Cossack Questions from the Imperial Frontier
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Thomas M. Barrett. At the Edge of Empire: The Terek Cossacks and the North Caucasus Frontier, 1700-1860. Boulder, Colo: Westview Press, 1999. xv + 243 $55.00, cloth, ISBN 978-0-8133-3671-8. Reviewed by Willard Sunderland Published on H-Russia (April, 2000) Who are the Cossacks? Are they state servi‐ 1700s and the 1850s. During this period, the tors or anti-state rebels? Are they a social group Terekers were, as Barrett puts it, the most "Cos‐ or an "ethno-cultural aggregation of people" sack" of all the Cossacks in the empire (p. 2). (kul'turno-etnicheskaia obshchnost' liudei)?[1] While every Cossack host in the empire was faced Are they Russian, non-Russian, or something in with the double challenge of frontier settlement between? The answer, of course, is that different and frontier service, the Tertsy faced this double Cossacks at different times have been all of these challenge in especially trying circumstances. Over things, which is precisely what makes Cossack‐ the late eighteenth and frst half of the nineteenth dom itself so hard to define. In this engaging centuries, the frontier of the North Caucasus was book, Thomas M. Barrett acknowledges these defi‐ on the move. The Russian state was pursuing a nitional complexities and -- in stereotypically Cos‐ "protracted and difficult expansion" against the sack fashion -- charges right into them. In the "heathen of the mountains" and the Terekers -- as process, he dismisses the whole idea of coming up Cossacks "of the line" -- stood very much at the with simple summations of Cossackness and in‐ front of this expansion. As a result, conditions of stead concentrates on explaining what in fact Cossack service and settlement along the Terek makes Cossacks so complicated. Barrett's elegant were unlike those on other ends of the empire. In but simple answer is that it all has to do with loca‐ the North Caucasus, Cossacks found themselves tion. Cossacks were people who were expected to pushed to the brink by a state-sponsored agenda settle on and serve on the frontier, yet the frontier of colonizing and conquering yet at the same en‐ was anything if not complicated. Consequently, meshed in a shared borderland world with non- Cossacks came out complicated as well. Russian "mountaineers" (gortsy) who were ulti‐ Barrett's work focuses in particular on the mately less alien to them than the Russian state history of the Terek Cossacks (Terskie kazaki, that they were fghting for. For the Terekers, in Tertsy) of the North Caucasus between the early other words, being Cossack meant living in an ambiguous position. As Barrett makes clear, the H-Net Reviews Tertsy served the state by "creating empire" but derland whose uniqueness only really ended with they did so as frontier people with distinct fron‐ the fnal conquest, colonization, and transforma‐ tier economies, identities, and loyalties. tion of the North Caucasus in the post-1850s peri‐ The world that the Tertsy inhabited was dis‐ od. tinct because it amounted to what Barrett calls an Barrett's presentation of this original reading "edge habitat," a zone "at the edge of states" char‐ of Terek Cossack history is impressive. His writing acterized by "great cultural complexity, inter‐ is fast and engaging; his research stands atop an change, and creativity" (p. 7). In this "edge habi‐ exhaustive reading in Russian archival and pub‐ tat," the Russian state and Russian society were lished material; and his knowledge of compara‐ barely present and consequently the Terek Cos‐ tive scholarship is deep, ranging across works on sacks developed in ways that were shaped -- for frontiers from "Scythia" to colonial New England. better and for worse -- by the exigencies of life in His study has brought frontier dynamics in the a frontier environment. These exigencies played Russian empire into better view and "frontierolo‐ themselves out in a variety of ways, which Barrett gists" everywhere should be grateful. The only explores frst by telling the story of how Cossack thing wrong with Barrett's book is that pages 47 groups formed and settled on the Terek and then through 54 were somehow published upside- by examining key themes relating to where and down, but even this glitch seems to make sense how they lived. since Barrett in many ways is turning over Land, for example, was abundant but labor (though not overturning) how Russianists have was scarce and service demands high, so Cossacks written about Cossacks and the North Caucasus. had enduring problems with establishing success‐ Barrett has moved away from a historiography ful agricultural economies. In a similar sense, dominated by military history and accounts of men were relatively numerous on the frontier "holy war" towards a fuller frontier history where while women were few, so Cossack societies de‐ one still sees the reality of multi-sided cross-cul‐ veloped pathways of gender relations that were tural conflict but also an equally important reality somewhat different than those that prevailed in of cultural accommodation and overlapping. interior Russian communities. The fact that Cos‐ While Westview Press could not have planned sacks were outnumbered by their non-Cossack, that this book would appear against the backdrop non-Slavic, and non-Orthodox neighbors on the of today's Russo-Chechen War, the timing --unfor‐ frontier was also a key factor that distinguished tunately -- could not have been better. "Cossacks" from "Russians." The Terekers, as it Notes turns out, ate, drank, dressed, raided, and amused [1]. This is the awkward categorization of Cos‐ themselves very much like native "mountaineers." sacks endorsed by the Russian government in its And they were also tied to the gortsy in intricate "Basic Principles for the Concept of a State Policy ways. They fought against them under A.P. Er‐ toward the Cossackry" (April 22, 1994). See Peter molov and other imperial generals, but they also Holquist, "From Estate to Ethnos: The Changing married with them, traded with them, and occa‐ Nature of Cossack Identity in the Twentieth Cen‐ sionally thieved with them, all of which created tury," in Nurit Schliefman (ed.), Russia at a Cross‐ lines of interconnection and interdependency roads: History, Memory, and Political Practice that, as Barrett notes, tend to be underempha‐ (London, 1998) p.112. sized by historians. All of these factors ultimately Copyright (c) 2000 by H-Net, all rights re‐ defined the Tertsy as a people of "the edge" and served. This work may be copied for non-profit made "the edge" itself into a unique imperial bor‐ educational use if proper credit is given to the au‐ 2 H-Net Reviews thor and the list. For other permission, please con‐ tact [email protected]. If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at https://networks.h-net.org/h-russia Citation: Willard Sunderland. Review of Barrett, Thomas M. At the Edge of Empire: The Terek Cossacks and the North Caucasus Frontier, 1700-1860. H-Russia, H-Net Reviews. April, 2000. URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=4037 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 3.