Faith, Custom, and Ritual inthe Borderlands: Orthodoxy,Islam, and the “SmallPeoples” of the Middle Volgaand the North Caucasus

AAAAAUSTIN JERSILDUSTIN JERSILDUSTIN JERSILDUSTIN JERSILDUSTIN JERSILD

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

Elderly Chechen to Nikolai Dubrovin, 1871

To 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.1 Borderland communi-ties predictably drew upon the central concerns and dilemmas of Russian cultural and intel-lectual history. The assumptions and terms of debate familiar to us from the “marvelousdecade” that gave birth to the Slavophiles and Westerners were also significant for the for-mation 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 thesummer 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 thesummer of 1999; audiences and panelists at the AAASS in Boca Raton (1998), the Southern Slavic Conference inRichmond (1999), the Old Dominion University Faculty Research Seminar (1999), and the Berkeley Program inSoviet and Post-Soviet Studies (1999); and commentators Tony Anemone, Wayne Dowler, Ron Suny, my anony-mous referees, and David Hoffmann.

1On 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 theearly modern social order upon the process of conquest and incorporation. The issue at hand important to contem-poraries 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): 512–529Copyright 2000 The Russian Review

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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 inthe vision of Alexei Khomiakov was its special ability to maintain and preserve its “way oflife” (byt) amid threats from both the powerful West and the vast East. The faithful adher-ence 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’sgreatness.”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-beatenpath through the Caucasus of the Russian literary imagination in his trip with the Russianarmy as far south as Adrianople in 1828.4 Romantic Slavophiles as well as Petr Chaadaevdrew on German Romantics such as Schelling to portray the character of a culture as aproduct of its particular religious inspiration. If small borderland peoples often appeared“savage” in their customs and ways, it followed that they had inadequately maintained theirlinks to historic Christianity, the true source of cultural progress and creativity. Romanticviews about custom, tradition, and the past shaped the thinking and the policies of border-land communities and officials in frontier regions such as the Middle Volga and the NorthCaucasus.5

The religious dimension to the cultural imagination of the empire is easily overlookedbecause 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 familiessuch as the Orbeliani and Eristavi at work within the Imperial bureaucracy, for example, see Sakartvelos sakhelmtsiposaistorio arkivi (Georgian National Historical Archive [SSSA]), f. 4, op. 3 (1846–55), d. 181, ll. 22–60. On faithand the emergence of a notion of custom in eighteenth-century texts of empire see Yuri Slezkine, “Naturalistsversus Nations: Eighteenth-Century Russian Scholars Confront Ethnic Diversity,” in Russia’s Orient: ImperialBorderlands and Peoples, 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 of the Russian Empire, ed. Catherine Evtuhov et al. (Moscow, 1997), 393–410; Boris Nolde, La formation de L’Empire Russe, vols. 1–2 (Paris, 1952, 1953); and portions of Jane Burbankand David L. Ransel, eds., Imperial Russia: New Histories for the Empire (Bloomington, 1998). On Russia andthe “small peoples” of Siberia see Yuri Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North (Ithaca,1994). On empire in comparative context see Karen Barkey and Mark von Hagen, eds., After Empire: MultiethnicSocieties and Nation-Building (Boulder, 1997); Michael W. Doyle, Empires (Ithaca, 1986); and Ronald GrigorSuny, “The Empire Strikes Out: Imperial Russia, ‘National’ Identity, and Theories of Empire,” in A State of Na-tions: Empire and Nation-Making in the Soviet Union, 1917–1953 (forthcoming).

2Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History, rev. ed., trans. J. Sibree (New York, 1944), 53.3A. S. Khomiakov, “O sel’skikh usloviiakh” (1842), in his Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (PSS), 3d ed. (Moscow,

1900), 3:64.4Khomiakov, “Ermak,” PSS 4:275–388. 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-Century RussianSlavophilism: A Study in Ideas, vol. 1, A. S. Xomjakov (The Hague, 1961), 33; and Nikolai Berdiaev, AlekseiStepanovich Khomiakov (Moscow, 1912), 34–37. On the literary imagination of the Caucasus see Susan Layton,Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from 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).

5The important questions of Russian identity and Russia’s relationship to the West understandably shape thestudy 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

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expansion, and the role of a general notion of European enlightenment as an integrativesource 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 theWest,” stood as a model for empire-builders in borderland towns in the nineteenth century.Viceroy Mikhail Vorontsov, for example, established newspapers, scholarly societies, and atheater in Tiflis, and regularly corresponded with Europeans about matters “of great impor-tance for public well-being.”6 Or our attention to the question of faith and the frontierevokes 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 centurychroniclers put it.7 The conquest of the southern borderlands featured the continuation ofthis holy struggle into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. To secure frontiers anddefeat mountain peoples the Imperial regime made extensive use of local Christian peoplesin 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 borderlandcommunities on the frontier is worth further consideration.

Educated society in the borderlands consistently associated the question of faith withother issues such as the importance of the maintenance of authentic custom over time andthe importance of the correct practice of ritual, things which in their view facilitated theendurance of the Christian faith. These concerns form the context to the Imperial preoccu-pation 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 ofnot just religious but also general cultural “apostasy” (otstupnichestvo). Apostasy, or thenotion of the “falling away” or the conversion to Islam of small peoples in the MiddleVolga, was in the Imperial conception a product of the failing on the part of borderlandpeoples to preserve and maintain true custom, faith, and the practices of the past. The termwas not as common in the North Caucasus, but the general notion was important there aswell. In the Imperial conception, history began for the small peoples of the Middle Volgawith their Christian conversion after the sixteenth-century conquests of the region, and forthe North Caucasus peoples as a product of their historic contact with Byzantine Christian-ity. Educated society, Imperial administrators, and missionaries saw themselves as theprotectors and promoters of “custom” on the frontier.

Berdiaev wrote in the early twentieth century, “Khomiakov never wrote an essay specifically about the nationali-ties problem, because all of his essays in one way or another are dedicated to this question” (Aleksei StepanovichKhomiakov, 208). On the Slavophiles see also Alexandre Koyré, La Philosophie et le Problème National en Russieau début du XIX siècle (Paris, 1929), 164–202; L. Strakhovsky, L’Empereur Nicolas Ier et L’esprit National Russe(Louvain, 1928); Nicolas Arseniev, La Sainte Moscou: Tableau de la vie religeuse et intellectuelle russe au XIXesiècle (Paris, 1948); and Nicholas Riasanovsky, Russia and the West in the Teaching of the Slavophiles (Berkeley,1952).

6SSSA, f. 4, op. 2 (1845–47), d. 19, l. 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, ll. 24–37, and d. 183, ll. 1–2.

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THE MIDDLE THE MIDDLE THE MIDDLE THE MIDDLE THE MIDDLE VVVVVOLGAOLGAOLGAOLGAOLGA

Obviously officials on the frontier were not in touch with the writings of classicalSlavophilism, but the general preoccupations of the Russian conservative tradition withfaith and its relationship to history and custom, the importance of indigenous cultural de-velopment, and the dilemmas of foreign borrowing and imitation shaped the expansion andformation of the empire. These ideas and assumptions guided the activities of numerousadministrators, scholars, military officials, and travelers who composed the borderland com-munities of the early and middle nineteenth century. The impulse to protect and preservecustom and the notion of the relationship between faith, ritual, and custom endured throughthe nineteenth century to become an important component of Russian identity, and an im-portant component of Russia’s Imperial and civilizing mission among “small peoples” ofthe 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 theempire. “Now I am sitting among my Chuvash friends,” reported Aleksandra Fuchs fromKazan province in 1840. “I very much love this simple and gentle people.”9 But she wasrepeatedly disappointed by the inability of the Chuvash to ponder questions of origin andidentity. “What did they think about themselves? Who were they? Where were theyfrom? And who were their ancestors?” Fuchs was astounded by their ignorance, andamazed 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 acollection of “distorted superstition and the temporary imprint of the primitive customs ofthe Old Testament.”10 The Chuvash were neither here nor there, no longer comprehendingeither their ancient faith or Christianity. “You might say that they have fallen away fromtheir own [faith], but have yet to adopt ours.”11

V. A. Sboev, another early observer of the Chuvash, agreed: the Chuvash were “badpagans and even worse Christians,” whose performance of Christian ritual sometimes re-minded him of pagan bachannalia.12 This religious ineptitude was related to the question ofcustom, or to the problem of the failure to maintain customs over time. For Sboev theChuvash were outside of history, “eastern” and “unknown” to historians and geographersuntil the sixteenth century, and without language, temples, religious law, ancient monu-ments, or other means of transmitting tradition through the generations.13 At least they hadlegends, which Sboev wanted to study for insight into “ancient Chuvash mythology,” andfolk songs, which were not always “improvised” but sometimes “were passed from onegeneration to another.”14 The numerous Russians on the frontier who glorified tradition and

9Aleksandra A. Fuks, Zapiski Aleksandry Fuks o chuvashakh i cheremisakh kazanskoi gubernii (Kazan, 1840),28.

10Ibid., 27–28.11Ibid., 49.12V. A. Sboev, Chuvash v bytovom, istoricheskom i religioznom otnosheniiakh (Moscow, 1865), 12, 52–53.13Ibid., 54.14Ibid., 55, 148.

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

Nikolai Il’minskii, the missionary, linguist, and educator with the ear of Pobedonostsevand the support of other high officials of the state, was shaped by the interest in peasantthought and culture common to the various shades of educated opinion in the 1830s and1840s. 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 peasantrythere existed the “beneficial, spiritual qualities of man” necessary for the fulfillment of his“religious needs.”15 Like Khomiakov and Kireevskii (and powerfully and repeatedly ex-pressed by Dostoevsky), Il’minskii believed that Russia’s educated society did not have amonopoly on genuine truth, knowledge, and meaning, and he took seriously the religiouspractices and ideas that were part of peasant culture and custom.16 “In the simple man thereis nothing memorized, or read from books, or artificial,” Il’minskii wrote: “the simple manexpresses himself directly from the treasures of his heart.”17 He took these ideas to theMiddle Volga region, convinced that the dilemmas and challenges of educating and mold-ing Russian peasants and inorodtsy were similar.18

For Il’minskii and his growing collection of disciples, genuine faith was an outgrowthof indigenous culture, or “native soil.” Thus even shamanism among inorodtsy in Siberiaand the Middle Volga was not necessarily a grave sin, and Il’minskii criticized missionarieswho too zealously persecuted it. Shamanism, he argued, was a form of religious expressioncharacteristic of “young tribes” still poorly developed and insufficiently educated and en-lightened. This was a temporary situation, Il’minskii felt, citing I Corinthians 13:11 tomake his point: “The apostle says: when I was young I spoke, thought and reasonedyouthfully; and when I became a man, then I left my youth behind.”19 And however primi-tive, shamanism remained a form of religious expression, a genuine example of the “striv-ing toward the divine and the unseen” that was in Il’minskii’s view a central component ofhuman nature. The religious impulse sprung from the customs and culture of peoples suchas the Chuvash, Cheremis [Mari], and Votiaks [Udmurts], who with time, education, and

15N. I. Il’minskii, “O kolichestve pechataemykh v Kazani magometanskikh knig i o shkole dlia detei kreshchenykhtatar” (1866), in his Kazanskaia tsentral’naia kreshcheno-tatarskaia shkola: Materialy dlia istorii khristianskagoprosveshcheniia kreshchenykh tatar (Kazan, 1887), 121.

16Khomiakov, “Mnenie russkikh ob inostrantsakh” (1846), in his Izbrannye sochineniia, ed. N. S. Arsen’ev(New York, 1955), 118; Christoff, Introduction to Nineteenth-Century Russian Slavophilism 1:89; Ivan Kireevskiiletter to V. A. Zhukovskii (1845), in I. V. Kireevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, ed. M. Gershenzon (Moscow,1911), 2:237–38; Fyodor Dostoevsky, Memoirs from the House of the Dead, trans. Jessie Coulson, ed. RonaldHingley (Oxford, 1983).

17Pis’ma N. I. Il’minskago k kreshchenym tataram (Kazan, 1896), xix.18Scholars 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 portrayhere as Romantic views about faith and custom, from Moscow to Tiflis to Kazan. See Saussay, “Il’minskij et laPolitique de Russification des Tatars, 1865–1891,” Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique 8 (Juillet-Septembre1967): 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.

19Pis’ma N. I. Il’minskago k kreshchenym tataram, 122.

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

Shamanism and paganism were also preferable to Islam, which Il’minskii viewed asperpetually foreign. Il’minskii’s prized student and eventually a teacher in the “Russian-Tatar” schools, Vasillii Timofeev, similarly defended indigenous forms of religious expres-sion.21 Such practices and ideals represented the “most beneficial soil upon which Chris-tian teaching might develop and provide its abundant fruit.”22 Missionaries and educatorssuch as Il’minskii and Timofeev were relieved to be confronted with what they called pa-ganism rather than Islam, especially in the Middle Volga region where Kazan Muslim Tatarsoffered 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 “totell the truth,” Timofeev conceded, “Russian influence was rather weak, much weaker thanMuslim influence.”23

Primitive paganism was a less formidable foe to Imperial officials than the establishedmosques, 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 Transcaucasuslooked for inspiration from the surrounding Muslim empires and holy centers of historicIslam, while Muslims in Kazan, as E. A. Rozov, the vice-governor of Kazan province em-phasized 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 onlyall the other inorodtsy of Kazan province, but even more developed than the Russian peas-ants.”25 Regime officials saw the preservation of indigenous culture as a means to facilitatethe spread of Christianity and counter the impact and influence of the Kazan Tatars and theinternational Muslim community. During his stay in Kazan in the early 1860s, the ministerof enlightenment appointed an official to work in the Kazan Educational District especiallywith 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 andculture of this “half-Christian, half-pagan narod.”26 The origins of the Soviet ethnoterritorialstate, or the Soviet version of federalism, are to be found within this important impulse ofthe expanding nineteenth century Imperial state.

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

20On baptism and the Mari see Paul W. Werth, “Baptism, Authority, and the Problem of Zakonnost’ in OrenburgDiocese: The Induction of over 800 ‘Pagans’ into the Christian Faith,” Slavic Review 56 (Fall 1997): 456–80.

21On native personnel and the Il’minskii system see Robert Geraci, “The Il’minskii System and the Controversyover 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 Il’minskii, Kazanskaia tsentral’naia kreshcheno-tatarskaia

shkola, 300. See also A. Kh. Makhmutova, Stanovlenie svetskogo obrazovaniia u tatar (Bor’ba vokrug shkol’nogovoprosa, 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 theChuvash were easy prey to Muslim missionaries because they were unable over time tomaintain their traditions amid too many Muslim Tatars. They were failing at both of theirassigned tasks: they were baptized but “without an internal transformation,” and “without afull conviction of the truth and salvation of the Christian faith, and even without a sufficientstudy of its dogmas.”27 They also inadequately understood the nature of what it meant to beChuvash, 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 fundamentaland peaceful means of maintaining true faith among the people is an upbringing from thevery 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 constantattention to ritual, liturgy, and doctrine. In an increasingly secular world proponents of theimportance of “custom” discard the faith but demand a similar adherence to tradition andthe history of custom—the rituals, liturgy, and doctrine of the people.

Written scripts, literacy, and ultimately even a literature were universally understoodby Russians and educated non-Russians to represent the key to resolving these problems offorgetfulness. “Literacy is the basic foundation of history,” wrote Khomiakov, “thereforeenlightened peoples who have forgotten their writing were reduced to a forgetfulness on parwith savages.”29 Initially skeptics in the borderlands were not opposed to the flowering ofnon-Russian literature, but wondered whether it was possible to express beautiful and sig-nificant concepts in the smaller languages of the empire. The limits of a language itselfmight 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 CaucasusPetr K. Uslar dedicated his life to showing that the local languages “allow one the possibil-ity of expressing the most refined and nuanced ideas,” and other scholars from around theempire, such as I. Ia. Iakovlev, a Chuvash educated at Kazan University, similarly testifiedthat such reservations were groundless.31 In fact high officials of the Imperial state weresupportive of the project. Il’minskii was in close contact with Pobedonostsev, and even theconservative D. A. Tolstoi, minister of education, concluded that the Kirgiz were “capable,thoughtful, and hard-working,” “inclined to enlightenment” and hence worthy of a Russianalphabet.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 ofthe 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 i krest’ianskoe dvizhenie 50–70-khgodov XIX v. (Moscow-Leningrad, 1936), 221.

28Ibid., 227.29Khomiakov, “Zapiski o vsemirnoi istorii,” PSS 5:pt.1:25.30V. Lebedev, “Simbirskie Chuvashi,” Zhurnal Ministerstva vnutrennikh del 5 (May 1850): 311. See also Fuks,

Zapiski Aleksandry Fuks o chuvashakh i cheremisakh Kazanskoi gubernii, 132–37.31P. K. Uslar, “O rasprostranenii gramotnosti mezhdu gortsami,” Sbornik svedenii o kavkazskikh gortsakh, vol.

3 (Tiflis, 1870), 28; Notes of I. Ia Iakovlev to D. D. Shestakov, in Agrarnyi vopros i krest’ianskoe dvizhenie, 333–34. See also Yuri Slezkine, “Savage Christians or Unorthodox Russians? The Missionary Dilemma in Siberia,” inBetween Heaven and Hell: The Myth of Siberia in Russian Culture, ed. Galya Diment and Yuri Slezkine (NewYork, 1993), 22.

32Report of D. A. Tolstoi to Alexander II (21 October 1876), in Agrarnyi vopros i krest’ianskoe dvizhenie, 339.33Ibid., 340.

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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 usedthe Greek alphabet; in the same fashion the Tatars, similar to all Muslim peoples, adoptedArabic along with the teachings of the false Arab prophet.”35 They would have been betteroff 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, publishedin 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, whichwas distinguishable from Islam and Arabic.

THE NORTHE NORTHE NORTHE NORTHE NORTH CATH CATH CATH CATH CAUCASUSUCASUSUCASUSUCASUSUCASUS

Imperial administrators, scholars, and missionaries brought similar ideas to the southernfrontier of the Caucasus. The many small peoples of the North Caucasus in the Russianview 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 andChristian past shared by the Armenians and Georgians. The expanding Russian armyestablished early fortresses with names like Vozdvizhenskaia (“the raising up [of thecross]”), and built Orthodox churches to accompany other fortresses at Mozdok,Vladikavkaz, and Kizliar, the basis of what became the “Caucasus Line.”37 The presence ofIslam in the North Caucasus, which usually took the shape of the more decentralized andelusive 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 andmaintain 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. Lackingtheir Cyril and Methodius, explained travel writer Evgenii Markov, the Ossetians were left“without a single comprehensible prayer, without liturgy, without the gospel.”40

34Il’minskii and Sablukov (9 February 1858), ibid., 230.35Ibid.36A. Voskresenskii, “Predislovie,” Pis’ma N. I. Il’minskago k kreshchenym tataram, xviii.37N. P. Gritsenko, Goroda severo-vostochnogo Kavkaza i proizvoditel’nye sily kraia v seredina XIX veka (Rostov,

1984), 75–78; G. A. Vertepov, “Obzor Tverskoi oblasti za 1894 god,” Zapiski kavkazskogo otdela ImperatorskagoRusskago 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 Die Muslimein 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 undTschetsche-Nien in der ersten hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts,” in Muslim Culture in Russia and Central Asia from the18th to the Early 20th Centuries, vol. 2, ed. Anke von Kügelgen, Michael Kemper, and Allen J. Frank (Berlin,1998), 63–99; and Alexandre Bennigsen and S. Enders Wimbush, Mystics and Commissars: Sufism in the SovietUnion (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 Kavkaza (St. Petersburg-Moscow, 1887), 177.

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Left to suffer the ravages of time, North Caucasus mountaineers adopted an eclectic mix ofChristian, 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 energyand a little courage as well, if he is to lead these mistaken creatures to the path of truth.”41

What Christianity mountaineers such as the Adygei did absorb and manage to maintain wastoo superficial and failed to influence their “moral understandings and internal life,” arguedhistorian Nikolai Dubrovin.42 Expressing a common concern of Slavophiles like Khomiakovbut 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 anenduring Christianity.43

Above all, the waning of Christian tradition was a failure on the part of North Caucasusmountain peoples to respect themselves, their past, and their customs. Lapses of faithmeant a betrayal of custom. To counter these problems, regime missionaries founded theOssetian Ecclesiastical Commission in 1771, which was succeeded by a larger and moreambitious 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 tradi-tions of the past. Teaching correct Orthodox ritual, as one of the many founding essaysproclaimed in 1860, was particularly crucial in the mountain areas, where most inhabitantspracticed a “strange mix of Christianity, Islam, and paganism.”44 Even the commander ofthe 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 ofVladikavkaz district needed “capable priests who can support the people in its Christianfaith and conduct services in Ossetian.”45 Numerous officials emphasized this theme, inparticular for mountain peoples like the Ossetians who resided in the liminal space betweenChristian Georgia and Shamil’s Imamate. They drew their inspiration from the apostlePaul, the original Christian evangelist. “The Gospels have never been translated into any ofthe mountain languages, and without adequate priests the message remains lifeless andstale, in particular because of the illiteracy of the mountain tribes.”46 Society teachers suchas the Georgian Isalia Purtseladze at the Saroi school in Ossetia and the Ossetian Tatiev atthe Kakhsk school paid careful attention to the observance of Orthodox ritual among theirstudents 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 andgrandfathers 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 vladychestva russkikh na Kavkaze, vol. 1, pt. 1 (St. Petersburg, 1871), 95.43V. Novitskii, “Anapa i zakubanskiia poseleniia,” in ZKOIRGO, vol. 2 (Tiflis, 1853), 15.44SSSA, f. 493, op. 1 (1860–1882), d. 1, l. 3.45Ibid., (1861–68), d. 14, l. 2.46Ibid., (1861–67), d. 16, ll. 6–7.47Ibid., (1870), d. 248, ll. 24, 31.

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The practices of conversion on the frontier must have contributed to the fears andconcerns of conservative writers and officials. The early modern state in the Kazan regiongranted clothes, boots, flour, and temporary exemptions from taxation in return for Chris-tian conversion.48 Eighteenth-century baptism in Siberia sometimes meant “being herdedinto rivers at gunpoint.”49 The heritage of such practices must have reminded officials andmembers of colonial educated society that the personal transformation of the heart centralto the experience of conversion was surely lacking on the frontier. How else could smallpeoples so easily “fall away,” or become apostates to the faith? When the Abkhaz Restora-tion Society missionary Gona Geromonakh promoted baptism in Pitsunda in September1868, he reported to officials in Tiflis that entire villages were prepared for baptism, andhad informed him only to “let them know when it was time and then they would bring thechicken and wine” for the ceremony. “We ourselves now see,” the Abkhaz villagers toldGeromonakh, “that the Christian faith is better than Islam, and being Christian is betterthan being Muslim. The Turks deceived us and those Abkhaz who resettled to Turkey, andthey are suffering there while we, thanks to the Dear Tsar and the Grand Prince, are living inpeace.” Geromonakh pushed for increased funding from the society for schools, priests,teachers, and reading materials in Abkhaz.50 But were such sentiments genuine? TheImeretian episkop Gabriel traveled to Abkhazia with a translator, and concluded thatGeromonakh had been “deceived,” was “insufficiently acquainted with the character andcustoms of the Abkhaz,” and suggested the state exercise more caution about enthusiasticreports of conversion on the frontier.51

Similar events took place throughout the North Caucasus. Georgian priest Ioseb Vatsadzereported that the Svaneti expressed “heartfelt wishes” to accept Christianity. After he ex-plained the meaning of the Lord’s prayer and various Christian symbols and shared a seriesof 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 con-cern about the nature of actual faith, belief, and ritual. The purported indifference to ques-tions of correct belief and doctrine among mountaineers compounded the problem. An“influential” Lezgin (Dagestan), reported (Ossetian) missionary Vitalii Dizhaev, “genuinelyadmitted [to me] that in general the Lezgin think that the salvation of the soul can be achievedthrough the teachings of either the Gospels or the Qu’ran.”53 If this was indeed true, howcould missionaries be sure some other incentive or fear was not responsible for the conver-sion?

A conservative preoccupation with custom and the past shaped the imagination of theempire 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 inEarly Modern Russia,” in Russia’s Orient, 18–20.

49Slezkine, “Savage Christians or Unorthodox Russians?” 17.50SSSA, f. 493, op. 1 (1862–68), d. 33, ll. 9–10.51Ibid., l. 38.52Ibid., l. 4.53Ibid., (1887–88), d. 489, l. 2.

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societies, the most well known of which were the Tiflis Branch of the Imperial RussianGeographic Society, the local work of the Imperial Archaeological Commission headed byA. P. Berzhe, and administrative arms like the Caucasus Mountain Adminstration. Theseinstitutions and their officials and scholars were determined to craft order out of the confus-ing chaos of the region and hence clarify the Imperial purpose, the larger significance of themilitary victory in the Caucasus War, and the historic significance of Russia’s expansioninto the borderland regions. They were less concerned with faith than Restoration Societymissionaries, but their vision remained in line with conservative and Romantic notionsabout the importance of tradition. Scholars took the Imperial purpose to be the revival andpreservation of antiquity, which might be contrasted to the more recent and degenerate pastwithout Russian rule, and their key terms were the familiar ones of samobytnost’ andnarodnost’.54

As for the small peoples of the Middle Volga, scholars emphasized that the region’sauthentic past and history were distinguishable from the history of Islam. This was nosmall task in a place like Dagestan, which possessed a tradition of Islamic literature inArabic since the seventh century.55 At least other mountain peoples closer to the Georgianfrontier possessed stronger links to Eastern Christianity. Linguist Petr Uslar developedwritten scripts for the mountain peoples, and Restoration Society missionaries and teachersand regime officials wrote and published primers and made accessible religious and othermaterials in local languages. The authentic and indigenous languages of the region wouldendure as a result of the help and guidance of the Russian Imperial state.

THE LIMITS OF THE LIMITS OF THE LIMITS OF THE LIMITS OF THE LIMITS OF THE RTHE RTHE RTHE RTHE ROMANTIC OMANTIC OMANTIC OMANTIC OMANTIC VISIONVISIONVISIONVISIONVISION

The strong voices and assumptions of the Russian conservative tradition continued to shapethe culture of empire building in the later nineteenth century. The earlier RomanticSlavophiles were excited and optimistic about the appearance of Russia upon the stage ofworld history. Later conservative writers and borderland communities, however, were in-creasingly worried about the role of Russia within the vast and diverse empire. The per-ceived threat of Europe and especially Germany after 1871 contributed to the rise of avariety of conservative phobias in Russia. Ivan Aksakov, for example, the familiar linkbetween the early Slavophiles and subsequent conservative thought, routinely denouncedBismarck and the Germans in Rus’ throughout the 1880s.56 Conservatives were preoccu-

54SSSA, f. 5, op. 1 (1869–74), d. 1096.55Kemper, “Einige Notizen zur Arabischsprachigen Literatur der Gihad-Bewegung in Dagestan und Tschetsche-

Nien in der ersten hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts,” in Muslim Culture in Russia and Central Asia 2:63–99; Amirxan A.Isaev, “Die ‘Islamische Druckerei’ von Muhammad-Mirza Mavraev,” and Natal’ya A. Tagirova and Amri R. Šixsaidov,“Abdarrahman Al-Gazigumuqi und Seine Werke,” both in Muslim Culture in Russia and Central Asia from the 18thto the Early 20th Centuries, vol. 1, ed. Michael Kemper, Anke von Kügelgen, 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.

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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 Slavophilestoo 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 laterclimate the promotion of native custom and native language instruction, which for Il’minskiioffered a fuller exposure to the message of the Gospel, instead prompted new kinds of fearsin an empire where Russians could not take their primacy for granted. The “native soilconservatives” confronted a different Russian context also, where they looked with remorseat an educated society long alerted to the problem of its own estrangement from the sourcesof authentic custom and true faith but unwilling to address this predicament. This was atheme most famously articulated by Dostoevsky, but long evident in the works of his con-temporaries Aksakov and Iurii Samarin as well.58

In spite of these differences, however, later writers and educated society on the frontiercontinued to draw upon the problems central to the earlier Romantic tradition. The EasternQuestion in the Balkans for Aksakov was again related to the issue of historic faith andcustom, and the possibility of preserving it over time. Ottoman and Muslim influencehampered the ability of small peoples in the Balkans such as the Chernogortsy, who accord-ing to Aksakov faced extinction “to the last person” as a result of “pressure from Asianhordes,” to maintain and preserve their links to the past.59 The Chernogortsy in his viewwere at the forefront of the battle against Islam and the Turks, similar to Cossacks withinthe 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 variousfrontiers. He was instrumental in the formation of the Slavic Society in Moscow, servedbriefly 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 withMagyars, Germans, and Turks.62 Yet the enduring preoccupation for Aksakov regarding theEastern Question was again the issue of correct faith, ritual, and the maintenance of customover time. The Chernogortsy, in spite of Russia’s negligence and the absence of supportfrom abroad, “remained true to their faith and Slavic narodnost’, not once confusing them-selves with change.”63 The essence of the Eastern Question lay in the heroic capability ofsmall Balkan peoples to preserve and maintain their faith and customs over time in the faceof 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: Iu. F. Samarin: Stat’i, Vospominaniia, Pis’ma, ed. T. A. Medovicheva (Moscow, 1997), 60–62. Onconservative 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 v Rossii v 1858–1876 godakh (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 staterule.64

Conservative writers of the later nineteenth century emphasized that the small peoplesof the empire needed to know their place. Obviously not all peoples were qualified tobenefit from the Romantic ideas about historically young peoples and their future culturalexpression. Religious writers like the Slavophiles always started with Christianity as the“historical engine, the foundation, the spiritual movement upon which arose and formedone or another narodnost’ into a political organism.”65 But even a secular thinker such asBelinskii disqualified numerous peoples, although according to a different set of criteria.Europeans and more recently Russians, he argued, were fortunate to see their history passfrom folklore to literacy to the production of literature, the “last and highest expression ofthe thought of a people.”66 There were peoples, however, with “fewer sources of spirituallife,” who possessed a less fertile soil of proverbs, sayings, parables, songs, tales, and leg-ends from which poetry might emerge—in short, a less-developed sphere of custom. Thesepeoples would never “rise to the significance of a universal-historical people.”67 Belinskiinotably 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 levelsof 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 ofthe Middle Volga, on the other hand, were to play the role of “ethnographic material,” “thatis, 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 apolitical 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, NikolaiIgnat’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,” Central Asian Survey 14:2 (1995): 205–23.

65Aksakov, from “Den’” (1867), in Ivan S. Aksakov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow, 1886), 1:175. Forother examples see Berdiaev, Aleksei Stepanovich Khomiakov, 22–23; E. A. Dubzinskaia, Slavianofily vobshchestvennoi bor’be (Moscow, 1983), 32; and Iurii Samarin, Okrainy Rossii, 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), PSS 7:44–65. See also Andrzej Walicki, A History of Russian Thought

from the Enlightenment to Marxism, trans. Hilda Andrew-Rublecka (Stanford, 1979), 131–40. On Belinskii andUkraine 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 politicalindependence for smaller peoples. See N. A. Dobroliubov, “Cherty dlia kharakteristiki russkogo prostonarod’ia”(1859), in his Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow, 1950), 3:89. To put this in context, however, we might recall that evennationalists like List and Mazzini, as well as other innovative challengers to the nineteenth century order such asEngels, were similarly unable to fathom independence for the small peoples of Europe. See E. J. Hobsbawm,Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge, England, 1990), 30–42.

69Nikolai Ia. Danilevskii, Rossiia i Evropa (St. Petersburg, 1871), 93 (see also p. 239).

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“fanatical religion, their way of life and habits, and even the land they inhabit,” they werelittle more than “natural (prirodnye) predators and robbers.”70 For Danilevskii they wereapparently like animals, lacking even the rudiments of culture and not worthy of muchconsideration. The conservative literary critic Nikolai Strakhov similarly argued that dif-ferent peoples represented different “cultural-historical types” and were far from equal intheir “spiritual strengths.”71 Within the context of the multiethnic empire, conservativethinkers felt the need to emphasize the limits of the “reverse Orientalism” implicit to therethinking 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 1830sand 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 growthof nationalism more advanced among the periphery peoples (Balts, Ukrainians, Georgians,Armenians) than among the “Imperial” people. As Andreas Kappeler points out, levels ofliteracy, education, professional achievement, and urbanization for many non-Russian peoplesexceeded those of the Russians.72 Uslar’s 1881 work on ancient myths about the Caucasuspossessed the vocabularly and assumptions of Danilevskii.73 Was it obvious to a linguisticspecialist on the region that Russians were indeed the “historical” people when Georgiansand Armenians possessed literary languages from the fourth and fifth centuries? Easternlanguages such as Turkish or Arabic were obviously out of the question as potential alpha-bets for the transciption of mountain languages, but Uslar and his colleagues knew anddiscussed 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 apromising future.

The experience of colonization and borderland settlement further distressed conserva-tive writers and officials in the later nineteenth century. The state reduced the restrictions ofthe commune upon peasant mobility and promoted and facilitated settlement to the frontierregions of the empire. Colonization was by definition a matter of cultural mixing andborrowing, and conservative officials in particular worried about the identity of the empirein regions such as the North Caucasus, where Russian settlers met Czech, Polish, Greek,German, and Ukrainian colonists. Ivan Zolotarev, one of many officials responsible forcolonization, expressed typical conservative fears and even desperate hopes when he claimedthat among “those of other tribes, among Turks and Moldavians, Poles, and Germans, thedescendants 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., Slavistic

Printings and Reprintings (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, l. 5.

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But was it true? The social practices of the frontier—where small peoples in the MiddleVolga borrowed clothes, implements, and customs from the Tatars, and Cossacks in theNorth Caucasus traded with and adopted clothes and domestic implements from mountain-eers, 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 indigenouscustom.76

Old Belief posed a similar dilemma. Russians presumably stood at the apex of cor-rect belief and the proper fulfillment of religious ritual. At the multiethnic AleksandrovskTeaching School in Tiflis in 1870, where one class roll included 23 Russians, 3 Poles, 8Georgians, 3 Mingrelians, and 3 Abkhaz, officials took it for granted that “Russians, as isknown, accurately observe the rituals and always attend church.”77 Orthodox settlers whodid not provide an inspiring religious example were particularly irksome to the plans andhopes of missionaries such as Il’minskii, and officials in the Middle Volga sometimesattributed the “apostasy” of baptized Tatars to their improper example.78 Old Believeremigration to the Caucasus continued throughout the latter nineteenth century, with oversix thousand moving into Terek oblast in 1890 alone. Officials in particular worried aboutthe 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 faithamid 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 theHoly Synod. Pobedonostsev, a virtual personification of “state, church and the Russiannation,” as Kappeler put it, is well known for his relentless assault on the main currents ofpolitical and social liberalism from the West, but he too was shaped by the general contoursof 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 border-lands such as I. I. Vorontsov-Dashkov, the official sent to the Caucasus to restore order inthe wake of the events of 1905.81 He was abreast of the works of Rostislav Fadeev, anotherveteran of the Caucasus known for his belligerent writings on the Eastern Question, and asevere 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, 1870–1910,” in Muslim Culture in Russia and Central Asia 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 Imperial Russia, 181–85.

77SSSA, f. 493, op. 1 (1870), d. 248, l. 48.78“Izvlechenie iz proekta 1849 g. o tatarskoi missii,” in Petr Vasil’evich Znamenskii, Na pamiat’ o Nikolae

Ivanoviche Il’minskom (Kazan, 1892), 331–35.79Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv (St. Petersburg), f. 37, op. 55 (1892–99), d. 69, ll. 46–47;

SSSA, f. 7, op. 1 (1876–77), d. 1755, l. 15.80Kappeler, La Russie: Empire multiethnique, 238.81K. P. Pobedonostsev i ego korrespondenty, vol. 1 (Moscow, 1923), 79, 276, 350–51.82Ibid., 79, 56.

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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 ofvalues, traditions, and institutions that did not spring “from the depths of the popular imagi-nation.” 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 productof reason but of the “rituals and traditions” of the peasant, passed down through the genera-tions.85 The last emperor himself issued homilies along these lines.86 Pobedonostsev servedas the important patron of the work of Il’minskii, and was pleased with the efforts of Uslarin the Caucasus.87

Romantic notions of faith, custom, and ritual shaped the ideas and attitudes of numerousImperial officials, scholars, military officers, and travelers, from influential characters suchas Il’minskii and Uslar to lesser-known participants in the emerging colonial communitiesin the borderlands. Small peoples of the Middle Volga and the North Caucasus were on themargins of the true faith, and their past and present deviance was a product of their inabilityto grasp fully the power and significance of the Christian faith and maintain the indigenouspractices 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, colonizedthe frontier, regulated Islamic clerics like it did Orthodox priests, and created theaters, news-papers, and even entire towns by decree, this conservative preoccupation with the mainte-nance 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 regionswere less threatening to Imperial officials than traditional Islam. In part, of course, officialssimply 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 theirown big states across the Imperial border in places like Persia or Ottoman Turkey. But thisconflict was about much more than the politics of Imperial rivalry. However much theyperceived 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 im-pulse 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 justdistanced themselves from the sacred story like Western Europeans, but had explicitlyreplaced 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, Moskovskii sbornik (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 of Revolution (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 contactwith Islam and the East, was distinct and unique to Russia and its unusual empire. Saidfocused on English and French colonialism in the nineteenth century, and to a lesser extentAmerican views on Islam after 1945, while calling for the study of the problem in otherparts of the world.89 But Said’s ability to describe the different historical contexts thatshaped European perceptions of Islam was limited by his repetitive return to a series ofproblems familiar to scholars of French intellectual history since 1945—the binary struc-ture of the mind, identity, and the question of alterity or “otherness,” the referential natureof language, the relationship between knowledge and authority. In this paper I have de-scribed the uniquely Imperial Russian context that shaped this relationship to Islam—theset of views and concerns that emerged as a product of Russia’s relationship to Westerncultures, neighboring Islamic empires, and vast borderland regions and peoples recentlyconquered and incorporated into the Russian empire.

Studying the empire with reference to the terms, attitudes, and problems that wereimportant to contemporaries challenges facile conclusions about ethnic politics today.Many Georgians in their newly independent state today emphasize Russian efforts to sup-port their own borderland peoples like the Abkhaz and Ossetians in an effort to weaken theirnew bid for genuine autonomy and independence. Scholars in both the West and the formerSoviet Union as well as numerous commentators today too quickly resort to accusations ofimperial design and the imperial politics of “divide and rule” to explain either interethnicconflict or the failed efforts of non-Russian nation-building. Imperial policy in the westernborderlands 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 andUkrainian. Along the eastern frontier, however, Imperial officials conceived of the problemdifferently, and promoted rather than restricted local languages and cultural expression. InRestoration Society schools children were learning Russian, but first and foremost the statewas seeking and training Abkhaz and Ossetian teachers, developing scripts, and publishingschool primers that might facilitate the use of local languages. Officials treated the Chuvashand other small peoples in the Middle Volga in a similar fashion. These policies were theproduct 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 amongdiverse frontier peoples.

International competitition, the experience of frontier colonization, and the prospectof resistance to empire posed new questions about the role and strength of Russia within theempire in the later nineteenth century, but later conservative writers and colonial communi-ties continued to draw upon the assumptions of the earlier Romantic writers about the ques-tion of faith, custom, and ritual in the borderlands. Prominent writers such as NikolaiDanilevskii and many others emphasized the cultural inadequacies of the other large civili-zations that contested Russian influence on its frontiers, and within the empire emphasizedthe distance between the people that counted and the “small peoples” of the

89Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1979), 16–17. See also the introduction to Brower and Lazzerini, eds.,Russia’s Orient, xi–xx.

Faith, Custom, and Ritual in the Borderlands 529

borderlands. The strength of Europe and the increasingly visible results of borderlandsettlement that sometimes included the nativization of the settlers rather than the Russificationof 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 productof the Romantic and conservative views discussed in this paper? While Bolshevik admin-istrators of course created their new ethnoterritorial state in the shadow of Wilsonian self-determination after Versailles, and were generally determined to be modern and eliminatevarious relics of the “feudal” past, at the same time they drew on this different heritagedeeply ingrained within nineteenth-century Russian thought and culture. If the Revolutionwas less of a cultural divide than we might assume, scholars of the Soviet era have reason tobe more explicit about the historical background to the twentieth-century ethnoterritorialstate.91 “After 1923 the Soviet government facilitated the creation and consolidation of‘nations’ (natsiia) or ‘nationalities’ (narodnost’),” explained Alexandre Bennigsen andChantal Lemercier-Quelquejay in 1964, anticipating more recent work on the formation ofthe Soviet state.92 The Romantic language of cultural authenticity endured among Sovietofficialdom, and even scholars depicted the virtues of Soviet rule to be the fostering of thesamobytnost’ of the “small peoples” of the frontier.93 Peoples who looked abroad for cul-tural inspiration, however, risked “falling away” from the true source of culture as definedby Soviet officialdom, and “diaspora” peoples in particular suffered through the Sovietera.94 Faith disappeared as new ideologies supplanted old ones, but conservative notionsabout 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 inthe 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,” SlavicReview 36 (March 1977): 86–100; and idem, “Nikolai Il’minskii and Language Planning in Nineteenth-CenturyRussia,” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 22 (1979): 5–26.

92Alexandre Bennigsen et Chantal Lemercier-Quelquejay, La presse et le mouvement national chez les musulmansde russie avant 1920 (Paris, 1964), 278. For recent work on the formation of the Soviet state see Ronald GrigorSuny, 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 the1926, 1937, and 1939 Censuses,” Slavic Review 56 (Summer 1997): 251–78; and Yuri Slezkine, “The USSR as aCommunal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” Slavic Review 53 (Summer 1994):414–52.

93N. G. Volkova, Etnicheskii sostav naseleniia severnogo Kavkaza v xviii–nachale XX veka (Moscow, 1974),223.

94See Terry Martin, “The Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing,” Journal of Modern History 70 (December 1998):813–61.