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  • Tsar, Cossacks, and Nomads. The Formation of a Borderland Culture in Northern Kazakhstan in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
  • Gulnar Kendirbai (bio)
Yurii Malikov , Tsar, Cossacks, and Nomads. The Formation of a Borderland Culture in Northern Kazakhstan in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (=Studien zum Modernen Orient 18, ed. Gerd Winkelhane ) (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 2011). 322 pp. Appendix. Bibliography. Glossary. Index. (Paperback). ISBN: 978-3-87997-395-8.

Yurii Malikov's book was in-spired by studies employing alternative approaches to evaluating the role of the Russian state and the Cossacks in shaping Eurasian frontier interactions. More specifically, his study followed the research of Thomas Barrett, 1 who had investigated "the lines of uncertainty" that marked interactions between the Terek Cossacks and the indigenous North Caucasian populations in the seventeenth century. Malikov extended Barrett's approach, by focusing on frontier interactions between the Siberian Cossacks and the Kazakhs of the Middle Horde that had unfolded in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By revealing the weak agency of the Russian state in those interactions, both studies strongly resonated with the influential concept of "middle ground," which its author, Richard White, described as "the place in between, in between cultures, peoples, and in between empires and the non-state world of villages." 2 In more general terms, both authors' findings challenge the center-oriented picture of Russian colonization, in which the Russian state figures as its major agent. One proponent of that view, Michael Khodarkhovsky, believes that "Moscow's colonization of the vanquished lands and peoples was emphatically a government enterprise." 3

The book's main body features six chapters, an introduction and a conclusion. Chapter 1 exposes the myths about the authoritarian and oppressive mode of the state's operations and the Cossacks' role as the state's "obedient tool for the subjugation of the natives" (P. 33) that had been created by the pre-Soviet, Soviet, and post-Soviet scholarships. 4 [End Page 428] In Chapters 2, 4, 5, and 6, Malikov proceeds with the main thrust of his argument, by showing that, for a greater part of the imperial period, the state proved unable to control Cossack/Kazakh interactions on its Siberian frontiers. Rather than pitting both groups against each other, the Realpolitik of everyday colonial life invited various forms of cooperation between them. Malikov therefore opposes Khodarkovsky's description of Eurasian frontier interactions as "fundamentally irreconcilable" and hostile due to "the ever-present and growing incompatibility between two very different societies" (P. 17). His research con-vincingly demonstrates that for most of the imperial period the Cossack and Kazakh frontier populations had been actively involved in trade relations with each other. Based on littleknown statistical and other archival data that Malikov recovered from the archives in Omsk, Almaty, Moscow, and St. Petersburg, his analysis of those relations constitutes the most important contribution of his book. The most valuable data relate to the rise of the Kazakhs as skillful traders, who in the second half of the nineteenth century competed with Russian and Cossack merchants. These data revise the accepted view of nomadic Kazakhs who had been the object of exploitation by those merchants (Pp. 229-233).

In his endeavor to minimize the role of the state, Malikov largely ignores the state's ever-growing role in regulating the Cossacks' life, which had begun under Peter I, and became especially prevalent in the period under consideration in his book. For example, he asserts: "Without trade with the Kazakhs, the Siberian Cossacks could neither prosper nor even survive, since the Russian state could not provide its representatives on the remote frontier with even the basic necessities" (P. 36). Other accounts, however, reveal that throughout the eighteenth century, the Cossack inhabitants of Siberian towns (gorodovye kazaki) had been receiving salaries and free grain (which formed their main source of subsistence) from the state, while the Cossacks living on the Siberian frontier lines (lineinye kazaki) were granted free trade on the lines. 5 Moreover, by drawing parallels with the Terek Cossacks, Malikov states that the Siberian Cossacks "were not a privileged estate" (P. 225). In fact, the opposite was true. Unlike the Terek Cossacks, the four groups of steppe...

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