urban Space in Post-Soviet Russia Konstantin Axenov, Isolde Brade and Evgenij Bondarchuk

31 Western Intellectuals and the Soviet Union, 192040

From Red Square to the Left Bank Ludmila Stern

32 The Germans of the Soviet Union

Irina Mukhina

33 Reconstructing the Post-Soviet Industrial Region

The Donbas in transition

Edited by Adam Swain

34 Chechnya Russias War on Terror

John Russell

35 The New Right in the New Europe

Czech transformation and right-wing politics, 19892006

Sen Hanley

36 Democracy and Myth in Russia and Eastern Europe

Edited by Alexander Wll and Harald Wydra

37 Energy Dependency, Politics and Corruption in the Former Soviet Union

Russias power, oligarchs profits and Ukraines missing energy policy, 19952006

Margarita M. Balmaceda

38 Peopling the Russian Periphery

Borderland colonization in Eurasian history

Edited by Nicholas B. Breyfogle, Abby Schrader and

Willard Sunderland

39 Russian Criminal Justice in the Age of Reform, 18551917 Theories, practice and legacy Frances Nethercott

40 Political and Social Thought in Post-Communist Russia

Axel Kaehne

41 The Demise of the Soviet Communist Party Atsushi Ogushi

42 Russian Policy towards China and Japan

The Eltsin and Putin periods

Natasha Kuhrt

43 Soviet Karelia

Politics, planning and terror in Stalins Russia, 192039

Nick Baron

Peopling the Russian Periphery

Borderland colonization in Eurasian history