Establishment of Alien Governance and the Mobilization of the Nokhchi for the Crimean Campaigns (1661–1676)

The occupation administration of the Tsardom of Muscovy maintained a regime that deprived the subjugated societies of the Nokhchi (the Okochans) of autonomy in the Terek town, prolonging the power over them of a loyal foreign ruler for their subsequent mobilization. In 1661, Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich issued a charter of grant to the Kabardian prince Kaspulat Mutsalovich Cherkassky, officially prescribing that he «be prince over the Okochans and over the Cherkasses who serve us, the great sovereign, on the Terek, and administer and judge them in military organization and in all our affairs»^[1]. Having received control, the appointed ruler became an instrument for implementing imperial objectives: in 1676, the central apparatus of the Ambassadorial Prikaz sent an instruction to Prince Kaspulat Mutsalovich Cherkassky on the need to arrive at the Terek «to administer the oath of allegiance of the population of the North Caucasus to Tsars Ivan and Peter Alekseevich»^[2]. In the same period, the subjugated Nokhchi were forcibly thrown into the metropole's military campaigns against the Crimean Khanate. A dispatch from Prince Kaspulat Mutsalovich Cherkassky to the Ambassadorial Prikaz of 1675 states that for the campaign into the Crimean uluses he had at his disposal various fighting men, including «190 Okochan men»^[2], and the historian I. Kh. Tkhamokova confirms that in 1675 detachments fought in Crimea that included men «with uzdens, with the newly baptized, and with «Okochans»»^[3].