Although by most accounts the Russian Empire never fully succeeded in turning “peasants into Russians,” it did succeed in shaping a Don Cossack people that was fiercely devoted to the Romanov dynasty and committed to a multi-ethnic Rossiia in which some peoples were more equal than others. Precisely because the boundaries of Don Cossack identity shifted so dramatically in only a few decades, the region provides a compelling case study for examining the construction of social identity and the creation of ethnic boundaries. While prior to 1705 the government played a predominant role in this process, suggesting that state intervention was a crucial ingredient in boundary creation and ethnic exclusivity, afterwards much of the initiative passed to Cossack leaders in Cherkassk. As in the modern world, a dynamic developed between documentation and deportation, ethnic exclusivity and economic exploitation. This chapter explores how and why the Cossacks began to codify, verify, and document individual identity in the Don region.

Previous studies of eighteenth-century imperial policies have not fully recognized the persistence of a territory conceptualized as Rus' within the Russian Empire nor analyzed the extent to which early imperial Russia was comprised of separate and distinct legal spaces. Marc Raeff argued that officials sought to create “a uniform pattern of administration throughout the empire.” James Cracraft outlined the parameters of a Petrine hegemony theory that would not “tolerate diversity in unity.”