This dissertation examines the settlement of Russian religious dissenters (Dukhobors, Molokans, and Subbotniks) in Transcaucasia from 1830 to 1890. During this period, tsarist officials promoted the relocation of sectarians (sektanty) to Transcaucasia--to the exclusion of other Slavs--in an effort to isolate their "heretical infection" from Orthodox Russians. Using previously unexamined archival materials written by the settlers themselves, this study explores Russian frontier colonization at ground level. It examines the migration experience, investigates the role of the periphery in nineteenth-century Russian history, and sheds light on the development of the Russian Empire. Since religious non-conformists comprised the majority of Russian migrants, this dissertation also discusses questions of popular religiosity and the role of religion in Russian society and polity.
Whereas existing scholarship describes Russian empire-building as a bilateral encounter between state representatives and indigenous peoples, this study demonstrates that Russian colonists played a vital role in constructing Imperial Russia as a multi-ethnic, multi-confessional entity. The sectarian-settlers influenced Russia's imperial enterprise through their interactions with tsarist authorities, local inhabitants, and Transcaucasia's ecology. Tsarist officials were obliged to rely on these "pernicious heretics" to administer the region because there were so few other Russians in Transcaucasia. Paradoxically, these "pariahs" came to be considered "model colonists."
The dissertation also asserts that a primary effect of Russian imperial expansion was to provide arenas on the frontier in which Russians (in this case religious dissenters) were able to forge alterative existences--"new worlds"--beyond those possible in the central provinces. The Transcaucasian frontier proved a fertile ground for contesting labels, manipulating categories, and refashioning notions of self and community. Distant from central power, and in dynamic interaction with a wide array of non-Russian peoples, the sectarians constructed and solidified new religious beliefs, social structures, economic practices, cultural systems, and identities. The use of non-conformists as colonizers loosened traditional links between Orthodox Christianity and Russian ethnicity, redefining Russian nationality.
