Although Russia has one of the oldest continuous histories of boundary maintenance, few scholars of Russian empire have taken borders seriously. Focused on dramatic moments of imperial expansion, historians have failed to see important attempts to stop, control, consolidate, and patrol rather than endlessly advance. Only Richard Pipes considered borders important, not because he recognized limits to expansion, but because he preferred to imagine early modern Russia as a totalitarian society and wanted to provide a commentary on the pre-history of the Iron Curtain: “No one was allowed to escape the system. The frontiers of the state were hermetically sealed.” More recently in a magisterial overview of centuries of Russian expansion John LeDonne gave the impression that borders were at best temporary and consistently in flux due to “a slow but steady momentum” aimed at expanding towards the true geographic boundaries of the Eurasian heartland such as mountains and oceans. In his recent survey of Russia's relations with the steppe, Michael Khodarkovsky all but ignored boundaries, but this oversight can be explained by his decision to privilege the perspectives of his nomadic protagonists, who didn't think very highly of borders themselves.

Since borders represent the single most neglected aspect of Russian empire-building, this chapter employs unpublished documents from two archives to analyze how the Don steppe frontier became a borderland. Borderlands history not only explores the consequences of the closing of frontiers, but also focuses on how states collude to assert their sovereignty over people, territory, and resources.