Intimacies of Exchange

This chapter examines the flow of goods across and through Crimea in an attempt to understand the impact of Russian rule on the economic landscape. It focuses on the patterns of exchange and consumption, arguing for the significance of small-scale transactions for understanding the economic geography of the region. While Russian officials were eager to facilitate and control Black Sea trade, farmers and gardeners and craftsmen began participating in the system of overland markets and fairs that connected the southern provinces to merchants and consumers everywhere from Kharkov and Moscow to Nizhnii Novgorod and Kazan. The Crimean economy thus moved southward toward Constantinople and northward toward Moscow, yet the towns of the peninsula remained key nodes of consumption and production, the orchards and vineyards key sites of prosperity.

Locating Crimea in Russian History

This introductory chapter locates Crimea in Russian history. Early in the spring of 1783, Empress Catherine II announced that Russia had at long last annexed the Crimean Khanate. Russia had annexed coastal territory before as well, though it was possession of Crimea that gave it a substantive presence on the Black Sea. Crimea was neither the biggest nor the most lucrative of the empire's acquisitions. Its significance rests instead in the combination of cultural, chronological, and geographical conditions that made it an object of intense fascination and anxiety in distant St. Petersburg. Ultimately, the khanate presented a novel opportunity to Catherine and the “viceroy of Southern Russia,” Prince Grigorii Potemkin. Surveying the steppe, the mountains, the rivers, and the sea, they saw an opportunity not simply to integrate a new province, but to build a new empire—a southern empire.

Rethinking Integration and Imperial Space

This concluding chapter argues that the empire-building process cannot be understood apart from its spatial context. On one hand, the exercise and experience of authority were shaped in important ways by the built and natural environments. Russian officials paid an inordinate amount of attention to sites and attempted to infuse many of them with particular symbolic significance. In another sense, the cultural and economic connections that integrated Crimeans into non-Russian, and usually trans-imperial, spaces were themselves valuable to the empire-building process. Commercial networks, family estates, and pilgrimage routes continually took Crimeans across the border of the empire. Cross-border transactions then provided the empire with channels for expanding its own sphere of influence.

The New Domain

This chapter discusses the changes to the regime of landownership and land use in the decades following annexation. In the second half of the eighteenth century, officials and scholars alike were developing new methods of quantifying Russian terrain. In their deployment of the cadastral survey and estate mapping and the compilation of statistics, they helped standardize the management and definition of imperial space. However, their efforts also cultivated an increasing awareness of the value and idiosyncrasies of micro-landscapes and shed light on differences in the cultural understanding of landownership in Russia and the former khanate. The chapter then shows how imperial officials, Russian pomeshchiki (landowners), and Crimean Tatars used landownership practices to shore up social and political hierarchies.

Geographies of Authority

This chapter explores the administrative reorganization of the khanate and the development of new structures of authority. It describes the implementation of Catherine's provincial reform and charter to the nobility, as well as the creation of the Tavrida Muslim Spiritual Board, as events that demonstrate the empire's capacity to preserve and control difference. While previous scholarship has suggested that Tavrida became a regular province of the empire in a matter of months, and certainly by 1802, the end of local particularity came much later—the result of nearly half a century of wrangling over the shape of administrative, social, and cultural institutions. Ultimately, the noble assembly emerges as a crucial site of debate and struggle over access to authority, for it was this body that served as gatekeeper of noble status.

Military Service and Social Mobility

This chapter demonstrates how service, whether elected or appointed, had great potential as an integrative tool. It could also be used as a mechanism for preserving local social hierarchies. The provincial government itself was part of an imperial system that cultivated multiple jurisdictions and multiple centers of power—a kind of flexibility essential to the function of a composite multiethnic empire. This flexibility or layered structure had a resonance even in the army, which had long served as a mechanism for integrating non-Russian elites. This was a form of interaction with the tsarist regime that the Crimeans found palatable, and the chapter looks at how Russians and Tatars used stints in a series of light horse regiments to their own ends: as a tool for maintaining the stability of the borderland during wars with the Ottomans, and as a vehicle for the acquisition (or maintenance) of rank and power.

Elusive Subjects and the Instability of Noble Society

This chapter focuses on one of the crucial mechanisms of empire building: the integration of elites. Previous scholars have presumed that the Crimean elite followed a path similar to that of their Georgian and Ukrainian peers. According to the accepted narrative, officials offered the mirzas a role in facilitating the establishment of Russian rule, and they accepted. By the early nineteenth century, mirzas relinquished the reins of authority to Russian officials and landowners, thus removing any vestiges of local particularity in the Tavrida administration. Those who remained in positions of power did so only by forsaking their previous allegiances and becoming part of the Russian social and cultural fabric. In so doing, they left the Crimean Tatar population vulnerable to integrationist policies.