faith, custom, and ritual in the borderlands: orthodoxy, islam, and the "small peoples" of...

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Faith, Custom, and Ritual in the Borderlands: Orthodoxy, Islam, and the "Small Peoples" ofthe Middle Volga and the North CaucasusAuthor(s): Austin JersildSource: Russian Review, Vol. 59, No. 4 (Oct., 2000), pp. 512-529Published by: Wiley on behalf of The Editors and Board of Trustees of the Russian ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2679276 .

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Faith, Custom, and Ritual in the Borderlands: Orthodoxy, Islam, and the "Small Peoples" of the Middle Volga and the North Caucasus AUSTIN JERSILD

I don't remember the crosses, but I heard that we once professed some other faith, but as to what it's called I don't know.

Elderly Chechen to Nikolai Dubrovin, 1871

T Io study Russia as an empire we need to pay close attention to the ideas, attitudes, assumptions, and even concepts that were important to its makers.' Borderland communities predictably drew upon the central concerns and dilemmas of Russian cultural and intellectual history. The assumptions and terms of debate familiar to us from the "marvelous decade" that gave birth to the Slavophiles and Westerners were also significant for the formation of the empire. German Romantic writers supplied the framework that allowed Rus- sian thinkers to clarify the nature of Russia's own unique contribution to "the process of

For support in the preparation of this paper, my thanks to the Kennan Institute for a Research Scholarship in the summer of 1997, where I was fortunate to work in close proximity to Nathaniel Knight and Paul Werth; the fee-for- support program of the American Councils for International Education, which facilitated a trip to Tbilisi in the summer of 1999; audiences and panelists at the AAASS in Boca Raton (1998), the Southern Slavic Conference in Richmond (1999), the Old Dominion University Faculty Research Seminar (1999), and the Berkeley Program in Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies (1999); and commentators Tony Anemone, Wayne Dowler, Ron Suny, my anony- mous referees, and David Hoffmann.

'On Russia as an empire see Andreas Kappeler, La Russie: Empire multiethnique, trans. Guy Imart (Paris, 1994). Kappeler's comprehensive survey of several frontiers and centuries is primarily a story of the impact of the early modem social order upon the process of conquest and incorporation. The issue at hand important to contemporaries that might have been further explored was both a practice and a concept called "poddanstvo" (subjecthood). The Imperial service elite was multiethnic, but we know little about the manner in which non-Russians conceived

The Russian Review 59 (October 2000): 512-529 Copyright 2000 The Russian Review



Faith, Custom, and Ritual in the Borderlands 513

Universal History."2 The architects of classical Slavophilism in particular worked to iden- tify the nature of Russian narodnost' and samobytnost' (originality). Russia's promise in the vision of Alexei Khomiakov was its special ability to maintain and preserve its "way of life" (byt) amid threats from both the powerful West and the vast East. The faithful adherence to Russian custom, he emphasized, something "organically growing out of local re- quirements and the character of the people, contains within itself the secret of Russia's greatness."3 Khomiakov wrote extensively about the borderlands in early works such as "Ermak," his eulogy to the Cossack "conqueror" of Siberia, and he followed the well-beaten path through the Caucasus of the Russian literary imagination in his trip with the Russian army as far south as Adrianople in 1828.4 Romantic Slavophiles as well as Petr Chaadaev drew on German Romantics such as Schelling to portray the character of a culture as a product of its particular religious inspiration. If small borderland peoples often appeared "savage" in their customs and ways, it followed that they had inadequately maintained their links to historic Christianity, the true source of cultural progress and creativity. Romantic views about custom, tradition, and the past shaped the thinking and the policies of borderland communities and officials in frontier regions such as the Middle Volga and the North Caucasus.5

The religious dimension to the cultural imagination of the empire is easily overlooked because of the important role played by the westernizing Petrine state in the process of

of the possibilities, privileges, and responsibilities of poddanstvo. For insight into powerful Georgian families such as the Orbeliani and Eristavi at work within the Imperial bureaucracy, for example, see Sakartvelos sakhelmtsipo saistorio arkivi (Georgian National Historical Archive [SSSA]), f. 4, op. 3 (1846-55), d. 181,11. 22-60. On faith and the emergence of a notion of custom in eighteenth-century texts of empire see Yuri Slezkine, "Naturalists versus Nations: Eighteenth-Century Russian Scholars Confront Ethnic Diversity," in Russia's Orient. Imperial Borderlands andPeoples, 1700-1917, ed. Daniel R. Brower and Edward J. Lazzerini (Bloomington, 1997), 27-57. See also Mark von Hagen, "Writing the History of Russia as Empire: The Perspective of Federalism," in Kazan, Moscow, St. Petersburg.-Multiple Faces ofthe Russian Empire, ed. Catherine Evtuhov et al. (Moscow, 1997), 393- 410; Boris Nolde, Laformation de L'Empire Russe, vols. 1-2 (Paris, 1952, 1953); and portions of Jane Burbank and David L. Ransel, eds., Imperial Russia. New Historiesfor the Eltpire (Bloomington, 1998). On Russia and the "small peoples" of Siberia seeYuri Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors.- Russia andthe SmallPeoples ofthe North (Ithaca, 1994). On empire in comparative context see Karen Barkey and Mark von Hagen, eds., AfterEEmpire.- Multiethnic Societies and Nation-Building (Boulder, 1997); Michael W. Doyle, Empires (Ithaca, 1986); and Ronald Grigor Suny, "The Empire Strikes Out: Imperial Russia, 'National' Identity, and Theories of Empire," in A State ofla- tions.- Empire andNation-Making in the Soviet Union, 1917-1953 (forthcoming).

2Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy ofHistory, rev. ed., trans. J. Sibree (New York, 1944), 53. 3A. S. Khomiakov, "O sel'skikh usloviiakh" (1842), in his Polnoe sobranie sochinendi (PSS), 3d ed. (Moscow,

1900), 3:64. 4Khomiakov, "Ermak," PSS4:275-388. See also Khomiakov, "Tridtsat' let tsarstvovaniia Ivana Vasil'evicha"

(1845), PSS 3:37-48. On the Caucasus see Peter K. Christoff, An Introduction to Nineteenth- Centuty Russian Slavophilism. A Study in Ideas, vol. 1, A. S. Xomjakov (The Hague, 1961), 33; and Nikolai Berdiaev, Aleksei Stepanovich Khomiakov (Moscow, 1912), 34-37. On the literary imagination of the Caucasus see Susan Layton, Russian Literature and Empire.- Conquest of the Caucasusfrom Pushkin to Tolstoy (Cambridge, England, 1994); and Harsha Ram, "Prisoners of the Caucasus: Literary Myths and Media Representations of the Chechen Conflict" (Berkeley Program in Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies Working Paper Series, 1999).

'The important questions of Russian identity and Russia's relationship to the West understandably shape the study of Russian intellectual history. But scholars might give more attention to the impact of empire, so to speak, upon the concerns of even classical Slavophilism, which is beyond the scope of the present study. As Nikolai



514 Austin Jersild

expansion, and the role of a general notion of European enlightenment as an integrative source of cohesion for the multiethnic service elite and educated society (obshchestvo). The growth of St. Petersburg itself through the eighteenth century, the tsar's "window to the West," stood as a model for empire-builders in borderland towns in the nineteenth century. Viceroy Mikhail Vorontsov, for example, established newspapers, scholarly societies, and a theater in Tiflis, and regularly corresponded with Europeans about matters "of great importance for public well-being."6 Or our attention to the question of faith and the frontier evokes visions of the old crusading impulse, of "pious" tsars and the "Christian warrior" Ermak, for example, in battle with "godless" infidels in Siberia, as seventeenth century chroniclers put it.' The conquest of the southern borderlands featured the continuation of this holy struggle into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. To secure frontiers and defeat mountain peoples the Imperial regime made extensive use of local Christian peoples in the many battles against Ottoman Turkey and Shamil.8 In the wake of the Romantic age, however, the specific nature of this preoccupation with faith among the growing borderland communities on the frontier is worth further consideration.

Educated society in the borderlands consistently associated the question of faith with other issues such as the importance of the maintenance of authentic custom over time and the importance of the correct practice of ritual, things which in their view facilitated the endurance of the Christian faith. These concerns form the context to the Imperial preoccupation with Islam on Russia's frontiers, in particular in regions with many "small peoples" such as the Middle Volga and the North Caucasus. Islam perpetually posed the question of not just religious but also general cultural "apostasy" (otstupnichestvo). Apostasy, or the notion of the "falling away" or the conversion to Islam of small peoples in the Middle Volga, was in the Imperial conception a product of the failing on the part of borderland peoples to preserve and maintain true custom, faith, and the practices of the past. The term was not as common in the North Caucasus, but the general notion was important there as well. In the Imperial conception, history began for the small peoples of the Middle Volga with their Christian conversion after the sixteenth-century conquests of the region, and for the North Caucasus peoples as a product of their historic contact with Byzantine Christian- ity. Educated society, Imperial administrators, and missionaries saw themselves as the protectors and promoters of "custom" on the frontier.

Berdiaev wrote in the early twentieth century, "Khomiakov never wrote an essay specifically about the nationalities problem, because all of his essays in one way or another are dedicated to this question" (AlekseiStepanovich Khomiakov, 208). On the Slavophiles see also Alexandre Koyr6, LaPhilosophie etleProblkme AationalenRussie au debutduXZXsikcle (Paris, 1929), 164-202; L. Strakhovsky, L'EmpereurlicolasleretL'espritltationalRusse (Louvain, 1928); Nicolas Arseniev, La Sainte Moscou: Tableau de la vie religeuse et intellectuelle russe au XIXe siccle (Paris, 1948); and Nicholas Riasanovsky, Russia andthe West in the Teaching of the Slavophiles (Berkeley, 1952).

6SSSA, f. 4, op. 2 (1845-47), d. 19, 1. 1. On Vorontsov and his administration see L. Hamilton Rhinelander, Prince Michael Vorontsov: Viceroy to the Tsar (Montreal, 1990).

7Terence Armstrong, ed., Yermak's Campaign in Siberia (London, 1975), 52, 55, 68, 241. 8SSSA, f. 229, op. 1 (1884-86), d. 127,11. 24-37, and d. 183,11. 1-2.




THE MIDDLE VOLGA

Obviously officials on the frontier were not in touch with the writings of classical Slavophilism, but the general preoccupations of the Russian conservative tradition with faith and its relationship to history and custom, the importance of indigenous cultural development, and the dilemmas of foreign borrowing and imitation shaped the expansion and formation of the empire. These ideas and assumptions guided the activities of numerous administrators, scholars, military officials, and travelers who composed the borderland communities of the early and middle nineteenth century. The impulse to protect and preserve custom and the notion of the relationship between faith, ritual, and custom endured through the nineteenth century to become an important component of Russian identity, and an important component of Russia's Imperial and civilizing mission among "small peoples" of the Middle Volga and the North Caucasus.

Travelers and especially ethnographers-curious, Romantic, and well intentioned- were obsessed with the question of historical self-knowledge among the peoples of the empire. "Now I am sitting among my Chuvash friends," reported Aleksandra Fuchs from Kazan province in 1840. "I very much love this simple and gentle people."9 But she was repeatedly disappointed by the inability of the Chuvash to ponder questions of origin and identity. "What did they think about themselves? Who were they? Where were they from? And who were their ancestors?" Fuchs was astounded by their ignorance, and amazed that they were not even aware of the many incorrect stories about their origins. Their religion, she agreed with the views of her husband and colleague, Karl Fuchs, was a collection of "distorted superstition and the temporary imprint of the primitive customs of the Old Testament."' 0 The Chuvash were neither here nor there, no longer comprehending either their ancient faith or Christianity. "You might say that they have fallen away from their own [faith], but have yet to adopt ours.""

V. A. Sboev, another early observer of the Chuvash, agreed: the Chuvash were "bad pagans and even worse Christians," whose performance of Christian ritual sometimes reminded him of pagan bachannalia. 2 This religious ineptitude was related to the question of custom, or to the problem of the failure to maintain customs over time. For Sboev the Chuvash were outside of history, "eastern" and "unknown" to historians and geographers until the sixteenth century, and without language, temples, religious law, ancient monu- ments, or other means of transmitting tradition through the generations.'3 At least they had legends, which Sboev wanted to study for insight into "ancient Chuvash mythology," and folk songs, which were not always "improvised" but sometimes "were passed from one generation to another."'4 The numerous Russians on the frontier who glorified tradition and

9Aleksandra A. Fuks, ZapiskiAleksandry Fuks o chuvashakh icheremisakh kazanskoigubernii(Kazan, 1840), 28.

0lbid., 27-28. "Ibid., 49. 2V. A. Sboev, Chuvash v bytovom, istoricheskom i religioznom otnosheniiakh (Moscow, 1865), 12, 52-53. 13Ibid., 54. 14Ibid., 55, 148.



516 Austin Jersild

a notion of an authentic past as a contrast to a spoiled present shared much in common with Slavophiles and many other thinkers who were intent on clarifying Russian identity in relation to the West.

Nikolai Ii'minskii, the missionary, linguist, and educator with the ear of Pobedonostsev and the support of other high officials of the state, was shaped by the interest in peasant thought and culture common to the various shades of educated opinion in the 1830s and 1 840s. This interest he described as an effort to explore "the conceptions and moral convic- tions of the simple narod," shaped by a sentiment that within the culture of the peasantry there existed the "beneficial, spiritual qualities of man" necessary for the fulfillment of his "religious needs." 15 Like Khomiakov and Kireevskii (and powerfully and repeatedly expressed by Dostoevsky), Il'minskii believed that Russia's educated society did not have a monopoly on genuine truth, knowledge, and meaning, and he took seriously the religious practices and ideas that were part of peasant culture and custom.16 "In the simple man there is nothing memorized, or read from books, or artificial," II'minskii wrote: "the simple man expresses himself directly from the treasures of his heart."'7 He took these ideas to the Middle Volga region, convinced that the dilemmas and challenges of educating and mold- ing Russian peasants and inorodtsy were similar.'8

For II' minskii and his growing collection of disciples, genuine faith was an outgrowth of indigenous culture, or "native soil." Thus even shamanism among inorodtsy in Siberia and the Middle Volga was not necessarily a grave sin, and II'minskii criticized missionaries who too zealously persecuted it. Shamanism, he argued, was a form of religious expression characteristic of "young tribes" still poorly developed and insufficiently educated and enlightened. This was a temporary situation, Il'minskii felt, citing I Corinthians 13:11 to make his point: "The apostle says: when I was young I spoke, thought and reasoned youthfully; and when I became a man, then I left my youth behind." 19 And however primitive, shamanism remained a form of religious expression, a genuine example of the "striving toward the divine and the unseen" that was in Il'minskii's view a central component of human nature. The religious impulse sprung from the customs and culture of peoples such as the Chuvash, Cheremis [Mari], and Votiaks [Udmurts], who with time, education, and

'5N. I. Il'minskii, "O kolichestve pechataemykh v Kazani magometanskikh knig i o shkole dlia detei kreshchenykh tatar" (1866), in his Kazanskaia tsentral'naia kreshcheno-tatarskaia shkola: Materialy dlia istori khristianskago prosveshcheniiakreshchenykhtatar (Kazan, 1887), 121.

16Khomiakov, "Mnenie russkikh ob inostrantsakh" (1846), in his Izbrannye sochinenlia, ed. N. S. Arsen'ev (New York, 1955), 118; Christoff, Introduction to Nineteenth-Century Russian Siavophiiism 1:89; Ivan Kireevskii letter to V. A. Zhukovskii (1845), in I. V. Kireevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinendi, ed. M. Gershenzon (Moscow, 1911), 2:237-38; Fyodor Dostoevsky, Memoiisfrom the House of the Dead, trans. Jessie Coulson, ed. Ronald Hingley (Oxford, 1983).

'7Pis'mat I Ii'minskago k kreshchenym tataram (Kazan, 1896), xix. 8Scholars such as Jean Saussay and Wayne Dowler tend to emphasize the political concerns and fears motivat-

ing Il'minskii and other officials. I do not wish to minimize this, but instead intend to take seriously what I portray here as Romantic views about faith and custom, from Moscow to Tiflis to Kazan. See Saussay, "Il'minskij et la Politique de Russification des Tatars, 1865-1891," Cahiers du monde russe et sovietique 8 (Juillet-Septembre 1967): 404-25; and Dowler, "The Politics of Language in Non-Russian Elementary Schools in the Eastern Empire, 1865-1914," Russian Review 54 (October 1995): 516-38.

'9Pis'ma N I Ii'minskago k kreshchenym tataram, 122.




exposure to the civilizing work of the empire would someday glorify Jesus rather than their traditional gods.20

Shamanism and paganism were also preferable to Islam, which Il'minskii viewed as perpetually foreign. II'minskii's prized student and eventually a teacher in the "Russian- Tatar" schools, Vasillii Timofeev, similarly defended indigenous forms of religious expres-

21 sion. Such practices and ideals represented the "most beneficial soil upon which Chris- tian teaching might develop and provide its abundant fruit."22 Missionaries and educators such as IL'minskii and Timofeev were relieved to be confronted with what they called paganism rather than Islam, especially in the Middle Volga region where Kazan Muslim Tatars offered a set of traditions and beliefs as a very real alternative for the nearby small peoples. Native custom and faith served in their view as a bulwark against foreign intrusion. And "to tell the truth," Timofeev conceded, "Russian influence was rather weak, much weaker than Muslim influence."23

Primitive paganism was a less formidable foe to Imperial officials than the established mosques, mullahs, texts, and legal traditions of Islam, which they found especially worri- some in the Middle Volga region. Muslims in the North Caucasus and the Transcaucasus looked for inspiration from the surrounding Muslim empires and holy centers of historic Islam, while Muslims in Kazan, as E. A. Rozov, the vice-governor of Kazan province emphasized in 1866, even possessed their own publishing houses for the distribution of "pro- paganda" among the "newly baptized" Tatars, and the Chuvash, Cheremis, and Votiaks.24 The Kazan Tatars were "active" and "lively," reported Rozov, "better educated than not only all the other inorodasy of Kazan province, but even more developed than the Russian peasants."25 Regime officials saw the preservation of indigenous culture as a means to facilitate the spread of Christianity and counter the impact and influence of the Kazan Tatars and the international Muslim community. During his stay in Kazan in the early 1 860s, the minister of enlightenment appointed an official to work in the Kazan Educational District especially with the Chuvash. His task was to develop primary school textbooks for Chuvash children, and generally to encourage the cultivation and preservation of the indigenous customs and culture of this "half-Christian, half-pagan narod."26 The origins of the Soviet ethnoterritorial state, or the Soviet version of federalism, are to be found within this important impulse of the expanding nineteenth century Imperial state.

Il' minskii and his supporters directly linked the question of apostasy, or the process of conversion from Christianity to Islam of groups such as the Chuvash, to their failure to

200n baptism and the Mari see Paul W. Werth, "Baptism, Authority, and the Problem of Zakonnost'in Orenburg Diocese: The Induction of over 800 'Pagans' into the Christian Faith," Slavic Review 56 (Fall 1997): 456-80.

210n native personnel and the Il'minskii system see Robert Geraci, "The Il'minskii System and the Controversy over Non-Russian Teachers and Priests in the Middle Volga," in Kazan, Moscow, St. Petersburg, 325-48.

22V. Timofeev, "Missionersko-pedagogicheskii dnevnik starokreshchenago tatarina" (1868), in Il'minskii, Kazanskaia tsentral'naia kreshcheno-tatarskaia shkola, 242.

23Ibid.

24E. A. Rozov, "Predstavlenie" (5 December 1866), in I1'minskii, Kazanskaia tsentral'naia kreshcheno-tatarskaia shkola, 300. See also A. Kh. Makhmutova, Stanovlenie svetskogo obrazovanila u tatar (Bor'ba vokrug shkol'nogo voprosa, 1861-1917) (Kazan, 1982), 23-25.

25Rozov, "Predstavlenie," 299. 26Ibid., 302.



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preserve custom over time. Il'minskii and colleague G. S. Sablukov maintained that the Chuvash were easy prey to Muslim missionaries because they were unable over time to maintain their traditions amid too many Muslim Tatars. They were failing at both of their assigned tasks: they were baptized but "without an internal transformation," and "without a full conviction of the truth and salvation of the Christian faith, and even without a sufficient study of its dogmas."27 They also inadequately understood the nature of what it meant to be Chuvash, and failed to maintain the rituals, practices, and ideas inherited from the past. Russian sectarians in the view of Il'minskii committed similar mistakes. "The fundamental and peaceful means of maintaining true faith among the people is an upbringing from the very early years in the rules and conceptions of this religion."28 Peoples, like Christians, possessed similar obligations to the past, and needed to seek education and pay constant attention to ritual, liturgy, and doctrine. In an increasingly secular world proponents of the importance of "custom" discard the faith but demand a similar adherence to tradition and the history of custom-the rituals, liturgy, and doctrine of the people.

Written scripts, literacy, and ultimately even a literature were universally understood by Russians and educated non-Russians to represent the key to resolving these problems of forgetfulness. "Literacy is the basic foundation of history," wrote Khomiakov, "therefore enlightened peoples who have forgotten their writing were reduced to a forgetfulness on par with savages."29 Initially skeptics in the borderlands were not opposed to the flowering of non-Russian literature, but wondered whether it was possible to express beautiful and significant concepts in the smaller languages of the empire. The limits of a language itself might impede the progress of a people. If the Chuvash were filthy, wondered V. Lebedev, perhaps this was because their language lacked the word for soap.30 In the North Caucasus Petr K. Uslar dedicated his life to showing that the local languages "allow one the possibility of expressing the most refined and nuanced ideas," and other scholars from around the empire, such as I. Ia. Iakovlev, a Chuvash educated at Kazan University, similarly testified that such reservations were groundless.31 In fact high officials of the Imperial state were supportive of the project. Il'minskii was in close contact with Pobedonostsev, and even the conservative D. A. Tolstoi, minister of education, concluded that the Kirgiz were "capable, thoughtful, and hard-working," "inclined to enlightenment" and hence worthy of a Russian alphabet.32 Both the Bashkir and the Kirgiz, Tolstoi reported to the tsar in 1876, needed to "preserve their type" and refrain from imitating the dress, names, and domestic practices of the Muslim Tatars.33 Because "alphabets are always adopted along with faith," as Il'minskii

27N. I. Il'minskii and G. S. Sablukov (9 February 1858), in Agrarnyi vopros i1kest'ianskoe dvizhenie 50-70-kh godovXlXv. (Moscow-Leningrad, 1936), 221.

28Ibid., 227. 29Khomiakov, "Zapiski o vsemirnoi istorii," PSS5:pt.1:25. 30V. Lebedev, "Simbirskie Chuvashi," ZhuinalMinistierstva vnutrennikh delS (May 1850): 311. See also Fuks,

ZapiskiAleksandry Fuks o chuvashakh i cheremisakh KAazanskoigubernfi, 132-37. 3"P. K. Uslar, "O rasprostranenii gramotnosti mezhdu gortsami," Sborniksvedenii o kavkazskikh gortsakh, vol.

3 (Tiflis, 1870), 28; Notes of I. Ia Iakovlev to D. D. Shestakov, in Agrarnyi vopros ikrest'ianskoe dvizhenie, 333- 34. See also Yuri Slezkine, "Savage Christians or Unorthodox Russians? The Missionary Dilemma in Siberia," in Between Heaven and Hell: The Myth of Siberia in Russian Culture, ed. Galya Diment and Yuri Slezkine (New York, 1993), 22.

32Report of D. A. Tolstoi to Alexander 11 (21 October 1876), in Agrarnyi vopros ikrest'ianskoe dvizhenie, 339. 33Ibid., 340.




and Sablukov put it, cultural expression would be shaped by the dominant religious pro- genitor.34 "So Western Europe adopted the Latin alphabet from the Latin church; we used the Greek alphabet; in the same fashion the Tatars, similar to all Muslim peoples, adopted Arabic along with the teachings of the false Arab prophet."35 They would have been better off cultivating their indigenous past and their native languages (but with a Cyrillic script!), the Russians emphasized. In his introduction to a series of letters of Il'minskii, published in 1896, A. Voskresenskii distinguished the "simple folk language" of the Tatars with its "ancient-folk [and] natural purity" from the "foreign [and] recent admixture of Arab-Mus- lim culture."36 The state would promote custom along the frontiers of the empire, which was distinguishable from Islam and Arabic.

TIE NORTH CAUCASUS

Imperial administrators, scholars, and missionaries brought similar ideas to the southern frontier of the Caucasus. The many small peoples of the North Caucasus in the Russian view were threatened by the intrusive missionary efforts of Ottoman and Persian emissar- ies from the eighteenth century, which threatened to cut them off from the Byzantine and Christian past shared by the Armenians and Georgians. The expanding Russian army established early fortresses with names like Vozdvizhenskaia ("the raising up [of the cross]"), and built Orthodox churches to accompany other fortresses at Mozdok, Vladikavkaz, and Kizliar, the basis of what became the "Caucasus Line."37 The presence of Islam in the North Caucasus, which usually took the shape of the more decentralized and elusive Sufi brotherhoods rather than the traditional mosques and mullahs of urban Islam, was depicted by Russians as another failure on the part of "savage" peoples to preserve and maintain both the true faith and their own true customs.38 Newspaper writers, scholars, ethnographers, archaeologists, and even officials were preoccupied with the history of Byz- antine settlement and influence in the Caucasus.39

Several factors, however, conspired to make history a tragic story of decline. Lacking their Cyril and Methodius, explained travel writer Evgenii Markov, the Ossetians were left "without a single comprehensible prayer, without liturgy, without the gospel."40

3411'minskii and Sablukov (9 February 1858), ibid., 230. 35Ibid. 36A. Voskresenskii, "Predislovie," Pis 'ma N 1 ZI'minskago k kreshchenym tataram, xviii. 37N. P. Gritsenko, Gorodasevero-vostochnogo Kavkaza iproi>voditelnyesilykraia vseredinaXIXveka (Rostov,

1984), 75-78; G. A. Vertepov, "Obzor Tverskoi oblasti za 1894 god," Zapiskikavkazskogo otdelalmperatorskago Russkago Geograficheskago Obshchestva (ZKOIRGO), vol. 19 (Tiflis, 1897), 164-68.

38On Sufi Islam in the North Caucasus see Uwe Halbach, "'Heiliger Krieg' gegen den Zarismus," in DieMuslilne in der Sowjetunion und in Jugoslavien, ed. A. Kappeler, G. Simon, and G. Brunner (Cologne, 1989), 213-34; Michael Kemper, "Einige Notizen zur Arabischsprachigen Literatur der Gihad-Bewegung in Dagestan und Tschetsche-Nien in der ersten halfte des 19. Jahrhunderts," in Muslim Culture in Russia and CentralAsiafrom the 18th to the Early 20th Centuries, vol. 2, ed. Anke von Kiugelgen, Michael Kemper, and Allen J. Frank (Berlin, 1998), 63-99; and Alexandre Bennigsen and S. Enders Wimbush, Mystics and Commissars: Sufism in the Soviet Union (Berkeley, 1985), 18-20.

39P. Khitsunov, "O sostoianii nekogda byvshago khristianstva na Kavkaze," Kavkaz (24 August 1846): 135-36, and (31 August 1846): 139-40.

40Evgenii Markov, Ocherki Aavkaza (St. Petersburg-Moscow, 1887), 177.



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Left to suffer the ravages of time, North Caucasus mountaineers adopted an eclectic mix of Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and pagan rituals. The colonial project was marked by urgency: "The long neglected spark of Christianity is close to going out," argued R. D. Eristov (Eristavi), "if it is not ignited by the pastors of Christianity. The priest needs a lot of energy and a little courage as well, if he is to lead these mistaken creatures to the path of truth.""4 What Christianity mountaineers such as the Adygei did absorb and manage to maintain was too superficial and failed to influence their "moral understandings and internal life," argued historian Nikolai Dubrovin.42 Expressing a common concern of Slavophiles like Khomiakov but in a very different context, these Russians in the borderlands (and many non-Russians) were dismayed that the Adygei mastered "only the ritual aspects of Christianity," as V. Novitskii wrote, and proved unable to cultivate the deep spirituality that would allow for an enduring Christianity.43

Above all, the waning of Christian tradition was a failure on the part of North Caucasus mountain peoples to respect themselves, their past, and their customs. Lapses of faith meant a betrayal of custom. To counter these problems, regime missionaries founded the Ossetian Ecclesiastical Commission in 1771, which was succeeded by a larger and more ambitious Society for the Restoration of Christianity in the Caucasus in 1860. As if in- spired by the Slavophiles, the society was to promote the Christian faith through its at- tempts at the "restoration" (vozstanovlenie) of the genuine and authentic customs and traditions of the past. Teaching correct Orthodox ritual, as one of the many founding essays proclaimed in 1860, was particularly crucial in the mountain areas, where most inhabitants practiced a "strange mix of Christianity, Islam, and paganism."' Even the commander of the Main Staff of the Caucasus Army, for example, accustomed to delivering frank assess- ments of Imperial security and the needs of the state, concluded that the Digor region of Vladikavkaz district needed "capable priests who can support the people in its Christian faith and conduct services in Ossetian."45 Numerous officials emphasized this theme, in particular for mountain peoples like the Ossetians who resided in the liminal space between Christian Georgia and Shamil's Imamate. They drew their inspiration from the apostle Paul, the original Christian evangelist. "The Gospels have never been translated into any of the mountain languages, and without adequate priests the message remains lifeless and stale, in particular because of the illiteracy of the mountain tribes."46 Society teachers such as the Georgian Isalia Purtseladze at the Saroi school in Ossetia and the Ossetian Tatiev at the Kakhsk school paid careful attention to the observance of Orthodox ritual among their students and their families. Tatiev noted that his charges performed prayers in honor of St. Uspenskii, which they "observe in all their primitive simplicity, because their fathers and grandfathers and other ancestors observed this ritual."47

41R. D. Eristov, "O Tushino-Pshavo-Khevsurskom okruge," in ZKOIRGO, vol. 3 (Tiflis, 1855), 95. 42Nikolai F. Dubrovin, Istoriia voiny i vladychestvarusskikh na Kavkaze, vol. 1, pt. 1 (St. Petersburg, 1871), 95. 43V. Novitskii, "Anapa i zakubanskiia poselenija," in ZKOIRGO, vol. 2 (Tiflis, 1853), 15. 44SSSA, f. 493, op. 1 (1860-1882), d. 1, 1. 3. 45Ibid., (1861-68), d. 14, 1. 2. 46Ibid., (1861-67), d. 16,11. 6-7. 47Ibid., (1870), d. 248, 11. 24, 31.




The practices of conversion on the frontier must have contributed to the fears and concerns of conservative writers and officials. The early modern state in the Kazan region granted clothes, boots, flour, and temporary exemptions from taxation in return for Chris- tian conversion.48 Eighteenth-century baptism in Siberia sometimes meant "being herded into rivers at gunpoint."49 The heritage of such practices must have reminded officials and members of colonial educated society that the personal transformation of the heart central to the experience of conversion was surely lacking on the frontier. How else could small peoples so easily "fall away," or become apostates to the faith? When the Abkhaz Restora- tion Society missionary Gona Geromonakh promoted baptism in Pitsunda in September 1868, he reported to officials in Tiflis that entire villages were prepared for baptism, and had informed him only to "let them know when it was time and then they would bring the chicken and wine" for the ceremony. "We ourselves now see," the Abkhaz villagers told Geromonakh, "that the Christian faith is better than Islam, and being Christian is better than being Muslim. The Turks deceived us and those Abkhaz who resettled to Turkey, and they are suffering there while we, thanks to the Dear Tsar and the Grand Prince, are living in peace." Geromonakh pushed for increased funding from the society for schools, priests, teachers, and reading materials in Abkhaz.50 But were such sentiments genuine? The Imeretian episkop Gabriel traveled to Abkhazia with a translator, and concluded that Geromonakh had been "deceived," was "insufficiently acquainted with the character and customs of the Abkhaz," and suggested the state exercise more caution about enthusiastic reports of conversion on the frontier.51

Similar events took place throughout the North Caucasus. Georgian priest loseb Vatsadze reported that the Svaneti expressed "heartfelt wishes" to accept Christianity. After he explained the meaning of the Lord's prayer and various Christian symbols and shared a series of Gospel stories about the life of Jesus, he proceeded to baptize the entire village of Tserimi.52 On the various frontiers of the empire officials were engaged in perpetual debate and concern about the nature of actual faith, belief, and ritual. The purported indifference to questions of correct belief and doctrine among mountaineers compounded the problem. An "influential" Lezgin (Dagestan), reported (Ossetian) missionary Vitalii Dizhaev, "genuinely admitted [to me] that in general the Lezgin think that the salvation of the soul can be achieved through the teachings of either the Gospels or the Qu'ran."53 If this was indeed true, how could missionaries be sure some other incentive or fear was not responsible for the conversion?

A conservative preoccupation with custom and the past shaped the imagination of the empire on this frontier in other ways as well. Numerous ethnographers, geographers, stat- isticians, and an assortment of scholar-officials were active in thriving scholarly

48Michael Khodarkovsky, "'Ignoble Savages and Unfaithful Subjects': Constructing Non-Christian Identities in Early Modern Russia," in Russia's Orient, 18-20.

49Slezkine, "Savage Christians or Unorthodox Russians?" 17. 50SSSA, f. 493, op. 1 (1862-68), d. 33,11. 9-10. 5'Ibid., 1. 38. 52Ibid., 1. 4. 53Ibid., (1887-88), d. 489,1. 2.



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societies, the most well known of which were the Tiflis Branch of the Imperial Russian Geographic Society, the local work of the Imperial Archaeological Commission headed by A. P. Berzhe, and administrative arms like the Caucasus Mountain Adminstration. These institutions and their officials and scholars were determined to craft order out of the confusing chaos of the region and hence clarify the Imperial purpose, the larger significance of the military victory in the Caucasus War, and the historic significance of Russia's expansion into the borderland regions. They were less concerned with faith than Restoration Society missionaries, but their vision remained in line with conservative and Romantic notions about the importance of tradition. Scholars took the Imperial purpose to be the revival and preservation of antiquity, which might be contrasted to the more recent and degenerate past without Russian rule, and their key terms were the familiar ones of sarmobytnost' and narodnost .54

As for the small peoples of the Middle Volga, scholars emphasized that the region's authentic past and history were distinguishable from the history of Islam. This was no small task in a place like Dagestan, which possessed a tradition of Islamic literature in Arabic since the seventh century.55 At least other mountain peoples closer to the Georgian frontier possessed stronger links to Eastern Christianity. Linguist Petr Uslar developed written scripts for the mountain peoples, and Restoration Society missionaries and teachers and regime officials wrote and published primers and made accessible religious and other materials in local languages. The authentic and indigenous languages of the region would endure as a result of the help and guidance of the Russian Imperial state.

THE LIMITS OF TIE ROMANTIC VISION

The strong voices and assumptions of the Russian conservative tradition continued to shape the culture of empire building in the later nineteenth century. The earlier Romantic Slavophiles were excited and optimistic about the appearance of Russia upon the stage of world history. Later conservative writers and borderland communities, however, were increasingly worried about the role of Russia within the vast and diverse empire. The perceived threat of Europe and especially Germany after 1871 contributed to the rise of a variety of conservative phobias in Russia. Ivan Aksakov, for example, the familiar link between the early Slavophiles and subsequent conservative thought, routinely denounced Bismarck and the Germans in Rus' throughout the 1880s.56 Conservatives were preoccu-

54SSSA, f. 5, op. 1 (1869-74), d. 1096. 55Kemper, "Einige Notizen zurArabischsprachigen Literatur der Gihad-Bewegung in Dagestan und Tschetsche-

Nien in der ersten hlIfte des 19. Jahrhunderts," in Muslim Culture in Russia and CentralAsia 2:63-99; Amirxan A. Isaev, "Die 'Islamische Druckerei' von Muhammad-Mirza Mavraev," and Natal'ya A. Tagirova and Amri R. Sixsaidov, "AbdarrahmanAl-Gazigumuqi und Seine Werke," both inAMuslim Culture in Russia and CentralAsiafrom the 18th to the Earl) 20th Centuries, vol. 1, ed. Michael Kemper, Anke von Kugelgen, and Dmitriy Yermakov (Berlin, 1996), 341-54, and 317-40, respectively.

56For example, in "Rus"' (12 January 1885) in I. S. Aksakov, Slavianskii vopros, 1860-1886(Moscow, 1886), 606. See also John Doyle Klier, Imperial Russia's Jewish Question, 1855-1881 (Cambridge, England, 1995), 153-56.




pied with the inevitable struggles between the various civilizations and their essential "spir- its," a theme taken up with particular force by Nikolai Danilevskii. The early Slavophiles too liked to measure civilizations and their respective contributions to "Universal History," but they were less explicit about the political implications of the differences.57 In the later climate the promotion of native custom and native language instruction, which for Il'minskii offered a fuller exposure to the message of the Gospel, instead prompted new kinds of fears in an empire where Russians could not take their primacy for granted. The "native soil conservatives" confronted a different Russian context also, where they looked with remorse at an educated society long alerted to the problem of its own estrangement from the sources of authentic custom and true faith but unwilling to address this predicament. This was a theme most famously articulated by Dostoevsky, but long evident in the works of his contemporaries Aksakov and Iurii Samarin as well.58

In spite of these differences, however, later writers and educated society on the frontier continued to draw upon the problems central to the earlier Romantic tradition. The Eastern Question in the Balkans for Aksakov was again related to the issue of historic faith and custom, and the possibility of preserving it over time. Ottoman and Muslim influence hampered the ability of small peoples in the Balkans such as the Chernogortsy, who according to Aksakov faced extinction "to the last person" as a result of "pressure from Asian hordes," to maintain and preserve their links to the past.59 The Chernogortsy in his view were at the forefront of the battle against Islam and the Turks, similar to Cossacks within the empire, "pioneers of Slavic freedom!"60 Aksakov was obsessed with international com- petition and the need for Russia to counter its rivals in the Balkans and on its various frontiers. He was instrumental in the formation of the Slavic Society in Moscow, served briefly as its secretary in 1862 and treasurer until 1868, and was close to General Cherniaev.61 Slavic visitors to the 1867 Slavonic Ethnographic Exhibit, he wrote in Moskva, strength- ened "their spiritual and moral ties to Russia" as preparation for subsequent struggle with Magyars, Germans, and Turks.62 Yet the enduring preoccupation for Aksakov regarding the Eastern Question was again the issue of correct faith, ritual, and the maintenance of custom over time. The Chernogortsy, in spite of Russia's negligence and the absence of support from abroad, "remained true to their faith and Slavic narodnost', not once confusing themselves with change."63 The essence of the Eastern Question lay in the heroic capability of small Balkan peoples to preserve and maintain their faith and customs over time in the face of the illegitimate cultural threat brought by Ottoman Islam. The concerns of

57Kireevskii, "Deviatnadtsatyi vek," PSS 1: 104; Khomiakov, "Zapiski o vsemirnoi istorii," pt. 2, PSS, vol. 6. 58Aksakov, "Den"' (1861) and "Moskvich" (1868), in Slavianskii vopros, 1860-1886, 10-11, 248; Samarin, in

1840-1876- Lu. F Samarin. Stat'i, Vospominanfia, Pis'ma, ed. T. A. Medovicheva (Moscow, 1997), 60-62. On conservative figures and thought see Edward C. Thaden, Conservative Nationalism in Nineteenth- Century Russia (Seattle, 1964); and Wayne Dowler, Dostoevsky Grigor'ev and Native Soil Conservatism (Toronto, 1982).

59Aksakov, "Den"' (1862), in Slavianskii vopros, 1860-1886, 25. 60Aksakov, "Den"' (1865), in ibid., 56. 61S. A. Nikitin, Slavianskie komitety vRossii v 1858-1876godakh (Moscow, 1960), 33-39, 82-83, 291. 62Aksakov, "Moskva" (1867), in Slavianskii vopros, 1860-1886, 148. 63Aksakov, "Den"' (1865), in ibid., 56, 59.



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conservative writers and officials did not necessarily respect the official borders of state rule.64

Conservative writers of the later nineteenth century emphasized that the small peoples of the empire needed to know their place. Obviously not all peoples were qualified to benefit from the Romantic ideas about historically young peoples and their future cultural expression. Religious writers like the Slavophiles always started with Christianity as the "historical engine, the foundation, the spiritual movement upon which arose and formed one or another narodnost' into a political organism."65 But even a secular thinker such as Belinskii disqualified numerous peoples, although according to a different set of criteria. Europeans and more recently Russians, he argued, were fortunate to see their history pass from folklore to literacy to the production of literature, the "last and highest expression of the thought of a people."66 There were peoples, however, with "fewer sources of spiritual life," who possessed a less fertile soil of proverbs, sayings, parables, songs, tales, and legends from which poetry might emerge-in short, a less-developed sphere of custom. These peoples would never "rise to the significance of a universal-historical people."67 Belinskii notably excluded even Ukrainians from this picture.68

Danilevskii emphasized that not all peoples were capable of "originality," or of attain- ing significant levels of culture and civilization; they "are born, achieve their various levels of development, age, deteriorate, and die." Predictably, the Slavs, headed by the Russians, were one of those "cultural-historical types" destined in Danilevskii's view to play a deci- sive role in the history of the world. Small peoples on the Russian frontier such as those of the Middle Volga, on the other hand, were to play the role of "ethnographic material," "that is, something like inorganic matter that makes up the composition of historical organisms."69 Danilevskii did not consider this process of assimilation a cultural insult or certainly not a political conquest, and instead felt that peoples at the mere stage of "ethnographic material" were in fact fortunate to contribute to the strength and richness of a genuine "cultural- historical type." Mountaineers in the Caucasus did not even make it this far: with their

64The reports stored in the military archive in Moscow of the Pan-Slav ambassador to Constantinople, Nikolai Ignat'ev, on Shamil and the Caucasus make for fascinating reading in this regard. See my "Who was Shamil? Russian Colonial Rule and Sufi Islam in the North Caucasus, 1859-1917," CentralAsian Survey 14:2 (1995): 205- 23.

65Aksakov, from "Den"' (1867), in Ivan S. Aksakov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenli (Moscow, 1886), 1:175. For other examples see Berdiaev, Aleksei Stepanovich Khomiakov, 22-23; E. A. Dubzinskaia, Slavianofily v obshchestvennoibor'be (Moscow, 1983), 32; and Iurii Samarin, Okrainy Rossfi, vol. 1 (Prague, 1868), 154.

66V. G. Belinskii, "Obshchee znachenie slova literatura" (1842-1844), in his Polnoe sobranie sochinenii(PSS) (Moscow, 1953), 5:623.

67Ibid., 632-33. 68Belinskii, "Istoriia Malorossii" (1842), PSS7:44-65. See also Andrzej Walicki, A History ofRussian Thought

from the Enlightenment to Marxism, trans. Hilda Andrew-Rublecka (Stanford, 1979), 131-40. On Belinskii and Ukraine see Andrea Rutherford, "Vissarion Belinskii and the Ukrainian National Question," Russian Review 54 (October 1995): 500-515. Even the radicalism of a critic like Nikolai Dobroliubov did not extend to political independence for smaller peoples. See N. A. Dobroliubov, "Cherty dlia kharakteristiki russkogo prostonarod'ia" (1859), in his Sobraniesochinenii(Moscow, 1950), 3:89. To put this in context, however, we might recall that even nationalists like List and Mazzini, as well as other innovative challengers to the nineteenth century order such as Engels, were similarly unable to fathom independence for the small peoples of Europe. See E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations andNationalism since 1780. Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge, England, 1990), 30-42.

69Nikolai Ia. Danilevskii, Ross/ia iEvropa (St. Petersburg, 1871), 93 (see also p. 239).




"fanatical religion, their way of life and habits, and even the land they inhabit," they were little more than "natural (prirodnye) predators and robbers."70 For Danilevskii they were apparently like animals, lacking even the rudiments of culture and not worthy of much consideration. The conservative literary critic Nikolai Strakhov similarly argued that different peoples represented different "cultural-historical types" and were far from equal in their "spiritual strengths."71 Within the context of the multiethnic empire, conservative thinkers felt the need to emphasize the limits of the "reverse Orientalism" implicit to the rethinking of the Russian past and its relationship to Europe initiated by the Slavophiles. Russia's historic "backwardness" was suddenly a virtue; Chuvash and Abkhaz "savagery," however, remained just that.

The question of "world historical types" and "historical peoples," which in the 1 830s and 1840s was self-evidently a debate about the big civilizations of the Hebrews, Latins, Germanic peoples, and so on, needed further clarification in an empire unique for its growth of nationalism more advanced among the periphery peoples (Balts, Ukrainians, Georgians, Armenians) than among the "Imperial" people. As Andreas Kappeler points out, levels of literacy, education, professional achievement, and urbanization for many non-Russian peoples exceeded those of the Russians.72 Uslar's 1881 work on ancient myths about the Caucasus possessed the vocabularly and assumptions of Danilevskii.73 Was it obvious to a linguistic specialist on the region that Russians were indeed the "historical" people when Georgians and Armenians possessed literary languages from the fourth and fifth centuries? Eastern languages such as Turkish or Arabic were obviously out of the question as potential alphabets for the transciption of mountain languages, but Uslar and his colleagues knew and discussed the fact that the guttural sounds of Georgian made the Georgian script a reason- able candidate.74 Instead they chose Cyrillic, the alphabet of an "historical" people with a promising future.

The experience of colonization and borderland settlement further distressed conservative writers and officials in the later nineteenth century. The state reduced the restrictions of the commune upon peasant mobility and promoted and facilitated settlement to the frontier regions of the empire. Colonization was by definition a matter of cultural mixing and borrowing, and conservative officials in particular worried about the identity of the empire in regions such as the North Caucasus, where Russian settlers met Czech, Polish, Greek, German, and Ukrainian colonists. Ivan Zolotarev, one of many officials responsible for colonization, expressed typical conservative fears and even desperate hopes when he claimed that among "those of other tribes, among Turks and Moldavians, Poles, and Germans, the descendants of Rus' preserve their language and customs and ancient social structure."75

70Ibid., 37. 71N. Strakhov, Bor'ba s zapadom v nashei literature, vol. 1 (Kiev, 1897), C. H. Van Schooneveld, ed., S/avistic

Printings and Reprintizngs (The Hague, 1969), 138-76 (citation from p. 173). 72Kappeler, La Russie: Empire multiethnique, 260-78, 341-44. 73Baron P. K. Uslar, "Dreveishiia skazaniia o Kavkaze," in Sbornik svedenii o kavkazskikh gortsakh, vol. 10

(Tiflis, 1881), 1-552. 74"Otchet o sostoianii i deistviiakh otdela s 1859 po 1863 god," in ZKOIRGO, vol. 6 (Tiflis, 1864), 9; "Nechto

ob azbukhakh kavkazskikh gortsev," Kavkaz (10 March 1863): 124-26. 75SSSA, f. 5, op. 1 (1868), d. 770, 1. 5.



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But was it true? The social practices of the frontier-where small peoples in the Middle Volga borrowed clothes, implements, and customs from the Tatars, and Cossacks in the North Caucasus traded with and adopted clothes and domestic implements from mountaineers, and Russians in Crimea mixed with Ukrainians, Germans, and Nogays-posed a chal- lenge to Romantic notions of cultural authenticity and the historic integrity of indigenous custom.76

Old Belief posed a similar dilemma. Russians presumably stood at the apex of correct belief and the proper fulfillment of religious ritual. At the multiethnic Aleksandrovsk Teaching School in Tiflis in 1870, where one class roll included 23 Russians, 3 Poles, 8 Georgians, 3 Mingrelians, and 3 Abkhaz, officials took it for granted that "Russians, as is known, accurately observe the rituals and always attend church."77 Orthodox settlers who did not provide an inspiring religious example were particularly irksome to the plans and hopes of missionaries such as Il'minskii, and officials in the Middle Volga sometimes attributed the "apostasy" of baptized Tatars to their improper example.78 Old Believer emigration to the Caucasus continued throughout the latter nineteenth century, with over six thousand moving into Terek oblast in 1890 alone. Officials in particular worried about the impact of the Old Belief among Cossack communities, long viewed as staunch up- holders of Russianness on the frontier.79 Cultural transgressions such as Old Belief re- vealed that Russians too were failing to maintain historic traditions of custom and faith amid the diversity of the frontier.

The conservative impulse was famously important at the heart of the declining empire, with the last tsars tutored by the influential Konstantin Pobedonostsev, procurator of the Holy Synod. Pobedonostsev, a virtual personification of "state, church and the Russian nation," as Kappeler put it, is well known for his relentless assault on the main currents of political and social liberalism from the West, but he too was shaped by the general contours of the conservative rendition of faith, custom, and ritual.80 He was in regular correspon- dence with Aksakov and Danilevskii as well as conservative administrators in the borderlands such as I. I. Vorontsov-Dashkov, the official sent to the Caucasus to restore order in the wake of the events of 1905.81 He was abreast of the works of Rostislav Fadeev, another veteran of the Caucasus known for his belligerent writings on the Eastern Question, and a severe critic of the "cunning" and "purely Eastern" (Armenian) administrator Loris-Melikov.82 In a letter to the tsar in January 1886, Pobedonostsev mourned the death of Ivan Aksakov,

76Allen J. Frank, "Islam and Ethnic Relations in the Kazakh Inner Horde: Muslim Cossacks, Tatar Merchants, and Kazakh Nomads in a Turkic Manuscript, 1870-19 10," in Muslim Culture in Russia and CentralAsia 2:211- 42; Thomas M. Barrett, "Crossing Boundaries: The Trading Frontiers of the Terek Cossacks," in Russia's Orient, 227-48; Willard Sunderland, "An Empire of Peasants: Empire-Building, Interethnic Interaction, and Ethnic Stereo- typing in the Rural World of the Russian Empire, 1800-1850s," in ImperialRussia, 181-85.

77SSSA, f. 493, op. 1 (1870), d. 248,1. 48. 78"Izvlechenie iz proekta 1849 g. o tatarskoi missii," in Petr Vasil'evich Znamenskii, Na pamiat'o aNiko/ae

Ivanoviche .I'minskom (Kazan, 1892), 331-35. 79Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv (St. Petersburg), f. 37, op. 55 (1892-99), d. 69, 11. 46-47;

SSSA, f. 7, op. 1 (1876-77), d. 1755,1. 15. 80Kappeler, La Russie. Empire multiethnique, 238. 81K P Pobedonostsev i ego korrespondenty, vol. 1 (Moscow, 1923), 79, 276, 350-51. 82Ibid., 79, 56.




an "honest and pure" person who expressed "deep love for Russia and all things Russian."83 In his many essays Pobedonostsev criticized Russia's enlighteners for their glorification of values, traditions, and institutions that did not spring "from the depths of the popular imagination." The "germs of eternal truth" resided not in the West but in the "old traditions [and] the old customs of the people."84 Reason divorced from life, he offered in familiar fashion, was "artificial, formal, and as a result, dead." Genuine religious feeling was not the product of reason but of the "rituals and traditions" of the peasant, passed down through the generations.85 The last emperor himself issued homilies along these lines.86 Pobedonostsev served as the important patron of the work of Il'minskii, and was pleased with the efforts of Uslar in the Caucasus.87

Romantic notions of faith, custom, and ritual shaped the ideas and attitudes of numerous Imperial officials, scholars, military officers, and travelers, from influential characters such as Il'minskii and Uslar to lesser-known participants in the emerging colonial communities in the borderlands. Small peoples of the Middle Volga and the North Caucasus were on the margins of the true faith, and their past and present deviance was a product of their inability to grasp fully the power and significance of the Christian faith and maintain the indigenous practices and customs where the faith historically resided. Even as the powerful and trans- formative Petrine state, the "well-ordered police state" described by Marc Raeff, colonized the frontier, regulated Islamic clerics like it did Orthodox priests, and created theaters, newspapers, and even entire towns by decree, this conservative preoccupation with the maintenance of tradition exerted an equally powerful influence upon the formation of the empire.88

These ideas form the context to Russian attitudes toward Islam in the empire. Sha- manism, paganism, animism, and a variety of local religious practices in frontier regions were less threatening to Imperial officials than traditional Islam. In part, of course, officials simply feared competitors, such as the Kazan Tatars, with their own arsenal of high culture, literacy, publishing houses, and ecclesiastical institutions, or rivals with all that and their own big states across the Imperial border in places like Persia or Ottoman Turkey. But this conflict was about much more than the politics of Imperial rivalry. However much they perceived shamanistic practices as bizarre, misguided, or the product of ignorance, Rus- sians such as Il'minskii suggested that they expressed in their own way the religious impulse which made humane society possible and granted access to tradition, the universal "striving toward the divine and the unseen," as he put it. Muslims, by contrast, had not just distanced themselves from the sacred story like Western Europeans, but had explicitly replaced Christian tradition with another. Muhammed himself, of course, was the great

83Ibid. 2:556. 84Konstantin P. Pobedonostsev, Reflections of a Russian Statesman, foreward by Murray Polner (Ann Arbor,

1965), 140, 154, 184. 85K. P. Pobedonostsev, Moskovskiisbornik(Moscow, 1896), 67, 151. 86Mark D. Steinberg and Vladimir M. Khrustalev, eds., The Fall of the Romanovs: Political Dreams and Per-

sonal Struggles in a Time ofRevolution (New Haven, 1995), 15-21. 87K P Pobedonostsev i ego korrespondenty 2:547. 88Marc Raeff, The Well-Ordered Police State. Social and Institutional Change through Law in the Germanies

and Russia, 1600-1800 (New Haven, 1983).



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apostate who denied the traditional story while simultaneously claiming to fulfill it. Russia's "Orientalism," as Edward Said notably defined the problem of Western culture in contact with Islam and the East, was distinct and unique to Russia and its unusual empire. Said focused on English and French colonialism in the nineteenth century, and to a lesser extent American views on Islam after 1945, while calling for the study of the problem in other parts of the world.89 But Said's ability to describe the different historical contexts that shaped European perceptions of Islam was limited by his repetitive return to a series of problems familiar to scholars of French intellectual history since 1945-the binary structure of the mind, identity, and the question of alterity or "otherness," the referential nature of language, the relationship between knowledge and authority. In this paper I have described the uniquely Imperial Russian context that shaped this relationship to Islam-the set of views and concerns that emerged as a product of Russia's relationship to Western cultures, neighboring Islamic empires, and vast borderland regions and peoples recently conquered and incorporated into the Russian empire.

Studying the empire with reference to the terms, attitudes, and problems that were important to contemporaries challenges facile conclusions about ethnic politics today. Many Georgians in their newly independent state today emphasize Russian efforts to support their own borderland peoples like the Abkhaz and Ossetians in an effort to weaken their new bid for genuine autonomy and independence. Scholars in both the West and the former Soviet Union as well as numerous commentators today too quickly resort to accusations of imperial design and the imperial politics of "divide and rule" to explain either interethnic conflict or the failed efforts of non-Russian nation-building. Imperial policy in the western borderlands is better known and researched, and the policies of "Russification" there en- tailed restrictions on cultural expression and the use of local languages such as Polish and Ukrainian. Along the eastern frontier, however, Imperial officials conceived of the problem differently, and promoted rather than restricted local languages and cultural expression. In Restoration Society schools children were learning Russian, but first and foremost the state was seeking and training Abkhaz and Ossetian teachers, developing scripts, and publishing school primers that might facilitate the use of local languages. Officials treated the Chuvash and other small peoples in the Middle Volga in a similar fashion. These policies were the product of a uniquely Russian set of assumptions about faith, custom, Orthodoxy, and Is- lam rather than a cynical imperial policy designed to foster division and weakness among diverse frontier peoples.

International competitition, the experience of frontier colonization, and the prospect of resistance to empire posed new questions about the role and strength of Russia within the empire in the later nineteenth century, but later conservative writers and colonial communities continued to draw upon the assumptions of the earlier Romantic writers about the question of faith, custom, and ritual in the borderlands. Prominent writers such as Nikolai Danilevskii and many others emphasized the cultural inadequacies of the other large civilizations that contested Russian influence on its frontiers, and within the empire emphasized the distance between the people that counted and the "small peoples" of the

89Edward Said, Orientalism (NewYork, 1979), 16-17. See also the introduction to Brower and Lazzerini, eds., Russia's Orient, xi-xx.




borderlands. The strength of Europe and the increasingly visible results of borderland settlement that sometimes included the nativization of the settlers rather than the Russification of the natives contributed to the belligerent urgency with which these questions were posed.90

Is it too big of a leap to imagine the formation of the Soviet state as partially a product of the Romantic and conservative views discussed in this paper? 'While Bolshevik administrators of course created their new ethnoterritorial state in the shadow of Wilsonian self- determination after Versailles, and were generally determined to be modem and eliminate various relics of the "feudal" past, at the same time they drew on this different heritage deeply ingrained within nineteenth-century Russian thought and culture. If the Revolution was less of a cultural divide than we might assume, scholars of the Soviet era have reason to be more explicit about the historical background to the twentieth-century ethnoterritorial state.91 "After 1923 the Soviet government facilitated the creation and consolidation of 'nations' (natsiia) or 'nationalities' (narodnost )," explained Alexandre Bennigsen and Chantal Lemercier-Quelquejay in 1964, anticipating more recent work on the formation of the Soviet state.92 The Romantic language of cultural authenticity endured among Soviet officialdom, and even scholars depicted the virtues of Soviet rule to be the fostering of the samobytnost' of the "small peoples" of the frontier.93 Peoples who looked abroad for cultural inspiration, however, risked "falling away" from the true source of culture as defined by Soviet officialdom, and "diaspora" peoples in particular suffered through the Soviet era.94 Faith disappeared as new ideologies supplanted old ones, but conservative notions about custom endured as an important part of the make-up of the new Soviet world.

90See Willard Sunderland, "Russians into Iakuts? 'Going Native' and Problems of Russian National Identity in the Siberian North, 1870s-1914," Slavic Review 55 (Winter 1996): 806-25.

91For a notable exception see Isabelle Kreindler, "A Neglected Source of Lenin's Nationality Policy," Slavic Review 36 (March 1977): 86-100; and idem, "Nikolai Il'minskii and Language Planning in Nineteenth-Century Russia," International Journal of the Sociology of Language 22 (1979): 5-26.

92Alexandre Bennigsen et Chantal Lemercier-Quelquejay, Lapresse etlemouvementnationalchez lesmusulmans de russie avant 1920 (Paris, 1964), 278. For recent work on the formation of the Soviet state see Ronald Grigor Suny, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford, 1993); Francine Hirsch, "The Soviet Union as a Work-in-Progress: Ethnographers and the Category Nationality in the 1926, 1937, and 1939 Censuses," Slavic Review 56 (Summer 1997): 251-78; andYuri Slezkine, "The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism," Slavic Review53 (Summer 1994): 414-52.

93N. G. Volkova, Etnicheskii sostav naselenlia severnogo Kavkaza v xviii-nachale AX veka (Moscow, 1974), 223.

94See Terry Martin, "The Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing," JournalofModern History70 (December 1998): 813-61.



faith, custom, and ritual in the borderlands: orthodoxy, islam, and the "small peoples" of...

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