AbstractOrthodox missions caught between tsarist authorities and non-Russian populations. An example of the ambiguities of the Russian colonial policy in the Kazakh steppes. Throughout the nineteenth century, the Orthodox Church, which had lost a great deal of its independence from the state, sought to assert itself by attempting to take part in Russia’s “colonizing mission” in Central Asia. The negotiations it had to carry on with the authorities for the right to engage in a so-called “anti-Moslem” mission, the mission’s evolution after its creation in 1881, and the numerous obstacles the missionaries were unable to overcome, led to Orthodoxy’s bitter failure in the Kazakh steppes. That can be explained through a triangular framework involving the colonizing power, the colonized population, and the government. The political authorities clearly did little to convert the Kazakhs to Christianity, and the Orthodox missionaries turned out to be ill-adjusted to their environment, crushed as they were by a hostile attitude from all parts (the Moslem “clergy”, Moslem or shamanist Kazakhs, the central authorities, the Church’s hierarchy and the Russian settlers). The reasons for the failure must therefore be sought not only in the context of the Christians’ minority status in Central Asia, but also in the declining influence of a Church rejected by the higher spheres of government. Such an approach allows one to question the notion that Russia’s expansion in Central Asia was also religious.