Taming the Wild Field: Colonization and Empire on the Russian Steppe (review)

"The history of Russia," wrote Kliuchevskii, "is the history of a country that colonizes itself." ¹ By the time readers of this fine history of Russia's colonization of the steppe frontier get to this well-known line, they will be in a position to understand a body of literature about the edges of the expanding empire that included a cast of characters far beyond Kliuchevskii (209–210). In contrast to Kliuchevskii and the many others who shared an inclination to depict Russia's expansion as sometimes spontaneous, natural, and organic, Sunderland emphasizes that these views and attitudes disguised the imperial nature of Russia's contiguous settler colonialism.

Sunderland belongs to a cohort of historians of Russia, perhaps initially inspired by the role of the nationalities and interethnic conflict in the unraveling of the Soviet Union, that has devoted extensive attention to the question of empire in Russian history. Scholars have recently studied the experience of the settlers, cultural borrowing and trade between settlers and natives, the state's regulation of Islam and other faiths on the frontier, Orientalism and various visions of eastern peoples and regions, and native responses to empire. Sunderland's focus is the conception of the steppe itself, or what he regularly refers to as its "symbolic appropriation," which means many things: the land, its peoples, the experience of settlement, and especially its meaning for "Russia." The steppe frontier serves Sunderland as a location perpetually useful for the exploration of the central characteristics of a Russian identity that is always changing over time.

These changes are evident in the evolving preoccupations of ecclesiastics, administrators, military officials, travelers, ethnographers, and geographers who addressed the nature and meaning of the frontier through Russian history. Sunderland's focus on the steppe is narrow but his geographical and chronological scope is vast. The ever-receding frontier means excursions to southern Ukraine, the North Caucasus, the Middle Volga, Siberia, and Central Asia. The ambitious chronological narrative traces a series of important changes over time, shaped by the unfolding issues of religion, science, and empire. Thirteenth-century chroniclers and churchmen simply noted "unknown people" (Mongols) on the steppe, or "evil beasts and godless creatures" (15–16). The evolution of late Muscovite society, however, included the emergence of chanceries increasingly dedicated to territorial description, cartography, and even the "faith and customs" of the nomad inhabitants of the steppe (34).

The concerns of faith were eventually eclipsed by the "self-consciously Westernizing domain" of the eighteenth century, when the new notions pertinent to the exploration, description, and treatment of the steppe were "utility" and "science" (36). "The new meanings did not come about because the steppe changed but because Muscovy did" (35). Russia's modern turn to the West had important implications for its civilizing mission in the East and the terms of assimilation of the inhabitants of the steppe. The nineteenth-century witnessed an extraordinary amount of learned speculation about the nature of Russia's national identity and destiny (narodnost'), which was closely related to the imperial civilizing mission.

Sunderland does not ignore the actual experience of frontier settlement. State policy toward peasants and agricultural practices and conditions are at the heart of his narrative. He provides stories of settler poverty and starvation, problems with supplies, water, and timber, the contraction of malaria and plague, encounters with native inhabitants, and the impact of the absence of women upon settler communities (90–93). He describes the efforts of bureaucrats to alleviate these problems and provide for order on the frontier. He uncovers a world of ethnic diversity, the practices of an empire that was rossiiskaia ("all-Russian") rather than russkaia (ethnic Russian). Colonists were not just Russian and Ukrainian but often Czech, Bulgarian, Jewish, and Greek. Officials especially sought out German Mennonites (114–122...