Description:
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the expanding Russian empire was embroiled in a dramatic confrontation with the nomadic people known as the Kalmyks who had moved westward from Inner Asia onto the vast Caspian and Volga steppes. Drawing...
Brief description: Michael Khodarkovsky is Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago. He is coeditor of Of Religion and Empire: Missions, Conversion, and Tolerance in Tsarist Russia and author of The Russian State and the Kalmyk Nomads, 1600-1771, also from Cornell, and author of Russia's Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500-1800.
Review Quotes:
Khodarkovsky's book is a detailed account of relations between Kalmyks and Russians prior to 1771. To provide greater balance than was previously available, he matches Russian sources with material gleaned from the Ottoman archives, and he provides an initial chapter on the structure of Kalmyk nomadic society.
--James Critchlow "Russian Review"