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There was far more, however, than simply resentment of the West in this Asiatic orientation. The Russian empire grew by settlement, and the Russians who moved out into the frontier zones, some to trade or farm, others to escape from Tsarist rule, were just as likely to adopt the native culture as they were to impose their Russian way of life on the local tribes. The Aksakovs, for example, who settled on the steppes near Orenburg in the eighteenth century, used Tatar remedies when they fell ill. These entailed drinking koumis from a horse-skin bag, using special herbs and going on a diet of mutton fat.⁴⁴ Trade and intermarriage were universal forms of cultural interchange on the Siberian steppe, but the further east one went the more likely it became that the Russians were the ones who would change their ways. In Yakutsk, for example, in north-east Siberia, 'all the Russians spoke in the Yakut language', according to one writer in the 1820s.⁴⁵ Mikhail Volkonsky, the son of the Decembrist, who played a leading role in the Russian conquest and settlement of the Amur basin in the 1850s, recalls stationing a detachment of Cossacks in a local village to teach Russian to the Buriats. One year later Volkonsky returned to see how the Cossacks were getting on: none of the Buriats could converse in Russian yet, but all 200 Cossacks spoke fluent Buriat.⁴⁶

Such a thing would never have occurred in the overseas empires of the European states, at least not once their mode of operation had been switched from trade to colonial mastery. For, with a few exceptions, the Europeans did not need to settle in their colonies (and did not have to take much interest in their cultures) to siphon off their wealth. But such things were almost bound to happen in a territorial empire as enormous as the Tsar's, where the Russian settlers in the remotest regions, six months' journey from the capital, were often forced to adopt local ways. The Russian Empire developed by imposing Russian culture on the Asian steppe, but in that very process many of the colonizers became Asian, too. One of the consequences of this encounter was a cultural sympathy towards the colonies that was rarely to be found in colonizers from the European states. It was frequently the case that even the most gung-ho of the Tsar's imperialists were enthusiasts and experts about oriental civilizations. Potemkin, Prince of Tauride, for example, revelled in the ethnic mix of the Crimea, which he wrested from the last of the Mongol khanates

in 1783. To celebrate the victory he built himself a palace in the Moldavian-Turkish style, with a dome and four minaret towers, like a mosque.⁴⁷ Indeed, it was typical, not just of Russia but of eighteenth-century Europe as a whole, that precisely at that moment when Russian troops were marching east and crushing infidels, Catherine's architects at Tsarskoe Selo were building Chinese villages and pagodas, oriental grottoes, and pavilions in the Turkish style.⁴⁸

A living embodiment of this dualism was Grigory Volkonsky, the father of the famous Decembrist, who retired as a hero of Suvorov's cavalry to become Governor of Orenburg between 1803 and 1816. Orenburg was a vital stronghold of the Russian Empire at this time. Nestled in the southern foothills of the Ural mountains, it was the gateway into Russia for all the major trade routes between Central Asia and Siberia. Every day a thousand camel caravans with precious goods from Asia, cattle, carpets, cottons, silks and jewels, would pass through Orenburg on their way to the markets of Europe.⁴⁹ It was the duty of the governor to tax, protect and promote this trade. Here Volkonsky was extremely successful, developing new routes to Khiva and Bukhara, important cotton kingdoms, which opened up the way to Persia and India.⁵⁰ But Orenburg was also the last outpost of the Imperial state - a fortress to defend the Russian farmers on the Volga steppelands from the nomadic tribes, the Nogai and the Bashkirs, the Kalmyks and Kirghiz, who roamed the arid steppes on its eastern side.