The Caucasus and Central Asia are still largely understudied areas. Their geographic, ethnic, linguistic, cultural and religious diversity has led to a high degree of scholarly compartmentalization, and the political conflicts in the regions make it hard to maintain a general view on the Caucasus and Central Asia as coherent regions; the most common way to do is is from the perspective of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union which “gathered” and administered the two regions and gave them names and definitions. Against this background the two volumes on the North Caucasus and Central Asia, in the series Okrainy Rossiiskoi Imperii, are highly welcome. Both volumes are confronted with the same problems, namely (1) to integrate the results of recent research on the regions into the fabric of the highly dynamic and topical discourse on Russian imperialism, (2) to keep a balanced view by taking the inhabitants and sources of Central Asia and the Caucasus seriously, and 3) to bring the results of the post-Soviet Russian research schools into connection with Western scholarship, mainly by coming to terms with the Soviet heritage in scholarship. My following remarks, written from the perspective of Islamic and Oriental Studies, will concentrate on the last two issues; and my conclusion is that the two volumes solve these problems in very different ways.

I.

Severnyi Kavkaz v sostave Rossiiskoi imperii (Moscow: NLO, 2007) is a survey of the history of the North Caucasus from the eighteenth century to ca. 1910 and is firmly grounded in the authors’ long-standing archival and field work. It represents a clear break with Soviet surveys of North Caucasian history. Previous Russian monographs read the Caucasus through the prism of Russian history, and within a Marxist framework: the goal was to detect classes and class conflicts, imperial aims, colonial and local forms of exploitation, national liberation movements, as well as indigenous trends of enlightenment. These trends would, in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, culminate in the acceptance of socialism and, ultimately, the Bolshevik project. All this was meant to acknowledge and justify the progress that ultimately evolved from Russia’s taking over the region and the Soviet Union’s development project. The chronology of the Caucasus was dictated by the crucial years in Russian history – 1825, 1856 and 1861, 1905 and 1917. Similar anachronistic and teleological frameworks have been used in (post-) Soviet historiography on the individual republics and their titular (post-) Soviet nation(s).
In contrast, the team of Vladimir O. Bobrovnikov and Irina L. Babich took the North Caucasus seriously, in and of itself. Perhaps the biggest novelty of this approach is that the authors decided not to simply add up sections on the individual sub-regions (West, Central, Eastern North Caucasus) but to describe, in each chapter, the history of the North Caucasus as a whole; most chapters draw simultaneously from case studies from the Adyges, Balkars and Kabardinians (the foremost fields of expertise of I. L. Babich and V. Kh. Kazharov), the Ossetians, as well as the Chechens and the various Daghestani peoples (where Vladimir Bobrovnikov is most at home). The design of the volume opens up ample opportunities for comparisons, to detect similarities and differences that usually go unnoticed because Caucasian history is in general so compartmentalized.
Bobrovnikov and Babich regard the North Caucasus as a frontier zone of peaceful and violent interaction and of various population movements in all directions, as well as of imperial reform experiments with often unexpected results. In their discussions the authors give due acknowledgment to the influence of American, French, and German research on the regions, and they build bridges to the current theoretical discourses in Western scholarship. While never letting go of the general (and by default: imperial) chronology, their chapters follow not the logic of the Russian state but that of North Caucasian developments: after an introduction into Russian foreign policies with regard to the Caucasus in the eighteenth century (ch. 2), special chapters are devoted to the interrelationship between Cossacks and Highlanders (ch. 3), Islam and Christianity (4), the Caucasian War, the subsequent uprisings and the Muslim mass emigration (5, 6 and 7), the administrative and peasant reforms and the economical development of the North Caucasus in the last third of the nineteenth century (8, 9 and 10), the state’s attempt to contain Islam and to promote Orthodoxy (11), culture and politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (12), as well as the 1905 revolution and its aftermath in the North Caucasus (13).
The discussion of Shamil and the Caucasian War rightfully presents “Muridism” not as a Sufi movement, as is held by most Western and Russian research, but as the apex of an indigenous shari’a movement based on the strive for introducing Islamic law, and therefore as a movement. It was directed in the first place against the Muslim defenders of customary law (‘adat), with the fight against the Russians coming only at a later point. Some of the subsequent topics have never been subject to special research before; for instance, the rebellions after 1859 until the early twentieth century in Daghestan and Chechnya (ch. 6) have conventionally been completely overshadowed by the previous jihad under Shamil in Soviet and Russian historiography, just like the 1905 Revolution and the Stolypin period (ch. 13) were usually treated only briefly as a prelude to the 1917 revolution (which was for good reason left outside of the scope of the volume); and the state’s attempts to integrate Islam into the administrative system in Daghestan is here for the first time discussed together with state promotion of Orthodoxy in Ossetia and other regions (11). With regard to population movements, the chapter on the Muslim mass emigration after the Caucasus War (7) is a good synthesis of research that is usually done only on individual ethnic groups, or on specific locations where they ended up; and the factor of forced mobility continuously also comes to the fore in many other chapters where Bobrovnikov discusses the phenomenon of forced exile to Russia, Ukraine, Siberia, or Central Asia.
The work thus discusses Imperial views, decrees and projects, and it also pays special attention to the role of Russian scholars in the process of administration and reform. But its focus is always, and very pleasantly, put on what happened on the ground; it is mostly the wealth of regional and local sources unearthed by the authors – in Russian, but for the North Eastern Caucasus also in Arabic, the most used language of writing in Daghestan and Chechnya until the 1920s – that provides us with new insights.
The volume also contains two interesting epistemological discussions: chapter one on Russian/Soviet and Western traditions of Caucasian Studies (by Bobrovnikov and Babich), and the closing chapter 14 on Russian Orientalism with regard to the Northern Caucasus (written by Bobrovnikov). According to the authors, post-Soviet Caucasian Studies in Russia is still in crisis: Soviet ideological stereotypes, but also the mentality of empiricism – to study “what really was” – are still very widespread, and the authors find that Western trends – like the awareness of importance of Orientalist imageries (Edward Said) and the notion of power and discourse (Foucault) – have largely gone unnoticed in Russian scholarship. By exploring ways out of this impasse, the volume is a sharp criticism of the state of the arts in Russia (and in the North Caucasus). Most of the chapters start with a statement on how little has been done so far on certain important aspects, and it was obviously Western research on other regions (e.g. on French colonialism in Algeria) that often provided the stimulus for asking these new questions. The volume is thus an inspiring attempt to break with old lines of segregation between Russian and Western scholarship, and to integrate Russian historical and Oriental studies on the Caucasus into global trends of research. However, the authors are also conscious of the Soviet and post-Soviet achievements of their own research schools (in the first place, of the Moscow Institute of Oriental Studies and Institute of Ethnography and Anthropology, but also of the Daghestani school of Oriental studies), especially in the field of source studies.
More than just an acknowledgment of crisis, I would therefore argue that the volume is a clear manifestation of a sound, and very justified, reassertion of self-confidence by Russian scholars on the Caucasus. The combination of analyzing imperial designs and practices and local (and especially Muslim) sources leaves, in my opinion, no room at all for suspecting the authors of harboring a neo-imperial point of view – after all, the series “Borderlands of the Russian Empire” is designed to search for how the center “structured” the peripheries, and the local elites figure not very prominently on the agenda of the general editors of the series (see their foreword, p. 6).
Designed as a textbook for students, the North Caucasus volume is written in a language comprehensible for non-specialists, with only a very brief reference apparatus but a list of recommended literature for each chapter. The appendices contain several colored maps and valuable sets of statistical data; they also include three separate essays by A. E. Krishtopa, V. Kh. Kazharov and D. Iu. Arapov that could obviously not easily be integrated into the main corpus. Needless to say, the book needs to be translated into English – we do not have anything comparable in the West.

II.

The Central Asian volume, Tsentral’naia Aziia v sostave Rossiiskoi Imperii (Moscow: NLO, 2008), is more difficult to review, for the individual chapters differ very much in depth and (as admitted on p. 29) also in their views and interpretations. I will concentrate here on the first chapter, which is also meant as an introduction to the volume, as well as on chapters two, three and four on the conquest of Central Asia, chapter 11 on the religious policy of the Russian authorities in Central Asia, and chapter 15 on the image of Central Asia in Russian society. Unfortunately, it is often hard to guess what sources the authors used, for there is no separate selected bibliography for each chapter.
According to chapter one, the volume intends “to overcome the ‘national perspective’ on Central Asia, which was formed in the Soviet period, and which has become dominant in the 1990s” (11). A foremost concern of the authors is to show that the “entry” (vkhozhdenie) of Central Asia into the Russian Empire was an “inevitable” process that ultimately brought an end to chaos and stagnation in the region. This agenda is set in chapter one’s brief overview of Central Asian history from the fifth millennium B.C. to the mid/late nineteenth century. It can be asked why such a sketch is necessary in a book that deals with the Russian period; if it is decided to include such an overview in a textbook, one would assume that it should be written with utmost care. Instead, the authors frankly state that it was not their task to describe “all facts, names and events, even the most important ones” (p. 27, and in this point they were very successful: the Seljuqs, the pride of present-day Turkmenistan, are not even mentioned), but “to show in a general perspective the factors that facilitated Central Asia’s entry into the Russian Empire” (27). This historical overview is mainly one of the ups and downs of warring dynasties, of violence and of concomitant cultural decline. This deplorable state of Central Asia appears ultimately as a result of the Mongol invasion in the thirteenth century, from which “urban civilization never really recovered before the nineteenth century” (20). Thus by the time the Russians advanced,

“the blossoming of Central Asia was a thing of the medieval past: the economy did not develop, agriculture had a primitive character, political life was dominated by arbitrariness (proizvol), in the spiritual field scholasticism^[1] prevailed, and the rulers gave no guarantees for the inviolability of property and personal life. Therefore in Central Asia the necessary economic and political conditions for an independent transition from a pre-industrial society to higher organizational forms of economic and social activities were not present” (26).

(We will come back to this quote below). Russia appears as a savior from the heritage of the Mongols – and, so it seems, from the Eastern world in general. The subjugation of Central Asia by one of the “world states” was “unavoidable” (neizbezhno), and for “objective reasons” (Soviet terminology!), and with some luck (here called sluchainye prichiny) it was Russia who fulfilled this task (26) – and one might add, her historical mission. While this might be a valid opinion, it is surprising to see that to prove Russia’s progressive influence is the declared goal in a volume of 2008. Even more devastating is the circumstance that the historical overview is written with utmost negligence and mainly based on outdated literature – above all, the works of the venerable Orientalist Vaslilii Bartol’d and the Stalinist Istoriia narodov Uzbekistana from 1947.
Chapter 2 describes the Kazakh tribes’ “joining” (prisoedinenie) with the Russian Empire, and their “approaching” Russia (sblizhenie). The narrative is only too familiar from Soviet textbooks: Russia was interested in securing trade routes through the Steppe and initiated diplomatic relations; the Kazakh tribes were being attacked and expelled from their territories by Jungars, Chinese and Kalmyks, and therefore “voluntarily” (dobrovol’no) took oaths to the Russian throne because the Russian troops protected the Kazakhs; this policy drew Russia more and more to the south, and made it necessary to build fortification lines. The authors avoid a discussion of the colonial character of this conquest. In particular, they leave unanswered what it means when a Kazakh sultan “voluntarily” (or “semi-voluntarily,” as is conceded at one point) takes an oath. We know that the Russian officers and administrators interpreted this act mostly as a promise of eternal submission and acknowledgment of Russian rule, as well as a readiness to become part of Russia with all its consequences; from their point of view, a withdrawal of allegiance could rightfully be punished. For the Kazakhs, the oath meant a strategic, and possibly temporary, alliance against common foreign or Kazakh enemies, and it was not meant to infringe upon their authority among their tribal groups (also, under certain conditions it was common to promise allegiance to more than one neighboring power). Finally, an oath to the Emperor could also mean an elevation of the respective Khan’s or Sultan’s status and power with regard to competitors within his group. All of these aspects are not even mentioned; they were however skillfully elaborated by Michael Khodarkovsky in his Russia’s Steppe Frontier of 2001, which is included in the bibliography. Left out of the picture are not only the inner dynamics of Kazakh communities, including the Russian practice of amanat (hostage taking) to ensure compliance, but also the interplay between Kazakhs, Cossacks and other settlers – by comparison to Bobrovnikov’s and Babich’s North Caucasus, the Steppe is described here not as a porous frontier zone but as an object of skillfully and successfully encapsulating native populations by fortified lines and then by administrative borders and regulations. Kazakh customary legal institutions are mentioned in a very imprecise manner: thus it is misleading to describe Zheti Zhargy, the concept of Kazakh customary law, as a Kazakh svod zakonov (p. 23; similarly, also the Mongol Yasa was never “codified”, as maintained on p. 22). It is equally misleading to state that that Kenesary Kasymov, in his rebellion of 1837 to 1847, instituted courts of elders that “judged according to the shari’a,” suggesting that the Khan introduced Islamic law against customary law (55).
It is made clear that Russian penetration proceeded by co-opting the Kazakh (mostly Chingizid) nobility, who were first acknowledged or installed as local rulers and then brought under Russian jurisdiction; in the process, their authority was effectively curtailed by putting liaison officers at their side (rightfully called sistema popechitel’skogo absoliutizma, p. 58), and ultimately their authority was completely abolished. Resistance against the Russian encroachment is not given much space (for instance, Kazakh participation in the Pugachev rebellion is mentioned in half of one sentence) or depicted as stemming from a “despot” like Kenesary (p. 55, another much-debated issue in historiography). Nothing is said about the resistance of the Turkmen tribes, who appear only as an amorphous entity in the shadow of the Uzbeks and Kazakhs throughout the book. What sense does it make to talk about a voluntary joining if those who “joined” by expressing their loyalty on Russian terms – parts of the elites – were marginalized or eliminated in the process? The term “colonialism” is completely avoided (and so is the term “imperialism” – even when talking about the ambitions of the Russian state to compete with other “great states” in Central Asia; p. 133). The taking possession of Kazakh grazing grounds by Slavic settlers and the ensuing conflicts are mostly described in the terms of a pereselencheskoe dvizhenie. The horrors of Russian punitive expeditions (a major theme in the North Caucasian volume) are left out of the picture.
The volume is probably at its best where it describes the development of Tsarist policies, and where the authors elaborate on all kinds of projects, proposals and revisions (and I assume that my colleagues discuss these issues). Equally competent is chapter 11 on Tsarist religious policy (presumably authored by D.Iu. Arapov, the foremost expert in this field); here we read, for the first time in the book, about Catherine the Great’s policy of using Islam and Tatar mullas for drawing the Kazakhs closer to Orenburg (and to the Russian Muftiat in Ufa). Islamic issues are discussed briefly in chapter 9, where we learn that Muslim identity was stronger than any other self-identification in Central Asia. However, this does not lead to a fresh discussion of Islam: Muslim practice is discussed in terms that could come from a Soviet anti-Islamic manual (“superstition”, “sooth-sayers”, “shamans”, and Sufism turning into a “conservative social institution”, pp. 205-207). A more dynamic picture of Islam and Sufism in Central Asia could have been obtained from the recent works of Bakhtiiar Babadzhanov, Devin DeWeese, Allen J. Frank, Anke von Kuegelgen, Ashirbek Muminov and Bruce Privratsky, and other scholars of Central Asia. Chapter 8 covers developments in culture and education; here the authors come to the conclusion that “[a]lthough the system of Islamic education covered a huge part of the population and every boy obtained certain skills and kinds of knowledge, in general the level of literacy in Central Asia remained very low” (160) – obviously meaning that a surprisingly high number of children went to a traditional Islamic school but learned nothing. This sets the stage for the emergence of mixed Russian-native schools and of the Islamic reform movement of the Jadids (where Tatar teachers are rightfully mentioned as having kul’turtregerskie funktsii in Central Asia, p. 169). The Tsarist authorities then decided to obstruct Tatar schooling efforts for fear of “Panislam and Panturkism” (p. 170), without giving the reader any evaluation what these highly disputed terms meant, and what they concealed; equally disappointing and devoid of meaning is the Soviet-style reference to Panislam and Panturkism in a later chapter, where these “ideologies” are incomprehensibly subsumed under “uzkonatsionalisticheskie interesy” (250).
A major problem with the Central Asian volume is that the authors rarely admit the many blank spots in the historiography; instead, they tend to gloss over all lacunae by relying on outdated and misleading Soviet literature. One of these blank spots is the issue of slavery; the liberation of Russian prisoners is mentioned among the foremost goals of the Russian conquest of Khiva and the Russian ban on slave trade is briefly referred to as a factor that ended the Kazakh raids on trade caravans. But the impact of this ban on society and how it was put into practice are nowhere discussed. The networks of slave trade (and also of Islamic education) did not stop before the Anglo-Russian demarcation and they reached deep into Afghanistan. In this respect, Afghanistan would have been an interesting topic not only from the perspective of the “Great Game” (82-85) but also for discussing how the colonial boundaries were probably much more permeable than the imperial map of this volume wants us to believe.
Chapter 15, “The Image of the Central Asian Region in Russian Society,” is a nice overview of images about the Orient and Central Asia in particular and it gives an insightful account of how stereotypes changed from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries with special sections on scientific expeditions, Russian art with Central Asian motifs, as well as on Russian perception of Central Asian art. By comparison to the Orientalism debate in the North Caucasian volume, however, the authors here do completely without references to Edward Said and the subsequent debates on Western forms Orientalisms. It is made clear that most Russian Orientalists were chinovniki, working for the state’s interest, but due to the neglect of the wider Orientalism debate, the connection between discourse and power is not addressed directly.
Curiously, the analysis of the Russian imperial discourse (imperskii diskurs) in chapter 15 can be seen as a refutation of the colonial apologetics in chapter one of the book. Let us compare the first chapter’s summary on the deplorable state of Central Asia before the Russian conquest (which I quoted in length above) with the following statement on imperial Orientalist discourse in chapter 15:

“Under the influence of these [Russian] publications [about Central Asia] emerged a rather stable imperial stereotype about the lack of socio-political development of Asian societies; this stereotype turned the conquest of these societies by European powers into [the assumption that it was to the Central Asians’] welfare. This stereotype contained the idea of half-wild Khans, who are blind tools in the hands of Dervishes; of a half-hungry army only busy with pillaging; of industrious common subjects who are viewed by their own government as a herd of sheep that can easily be sheared, and who constantly live in fear for their lives and property, and who see their salvation only in foreign occupation” (319).

Clearly, the last chapter reveals that the views of the first chapter are a continuation of the imperial nineteenth-century discourse!
In conclusion, the Central Asian volume is very heterogeneous and largely written against current historiography in the Central Asian republics. However, while being guided by a desire not to describe Russia’s role in Kazakhstan and Central Asia as colonial, the book does not clearly discuss why this should not be done. In most of the volume, this confrontation is therefore only the subtext. Remarkably, a direct debate of (and assault on) some recent Kazakh and Uzbek works has been delegated to the appendices, which contain (next to useful statistics) two review articles on recent Kazakh and Uzbek historiography authored by S. V. Timchenko and V. V. Germanova, respectively. While I agree that state-sponsored historiography in Central Asia is mostly in very bad condition, one could have avoided the personal and polemic tone in these reviews (see, for instance, Timchenko’s sarcastic question if the Kazakh Academy of Sciences might be compared to an Indian reservation, p. 355). What the volume as well as its appendices makes obvious is that Russian as well as Central Asian scholarship on Central Asia are both still rooted in Soviet conceptions, so that any “anti-colonialist” perspective smacks of the Pokrovskii school of the 1920s and 1930s, while a defense of Russia’s progressive mission inevitably remind us of the “Minor Evil” debate of later Soviet times. The volume under review misses the opportunity to break out of this Soviet straitjacket. Primarily as a reaction to Central Asian nationalist excesses and “falsifications,” and only half-heartedly taking into account Western trends in research, the volume does not manage to provide a balanced picture. Instead of raising questions and introducing reflection and debate, it defends one old view against other old views.