Expansion of Russia (1500–1800)

• 1. Introduction

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  The expansion of Russia from 1500 to 1800 was one of history's most consequential land grabs, transforming a landlocked principality into an empire that stretched from the Baltic nearly to the Caspian. Vasily Klyuchevsky, writing in Kurs Russkoy Istorii in 1904, put it bluntly: the history of Russia is the history of a country being colonized. Migration and colonization, he wrote, were fundamental facts of Russian history. The land in question was the vast steppe and forest-steppe of Ukraine and southern Russia, a region whose black soil promised enormous agricultural wealth to any power that could hold it. The problem was that someone else already lived there. For centuries, pastoral nomads had controlled this grassland, and their constant raiding kept the southern lands effectively empty of peasants. What followed over three centuries was a grinding competition between Moscow, Poland, the Crimean Khanate, the Cossacks, and the Ottoman Empire for dominance over this contested frontier. The questions that shaped those three hundred years are layered and still live in the geography of eastern Europe today: how did Moscow overcome its rivals, what fortifications held back the raiders, and what happened to the people who were swept up in the process?

• 2. The World Before Moscow

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  Around 1240, the Mongols swept across the entire region and brought it under a single imperial rule. As that empire fractured, its western portion became the Golden Horde, centered on the lower Volga. The Horde's political and cultural elite adopted Islam around 1315. By the mid-15th century, the Golden Horde was splitting apart into successor khanates: Kazan on the upper Volga in 1438, Crimea on the Black Sea in 1441, and Astrakhan on the lower Volga in 1466. The steppe remnant, called the Great Horde, clung on until 1502, when Crimean forces killed its last Khan. From this moment, the buffer that had stood between Moscow and Crimea was gone, and the two powers were suddenly face to face. The peoples who inhabited this space were not a single bloc. Steppe nomads north of the Black and Caspian Seas raided into the forest-steppe to the north. The Cossacks, Slavic frontier people organized into two military communities by around 1500, held the Zaporozhian Sich on the Dnieper bend and the Don Cossacks on the Don River bend. The Crimean Khanate could field up to 80,000 horsemen, and many of its wars were essentially slave raids. The export of captives to Turkey was a major driver of the Crimean economy, with the great slave port of Kaffa on the southern peninsula serving as the main transit point. Some captives were ransomed back; others were sold east as far as Bukhara. One estimate holds that between 150,000 and 200,000 people were taken from Russia in the period 1600 to 1650 alone.

• 3. Lines in the Grass

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  Moscow's answer to the raiding threat was physical: a sequence of fortified lines pushing steadily southward across the steppe. The first major effort was the Bank or Oka Line, using the river itself as a barrier. By 1533, about 250 kilometers of the bank was extensively fortified, anchored between Kaluga on the Oka bend and Kolomna, with the military headquarters established at Kolomna from 1522. Troops were mostly horse archers drawn from the land-owning class, supplemented by growing numbers of artillery and musketeers. The Oka Line held well enough that the Crimean raid of 1633 was apparently the last to cross the river. But a river line alone could not stop a determined enemy from finding crossings. After 1533, work began on the Abatis Line, known in Russian as the Zasechnaya cherta, roughly 100 kilometers south of the Oka. The line used felled trees, earthworks, and forts strung together into a barrier that combined passive obstruction with active garrison sorties. It ran in two sections, anchored by the great fort of Tula at 193 kilometers south of Moscow. The Abatis Line was extensively reconstructed in 1638 and again in 1659-60. Then came the Belgorod Line, begun after the Smolensk War ended in 1634. Eleven new garrison towns were established in 1635-37, and by 1653, eighteen additional forts had been built. The completed line was shaped like a reversed letter L, running south down the Voronezh River and then bending west through a chain of fortified towns, enclosing a rectangle of roughly 400 by 300 kilometers of black-earth country. The number of frontier troops was more than tripled, to 17,500, in the period following 1634. By the time the Simbirsk Line and Trans-Kama Line were completed in the 1650s, Moscow had roughly 1,800 kilometers of continuous fortified line stretching from Polish territory almost to the Urals.

• 4. Eyes on the Steppe

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  Fortifications alone could not stop raiders who moved faster than messengers. The solution was an intelligence network built from ranging patrols. The practice appears to have begun in the early 16th century at Putivl, near the upper Oka. In 1541, a patrol provided enough warning to block a Tatar raid. By 1551, patrols had become a regular practice. A ranger patrol typically consisted of a captain and a few dozen men who covered great distances with no fixed route. When they detected signs of a raiding party, they sent riders back to the nearest garrison. After the Crimean raid of 1571 burned Moscow and exposed the limits of the Oka defenses, the patrol system was made more systematic. A unit called the starozha usually consisted of two to six horsemen operating from a fixed point and surveying an area with a radius of up to 70 kilometers. These beats interlocked across the frontier. By 1623, there were 180 of them. The Don Cossacks on the upper Don provided an additional source of intelligence from even further south. The raid of 1571 was the catalytic event. While Russian troops were committed to the Livonian War in the west, the Crimean Khan broke through the Oka Line. The consequence was a rapid strengthening of southern defenses, and the new defensive line successfully blocked the next major raid at the Battle of Molodi.

• 5. Down the Volga

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  While building lines against Crimea in the west, Moscow was simultaneously pushing southeast down the Volga. Kazan, about 700 kilometers east and slightly south of Moscow, fell in 1552 after a series of Russo-Kazan wars in which both Moscow and Crimea had backed rival claimants for the Kazan throne. Moscow built advanced positions to stage the attack: Vasilsursk on the Volga below Nizhny Novgorod in 1523, and Sviyazhsk near Kazan in 1551. Two years later, in 1554, Moscow installed a Nogai prince on the throne of Astrakhan. When he rebelled, Russia annexed Astrakhan in 1556, reaching the Caspian Sea. The Ottoman Empire recognized the threat: in the First Russo-Turkish War of 1568-1570, the Ottomans tried and failed to retake Astrakhan for Islam. The Nogai Horde, which occupied the lower Volga lands between these two conquests, was managed through a mixture of bribes and threats. Some Nogais found more profit in trading than raiding. In 1555, a leader named Ismail sent 20,000 horses to Moscow. Nogai assistance was significant in the conquest of Kazan. Factional violence within the Nogai leadership, worsened by famine, eventually weakened them. By around 1630, the Kalmyks, Buddhist Mongols who had migrated from Dzungaria, took over most of the Nogai lands on the lower Volga. The string of forts built along the Volga after the Livonian War, at Samara in 1586, Saratov in 1590, and Tsaritsyn (the modern Volgograd) in 1589, stitched this southeastern frontier together. The crossing of the Urals in 1582 opened the conquest of Siberia.

• 6. Ukraine and the Cossack Question

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  By the Union of Lublin in 1569, during the Livonian War, Poland absorbed most of Ukraine from Lithuania. The Orthodox population in these eastern lands grew increasingly alienated from Catholic Poland, and from about 1637, a series of rebellions began driving people eastward into Russian territory south of the Belgorod Line. In 1648, Bohdan Khmelnytsky launched a rebellion that quickly became a general Orthodox rising extending as far west as Volhynia. It also became a social upheaval, driving landowners, Poles, Catholics, and Jews westward. Russia hesitated, knowing that accepting Khmelnytsky as a vassal would mean war with Poland. In 1654, it accepted that consequence through the Treaty of Pereyaslav. The Russo-Polish War that followed ran from 1654 to 1667. Sweden's attack on Poland in 1655, causing the near-collapse of the Commonwealth in what became known as the Deluge, might have finished Poland entirely. Instead, Russia and Sweden fell out in their own war of 1656-1658, giving Poland time to recover. The Treaty of Andrusovo in 1667 gave Russia Smolensk, Chernihiv, and nominal rule over the lands east of the Dnieper, including Kiev. After Khmelnytsky's death in 1657, the Cossack political structure fragmented. The effective division of Ukraine at the Dnieper from 1660 produced four distinct zones after 1667: the Right Bank returning to Polish control; the Cossack Hetmanate on the Left Bank under Russian suzerainty; Sloboda Ukraine to the east and south of the Belgorod Line; and Zaporizhia on the Dnieper bend, nominally under the Hetmanate but practically self-governing. The Eternal Peace Treaty of 1686 ended Poland's claim to Zaporizhia entirely.

• 7. Reaching the Black Sea

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  Peter the Great's campaigns against Azov marked the moment Russia first tried to break through to the Black Sea. The Turks had held a fortress at Azov at the mouth of the Don since 1471; Don Cossacks had briefly captured and held it from 1637 to 1642. Peter failed to take it in 1695 because he could not prevent resupply by river. In 1696, he built ships at Voronezh, sailed them down the Don, and captured Azov. Russia gave Azov back after its defeat in the Russo-Turkish War of 1710-1711. The Russo-Turkish War of 1735-1739 brought it back: Russians stormed Perekop, captured Bakhchisarai, and retook Azov in 1736. Plague forced withdrawals from gains in Ochakov and on the Crimean peninsula. The Russo-Turkish War of 1768-1774 proved more decisive. Russia sent its Baltic fleet into the Mediterranean and defeated the Turkish fleet. The Treaty of Kuchuk-Kainarji gave Russia use of Azov for military purposes, control of the Kerch Strait, and the new port of Kherson founded in 1778. Crimea was declared independent of the Turks, a legal fiction that made it a Russian vassal in practice. Russia installed Sahin Giray as Khan. His firm rule provoked rebellion and required Russian troops to prop him up. Crimea was formally annexed in 1783. William Hardy McNeill, in a 1978 lecture series called The Great Frontier, proposed that the Russo-Polish frontier in the east can be understood alongside the Trans-Atlantic frontier in the west as part of a single worldwide expansion of Europe. The last areas of open steppe in this region fell to the plow sometime before 1900.