Chernyye Zemli

Chernyye Zemli, the “Black Lands”, occupies sparse grassland and semi-desert in the Caspian Depression northwest of the Caspian Sea, west of the lower Volga. Rain is meagre, generally below 200 millimetres a year, and temperatures swing sharply across days and seasons. Wildlife, above all the saiga antelope, gathers around the river systems and the sea that fringe this dry country.

These scarce waters shaped the people who lived here. The steppe was the pasture of the Nogai Horde and of the Astrakhan Khanate until Ivan IV took Astrakhan in 1556. In the 1630s Kalmyk Oirat nomads, the Torghuts, moved onto the lower Volga steppe and drove out most of the Nogais and formed the Kalmyk Khanate, until most of them left for the east in 1771.