The Caucasus that occupied the Russian cultural imagination was as complex as the actual place itself. The romantic image of the free inhabitants of the mountains, known collectively as gortsy, and the adventures of the Russian soldier in the area blended, so that the young officers who arrived there tried to act out both sides of the drama. In much the same way, the Caucasus had an immense impact on Russian arts and letters as a vision of the Orient and simultaneously presented substantial military, geographical, and cultural problems to the Russian government. The practical and the imagined constituted two sides of the imperial coin, and they cannot be completely separated.
The present essay uses the memoirs of eight officers serving in the Caucasus during the height of the war of conquest to consider how they presented their experiences in the region. Much has been written about Orientalism and the ideology of empire in literature, intellectual discourse, and official statements, and the present paper will look at how the men who made empire a reality viewed their own actions. Some of the memoirists considered here were kavkaztsy, officers who spent their entire career in the region, while others served for only one year before leaving, but it is clear from their memoirs that each felt a strong sense of purpose while they were in the region. The memoirs and personal correspondence of prominent officers in the Caucasus Corps were published as monographs and appeared frequently in major historical journals such as Russkii arkhiv, Russkaia starina and Russkii viestnik. The many accounts of the war bespeak not only a clear public interest in the topic, but also the importance the officers placed on their experiences there. My analysis will focus on three main points: the officers’ views of the mountain tribes, or gortsy; their treatment of violence on and off the battlefield; and their assessment of the unique problems facing the Russian army in the region. By exploring these themes, I hope to address a larger question. How did the direct experience of conquest transform the abstract views of the Orient that these men brought with them to the Caucasus?

Background

Russia gained control of the Caucasus through a combination of military and diplomatic triumphs. Although its expansion into the region began in the mid-sixteenth century, it was not until the early nineteenth century that Georgia became a permanent factor in Russian policy. In 1800, the ruler of the Georgian kingdom of Kartli-Kakhetia, lacking a strong heir to his throne, asked to be taken under Russian protection. According to the agreement written at this time, his family was to retain its privileges and local power. However, before the agreement was proclaimed, Paul I was killed, and Alexander I ascended the throne. After much debate, the kingdom of Kartli-Kakhetia was abolished, its former rulers stripped of their privileges, and its inhabitants made Russian subjects.^[1] Once the deed was done, Russia faced the awkward issue of subduing the territory that lay between it and its new southern holdings and consolidating its control over the remaining Georgian provinces. Thanks to military and diplomatic successes, by 1830 Russia had technically created an unbroken land connection with its holdings beyond the Caucasus chain and exerted its influence over territory extending from the Black Sea to the Caspian.
At first, it seemed that Russia was following the same path of gradual growth that had brought it such success in its other borderlands. Yet, in the event the Caucasus proved to be one of the greatest thorns in the side of the empire. The Christian population had, for the most part, resigned itself to Russian rule by the 1830s, but the Muslim inhabitants of the north Caucasus offered stubborn resistance for at least another thirty years, and arguably through the present day. Intellectuals such as Decembrist Mikhail Lunin used similar terminology to condemn the anarchical freedoms embraced by the gortsy and the Poles, and these two groups offered some of the strongest resistance to Russian rule of any of the minority peoples of the empire.^[2] Unlike the Poles, however, the gortsy clearly did not take part in European culture. They were oriental, or Asiatic, to use the term most commonly employed by the officers themselves. While resistance from a nation that had been a European state such as Poland could be comprehended (and despised), it was much more difficult to grasp how a conglomeration of tribes could oppose a great power such as Russia. Moreover, the specifically Muslim nature of the local resistance, which grew out of a religious movement known as muridism and found its most famous leader in the third imam, Shamil, made it even harder to swallow.
The debates over what was to be done with the Caucasus began as soon as Kartli-Kakhetia was annexed in 1801 and continued throughout the war. There was a general consensus that it needed to be administered in accordance with Russian norms, but opinions varied greatly on how that goal would be best achieved. The bayonet played a major role in bringing Russia’s new subjects into compliance with the new order, and the history of Russian rule prior to Shamil’s surrender in 1859 is largely the story of battles large and small, engagements won and lost. Eventually, the establishment of Europeanized civil administration played a role in Russian control over the cities, though its impact on the gortsy has not been explored.^[3] In the end, however, it was the seven decades of constant warfare in the region that made the deepest impression on the memories and imaginations of actors of the period and historians alike.
The military history of the war could be viewed from two perspectives. On the surface, it was the story of ceaseless raids by both sides that had no lasting territorial significance, despite the many thousands of lives lost. Of the Russian punitive raids (which could claim hundreds of lives in a single expedition), one of the most prolific Russian historians of the region today writes that they had so little visible effect on the situation that “unpacified space closed up again behind them, like water behind a ship”.^[4] This sense of futility gave rise to the disenchantment with war expressed by writers such as Lermontov, who deplored the meaningless sacrifices made in the name of empire. It also created opportunities for glory and heroism, not to mention for rapid advancement through the ranks, an aspect emphasized by other officers. Yet, there is an alternate vision as well, which tells the story of the slow yet inexorable “siege” of the Caucasus, as advocated by renowned general Aleksei Veliaminov, as Russia gradually built rings of forts and towns to enclose the rebellious tribes. Despite their decades of inability to pacify the region, Russian policy makers at the time always remained optimistic that they would be victorious in the end. This optimism was challenged strongly once Shamil gained a strong following in the region, but ultimately he lacked the means to withstand an enemy with Russia’s resources.
But beyond all else, what set the Caucasus apart from other parts of the empire was its exotic appeal, with its beautiful scenery, the hint of lost glory in its past connections with ancient Greece, and of course its “Asiatic” inhabitants. While Siberia and Central Asia could geographically qualify as Asian, they did not capture the Russian imagination in this regard. By gaining control of the Caucasus from the quintessentially Eastern Ottomans and the Persians, Russia acquired an Orient of its own.

The intelligentsia

Pushkin’s Kavkazskii plennik (written 1820-1821) marked the debut of the Caucasus as a major theme in Russian literature. The iconic literary incarnation of the male mountaineer was a violent figure, who posed a military and possibly sexual threat to Russia, while the mountain maids were passionate and ideally loving. Local heroes and heroines alike rarely survived beyond the end of the story, with the men typically dying in a final battle and the women throwing themselves into the Terek or another mountain stream.^[5] The colonial encounter was dangerous to Russians and locals alike, although the Russians did not usually pay for their incursion with their lives. Despite the excitement of the exotic locale, by avoiding happy endings and simple characterizations both high literature and popular fiction tended to imply dubious outcomes of incorporating the Caucasus into the empire.^[6] At the same time, the explicit message of these novels was positive – Russian dominance was inevitable and Russian superiority obvious. Contemporary readers apparently took away the positive message without regard for the reservations, as the image of a romantic life far from the confines of Petersburg attracted young officers in addition to the practical lure of rapid advancement, as the officers themselves attested.
In contrast to fictional tales, the non-fictional writings of the intelligentsia were more unilaterally optimistic about the outcomes of empire. In his analysis of the writings of several prominent Decembrists over the first half of the nineteenth century, one Russian historian concludes that “they believed that one way or another, it was possible to achieve the desired result in the Caucasus. [Pavel] Pestel’ believed in the reality of the practical genocide of mountain tribes, [Mikhail] Lunin – in military victory and rational organization of the administration of pacified territories on the basis of liberal ideas, [Andrei] Rozen did not doubt the effectiveness of economic and psychological methods, [Platon Zubov, not Catherine II’s favorite] was convinced of the invincibility of Russian arms”.^[7] The Decembrists criticized the lack of humanity in Russia’s administration of the savage peoples of the region, implying a lack of civilization on both sides, but ultimately they were confident that Russia would civilize the region and the end result would be harmonious.

The officers

No clear line between the intelligenstia, the literati, and the officer corps can be drawn for the period in question, given the close contact between the groups. Most of the authors famous for writing about the Caucasus served in the region; some, like Bestuzhev-Marlinsky (the so-called Russian Walter Scott), were sent to serve there as punishment for their involvement in the Decembrist uprising. The memoirs considered here show the former Decembrists interacting freely with their fellow officers, even if they had been reduced to the ranks. Nevertheless, one can see certain trends common to accounts written by officers who defined themselves solely through their military career. The literary and philosophical images of the Caucasus and Russia’s role there shaped their expectations of the region, yet the military memoir nevertheless diverges from these forms to create a distinct genre with its own tropes. Rather than passively reflecting the images already created in other texts, the memoirists consistently engaged in a dialog with the literary texts and insisted on showing the distance between what they went through and what romantic writings had led them to expect.
As stated in the introduction, I will focus on the accounts of eight officers: the diary of Nikolai V. Simanovskii (1811-1877), covering 1837; the memoirs of Grigorii I. Filipson (1809-1883), covering the years 1837-1850; the memoirs of Dmitrii A. Miliutin (1816-1912), covering 1839; the memoirs of Melentii Ia. Ol’shevskii (1816-1895), covering 1844; the memoirs of Aleksandr M. Dondukov-Korsakov (1822-1893), covering 1845-1846; the memoirs of Ivan Klinger (d. 1897), covering 1847-1850; the memoirs of Viktor Ia. Dolivo-Dobrovol’skii-Evdokimov (1825-1869), covering 1848; and a diary written by “P. K.”^[8], covering 1859.
On the level of genre, the diary differs from the published memoir in several important ways. It lacks a clear narrative line with a known conclusion. It does not move from a beginning to a climax to an end, but simply from day to day. While the writer may have an idea of where he thinks his story will lead, there is always room for the unexpected. The editors of Simanovskii’s diary (first published in 2000) have imposed a limited narrative structure on it by including only those entries that relate to his active period of duty, but Simanovskii himself did not write his diary to match these parameters, and the story lacks a resounding conclusion. Above all these issues, though, the diarist typically does not write to present a positive image of himself to an audience. All the memoirs considered here were written not only as accounts of historic and exciting experiences, but also to show how well the author handled himself in the face of great adversity. This adversity took many shapes, and each officer found a different aspect of service that was most challenging to him, but it was of fundamental importance that the readers saw how responsible and capable the author was.
These generic differences bring thematic disparities in their wake. Simanovskii included many references to his homesickness and his boredom, topics which are omitted from the memoirs.^[9] In contrast, the anonymous journal, published in 1897, is a much more polished text than Simanovskii’s diary. Its narrative runs smoothly from the beginning to the end of the expedition, culminating in Shamil’s capture. It also fails to invoke God at any point, an omission that is typical for the memoirs but unlike personal correspondence of the time or the unpublished diary. While the last point may simply reflect this author’s inclinations, I would argue that the structure of the narrative, whose tension grows steadily until the final climax of Shamil’s surrender, and the absence of complaints about boredom, although it includes several days that could easily be described as boring, suggest that its author later edited his account for circulation or publication.
On an individual level, the officers considered here form a more homogeneous social group than the diverse origins of their names would suggest. None were émigrés themselves, though not all explain when exactly their families had emigrated to Russia. All were members of the nobility, and all were exposed to war in the region as members of the General Staff. Five of the eight men were kavkaztsy, or spent their career serving in the Caucasus, while two came to the Caucasus for a one year tour of duty before returning to a military career elsewhere (the social background and career of the unidentified P. K. are unknown). Of the six officers whose educational backgrounds are known,^[10] five were graduates of various military academies in St. Petersburg, and Dondukov-Korsakov received a law degree from St. Petersburg University. They were all well-born, educated officers, and each first encountered the Caucasus early in his career.
Once they arrived, however, social differences began to emerge. They did not all arrive with the same social connections, and not all became integrated into military society in the region. This personal factor had implications for their evaluations of their fellow officers, with their degree of social integration relating directly to their positive evaluation of their compatriots and a corresponding negative view of the gortsy. Finally, they all took their service very seriously. Several memoirists include references to officers who spent their time carousing, but each of the officers considered here was strongly committed to his duties (at least in retrospect) and took a critical stance towards his less serious peers. In each case considered here, these duties were literary in nature, whether writing reports to send back to Petersburg, compiling commentaries on such reports, or writing orders for the deposition of troops. The men here thus constituted a subgroup within the entire officer corps, but I would argue that the very qualities that set them apart make them an integral part of the imperial project. They were the men who actively determined how the war would be represented in reports to Petersburg and how it would be fought on the ground. Their memoirs, therefore, carry additional significance, as they reveal the perspectives of the men who showed the imperial center how to conceptualize the war and then implemented the policies that their visions helped to generate.

Engaging the literary models

Literary depictions of the Caucasus pre-dated the bulk of the published memoirs and sparked public interest in the area, as other sources of information on the region were generally not available. Moreover, the officers themselves revealed that their initial expectations of service in the area were based on popular fiction and high literature describing the area. As educated members of society, it is reasonable to assume that the officers were familiar with Pushkin’s Kavkazskii plennik. Explicit references to literary works, particularly the writings of Bestuzhev-Marlinskii, appear in several accounts, and Simanovskii was an associate of Lermontov. All but two of the officers considered here began their accounts in reference to the dreams of the Caucasus that drew them to the region, dreams which visibly grew out of literary models of Caucasian exoticism. References to exotic southern ladies – the passionate and ideally loving heroines of the literature – were omitted from descriptions of their dreams, and in the event it was Cossack women, notable for the “agility of their morals,” to use Miliutin’s delicate phrase,^[11] who became erotic objects for the memoirists’ fellow officers.^[12] Similarly absent were broader ideological statements about the nature and the future of the war. As they delineated it, their dream of the Caucasus was of real, glorious battles and an encounter with the exotic East, defined by the beauty of the landscape and freedom from Peterburg’s rigid social hierarchy. Miliutin offered the most explicit description of what they all seem to have imagined:

[…] I had already begun to dream of such a tour of duty [in the Caucasus]; I had already begun to tire of colorless Petersburg life and the formality of service in the Guards; I felt the need to breathe fresher air, to see something other than Petersburg locales, and especially to familiarize myself with real military life.^[13] (Miliutin, 191)

This vision of Kavkaz is formed in contrast to Petersburg more explicitly than the others, but each man dreamt his tam in contrast to his tut. Simanovskii’s diary demonstrated this need to comprehend his situation in the Caucasus in relation to Petersburg as well, as he repeatedly compared landscapes, stars, and social events of each day with those found at home. Against the literary model, he always found that Petersburg was the equal of the Caucasus in every way. In the event, none of the men found what he had expected. The miserable conditions of service in the region dampened their original enthusiasm, and those intended for longer service in the area typically found themselves trapped behind a desk that differed from desk jobs at home only in that it lacked the glamour of the capitals. Moreover, at least one officer learned upon arrival that the information on local tribes which he had laboriously mastered in the military academy was absolutely inaccurate. The prospect for advancement through courageous performance under fire existed for those officers who did see active duty, but difficult marches occupied much more time than did magnificent battles. Freedom from supervision also had its negative attributes, as it led to problems of corruption, the presence of dubious characters surrounding the officer corps, and dubious behavior in the field. Even the beautiful mountains lost their charm in time, and Simanovskii confided in his diary after a month of campaigning that climbing up and down the mountains was “a terrible bore”.^[14] Once they lost their illusions and their vision cleared (a change for the better in opinion of all the memoirists considered here), the officers could go about gaining a true understanding of the Caucasus and its inhabitants. Their memoirs aimed to share their insights with their reading audience.

Visions of the Other

Layton argues that the Christian population of the Caucasus was presented in literature as incarnations of the voluptuous, enervated Oriental.^[15] Certainly, the lush landscapes of Transcaucasia lent themselves to visions of Edenic gardens more readily than the rough mountain terrain inhabited by the gortsy. Yet while the officers would occasionally nod to the charms of the lowlands, they mentioned only the Cossack settlements there and completely ignored the Georgian and Armenian population. It was the warlike gortsy who attracted the most attention from the officers and the general public alike. In the memoirs, the gortsy appeared as a military threat, of course, but some officers also made attempts to explain their enemy’s actions to the reading audience, with varying degrees of sympathy. Of our officers, Miliutin took the least sympathetic view of the local Muslims. Miliutin did not show great curiosity about the local population as a group, whom he routinely referred to as fanatics and bandits. He did have the opportunity to interact with the leaders of two pacified villages, and he included accounts of these meetings in his memoirs. In both cases, he commented on the Asiatic style of their hospitality, which meant a lack of chairs and substandard dining. In the second instance, he came to his host Alillo with respect for the latter’s success in resisting Shamil. When Miliutin expressed this admiration,

Alillo cast off all modesty and abandoned himself to praise of his own deeds […] and in conclusion directly expressed his claims for a reward. When I said that General Grabbe fully appreciated his services and had prepared an expensive fur coat for him, I noticed displeasure on the face of my interlocutor. Then after a rather long dialog with the translator, I learned from the latter that Alillo expected a more important reward: the rank of ensign. I smiled involuntarily at such a modest claim from a man who had shown himself to be an energetic opponent of Shamil. I admit that this conversation rather disillusioned me about Alillo.^[16]

This exchange highlights the cultural distance between the two sides of the exchange. Both parties clearly expected that their rules would apply and that their interlocutor did or should understand them. Miliutin did not hesitate to apply Russian standards of etiquette to his host, and he presumed that Alillo should know Russian military ranks. Both General Grabbe, one of the most important generals in the war and a lifetime kavkazets, and Miliutin misjudged the type of reward Alillo hoped to gain for his services to the tsar, offending him with an offer of a material reward when he clearly sought something of greater long-term significance. Miliutin did not expect to lose his respect for his host when the meeting began, but his application of Russian standards of behavior to his host reduced this meeting of equals to a stereotypical colonial interaction, with the civilized Russian laughing at the coarse Asiatic.
In Klinger’s account of his two and a half years in captivity with the Chechens, the structure of the situation itself made it impossible for him to present himself as the superior figure. He was able to endure his confinement thanks to the intense religious experiences he underwent while in captivity, and his memoir was devoted primarily to sharing his visions with the reader. This focus created a memoir that bears little in common with the concerns of the rest of the texts considered here, but the dismal conditions of his confinement make his idiosyncratic account more comprehensible. He spent the entire time chained to a bed in a small, dark hut, with limited interactions with the Chechens and with the less valuable Russian captives who served as slaves in the village. Despite his isolation, over time he came to gain an insightful and surprisingly sympathetic understanding of Chechen society.
The Chechen society Klinger described was dominated by the man who captured him, Taram. According to Klinger, Taram was “greedy to the utmost degree, ambitious, a personal enemy of Russians, fanatically devoted to Shamil’s ideas and teachings and his ardent servant, a person of sound mind and strong will, a determined and stern Muslim”.^[17] This characterization drew on some common tropes, particularly the motifs of fanaticism and Muslim greed, which appeared frequently in condemnations of the tradition of raiding. Yet, despite the stereotypical terms used in this description of Taram, Klinger made it clear that they applied specifically to him as an individual by focusing on the tension between Taram’s self-centered greed and the more communal interests of the rest of the village. The other inhabitants of the village were not as driven by avarice and placed a higher value on social ties than on money, as seen later when several of their number were captured by Russians during an unsuccessful raid. Only Taram resisted the idea of a hostage exchange – despite the fact that his own brother Zaur was captured – and held out for a financial reward. Klinger reported that Taram was indifferent to the fate of the Chechen captives and exclaimed, “Give me money, money, and money!”.^[18] His greed was due in part to his need to give a substantial cut to Shamil, but Klinger claimed that it was a personal weakness in the eyes of the other Chechens.^[19]
Taram’s older brother Zaur was at the other end of the spectrum of Chechen society. Unlike his brother, “Zaur was an older person, serious, but with a good soul and respected in the aul. Zaur did not enjoy particular distinction, as he did not have the wealth or the military abilities of his brother, but he was loved for his honor, goodness, and calm good sense”.^[20] Thus, the Chechens could be good, peaceful people and respect those qualities in their peers, though these traits were less valued than more aggressive qualities. Zaur promised to help lower the ransom demanded for Klinger’s release, and in exchange for this service, he asked for assistance in going over to the Russian side because “he had had enough of the turbulent life”.^[21] To Klinger’s misfortune, Zaur and a number of other villagers were captured in the raid referenced above and subsequently sent to Siberia when Taram refused to negotiate. Eventually social pressure forced Taram to change his stance, but the deal was never realized. These portraits are too specific to draw general conclusions about the nature of the Chechens, but they imply a need to evaluate the locals on an individual basis rather than making blanket assumptions about them. With such variations within the group, it is impossible to form a composite view. Abstract notions of the East described by writers with more distance from their subjects disappeared in the particularism of close contact.
After observing life in the village for over a year, Klinger claimed that he came to understand the motivation behind the raids and resistance to Russian rule. He wrote that he was able to absolve the Chechens of their “acts of war, their hatred of Russians, the general poverty and appetite for profit, as it also constituted for them an important way of supporting their existence”.^[22] His absolution of their hatred of Russians was motivated by his religious beliefs, but he was the only officer to ponder the logic behind the system of raiding beyond attributing it to a love of freedom.^[23] His conclusion, that it was a necessary part of their economic life, is now widely shared by historians and was ahead of its time.^[24]
Simanovskii’s view of the gortsy is the most speculative of the accounts considered here, stemming from his increasingly sympathetic observations of their actions rather than from close interaction or extended study of local cultures. Initially, he was confident of Russia’s eventual conquest of the area through military means:

For, now that their [i.e., the Circassians’] communications with the Black Sea are severed, they will have a great shortage of gunpowder […]. The wars are also killing them significantly, a single death in the family means a great deal to them, they [i.e., the Russians] destroy their bread and their villages […], they [again the Russians] drive out their horned livestock and sheep, which comprises their largest industry. In this way, many families are left without a crust of bread. A situation of this sort should soon subjugate [them] despite their martial spirit.^[25]

By denying the Circassians access to the Black Sea, the Russians aimed to cut off their contraband trade with the Ottomans and the arms shipments they received from the Ottomans and a handful of enthusiastic Englishmen.^[26] Simanovskii’s assessment of the situation proved overly optimistic in time, but in 1837 it would have been difficult to foresee that war in the area would continue for almost thirty years more. Initially, he seemed to expect that Russia’s actions would produce no reactions from the locals. He complained that the “unbearable Circassians don’t want to leave us in peace, even though we’re not burning their villages”,^[27] disregarding the fact that the Russians had been doing precisely that for the last few weeks. Only a week later, though, he had come to a more philosophical stance: “I don’t blame them [for harassing the Russian camp], they should, in the end, vent their fury and try to bring as much harm to us as they can, for what else do they have left? Their homes are taken, their bread has been destroyed through foraging expeditions”.^[28] He had thus begun to question the very methods that he advocated just two weeks before, though the oddly distancing use of the third person in referring to Russia’s actions in the long passage cited above may have foreshadowed this change of opinion.
Simanovskii also came to admire the gortsy’s proud spirit, as shown in his comments on a Circassian who preferred death to capture: “Is it not cowardice, is it not fear of being taken captive? No, I think it is nothing other than Asiatic hardness of character: He resolved that it was better to die than to become dependent, than to be deprived of his freedom!”.^[29] His positive evaluation of the Asiatic nature in general on the basis of Circassian behavior raises questions about the influence of the experience in Caucasus on Russian perceptions of “Asiatics” more broadly defined.^[30] This love of freedom is implicitly in contrast to the Russian zeal for service described elsewhere in the diary, but Simanovskii did not elaborate on this opposition. Although he sympathized with the gortsy and in many respects mirrored the ambiguity in the literary handling of the enemy, he did not go so far as to condemn Russian practices in the area or the Russian character in general. It was not entirely clear which side was “good” and which was “bad” in Simanovskii’s account of the conflict. The same could not be said of the memoirs of Melentii Ia. Ol’shevskii.
By far the most positive account of Chechen life appeared in an ethnographic section of Ol’shevskii’s memoirs. In addition to his military responsibilities, he was a member of the Caucasus division of the Russian Geographical Society and wrote ethnographic texts on the gortsy in addition to his notes on the war. This pastime was not shared by any of the memoirists considered here, and it may have compounded the strong sense of estrangement from his less academic peers that is evident throughout the text. Certainly, his disparaging presentation of his compatriots as individuals correlates with his positive evaluation of the Chechens. The ethnography of the Chechens included in his memoirs is based on data he gathered in 1844-1845, and he maintained that his further experiences only confirmed his original findings.^[31] After briefly describing life in a Chechen village, he engaged in a polemic with the stereotypical presentation of the Chechen people, which he claimed depended more on political goals rather than the truth of the situation. He offered a defense of the Chechens’ unwillingness to submit to Russian rule:

We have tried to subjugate the Chechens, as our enemies, by any means, and we have even tried to turn their merits into shortcomings. We have considered them to be a people (narod) that is extremely treacherous, credulous, greedy, and untrustworthy because they did not want to satisfy our demands, which did not correspond with their views, tastes, habits, and way of life. We have maligned them only because they did not want to dance to our drum, whose sounds were too harsh and deafening for them.^[32]

In short, he accused Russians of what would later be known as Orientalism vis-à-vis the gortsy, deliberately or subconsciously characterizing them negatively to justify their territorial aims. In fact, he argued, the Russians themselves had behaved treacherously, not the gortsy. Russian demands were not always clear to the Chechens, who had reason to accuse the Russians of playing them false as well. The very anarchy of Chechen society meant that no agreements could be binding on their side:

But did we have the right to censure an entire people (narod) for such [infidelities], when we made agreements not with the entire Chechen population, but with a dozen Chechens who were neither representatives nor deputies. […] How can we know, perhaps these select individuals acted out for their own personal gain and acted deceitfully against their own people.^[33]

After defending the honor of the Chechens, Ol’shevskii went on to romanticize their proclivity for raiding and robbery, which is “due to the wildness of their nature and their passion for audacity and horsemanship […] But with what art and patience have they mastered their raiding, what deprivations and dangers do they overcome in [the raids]!”^[34] The contrast between the patient, skillful, and wild Chechens and the indecisive, ignorant, and presumably civilized Russians elsewhere in the memoir could not be stronger, and the enthusiasm with which Ol’shevskii described a raid was unmatched in his accounts of Russian campaigns. It is noteworthy that he did not challenge the distinction between wild Chechens and civilized Russians, as he described nothing shocking in his peers’ behavior. Yet the fact that he did not report barbarous behavior on the part of the Russians cannot be read as praise for his comrades, who embodied only the bureaucratic aspects of civilization. The civilized-barbaric dichotomy inherent in Orientalism is prominent in his memoirs, but the significance behind the terms has been reversed.
Ol’shevskii did admit that some Chechens went over to the Russian side, but he argued that these turncoats only came to the Russians because they had committed some heinous crime that led to their exile from their home communities or for the sake of the ruble. “[E]nticing them with money, we led these children of nature” to betray their people to the Russians, perhaps without their recognizing their own act of betrayal.^[35] Indeed, it is remarkable that Ol’shevskii’s account could be published with such a resounding affirmation of the gortsy’s way of life, and it was even published during his lifetime.^[36] Moreover, Ol’shevskii’s skeptical view of the conquest did not prevent him from making a long and successful career in the army in the region. His memoirs do not reveal how he dealt with the implicit conflict between his responsibilities as an officer, and ultimately a general, and his admiration for the enemy he worked to defeat. In the end, though, his valorization of the Chechens shared one point in common with the others: he saw the Russians and the Chechens as living in complete separation. This view was challenged in the final account considered here.
P. K. presented Russians and locals interacting as complete equals. His account described conversations he held with locals serving in the Russian army and one with his kunak, the Caucasian friend so lionized in the popular tales of the time, a figure absent in the other memoirs considered here. What is more, he included many references to Russian deserters who were living among the gortsy or even fighting with the murids. The cultural exchange thus worked in both directions, with the exiles from each group conforming to the standards of their adopted society. This fluidity was absent in other accounts, although locals had served in the army and even in the officer corps almost from the beginning of the war, albeit in rather small numbers. P. K.’s account was the first to show this aspect of service, and his unthinking acceptance of his Muslim companions is surprising.^[37] Intentionally or unintentionally, it reflected a picture of Russia as a tolerant, all-embracing multi-national society, where Russian norms were gladly embraced by other ethnic groups. Regardless of the motives behind his description, he chose to disregard ethnic stereotypes in favor of a picture of successful assimilation. The gortsy who had not yet joined Russia were eager to do so in P. K.’s account, rushing to declare their allegiance to Russia now that Shamil’s rule was visibly drawing to a close. He did see limits to tolerance when it came to the murids, though. A native officer claimed that the murids were “unreliable, and although they were now forced by circumstances to submit to the Russians, they would never be true to the Russians and would take up arms at the first opportunity. […P. K. agreed that] [T]here was much truth in this, and it will never do to rely much on the submission of the free (volnye) sons of the mountains, imbued with the fanaticism of muridism”.^[38] The fundamental difference is one of principle, not ethnic or religious. While P. K. doubts that the murids will ever truly cast off their fanaticism, only the excessive strength of their convictions keeps them from joining the Russian family. Again, the dominant discourse here does not draw a clear cut distinction between the Russians and their potential Muslim subjects, but rather includes all obedient subjects in an accommodating imperial, rossiiskii, identity.
From this sample, it is clear that the officers had a wide range of views on their opponents. While Ol’shevskii’s positive evaluation of the gortsy cannot be fully explained by his estrangement from the society of his peers, it is difficult to separate the two completely. Moreover, officers who embraced their identity as members of the Caucasus corps often did not write explicitly about the gortsy. Nevertheless, there is general agreement on the terms of the argument – the gortsy can be ignorant, free, daring, hard of character, or wise, but they are never presented as industrious, for example. The boundaries of the debate parallel those seen in literary representations of the gortsy, yet, as seen here the officers did not parrot these discourses blindly. They drew upon typically dismissive (or typically laudatory) terms in describing their experiences, but their accounts are more open-ended than the literary texts. In this respect, the memoirs and the diaries show their author’s willingness to revise his views in response to direct experience. A topic closely related to visions of the enemy in a military setting such as this one is the presentation of violence, which will be addressed in the following section.

Violence

Violence in war can have many aspects. Battles inevitably involve a sort of sanctioned violence against the enemy, and the officers here include many detailed accounts of troop movements and the like in describing military engagements. However, my focus is not on this technical side of war, but those features of the war that evoked a stronger emotional response from the officers. These can be positive, as seen in glowing accounts of glorious charges. Popular fiction set in the Caucasus often presented such romantic pictures of battle, but Miliutin is the only officer considered here who reacted to his first battle ecstatically. He and his companion officer heard shots in the distance and could not wait to get to the battle. When they arrived,

we both were so drawn to the enemy fortification that we galloped forward, at the risk of being shot from the forest. It did not occur to us at that moment that in abandoning the column of our own will, we allowed ourselves to act against the order of service. On my side, that was the thoughtless enthusiasm of an inexperienced youth, and [my companion…] later admitted that he didn’t want to let me go ahead alone.^[39]

The high excitement of the moment was crowned with a light wound, but the account took a decidedly unromantic turn after that point. Miliutin returned to the staff for a cup of tea and then “fell asleep” in the midst of the battle.^[40] While there is no reason to doubt that he did in fact fall asleep or lost consciousness after his exploits, his decision to conclude the episode on this low note is difficult to understand. Even such anti-climactic heroic violence is absent from the remainder of Miliutin’s text, where it is replaced by other, more troubling episodes of bloodshed.
Miliutin described a number of bloody conflicts on the battlefield, lamenting the extraordinary loss of life. The culprits, though, are not the gortsy, but the irresponsible generals who did not take care of their soldiers as they should. Officers were also partially responsible for instances of violence committed by Russian soldiers outside of the field of battle. Miliutin claimed that the common soldier had a personal hatred of the gortsy. When five gortsy were captured after shooting at the Russian column from the trees, Grabbe chose to make them run the gauntlet. Miliutin reported that “the soldiers took revenge on these unfortunate men for their misdeeds – of the five, only one remained alive”.^[41] Yet, this hatred ebbed and flowed, as later in the text, “our goodhearted” soldiers allowed the gortsy who had fought them viciously for days to “mingle peacefully” with them.^[42] Miliutin himself seemed surprised at this placidness. Several days later, the mood changed again, and “the soldiers, enraged by the stubbornness of the gortsy [in defending their homes], often revealed great cruelty”.^[43] The “cruelty” of the Russian soldier did not depend entirely on encouragement from his officers, although it seems to have been restricted to the heat of battle without help from above. In either case, though, the soldiers’ treatment of their enemy was contingent on the behavior of the gortsy – when they offered resistance or were presented as evil-doers, the Russians reacted violently. Without provocation, the soldiers reverted to their normal, “good-hearted” state. In posing the problem in this light, Miliutin placed the blame squarely on the shoulders of the objects of violence.
On the whole, though, the preponderance of the scenes of violence Miliutin described cannot be called atrocities. Bloody details were reserved for the battlefield, where unlike most other memoirists, he did not spare the reader. The majority of them describe the horror of the war, showing the bloody and stubborn resistance on both sides, but he did not dwell on the shocking cruelty described in other texts. He expressed outrage akin to that reserved for atrocities in other texts when he described how the soldiers plundered villages and robbed corpses, but these offenses hardly match what some of his peers described.
Dondukov-Korsakov’s memoirs included the most shocking description of atrocities committed by the gortsy. As the Russians approached the village of Dargo in what would become one of the most costly battles in the war, he claimed that Shamil took Russian captives out of the pits where they had been kept and gave them to the populace to meet local justice. When the troops enter the village, they find the “martyrs who had been torn to bits [isterzannye].” The worst was yet to come, though: “Old Caucasus soldiers and officers were enraged to the extreme by this terrible disorder, but their cruelty reached the ultimate extremes when, going further into the forest, they saw the viciously [izuverski] mutilated corpses of their comrades who had fallen on the previous day, hanging on all the trees in their path”.^[44] The savagery was entirely on the part of the gortsy, as Dondukov-Korsakov did not give any examples of the “cruelty” of the Russian troops. In fact, his account was the only one to omit Russian atrocities completely, and given his great enthusiasm for the Caucasus corps, it seems reasonable to presume that he suppressed such stories to avoid damaging their reputation. As to what those cruelties may have been, we can look to other memoirs that do address the problem of Russian violence.
Filipson focused on the remarkable customs encouraged by generals Zass and Vel’iaminov in the late 1830s. He reports that after defeating a group of gortsy:

According to tradition, [Zass] ordered the heads cut off of the dead and returned to Prochnyi Okop with this trophy. A year later, I encountered General Zass in Stavropol. He was traveling by sleigh, and a second sleigh followed behind him. […] [H]e opened the fur cover, and I saw not without a chill some fifty bare skulls. Vel’iaminov would send them to the Academy of Sciences.^[45]

Filipson included this passage because “for me, it was an idiosyncratic and characteristic picture of the […] war in the Caucasus, and moreover because it is of great general interest in its own right”.^[46] He reported several more incidents of this type, some of which took place immediately following battle. There, he claimed,

The brawls for corpses and severed heads affected the morals and habits of the Caucasus regiments. For the first time, despite the excitement of the novel pictures and impressions, the sight of heads wrapped up in linen, attached to the end of Cossack lances, evoked a feeling of nausea and coldness.^[47]

It is striking that the only atrocities in Filipson’s text were those committed by Russian forces and commissioned by Russian officers. They were committed in the name of science, but such practices evoke images of the Turkish practice of cutting off the noses or ears of enemies fallen in battle, a custom widely condemned as barbaric by European contemporaries. Somehow, the knowledge that the decapitated heads would end up as skulls in a museum collection did not alleviate the horror of the scene in Filipson’s eyes. These scientific aims of their gruesome project did not shelter them from moral decline, and this degeneration set them apart from other Russians, a theme that will be addressed more extensively below. All the same, theirs was a passionless violence. The personal hatred of the gortsy that Miliutin saw had no connection with the quarrelling over heads for the sake of the money they could bring. For examples of more zealous violence, we can look to the memoirs of Evdokimov.
Evdokimov included more tales of excessive violence in his account than any other officer considered here. Remarkably, these atrocities were overwhelmingly committed by Russians against unarmed or injured gortsy. The gortsy were the authors of the first and least shocking atrocity, as the division stumbled upon Russian corpses in a fort on their second approach to Akhty, and “all the corpses had been stripped naked and cruelly stabbed with shashki”.^[48] The Russian soldiers became silent and “their faces darkened” at the sight of their unfortunate compatriots, and one can read this scene as a justification for the greater horrors that follow, although Evdokimov never made that connection explicitly. When they reached Akhty, “the soldiers bayoneted [the enemy] with cruelty, and many bayoneted the wounded who were strewn on the ground”.^[49] Prince Argutinskii, the commanding officer, tried to stop this practice by giving the wounded into the care of the officers, a measure that was only partially successful. Yet despite this humanitarian start, Argutinskii in the same passage embarked on the first in a series of atrocities that overshadow those cited above. He selected a young boy from a group of prisoners and “squinting his eyes, ordered [the soldiers] to bayonet the unfortunate one. The boy at first was frightened and shrank back with a wordless shudder when the soldiers plunged their bayonets into his senseless [sukhoe] body. No one dared to ask the gloomy (mrachnyi) leader about the reasons for this deed. Everyone tried to understand it, but no one learned anything”.^[50] The situation did not improve after the troops regained the fortress at Akhty, when “black (kary) days for the guilty began”.^[51] Argutinskii went on a spree of vengeance, giving orders to bayonet one or more captured gorsty on four occasions. His final act of reprisal took place when his troops stumbled on an abandoned village. The inhabitants were found in the surrounding forests, and Argutinskii ordered that they all be bayoneted and the village looted. Evdokimov did not draw any morals from these incidents, and they did not invalidate his positive view of the Caucasus corps in general. He did present them in a very negative light, so that Argutinskii reads as an ambiguous figure at best, and an erratically violent one at worst. Evdokimov chose not to give the reader clear guidance in interpreting Argutinskii’s actions, perhaps because he himself was unable to reconcile them with his positive view of the Caucasus corps in general. Nevertheless, his reluctance to suppress these incidents suggests that they held an important and disturbing place in his memories of his first year in the region.^[52]
With the exception of Dondukov-Korsakov’s memoirs, the preponderance of the atrocities included in these accounts was committed by Russians. Filipson alone offered a strong condemnation of the practices encouraged by the officers and the deleterious effect they had on the men’s character, but none were able to justify completely the violent behavior of the soldiers. Such acts were unsettling and confusing at first sight and in hindsight, as the memoirists on the whole neither suppressed nor explained this part of their experience. This aspect of war in the Caucasus did not figure prominently in literature,^[53] and its importance in the memoirs marks a significant departure from the literary model. The officers’ memoirs demonstrate that the problem of atrocities was widespread. A seemingly easy solution to the problem would be to vilify the gortsy, but none of the memoirists took that path.^[54] The shock of such behavior, which was inexcusable in the eyes of the memoirists, could not be explained away that easily. Even if the gortsy were savage, and there was no agreement on that count, the Russians should not be. The opposition of civilized Russians and wild Asiatics was vulnerable not only to suggestions that the gortsy might have positive qualities, but also to evidence that the Russians no longer adhered to the behavioral norms they followed at home. The tolerance of violent behavior was one way in which the members of the Caucasus Corps differed from their counterparts at home, but the differences did not end there.

The nature of service in the Caucasus

Even as early as 1837, the distinctiveness of service in the Caucasus was evident to Simanovskii. When he crossed to the left bank of the Kuban, marking the end of his first campaign, Simanovskii wrote that he “immediately crossed into Europe, and the very air seemed incomparably better to me, in a word, it was easier for me to breathe” (Gordin 2000, 426). A longer passage in a subsequent entry makes it clear that it was the hardships and chaos encountered in service that set the Caucasus apart from Europe, rather than cultural differences.

In a European campaign there are more pleasures, more of life, I see my enemy, but here you don’t see where the bullets are coming from and it is hard to get by, your life is in danger at every minute, while in a European campaign, it is threatened only when you see the enemy. In a European campaign I engage the enemy by the type of my service, here I – a cavalryman – crawl with the foot troops along the mountains; there you meet villages, you see people, here – neither one nor the other.^[55]

The individual was lost in the course of a campaign in the Caucasus. Specific military skills accounted for nothing, there was no enemy to be seen but simply a disembodied sense of danger, and there was no sign even of human settlement. The delineated army (and self) defined by European standards simply had no place there. Simanovskii objected to this confusion of roles, but the other side of the lack of differentiation would be an awareness of common threats, which helped foster a sense of unity between officers and men. This aspect of the war was cast in a positive light by more enthusiastic memoirists, and it has been taken up by a current scholar in this spirit.^[56] Battle was not the only source of danger for the Russian corps, however. Disease was a serious problem for the army, and in some regions more men were lost to disease than to enemy fire. While the unfamiliar climactic conditions accounted in part for the high mortality rate, the conditions of service exacerbated the problem.
Filipson developed this theme most dramatically in his critique of the miserable conditions endured by the men and the officers in the region. He wrote:

All the garrisons were weakened by cruel diseases and the unnatural order of life and service. The garrison spent all their nights at arms, expecting an attack at any minute, and went to sleep only when it was completely light and the patrols monitored the immediate area. If you add to that the boredom, the absence of women, the lack of movement, the scarcity of fresh meat and vegetables, it will be understood that the companies were reduced to half their composition or even less. You have to marvel that under such terrible conditions, the regiments never and nowhere lost their daring and their moral strength.^[57]

Physical exhaustion, due to local conditions and worsened by army policy, plagued the soldiers. The beauty of the location was outweighed by the unnaturalness of life there for the Russians. For the officers, it was the region’s distance from inquiring eyes that led to a more spiritual ailment. Specifically, the great weakness of the commanding generals, in Filipson’s view, was corruption. He merely hinted at financial corruption by making reference to the activities of “dark personages” in the retinues of various generals, but the problem of misinformation concerned him much more deeply. He waged consistently unsuccessful battles to send accurate reports to Petersburg in the face of his commanding officer’s desire to send self-laudatory statements, whether this meant lying about the distances between villages attacked or even the outcome of engagements. He attributed the problem of corruption to a lack of conscience among the officers, who took advantage of the opportunities afforded by distance to deceive Petersburg. For Filipson, it was the physical reality of the Caucasus that brought out the worst of what was already inherent in the Russian officer corps.
The distinctive geography of the Caucasus did not inevitably lead to mental or physical deterioration, though. It also created opportunities for greatness that could not arise in more mundane settings, as Evdokimov demonstrated in his memoirs. He took the mountains and the nature of warfare in such a setting as his central concern, which caused him to redefine his conceptions of the heroic. He wrote that before his first action, “I, like each novice, did not foresee what road leads to laurels and glory. But there was greatness in our situation, and we recognized that in us lay the salvation of Dagestan […]”.^[58] The timing for this comment certainly confirmed that the road to glory had unexpected twists. In this case, Evdokimov and his division were marching away from their besieged countrymen in the fortress of Akhty, effectively abandoning them to the gortsy. Eventually, they took another approach to the fortress, and the besiegers were repulsed, but there was no reference to this outcome in the initial passage. Rather, they were heroic because as the sole surviving remnant of the Russian army in the area, they were men marked by fate to uphold Russia’s (unspecified) cause in Dagestan. Moreover, the physical obstacles they faced as they retreated by night along narrow defiles and down steep cliffs required great courage and strength and thereby offered another form of glory. Rising above the physical environment and enduring the harsh conditions in the area were an essential part of being a hero of the Caucasus.
An equally important part of heroism for the officer corps was addressed when Evdokimov entered the liberated fortress and met Novoselov, the officer who took charge of the besieged fortress and refused to surrender even when the situation seemed hopeless. Evdokimov was disturbed by Novoselov’s non-heroic appearance: “In vain did I search for signs of the hero in Novoselov, his lack of a threatening countenance puzzled me greatly”.^[59] In fact, though, what made Novoselov a hero was not his prowess in battle in the usual sense, but rather his great success in keeping morale high despite the deteriorating circumstances. Not only did he force Evdokimov to abandon his expectations of a hero’s physical presence, Novoselov also caused Evdokimov to re-evaluate the usual terms of heroism itself. The standard vision of heroism is inadequate to account for the type of greatness experienced in this southern setting, and Evdokimov exchanged it for a more personal military heroism, defined by fortitude and the ability to create a sense of unity and purpose among the soldiers rather than military prowess in the usual sense. In other words, the ability to maintain a Russian order, without falling into questionable practices, was central to maintaining the Russian cause.
Dondukov-Korsakov took this positive evaluation of individual officers one step further and devoted his memoir to valorizing the Caucasus corps as a specific cultural group. He acknowledged that the Caucasus was important as a site for rewards, and possibly quick advancement, but more fundamentally it was also a place of great hardship. As a result, there developed a “particular way of life for these laborers (truzhenniki), torn away from the general Russian family for the honor of Russian arms and the good of the fatherland”.^[60] These laborers were the kavkaztsy, for the officers coming for only a year-long tour were not integrated into kavkazets society. This distinction was an important one in the memoirs written by kavkaztsy, for their place in the Caucasus differed greatly from that of officers there for the short term. Each year a new crop of officers came from Petersburg to spend a season in the Caucasus to acquire field experience, and accordingly they were sent to participate in campaigns immediately. Kavkaztsy, in contrast, frequently spent their first years writing behind a desk. Even when they did reach active service, the differences persisted. Dondukov-Korsakov made a point of acknowledging the courage the short-timers displayed, but by virtue of their better connections in the capitol, they took awards away from the kavkaztsy. Second, “in their ways of thinking, the Guards officers did not correspond in any way with Caucasian customs (nravy) of that time”.^[61] This friction was removed when policy changed and only those officers who enlisted with local regiments were allowed to serve in the region.
What, then, set the kavkazets apart from the ordinary Russian officer? Dondukov-Korsakov explained his vision at some length:

The darkest and even reprehensible aspects of this [social] type had their inevitable source in the distinctiveness (osoboblenie) of the Caucasus, in that estrangement (otchuzhdenie) from the rest of the Russian military family in which all the glorious kavkaztsy of that time found themselves. All the exploits of self-denial, all the deprivations that the Caucasus troops overcame, all were unknown to Russia. The miserly rewards for exploits undertaken could not serve as incentive of military valor: these rewards were received a year or more after the fact and frequently were not presented to the individuals who earned them while they were still alive.^[62]

In this view, the Caucasus Corps was made up of Spartan soldiers, and their glory was based on absence and abstinence. But where Evdokimov’s observations prompted him to re-evaluate the nature of heroism in general, Dondukov-Korsakov declared that the combination of the conditions in the Caucasus and the vigor of the Russian army had created a new type of hero. He did not elaborate on what exactly those dark aspects were, but from the other accounts it seems reasonable to assume that he was referring to the atrocities the army was prone to commit. Filipson used a similar logic to excuse the excesses of the Cossacks, but Dondukov-Korsakov made the first attempt in the documents considered here to explain the problem of Russian atrocities. Their estrangement from ordinary Russian life led to the development of new practices, and while Dondukov-Korsakov did not suggest that other influences affected the development of the kavkaztsy, they did not live in a vacuum. Impressions of local behavior, often not fully understood, had a role in determining how these new heroes adopted practices that seemed appropriate in the exotic setting.
If, as the above passage suggests, the rewards for which the Caucasus was famous were insufficient to explain the heroic deeds common among the corps, what was their real motivation? Dondukov-Korsakov found their origin in the bonds of service, in the “feeling that they were discharging a holy duty before the fatherland and their uniform, which each considered a joy and a particular honor to wear”.^[63] He also claimed that there was a sentiment among the troops as well that they were different from troops used to serving in Russia proper. This feeling was shared by their officers, who also felt the effects of the region on their character.

A common spirit and a common interest connected the officers of the Caucasus corps; divergent ways of thinking and education – all this was smoothed away in a similar military life, identical deprivations and dangers, which each experienced equally with the rest of his companions. A feeling of self-satisfaction appeared, a consciousness of their worth in fulfilling a difficult duty in the face of all possible events, where an officer had to show his sagacity and his self-denial. The very character of the war with the gortsy, acting in partisan parties, ceaseless skirmishes with light weapons at every step, beyond the borders of the forts, with an uncatchable enemy – all this made them think, imagine, position themselves [rasporiazhatsia] and moreover developed an interesting boldness in the officers, not infrequently exceeding the limits of good sense. Young officers were particularly infected with this spirit of industry, contempt for danger; further service and an awareness of responsibility before their commanders smoothed out these outbursts of youth, and old officers of the Caucasus were distinguished by their particular coolness and carefulness in battle, not abandoning themselves to the passion that so often endangered success.^[64]