During the course of the eighteenth century the Bashkir pastoralists had risen up in a series of revolts against the Tsarist state, as Russian settlers had begun to move on to their ancient grazing lands. Many of the Bashkirs joined the Cossack leader Pugachev in his rebellion against the harsh regime of Catherine the Great in 1773-4. They besieged Orenburg (a story told by Pushkin in The Captain's Daughter) and captured all the other towns between the Volga and the Urals, plundering property and terrorizing the inhabitants. After the suppression of the rebellion, the Tsarist authorities reinforced the town of Orenburg. From this fortress they carried out a brutal campaign of pacification against the steppeland tribes. This campaign was continued by Volkonsky, who also had to cope with a serious uprising by the Ural Cossacks. In his dealings with them both he was extremely harsh. On Volkonsky's order several hundred Bashkir and Cossack rebel leaders

were publicly flogged and branded on their foreheads or sent off to the penal camps in the Far East. Among the Bashkirs, the governor became known as 'Volkonsky the Severe'; he was a demon figure in the folklore of the Cossacks, who still sang songs about him in the 1910s.⁵¹ Yet Volkonsky was by no means all severe. By nature he was soft and kind-hearted, according to his family, with a poetic spirit and a passion for music, intensely Christian in his private life. Among the citizens of Orenburg, he had the reputation of an eccentric. It was perhaps the consequence of a shrapnel wound he had received in the war against the Turks which left him with strange voices in his head. In mid-winter, when the temperature in Orenburg would sink as low as -30 degrees centigrade, he would walk about the streets in his dressing gown, or sometimes only dressed in his underpants, proclaiming that Suvorov (who had died ten years before) was 'still alive' in him. In this state he would set off to the market and hand out food and money to the poor, or go entirely naked into church to pray.⁵²

Despite his brutal treatment of the Bashkir population, Volkonsky was an expert on their Turkic culture. He learned their Turkic language and spoke with the local tribesmen in their native tongue.⁵³ He travelled widely throughout Central Asia and wrote extensively about its flora and fauna, its customs and its history and ancient cultures in his private diaries and letters home. He thought the Tobol river, on the eastern side of the Ural mountains, was 'the best corner of all Russia'.⁵⁴ He was a connoisseur of oriental shawls, carpets, chinaware and jewellery, which friends from Petersburg would commission him to buy.⁵⁵ During his last years in Orenburg he even came to lead a semi-oriental life. 'I love this place', he wrote to his nephew Pavel Volkonsky, the Emperor Alexander's Chief-of-Staff. 'I love its nomadic way of life.'⁵⁶ Volkonsky lived like a Persian sultan in his exotic palace, surrounded by a retinue of Kirghiz and Kalmyk household serfs whom he regarded as his 'second family'.⁵⁷ He also kept a secret harem of Bashkir 'wives'.⁵⁸ Volkonsky mixed in a large society of Tatar tribesmen, whom he liked to refer to as 'my natives'.⁵⁹ Abandoning his Imperial uniform, he would receive the Kirghiz khans in a Mongol ceremonial uniform, or even in a khalat.⁶⁰All the years he lived in Orenburg, Volkonsky never said he missed St Petersburg, and throughout this time he went back only once. 'The quiet life of the Asian steppe suits my temperament',

he wrote to his daughter Sofia. 'You may consider me an Asiatic -perhaps I even count myself as one.'⁶¹

4

'A fairytale land from The Thousand and One Nights,' proclaimed Catherine the Great on her first trip to the newly annexed Tatar lands of the Crimea in 1783.⁶² Literature and empire had a close relationship in the Russian conquest of the Orient. The marvels of these places were such a fertile source for the imagination that many statesmen came to view them through their images in literature and art. Eighteenth-century tales, starting with the Russian translation of The Thousand and One Nights (1763-71), portrayed the Orient as a hedonistic kingdom of sensual luxury and indolence, seraglios and sultans, as everything, in fact, that the austere north was not. These themes reappeared in the oriental dream worlds of the nineteenth century.