Christianization as an instrument of Russification in the Kazakh steppe (late nineteenth – early twentieth centuries)

This article examines Christianization as a component of the Russification policy pursued by the Russian Empire in the Kazakh steppe during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawing on materials from the Central State Archive of the Republic of Kazakhstan, missionary reports, Kazakh petitions, and statistical records, it reconstructs the mechanisms and outcomes of imperial confessional policy. Russian-Kazakh schools, the Ilminsky system, and the stations of the Kirgiz Mission served as instruments of conversion, reinforced by material incentives. Yet success was limited: the mission’s returns count 1,478 baptisms by 1902, and baptized Kazakhs in its flock fell from 512 in 1901 to 290 in 1907; documented converts came mainly from the impoverished and displaced, and many reverted to Islam after the 1905 Edict of Toleration. We argue that Christianization functioned as an instrument of Russification because conversion, schooling, and sedentarization were designed as a single apparatus of political incorporation, one that recruited precisely the constituency least able to sustain the affiliation. Imperial confessional policy in the nomadic periphery was coercive in intent but sharply constrained in effect. The Kazakh petitions of 1905 further suggest, as an implication requiring separate study, that it politicized Muslim identity rather than eroding it.