Preserved in the Foreign Policy Archive of the Russian Empire, in Moscow, is a document titled “Translation of a petition from Kabardian lords to Her Imperial Majesty, submitted on their behalf by lord Kaitoka Kaisinov to his honor the vice-chancellor [of the Collegium of Foreign Affairs].”^[1] Presumably, it was the translator, Aleksandr Turchaninov, a secretary at the Collegium (kollegiia), who gave the Julian calendar equivalent of the document’s original Hijri date (11 Ramazan 1177) as 2 March 1764, and transcribed the names of the petitioners as Dzhanbulat bek, Kasai bek, Musavus bek, Khamza bek, and Kazi bek. After a formulaic introduction, the Kabardians point to a tradition of Russo-Kabardian cooperation dating to the time of Ivan IV, when Kabardian lords gave hostages to tsarist officials and did Russia’s bidding, sometimes at their own expense, in exchange for tsarist largesse. They tell, too, of a time when tsarist authorities refrained from meddling in Kabardians’ internal affairs, and compensated Kabardians whose escaped slaves had taken refuge in Russian towns. They recall examples of Kabardians converting to Christianity and resettling in the Russian Empire (Prince Aleksandr Bekovich Cherkasskii, who led the disastrous Khiva expedition of 1717, is mentioned specifically). And they mention the kinds of goods they sell and buy, and the duties they pay, in Russia’s North Caucasian fort towns.
In the petition, the Kabardian supplicants also sketch the borders of their lands, noting that Russia was in the process of building a fort at Mozdok, on the Terek River, and settling there, “on our lands,” a Kabardian lord who had converted to Christianity. Claiming to speak on behalf of “all your Kabardian servants” (vse kabardinskie raby vashi),^[2] they “request” (prosim) a reduction in the duties they pay on goods sold in Russia; compensation for their fugitive Christian slaves, and the return of their non-Christian slaves; an end to fort-building activities, a ban on settling Kabardian converts there; and, finally, that Russia not interfere in the internal affairs of Kabarda.
What, if anything, can we learn from this document about relations between Catherine II’s government and Kabardian Muslims? Does the fact that the document is preserved in the archives of Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in a record group titled “Kabardian affairs,” compromise its truth-value? Is truth what historians are looking for in the archives? Or are they searching for something else less metaphysical: for example, evidence about the past?
More generally, to what extent is it possible to use archival materials to study the historical interactions of the Russian state and the Islamic world, of Christians and Muslims and peoples of other faiths on the territory of the Russian Empire? In what ways were these worlds separate, conceptually and practically, and to what extent were they intertwined? Can the voices of Muslims be heard in documents addressed to non-Muslim state officials and preserved in the archives of the former Soviet Union? Can their voices be heard more clearly in documents addressed to Muslim rulers and preserved in, say, the archives of Turkey? To what extent do Russian translations of documents originally written in the languages of Russia’s Muslim communities distort the content of the originals? If the Russian Empire was “a Muslim power,” as Robert Crews argues,^[3] is it possible to consider Russian a Muslim language? In what ways has the much-discussed “archival revolution”^[4] impacted the study of Russia’s Muslim communities in the past? Finally, what training do historians need to be able to meet the challenges of studying Islam and Muslims in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union?
With these and other questions in mind, I organized an international workshop on the possibilities and limits of using archives to study the history of relations between Russia and the Islamic world. Sponsored by the Harriman Institute for Russian, Eurasian, and Eastern European Studies at Columbia University, the workshop was part of a research project directed by Mark Mazower and titled “Russia and Islam: Religion, the State and Modernity during and after the Age of Empire.”^[5] Of the original six speakers, four have revised their papers for publication in this forum. They are joined by another workshop participant who shares his experiences of working primarily in archives and libraries in Russia and Turkey.^[6]
The forum comprises two parts. The essays in Part One identify archives and libraries in Azerbaijan, Georgia, Russia, and Turkey that house records pertaining to the history of relations between Russia and the Islamic world. While acknowledging the partiality (in both senses of the word) of these records, the authors of these essays nonetheless emphasize their importance as evidence of the ways in which tsarist authorities and Russian subjects understood Islam and interacted with Muslims. In addition, Jim Meyer’s paper suggests how historians of Russia’s Muslim subjects can profit from conducting research in the Ottoman archives. The articles in Part Two also address the possibilities of using archival materials to study Muslims in the Russian and Soviet empires. The emphasis here, however, is on the limitations of these materials. The authors of these papers encourage historians to think of archives as institutions simultaneously engaged in the production and preservation, on the one hand, and the processes of empire-building, on the other, and to explore what this means for the study of Russia’s Muslim communities.
George Sanikidze’s article addresses imperial Russian and early Soviet policy toward Georgia’s Muslim communities. Based in part on research conducted in the Central State Archive of the Ajarian Autonomous Republic, in Batumi, and the Central State Historical Archive of Georgia, in Tbilisi, the study documents the growth of Georgia’s Muslim population following its incorporation into the Russian Empire, as well as the complex, evolving relationship between the government and the region’s Muslims. The materials preserved in these archives also throw light on the interactions of Russia’s subject populations – Christians and Muslims, Armenians, Azeris, Georgians, Persians, Turks, and others – at a time when the tsarist (and later Soviet) government was attempting to establish its authority in South Caucasia. The Batumi archive is “extremely rich” in materials pertaining to the emigration of Ajaria’s Muslims to the Ottoman Empire after 1878, and attempts by Orthodox churchmen to convert Muslims. Historians can also learn about relations between the Russian and Ottoman empires, the region’s economic and social profile, and religious life in and around Batumi. Among the materials housed in the Tbilisi archive are records containing statistical data on the Muslim population in Tbilisi guberniia, and the papers of scholars involved in documenting Christian “traditions” in Ajaria and among Georgians in the Ottoman Empire. Also preserved there are the papers of an Orthodox priest of Kist, or Vainakh, origin who describes the religious life of Kists in the Pankisi Gorge. Relations between Shiites and Sunnis in Tbilisi, as well their educational and publishing activities, also find reflection in the Tbilisi archive.
Sanikidze acknowledges that these sources are not without their problems. Government censuses, for example, were far from perfect instruments for counting the empire’s growing Muslim population. That the observations of a French traveler “reflects more accurately the reality of [Tbilisi’s] demographic situation” surely says something important about the quality of the information presented in censuses in particular and Russian state capacity in general. (Vladimir Bobrovnikov makes a similar point in his essay in Part Two.) It is also fair to ask what, if anything, historians can learn about the place of Islam and Muslim religious practices in South Caucasia from nineteenth-century Georgian scholars and churchmen determined to find evidence of Christian traditions among Georgian Muslims? And of course no historian worth his salt would take at face value the claim of the Orthodox priest who characterized the founders of a village in the Pankisi Gorge as “Muslim fanatics.”^[7] Here it is helpful to distinguish between what Arthur Marwick calls witting and unwitting testimony; in this case, the witting testimony concerns the presence of Muslims in the village, while the unwitting testimony reveals the priest’s attitude toward Islam.^[8]
Dmitrii Arapov reminds us that Russia’s relationship with the Islamic world is as old as its empire. By the end of the nineteenth century, Russia’s many millions of Muslims could look back on more than four centuries of relations between their co-religionists and the Russian state. Which state institutions gathered and preserved information concerning the Empire’s Muslim subjects? The records of the Chancellery of His Imperial Majesty, the private office of Russia’s emperors and empresses, are preserved at the Russian State Archive of Ancient Records (RGADA) and can be used to study the Muslim policies of Russia’s rulers. The Third Section of His Imperial Majesty’s Own Chancellery, or secret police, whose records are housed in the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), gathered information on Muslim communities throughout the empire. The Russian State Historical Archive (RGIA)^[9] houses the records of the Council of Ministers, which throw light on the thinking of high-ranking government officials concerning Islam and Muslims. The Ministry of Internal Affairs was not only the largest, but also the most influential of the ministries, according to Arapov. Two of its departments were concerned with Muslim matters. Among the records of the Department of Spiritual Affairs of Foreign Confessions, preserved in RGIA, are “massive” files concerning pan-Islamism and pan-Turkism, as well as the papers of the ethnographers A. N. Kharuzin and S. G. Rybakov. The Department of Police also maintained files on Muslims, and these are preserved in GARF. The Russian State Military-Historical Archive (RGVIA) houses the records of the Ministry of War. From these one can learn about the ministry’s efforts to shape the lives of Muslims serving in the armed forces, its insistence that Muslims mention the tsar in Friday prayers, and the activities of the Asian Section of the General Staff, which kept a watchful eye on Muslims from Batumi to Bukhara and beyond Russia’s borders. Finally, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had its own Asian Department, which in the second half of the nineteenth century was involved in planning for the creation of institutions aimed at regulating the lives of Turkestan’s Muslims. Naturally, the Foreign Policy Archive of the Russian Empire (AVPRI) is also where researchers will find the records of Russia’s relations with rival Muslim powers.
Arapov divides the materials found in these archives into two categories (legislative [zakonodatel’nye] and institutional record-keeping [deloproizvodstvennye]), and inventories the types of documents researchers are likely to encounter, including reports from high officials to the emperor (doklady); instructions from ministers and their deputies to provincial governors and their subordinates (tsirkuliary); internal memoranda of various kinds generated by state institutions throughout the Empire (zapiski); summary discussions of a specific topic (spravki); opened and inspected correspondence (perliustrirovannye materialy); reports of agents of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (doneseniia); and many others. In providing insight into the processes of document generation within state agencies, the essay calls to mind Ann Stoler’s discussion of the collections and documents that serve as the basis of her analysis of Dutch colonial governance in the nineteenth-century West Indies.^[10] What the Russian documents primarily reflect, Arapov concludes, are the activities of the institutions charged with managing Russia’s Muslim communities, and the ways imperial authorities approached and understood Islam and Muslims within the country and beyond its borders.
What can historians of the Russian Empire learn about its Muslim subjects by conducting research in the Ottoman archives? What do Ottomanists stand to gain by consulting materials preserved in the archives of the former Soviet Union? These questions frame Jim Meyer’s discussion of his experiences of working in archives in Turkey, Russia, Azerbaijan, and Ukraine. His article will be of particular interest to historians working on transnational topics.
According to Meyer, the Ottoman archives contain valuable information concerning not only relations between the Ottoman and Russian governments, but also the cross-border interactions of Ottoman and Russian subjects. The challenge for Russianists is being able to locate and read this information. Ironically, though Islam was one of the traditional religions in the Russian Empire, and though Muslims accounted for some fifteen percent of its population by the end of the nineteenth century, Russianists have traditionally not received training in the study of Islam, Muslim communities, and the languages they used (besides Russian). In light of this fact, how realistic is it for Russianists to expect to be able to conduct research in Turkish archives, where the texts of the overwhelming majority of records are in Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, and Persian? Meyer points to a wealth of online information concerning the archive, some of it in English, and to the archives of the Foreign Ministry, where there are records in French pertaining to Ottoman diplomatic relations and the activities of Russian subjects in the Ottoman Empire, among other topics. To locate these materials, however, one needs to be proficient in the language of the guides and catalogues, which is modern Turkish.
Ottomanists pursuing research on similar topics should be interested to learn that former Soviet archives and libraries contain a wealth of material in Turkic languages, Arabic, and Persian. Archives and libraries in Kazan (Republic of Tatarstan) house substantial collections of documents in Arabic pertaining to Islamic religious interpretation, as well almanacs, newspapers, personal papers, and village histories in Tatar and Ottoman Turkish. In addition to the increasingly well-studied records of the Orenburg Muslim Spiritual Assembly, evidence of Muslim “activist movements” is preserved in repositories in Ufa (Republic of Bashkortostan). Scholars interested in the history of imperial Russia’s South Caucasian Sunni and Shiite spiritual assemblies, and of Azeri literature, will find ample material in Azeri Turkish and Persian in the archives and libraries of Baku, Azerbaijan. Finally, the history of Crimea’s Muslim communities can be fruitfully studied at the State Archive of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the Regional Studies and Gasprinskii libraries, in Simferopol, Ukraine.
Together, these essays emphasize the possibilities of using Eurasian archives to study the historical interactions of the Islamic world and Russia in general and of Russian Muslims and the Russian state in particular. This discussion is continued in Part Two of the forum. There, however, the authors place greater emphasis on the former Soviet archives’ limitations as repositories of information concerning Islam and Muslims. They raise questions about the kinds of sources generated by the tsarist and Soviet states, and what they can and cannot tell us about the place of Islam and the lives of Muslims within these states. In doing so, they urge historians to attend more carefully to the problems of their sources, and speak to the concerns of scholars in other fields who treat “colonial knowledge” and “colonial archives” as analytical problems and subjects of inquiry in their own right.^[11]
As a historian of Central Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Adeeb Khalid is well positioned to discuss both the possibilities and limits of using what he calls “post-Soviet archives” to study the region’s Muslim populations in the Russian and Soviet empires. He understands that both states possessed sizeable Muslim populations, and that both gathered and preserved “vast storehouses of documentary materials” relating to these populations. What kinds of materials are these, specifically, and to what extent do they register Muslim voices? Or, to paraphrase Gayatri Spivak, can Muslims speak in post-Soviet archives?^[12] These questions frame Khalid’s discussion and call to mind some of the core concerns of what has been called postcolonial, or colonial discourse, studies. Yet, whereas Spivak once claimed that the subaltern cannot speak in colonial archives,^[13] Khalid argues that Muslims can speak in post-Soviet archives, but only in highly circumscribed ways.
Khalid bases his critique of post-Soviet archives on his experiences of working in central archives in Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Moscow. He argues that technologies of rule and of archival organization were intimately intertwined and ultimately “determined the kinds of Muslim voices that may be found in the archives.” Most important, this means that researchers “find Muslims in these archives only when [Muslims] deal with the state.” For the tsarist period, Muslims appear most often as supplicants and objects of suspicion. In the Soviet period, they ultimately learned to “speak Bolshevik.” Khalid’s point is that the language of both tsarist-era petitions and Soviet secret police reports “should be seen as a state discourse, and not taken as a transparent vehicle of information.” Far from providing direct access to the thoughts and actions of Muslims in the past, such materials have undergone “a number of transformations” and contain “many layers of literary production and many kinds of translations.” Interpreted carefully, they can provide evidence of the extent to which the state thought about and attempted to manage and transform its Muslim subjects, and the ways in which these subjects viewed and interacted with the state, but “have little to say about the vast stretches of social and individual existence [of Muslims] that did not touch the state.” In order to move beyond archival silences and gain access to other aspects of Muslim lives, Khalid suggests reading archival records in conjunction with “Muslim sources” – private papers, early Soviet periodicals, printed books, and manuscripts – composed in “Muslim languages.” Without a deep understanding of the ways that Muslims understood and practiced Islam, and the requisite linguistic and paleographic training, Khalid argues, “no serious claims to expertise on this subject may be entertained.”
These are bold claims, to be sure, and they are echoed in Vladimir Bobrovnikov’s essay. Bobrovnikov’s research focuses on the religious practices of Sunni Muslims in North Caucasia, and the changes experienced by Muslim villagers in Highland Dagestan as the tsarist and Soviet governments undertook reforms. In his essay, he discusses his experiences of conducting research in Russia’s regional and central archives, as well as the challenges historians face in studying and publishing archival materials.
The archival revolution has impacted the study of North Caucasia’s Muslim populations in several productive ways, according to Bobrovnikov. Historians now have access to previously unknown or inaccessible private collections and provincial archives. As a result of the discovery of new archival sources, “old borders, ideological barriers, and theoretical blinkers have fallen.” A growing number of historians of Islam are studying Russia’s Muslim borderlands, and have already produced several “classic works” on the topic, in both Russia and the West. In recent years, the publication of some of these new sources has “completely overturned notions of Islam as something distant and foreign that were typical of the late-Soviet era,” and has demonstrated that Islam was a constant factor in Russian strategic thinking about North Caucasia.
However, Bobrovnikov sees no reason to exaggerate the achievements of the archival revolution, which may be coming to an end in any event. He notes that recent years have witnessed the closing of major Russian archives “for economic reasons.” This fate has already befallen RGIA and apparently awaits RGVIA. The situation appears more promising in Dagestan and other North Caucasian republics, where central archives remain open to researchers, at least for the time being. As for recent publications, some present “an extremely distorted picture” of Russia’s Muslim borderlands. This is due in part to researchers’ insufficient knowledge of Islam, Islamic societies, and Arabic, which after all was the language of culture, education, and officialdom in Dagestan until 1927. Not that proficiency in literary Arabic will help researchers penetrate very deeply into the life of Dagestani villagers, no more than 5% of whom knew Arabic, according to prerevolutionary statistics (themselves a problematic source). Islamic court proceedings were often conducted in one of the local languages, knowledge of which is essential to the historian of Caucasian village life, Bobrovnikov argues. Finally, there is the question of how to approach the study of Islam, though oral sources attesting to Muslim practices, or normative texts in Arabic and other eastern languages. Bobrovnikov suggests that one way out of this “source-study crisis” is to engage in the comparative study of multiple archives and different kinds of sources that “compete with and supplement each other.”^[14] He provides a compelling example of this approach in the second half of the paper.

* * *

In different ways, each of the articles in this forum raises important questions for historians who use archival materials in writing about Russia’s past. What can we learn about the Russian and Soviet states in archives organized under their auspices? In what ways has the archival revolution impacted the study of Russia’s Muslims? To what extent do the archives of a self-consciously Russian Orthodox state reflect the experiences of its non-Orthodox subjects? Similarly, in what ways do the archives of a self-consciously atheistic state reflect the experiences of its religious communities? What linguistic and paleographic challenges attend the study of Russia’s Muslim populations? Crucially, is knowledge of Russian insufficient for studying these populations, as Khalid and Bobrovnikov seem to suggest? Have historians in the former Soviet Union and the West overcome the barriers that separated them prior to 1991? Finally, to what extent can debates about the relationship between power and knowledge in other colonial contexts help historians make sense of Russia’s colonial situations?
In what follows, I address some of these questions as they relate to the articles below. In all cases, the essays provide historians of Russia with compelling reasons to consult archives in studying its relationship with the Islamic world. In most cases, I am persuaded by what the authors have to say about the possibilities and limitations of conducting this research. It seems clear, however, that some of the questions raised by the authors cannot be satisfactorily answered until we know more about how tsarist and Soviet archives came into being, functioned, and evolved as institutions, both as repositories of information and as part of the machinery of rule. The essays, then, underscore the need for further research into the histories of post-Soviet archives (the same could be said with regard to Ottoman archives).^[15] They demonstrate the foundational importance of archives for historical study, even as they draw attention to the challenges historians face in using archives to produce knowledge about Russia’s past.
The papers evince the progress that historians in the former Soviet Union and the West have made in overcoming some of the barriers that formerly separated them. Prior to 1991 it was all too common for historians to divide into camps and take up partisan positions on specific topics, particularly concerning questions of empire and religion on the territory of the Soviet Union. In discussing Russian and Soviet empire-building in Caucasia and Central Asia, the authors of the essays below demonstrate a commitment to writing history based on the critical examination of sources, as opposed to a priori theory. They find no use for such formulas as “prison of nations,” “lesser evil,” “friendship of nations,” or “voluntary incorporation.” Nor do they attempt to reduce the history of Russia’s relations with the Islamic world to a story the former’s “aggression” and the latter’s “victimization.” Instead, they show that Russian official thinking about Islam and Muslims was complex and contradictory, and that Muslims played a variety of roles within the tsarist and Soviet states. To judge by the papers in Part Two of the forum, the epistemic and methodological concerns of historians in Russia and the West have converged to a remarkable degree.
The articles contribute to our understanding of the history of Russia’s relationship with the Islamic world in a number of ways. Perhaps most important, they demonstrate that the Muslim question figured, often prominently, in Russian political thinking whenever and wherever the state and Muslims interacted. Sanikidze and Arapov stress the dynamic quality of tsarist policy toward Muslims. Sanikidze argues that this policy was “not static,” but rather “changed depending on circumstances.” According to Arapov, the government’s approach to Muslims was inconsistent (persecution and toleration, benign neglect and depraved indifference characterized policy at certain times and in certain places), and, in the long run, “contradictory.” On the one hand, the government sought to manage Russia’s Muslims through state institutions in which Muslims themselves were encouraged to play (sometimes leading) roles. On the other hand, some Russian elites (representatives of what Arapov calls “official Orthodoxy,” primarily missionaries) hoped to integrate the Empire’s Muslims into an ethnically homogeneous and culturally unified body politic on the basis of education in Russian-language schools. This dream was doomed to fail, however, in part because the interests of its champions were not shared by the government, which officially recognized Islam as the religion of millions of Russian subjects, and whose most perspicacious bureaucrats understood that the state was in no position to weaken Islam in the eyes of its adherents. These bureaucrats believed that in designing policy, the government should either take seriously the interests of its Muslim subjects or else not interfere in their affairs. Arapov’s article and other writings,^[16] which are based on extensive research conducted in state archives, demonstrate that the Muslim question, understood as a political problem, has commanded the serious attention of Russian central authorities since the reign of Catherine II if not earlier.^[17] It is worth noting, however, that Arapov has hardly anything to say about those aspects of Muslim life that did not involve the Russian state. The papers by Khalid and Bobrovnikov go some way toward explaining why this is so.
Read together or separately, the papers also convey a sense of the complexity of the relationship between tsarist and Soviet authorities, on the one hand, and Muslims, on the other. Given the heterogeneity of the Russian Empire’s populations, and that difference has increasingly come to be seen as a characteristic feature of empire in general and of Russia’s empire in particular,^[18] some readers may find it difficult to accept Khalid’s claim that what he says about Central Asia pertains “in broad outline, to all the Muslim societies under Russian and then Soviet rule.” In fact, there is much in his essay that points to the peculiarity of the region within the context of the Russian history. First, the region was annexed to Russia relatively late, while in other Muslim regions incorporated earlier “we can find a broader range of materials on Muslims.” Second, unlike Orenburg, Crimea, and South Caucasia, Turkestan never had a Muslim spiritual assembly.^[19] One wonders, then, whether the voices of Central Asian Muslims would be more prominent in the archives had they had a longer history of interactions with the state, more opportunities to serve in its institutions, and more time to assimilate its ways. In this connection, it would be interesting to compare the records of Islamic courts in Kazan with those in Tashkent to determine the extent to which Muslim discursive strategies differed from one place to another.
The question of language figures prominently in the second half of the forum. Khalid and Bobrovnikov take historians to task for using Russian-language materials of post-Soviet archives to make sweeping claims about the place of Islam and Muslims in the Russian and Soviet empires. They argue that historians need to attend more carefully to the conditions in which such materials were produced, and to acquire the specialized linguistic and paleographic skills required for studying Muslim communities in North Caucasia and Central Asia. Specifically, Khalid is critical of historians who treat tsarist petitions and Soviet secret police digests, or svodki, as “a transparent vehicle of information” concerning Muslims in those states. The question of whether Robert Crews and Douglas Northrop in fact do this in their work, as Khalid suggests below and elsewhere,^[20] is beyond the scope of this essay. Still, it is doubtful that Crews and Northrop need to be reminded not to interpret their sources as “forthright representations of reality.” Calls for “a more cautious engagement with archived materials,”^[21] and for greater attention to be paid to the conditions in which they are produced,^[22] are fashionable among advocates of postmodern history and students of postcolonial studies, but they are not new.^[23] Surely Crews and Northrop already know that their sources and the archives they cull them from are problematic. They would likely agree with Khalid and Bobrovnikov in urging historians of Russia’s Muslim communities not to rely on a single source or kind of source, to be ever mindful of the limitations of state-generated sources concerning Muslims, and to consult sources generated outside state institutions by non-state actors.
In emphasizing the limitations of Russian-language materials for studying Muslims in the Russian and Soviet empires, Khalid and Bobrovnikov also call for greater attention to be paid to questions of translation in using archival sources. For Khalid the problem has to do with the strategies Muslims deployed in communicating with state agents, and with the processes of producing the documents preserved in the archives. The Muslim voices of these documents, he argues, have been transformed in ways that create distance – both linguistic and conceptual – between the original message and its final form and content. The question is how much distance, and the answer, it seems to me, will vary from document to document, from genre to genre, from place to place, and will depend on the specific conditions in which a given document was produced. What do historians know about these conditions? In the case of Soviet svodki, Khalid states that historians in fact know “very little” about the circumstances surrounding their production. Bobrovnikov says something similar with regard to state-generated Arabic translations of tsarist law. Clearly, more work needs to be done to determine the quality of translations executed under the auspices of, say, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, or the Tauride Muslim Spiritual Assembly, or the NKVD. But as I suggested at the beginning of this article, and as Bobrovnikov shows in discussing the case of a certain Sheykh Khusein, it seems equally clear that Muslim voices can be heard in Russian translation, even (and perhaps especially) when they speak in an Islamic language of local opposition to tsarist and Soviet rule.
If the Muslim voices historians encounter in post-Soviet archives are “problematic,” as Khalid and Bobrovnikov cogently argue, it is worth asking whether their voices are more likely to be heard in documents written by Muslims in Muslim languages, addressed to Muslims, and preserved in Muslim archives. Consider the case of the Democratic Republic and Azerbaijan (1918-1929) and the People’s Soviet Republic of Bukhara (BNSR, 1920-1924). According to Khalid, these short-lived states related to Muslims in ways that differed from those of the tsarist and Soviet states. BNSR officials, for example, spoke to Muslims in the “conceptual language of Muslim modernism,” in ways that reflected and refracted debates over political and cultural reforms then taking place in the Ottoman Empire and Central Asia. A Khalidian critique of these archives, however, might question whether these documents reflect anything more than the concerns of the state and the ways that Muslims interacted with it. What, if anything, are they likely to tell us about the lives of Muslims who sought to avoid contact with the BNSR and its agents, or who were either ignorant of, or not interested in, intellectuals’ debates concerning reform? Like all sources, these too would seem to have their limitations.
One also wonders to what extent petitions of Muslim supplicants addressed to Muslim rulers differed from those addressed to Russian rulers. To get a sense of how strikingly similar such petitions could be – in terms of both form and function – it is worth comparing the Kabardian petition discussed at the beginning of this essay with the petition of a certain Rahim Iaiji that has come down to us in Persian and been preserved among the papers of Karim Khan Zand, who ruled in Iran in the second half of the eighteenth century.^[24] Similarly, it is interesting to compare the same Kabardian petition with Russian peasant petitions from roughly the same time.^[25] In both cases, the tsar’s “slaves” express distress and seek redress; they talk about the ways their lives intersect with those of others – some salaried, others not, by the state. They address specific concerns, usually sources of pain of one kind or another. Their narratives of suffering chronicle times of trouble. To petition the tsar and his officials was by definition to engage the state, but the form of communication did not determine its content, which could and often did touch on aspects of petitioners’ lives that had little or nothing to do with the state. Still, Khalid’s main argument is sound: historians are unlikely to recover the totality of Muslim experience under tsars and commissars if they rely solely on materials preserved in state archives.
Every government has its reasons for generating, receiving, and preserving documents. The forms that these documents take, and the content they contain, can reveal much about the ways a government views itself and its place in the world. No government is omnipotent or omniscient, however; its ways of seeing and understanding are the result of its experiences and fantasies, past and present, and are therefore limited. Some of these experiences are shaped by individuals and groups whose interests are not entirely consonant with those of the government in question, and may be antithetical, even hostile, to them.
In the case of the Kabardian petition discussed above, its form no more determines its content than the color of a man’s skin determines his character, to paraphrase a famous American “subaltern.” Although framed as a petition (proshenie), the document is in fact a laundry list of complaints about tsarist policies and practices in North Caucasia. Its authors speak to the representatives of a state, but they also speak about relations among themselves. The document is polyphonic, containing and constraining multiple voices and perspectives, tsarist and Muslim. The process by which these perspectives are turned into what Edward Carr called “the facts of history” is complex and involves still another voice, that of the historian. To paraphrase Carr, the document in question can only tell us what its authors thought had happened, or thought ought to happen or would happen, or what they wanted others to think they thought, or even only what they themselves thought they thought.^[26] In using such sources to study transnational and cross-confessional interactions in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, historians clearly have their interpretative work cut out for them. Having insisted on the need for the critical examination of sources since at least the time of Leopold von Ranke, they are well positioned to carry out this work. They understand that the production of knowledge about the past always requires highly skilled and difficult work among these sources, whose languages must be construed with the utmost care.

* * *

In light of what I have said above, and what the papers demonstrate below, it is difficult to agree with the assertion of Jan Plamper that “there are no intrinsic reasons for [historians] to work in archives.”^[27] Ranke laid out the case over a century ago for the importance of archives to the work of historians. Even critics of archives understand that they are foundational for all historians, that archives are “one condition of having a historical record in the first place.”^[28] In fact, there are several reasons for historians to conduct research in archives, some of which can be found between the lines of Plamper’s own study. First, it is worth asking why institutions and individuals have gone to such lengths to restrict and gain access to archives. Why did Prince Mikhail Shcherbatov, official historiographer at the court of Catherine II, seek access to state archives, and why did he require “special permission” to work in them? What does it say that the appointment of directors to state archives has been the prerogative of kings and emperors? What possessed Aleksandr Pushkin to seek Nicholas I’s permission to conduct archival research, and to travel to Kazan and provincial Orenburg to consult archives there? Why did Khrushchev turn to the archives in his struggle with rivals? These individuals turned to archives for the same reason that historians do: in order to find evidence about the past. (How they approached, and what they intended to do, with that evidence is another matter entirely.) Whatever else they may be, archives are repositories of evidence about the past. Since the critical assessment of this evidence is the historian’s responsibility, it is difficult to imagine how this might be accomplished outside the walls of archives.
Another reason for historians of Russia in general and its Muslim borderlands in particular to conduct archival research has to do with the circumstances in which knowledge about the past was produced in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Prior to the annexation of a given territory and the incorporation of given people, borderlands history is to a significant degree foreign relations history. Historians face two main challenges in studying Russian borderlands, one having to do with historiography, the other with sources. As Alfred Rieber has argued, the nature of tsarist autocracy and Soviet government “virtually dictated that the scholarly history of foreign relations would take on the coloration of officialdom.”^[29] In both states, access to sources was granted to people close to the centers of tsarist and Soviet power. It is difficult to overstate the distorting effects that this has had on the interpretation of Russian borderlands and foreign policy. It is not only that tsarist and Soviet histories of the state’s expansion into Caucasia and Central Asia are biased, but also that the sources published under these regimes are extremely problematic due to the highly politicized circumstances in which they were produced. And to judge by Jonathan Brent’s recent memoir, tsarist and Soviet traditions continue to shape the conditions in which historians work in the “New Russia.”^[30] In light of all this and recent trends in Central Eurasia, the reasons for historians to conduct research in post-Soviet archives are both compelling and urgent.