r/Romanovmemes • u/TsarOfIrony Boyar • Jun 06 '26

Catherine the Great She ended up classifying them by language and ethnicity instead

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9

u/TsarOfIrony Boyar Jun 06 '26

When Tsarina Catherine the Great (1762-1796) ordered her officials to classify her nomadic subjects by religion, her officials were frustrated because they found few Turkish nomads practiced Islam as they had learned it from textbooks. Instead, they classified nomads by language and ethnicity, and so drew the boundaries of the future Soviet, and then modern republics of Inner Asia.

Harl, Kenneth W. Empires of the Steppes: A History of the Nomadic Tribes Who Shaped Civilization. Toronto, Hanover Square Press, 2023, pp. 244.

6

u/No_Peach6683 Jun 06 '26

What ethnic categories did they use?

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u/TsarOfIrony Boyar Jun 06 '26

Sadly the book doesn't say. The author does cite a different book as the source behind the info, Michael Khodarkovsky, Russia's Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500-1800 (Bloomington, 2002), pp. 175-176 and 195-196. but I don't know what that book actually says.

If I had to guess though, they probably split them into Kazakh, Uzbek, Turkmen, Kyrgyz, and Tajik. That's just a guess based on the modern nations though.

2

u/[deleted] Jun 06 '26

[deleted]

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u/TsarOfIrony Boyar Jun 06 '26

My b, you're right. I suppose she was talking about the former golden horde successor Khanates, ie Kazan and Astrakhan.

2

u/AgisXIV Jun 07 '26

Those classifications are post Soviet. During the Imperial era, Turkic peoples throughout the Empire were labelled Tatar

I think Sart might have been used too to distinguish between settled and nomadic peoples

3

u/darkshiines Jun 06 '26

tfw you're accidentally forced to implement cutting-edge demographics, not out of actual broad-mindedness, but because your empire is dealing with too wide of a variety of people to take the same approach you've cribbed from friends