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The article examines activities of Turko-Mongols to have inhabited the Great Steppe and adjacent territories in the military service of Russia throughout the 18th and early 19th centuries. The period witnessed the employment of ethnic military units of irregular cavalries Russian army recruited from the Mongolian-speaking Kalmyks and Buryats, Turkic-speaking Bashkirs, Teptyars, Mishar and Tatars. The work focuses on the largest ethnic military forces ― those of the Kalmyks and Bashkirs. Despite Russian forces were reorganized to from a regular army in the early 18th century, the latter still contained significant irregular components, including ones recruited from Turko-Mongols. Initially, the ethnic groups had served as independent military contingents with traditional structures, tactics, and weapons, but by the late 18th century all ethnic forces were clustered into Don Cossack-type regiments. The first part of the article deals with the features of military service of the Kalmyks and Bashkirs in their usual habitat ― in the Great Steppe. The second part of the article, which will be published in the next issue, analyzes the actions of the Turkic-Mongol cavalry in the three largest wars of Russia in the XVIII – early XIX centuries. (The Northern, Seven-Year War, the Patriotic War of 1812 and the Foreign Campaign of 1813–1814). Rational approaches and command of the ethnic units would yield good results ― both in Eurasian plains and European battlefields. The use of ethnic forces within the Russian army not only saved essential financial and physical resources for the defense of large territories and dramatically long frontiers but also facilitated further integration of their elites into the Empire’s community.
Utash B. Ochirov (Fri,) studied this question.