ABSTRACT
The six main peoples of the Volga basin—the Tatars, the Udmurts, the Bashkirs, the Mordvins, the Chuvashes, and the Maris—fell under Russian domination in the sixteenth century, when the Khanate of Kazan was conquered by Tsar Ivan the Terrible. Tatars, Bashkirs, and Chuvashes are of Turkic origin; the other three groups are Finnic. Tatars and Bashkirs are Sunni Muslims; in the course of history the others have been converted to Russian Orthodoxy. Except for the Finnic tribal region of the northern part of today’s European Russia, absorbed prior to the fifteenth century, the Volga basin is the oldest colonial region of Russia and it was there that Moscow learned the ropes of colonial administration. At the outset of the sixteenth-century Russian eastward expansion, a prototype of a future colonial office, namely the prikaz of the Meshchera Court, was established in Moscow to take charge of alien lands. After the annexation of Kazan, the office was renamed the prikaz of Kazan. It operated until the time of Peter the Great, administering the conquered the khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan, and even handling Siberian affairs until the establishment of a separate Siberian prikaz.
