By the mid-1990s, when interest in the post-communist transition in Eastern Europe and especially in the former Soviet Union was waning, Russian studies at Anglo-American and German universities seemed doomed. Since then, a spate of highly sophisticated studies has been published, opening up new fields of enquiry. One of the most prominent new fields is the study of Russia’s borderlands and the encounters between locals and immigrants. These authors no longer understand “area studies” as the privilege to ignore theoretical insights from the political and social sciences. At the same time, they have made good use of the opening up of archives, not only in Moscow and Petersburg, but (in the case of the two monographs under review) also in Tbilisi and Makhachkala. Although Breyfogle’s footnotes are full of references to archival and other unpublished sources, the actual text hardly offers the reader an inkling of the sources’ content: most of the lengthy quotes are from official documents after all.
Nicholas Breyfogle and Michael Kemper share a bottom-up perspective. They are both interested in nineteenth century Russian empire building, but avoid the bias of the official Petersburg perspective by focusing on the realities of daily life in the imperial periphery of the Caucasus: “embed[ding] people and their communities in the most abstract of historical processes without losing sight of what it was like to live through those processes” (Breyfogle, P. 7). Breyfogle looks at Slavic heretics (non-Orthodox Christians) who were used as colonists, ironically becoming the face of tsarism for the indigenous Islamic populace, and thereby playing their part in the consolidation of the empire that failed to tolerate them in the core regions of the state. Conversely, Kemper looks at Islamic forms of indigenous social organization and interaction with the interfering Russian colonial power. Although both authors sympathize with their object of research as underdogs in fated defiance of the Russian Empire, the grey zones of local realities rather than the ex post construction of bilateral confrontation between Russian colonial agents and local resistance determine these studies. As Breyfogle argues: “[W]hether they supported or opposed tsarist power, the sectarian settlers … performed a range of military, economic and administrative functions essential to Russian empire-building – sometimes unwittingly” (P. 3). In sync with recent studies of Western nineteenth century colonialism, his assumption is that metropole and colony/periphery co-produce each other. In fact, the tsarist policy of “heretic colonization” actually produced the heretic communities by concentrating the scattered groups from all over the empire in a fairly small region. Kemper for his part demonstrates that the various forms of societal organization and rule in Dagestan prior to Russian conquest were by no means static or primitive – debunking the typical view of a civilizing colonial power. The argument is well stated, even though two hundred pages and a historical narrative starting with the earliest recorded political histories from the seventh and eighth centuries may be somewhat overdone with regard to demonstrating the dynamics of autochthonous developments and the role of Islam.^[1] Strictly speaking, Kemper’s argument, that this golden era was later used to legitimze new rulers and regimes, does not very convincingly explain two hundred pages worth of historical reconstruction. “What actually happened” is essentially irrelevant for a better understanding of the later instrumentalization of historical legitimization (Kemper, S. 65-66). Kemper also underlines that in Dagestan (unlike in the Southern Caucasus) the dynamic relations between princedoms and free communities were not swept away by the Russian conquest of 1750 – 1828, but rather redefined: for some rulers the Russian advance proved to be the right opportunity to restore authority over unruly communities (S. 211-216).
Breyfogle’s choice of the heretic colonists is partly explained by the fact that these communities’ higher degree of literacy and their migration to the United States in the late nineteenth century resulted in a wealth of (mostly unpublished) memoirs, letters and other authentic testimonies of colonization, other than official documents and policies. Similarly, for Kemper the existence of large collections of unpublished and under-researched Arabic sources offered an authentic bottom-up perspective to balance the well-known narratives from the three surrounding and encroaching empires: Iran, Russia and the Ottoman Empire.
Breyfogle’s story opens with Nicholas I’s paradoxical edict of 1830, which uses disloyal heretics as colonists for the recently conquered Caucasian territories only nominally under Russian rule. Convincingly placing this paradox in the context of uncoordinated imperial strategies, Breyfogle argues that the peripherialization of the heretics was part of an agenda of domestic religious homogenization, not of the parallel agenda of empire building and thus qualified as “unintentional colonialism” (Breyfogle, P. 19).
Although Breyfogle lists “changing parameters of identity” as one of his key interests in the introduction (P. 3), his determination to ascribe ethnic identities in the first half of the nineteenth century seems somewhat anachronistic. Did the tsars really prefer the Dukhobors, Molokans, and Subbotniks as colonists because these pernicious anti-state and anti-church rebels were, after all, ethnic Slavs (P. 2)? The line of reasoning mentioned elsewhere (P. 212), that the tsarist officials simply deemed sectarians less likely to make many convicts among Muslims, seems more to the point. Should a historian correct his sources because the indiscriminate use of the term “Tatars” by the mid-eighteenth century tsarist administration for both the Islamic population of the Caucasus and Azerbaijani may confuse an early twenty-first century reader (Pp. xiii-xiv)? All the more so, as the author argues that “[C]oncepts of Russianness … were defined and redefined in the colonial encounter” (P. 5). So were, in all likelihood, other religious and ethnic identities and not the least those ascribed by tsarist administrators. The author’s argument is that one of the motives behind heretic colonialism was the ethno-confessional unity of the Russian people. The contemporary sources quoted in the text identify the heretics as disrespectful to the tsar and the church, whereas the ethnic argument typically harks back to a meagre early twentieth century source, Nicholas Riasanovsky’s famous 1961 book, Nicholas I and Official Nationality, and studies on the Russian minority in the western borderlands (Pp. 21-23, fn. 16, 308-309). Later on, the author even refers to “the biological “Russification” (obrusenie) of the South Caucasus” (Pp. 135, fn. 20, 310) without making a distinction between the first wave of heretic colonists in the 1840s and tsarist Russification policies of the late nineteenth century.
As issues of ethnic identity are not at the core of the author’s argument, the historically unspecific and rather uncritical use of these terms is not a major setback for the study as a whole. Essentially, Breyfogle is interested in the colonists’ bilateral and dynamic relationship with the indigenous population, the local tsarist administration, and the natural milieu of the South Caucasus. Devoting a chapter in Part 2 to each of these three, the author gets carried away by the symmetry of the argument and ends up defending the self-evident conclusion. Not only did the colonists change their natural environment, their habits and social organization were conversely changed by the new habitat too! For the colonists’ contact with tsarist officialdom and with the local population, the same argument of reciprocity, however, is not common sense and certainly opens new perspectives in historiography. Detailing the major differences between central tsarist policies and the actual line of local officials on a broad range of sources is a major strength of the study. These differences include, for instance, the central government’s indifference to the fate of the early colonists versus the assistance offered by local officials, who even occasionally lobbied the central bureaucracy for the sake of the dissenters. The overall impression from the narrative is one of an amazingly “present” state, despite all makeshift policies and inefficiencies. The chapter on the encounters between the social and religious nonconformists, and the traditional societies of the South Caucasians is equally fascinating and lives up to the author’s promise to offer a meaningful combination of abstract processes and actual human experiences (P. 7) – in the form of land disputes, mutual assistance, economic dependence and violence, including Russian peasant settlers subordinating to native noble landowners.
Unlike some other studies sympathizing with the underdog and the exotic, Breyfogle carefully avoids the trap of perceiving the religious beliefs and communities of the heretics as unchanging vis-а-vis the dynamics of tsarist policies and history in general: even their most intransigent prophets signify changing attitudes and beliefs. In sum, there is a lot of middle ground between the conflictuous and mutually exclusive images of imperial assimilation and cultural persistence. The second half of the book has a different setup and rhythm by focusing on the single event of the Dukhobor Uprising of 1895 and its consequences – a shift in Russian colonialism toward Orthodox settlers and the out-migration of the “model colonists” who had once again become “heretic pariahs” (P. 219).
Kemper studies Islamic rule in Dagestan on the basis of autochthonous and Russian sources. The focus of the 460-page monograph is on the Jihad resistance by the three imams Gazi-Muhammed, Hamzat-Bek and Shamil in the mid-nineteenth century. With all due respect for the meticulous archival research under what must have been abominable circumstances, the author tends to forget his readers: on many pages the footnotes try to reach the top half of the page, and with the parades of (certainly academically correctly transcriptions of) Arabic names, the interested Russophone reader soon gives up trying. Two lengthy chapters provide in-depth assessments of the intricate links between the three imams’ centralizing actions against communal autonomy replacing customary law by Sharia, on the one hand, and their audacious campaigns against the Russian imperial power, on the other hand. Sharing Breyfogle’s acute sense for the unintended consequences and intricacies of historical action and reaction, Kemper underlines that Russian military retaliation contributed substantially to forced mobility and thus to spreading word of the Jihad. Again, the author’s fascination for literary and historiographic niceties, or legal and other details tends to alienate the reader: one of the many footnotes, for example, informs the reader that the Russian translation of the tariq by Gamaladdin published in 1869 is very poor compared to the Arabic original published in 1904 in Petrovsk. The author then confides to the reader that both were reprinted in one volume in 1986, but urges him to check out the “justified” critique in a Western review, without revealing what the critique amounted to or how these (and innumerable other) petty details relate to the grand narrative of the study (Kemper, S. 231, fn. 47). On the other end of the scale Kemper adds some well-chosen grand comparisons between the Russian subjugation of Islamic Dagestan and the French conquest of Algeria, including fascinating connections such as the fact that the famous resistance leader Shamil actually left correspondences with his Algerian counterpart, written when in each case the victor had allowed its respective opponent to go into exile.
In sum, both studies combine the fascination of the exotic with solid scholarship. Breyfogle tends to take his theoretical terminology somewhat too seriously, and lets theory and sources get in the way of the all-important time dimension, but not only on the issue of Russianness: the narrative seems to move back and forth from the “Orthodoxy, autocracy and nationality” of the 1840s to the imperial modernization and Russification of the late nineteenth century without much of a thought on qualitative changes in the state’s views of itself and relations with society and citizens. Consequently, Breyfogle effectively and elegantly debunks many top-down views of conquest and resistance, but is less successful in fully integrating the case of heretic colonialism within the South Caucasus into the bigger picture of Russian imperial policies: “the dissenters’ leading role in tsarist empire-building” (P. 299) clearly overstates the importance of the case.
Kemper’s debunking of similar simplistic colonial views is far less effective. Not many scholars will be able to appreciate the richness in detail and analytical nuances Kemper’s study provides. The general reader interested in Russian imperial power and Islamic borderlands will quickly lose sight of the bigger picture concerning the triangular relation of dominion, law, and religion for the Muslims of Dagestan in the context of the Russian conquest. Better than Breyfogle, Kemper succeeds in dissecting the intricacies of the autochthonous developments without depreciating the hegemonic factor of Russian imperial power: “The Jihad state is therefore no doubt an externally induced political structure, brought to the fore by the defensive struggle, but it is also the culmination of [Dagestan’s] own history.” (Kemper, S. 413). The author has titled his conclusions “The ten findings of this study.” Not unlike Moses’ ten commandments, these findings are unambiguous, compelling and succinct; but for the awestruck audience it remains a mystery, where exactly they come from. If only the author had worked his way back from these conclusions to restore the balance between the richness of historical evidence and the lucidity of the main arguments.