South Russia (Cossack steppe)

The steppe, the frontier, and the breadbasket. This is the open grassland north of the Black Sea and along the lower Don, Kuban and Volga, which for most of recorded history was not Russian at all but the corridor along which Scythians, Huns, Khazars, Pechenegs, Cumans and finally the Mongols moved west. Its black earth is among the most fertile soil on the planet and was almost useless while it could not be defended. The Cossack hosts that formed along the rivers from the fifteenth century were the mechanism by which it became usable: self-governing communities of escaped serfs and frontiersmen who raided the Crimean Tatars, served the tsar for privileges and land, and rebelled against him repeatedly under Razin, Bulavin and Pugachev. Systematic Russian settlement followed the conquest of the Crimean Khanate in 1783 and turned the region into the empire's grain export engine, shipping wheat through Odessa and Rostov. The Cossacks' double character as both instrument and rebel decided the region's twentieth century: it was the heartland of the White armies in the civil war, and the Soviet state answered with decossackisation, mass deportation and, in 1932 and 1933, the famine that struck the grain regions hardest. The south today is agricultural, comparatively young, and Russia's warm-water outlet, which is why Sevastopol and the Kerch strait keep reappearing in its politics. Rostov-on-Don is the region's largest city. Sochi, on the Black Sea coast, is its resort. The Don and Kuban hosts were the two largest Cossack communities. Russia's wheat exports, again the world's largest, still leave mainly through these ports.

• Existed: 1600 CE – present
• Type: Entity