Voices from the Steppe

"Voices from the Steppe" presents 101 sources on the history of the Kazakh Steppe and Russia’s South Urals region from the sixteenth to the mid-twentieth century. It offers a range of texts—local histories, songs, poems, letters, memoirs, religious-legal writings, and official documents—that shed light on politics, culture, spirituality, economic activities, gender, and daily life in one of the world’s great grasslands. The volume foregrounds the voices and experiences of ethnic non-Russians in living in what eventually became part of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. The texts have been translated from published and unpublished materials in Kazakh, Tatar, Bashkir, and Russian, and are appearing in English for the first time.