The article is devoted to the issue of establishing the boundaries of the nomadic territories of the Stavropol Turkmens after 1771, who found themselves without their own pasture territories. In the XVIII century, the Turkmens were included in the system of nomadic places of the Kalmyk uluses, but after its liquidation of the Kalmyk Khanate, they were displaced to the Stavropol highlands, which was an unfavorable area for the functioning of traditional nomadic pastoral cattle breeding. For the effective use of natural resources in the conditions of nomadic economy, the established territories of summer and winter nomads were required. Since the beginning of the XIX century the Turkmen population is making attempts to return to the past traditional system of joint nomads with the Kalmyk population, when the Turkmens roamed «in the wake of the Kalmyks». It should be noted that the attempts of the Russian administration to separate the Kalmyks and Turkmens were unsuccessful, which led to the fact that in 1809 the authorities granted the petition for the accession of the Stavropol Turkmens to the Kalmyks. Immediately after the unification of the Kalmyks with the Turkmens, the question arose about the allocation of lands belonging to the “Trukhmen people”. The Russian administration noted that although the Kuma River is considered the border between the Kalmyks and other nomadic peoples of the "Mohammedan faith", an exception was made for the Turkmen population and it was allowed to roam in the Kalmyks' footsteps along the Kalaus River basin and the Ergeninsky Upland. The establishment of nomadic territories of Stavropol Turkmens in the early XIX century led to the emergence of the conditional term “Trukhmen steppe”. In the future, this led to a period of long-term territorial and property disputes between the Kalmyks and the inhabitants of the Caucasus Region, which were resolved by themselves as peasant colonization in the Stavropol province grew.
Koltsov P. M. — scientific guidance, development of the research concept, substantiation of the purpose of the article, writing the source text, summary of all data, final conclusions; Shurguchinov R. S. — work in the archive, collection and processing of materials, search for published sources, revision of the text, final conclusions.
The work was supported by the Russian Science Foundation, Project № 22-18-00313 “Transformation of nomadic societies of the South of Russia in the context of natural and factors (XIX – mid XX centuries)” (https://rscf.ru/project/22-18-00313/).
Koltsov P. M., Shurguchinov R. S. Establishment of nomadic lands of Stavropol Turkmens at the beginning of the XIX century. Kaspiyskiy region: politika, ekonomika, kultura [The Caspian Region: Politics, Economics, Culture]. 2023, no. 2 (75), pp. 26–31. https://doi.org/10.54398/1818510Х_2023_2_26.
