Barrett T.M. At the Edge of Empire: The Terek Cossacks and the North Caucasus Frontier, 1700-1860

Boulder, Colorado; Westview Press, 1999. - 243 pgs. At the Edge of Empire examines the history of the Cossack frontier settlements in the North Caucasus during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The specific focus is the Terek Cossacks, frontier settlers along the Terek river who became servants of the Russian state, warriors, and occasionally soldiers for (and deserters from) the Russian imperial armies. These were the most "Cossack" of all the Cossacks in the empire. Conditions of Cossack service and settlement along the Terek were unlike those on other ends of the empire. In the North Caucasus, Cossacks found themselves pushed to the brink by a state-sponsored agenda of colonizing and conquering yet at the same enmeshed in a shared borderland world with non-Russian "mountaineers" who were ultimately less alien to them than the Russian state that they were fighting for. For the Terekers, in other words, being Cossack meant living in an ambiguous position.