SUMMARY:

The concept of the “frontier,” conceived by F.J. Turner for North America and applied to Eurasia by O. Lattimore and others, does not refer to a state border, but to a transitional zone between different geographic, socio-economic, political, religious and cultural spaces. From the15th to 18th centuries, the Russian steppe frontier in the south and southeast was a relatively stable military frontier between the sedentary Christian Russians and the nomadic Muslim Turks and Lamaist Mongols. The frontier was simultaneously a zone of intensive commercial and diplomatic interaction. Only during the 18th and 19th centuries did the steppe frontier become an area of settlement and extraction. Another example, the forest frontier in Siberia, was extractive frontier from the beginning, an area where an economy based on furs and precious metals pushed the frontier rapidly forward. Only its southern sections gradually became a settlement frontier.
On the steppe frontier, Russians and the militarily superior nomads were generally on equal terms through the 18th century, whereas the Siberian indigenes were quickly subjugated by Russia and had to pay tributes in furs. Along the rivers of the steppe frontier, the military frontier communities of free Cossacks emerged on the forest frontier as trappers. Cossacks, tradesmen and settlers developed a “Siberian mentality” of free, enterprising pioneers. So the famous “Turner thesis” can be applied to Russia, but only to the peripheral regions of the Cossacks and Siberia, and not to Russia as a whole.