Taming the Wild Field Colonization and Empire on the Russian Steppe

Willard Sunderland, "Taming the Wild Field: Colonization and Empire on the Russian Steppe"
English | ISBN: 0801473470 | 2006 | 264 pages | EPUB | 4 MB
Stretching from the tributaries of the Danube to the Urals and from the Russian forests to the Black and Caspian seas, the vast European steppe has for centuries played very different roles in the Russian imagination. To the Grand Princes of Kiev and Muscovy, it was the "wild field," a region inhabited by nomadic Turko-Mongolic peoples who repeatedly threatened the fragile Slavic settlements to the north. For the emperors and empresses of imperial Russia, it was a land of boundless economic promise and a marker of national cultural prowess. By the mid-nineteenth century the steppe, once so alien and threatening, had emerged as an essential, if complicated, symbol of Russia itself.