This essay focuses on one particular aspect of the imperial conquest and colonization – a group of the indispensable intermediaries who provided the first and crucial link between the imperial government and indigenous societies. Whether they served as interpreters, government officials, or military officers, they shared a similar background. They were the native sons who, for various reasons, usually as hostages or captives, found themselves in Russia, where they were schooled in Russian and sent back to the regions of their origin. They were a focal point of contact between the different cultures and civilizations, and a critical filter of information that flowed between the Russian outsiders and the native societies. Such individuals existed in the history of all empires and without them the imperial conquest and rule would have been impossible.
Below I present the stories of a few such individuals from the nineteenth-century North Caucasus. I conclude with some thoughts on the role of the Russified indigenous elite in the Russian empire and the nature of the Russian empire in Asia.

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Semen Semenovich Atarshchikov was a Russian officer. A dashing Cossack uniform, a bushy mustache, a tall hat of black wool, a fine saber, and a pistol – in short, nothing in his appearance distinguished him from other fellow officers stationed as he was in the frontier regiments of the North Caucasus. Yet his command of four languages, in addition to Russian, including Arabic and two regional tongues – Chechen and Kumyk – clearly set Semen apart from his compatriots. His intimate knowledge of regional languages and cultures made him an indispensable translator and expert on the highlanders of the North Caucasus.
Atarshchikov’s professional star seemed to have risen steadily if not spectacularly. In 1830, his service as a translator was needed in St. Petersburg, where he joined the Caucasus Mountain half squadron, better known as the Circassian Guard. Two years later, as the foremost expert on the Chechens, now promoted and decorated, he was dispatched back to the Caucasus, where the new imam, Shamil, led the native peoples in the long and bloody war against the Russians. In 1836, Atarshchikov was transferred to the northwest Caucasus and appointed a superintendent of the Karachay people. During all these years he earned the respect and trust of one of the top Russian military commanders in the Caucasus, the notorious Baron Grigorii Khristoforovich von Zass. An eccentric general equally known for his courage and cruelty, Zass regularly dispatched Atarshchikov on sensitive missions deep into the mountains, and Atarshchikov always performed admirably. But in 1841, at the age of thirty-four, suddenly and without any apparent reason, Atarshchikov fled to seek refuge among the Adyge highlanders.
Such desertions were far more frequent than Russian officials were willing to admit. Typically, the deserters were rank-and-file soldiers and Cossacks who fled to escape justice or abuses of their officers. Some simply preferred a few years of freedom to twenty-five years of grueling military service. But a deserting officer whose previous ten years of service were an example of diligence and dedication was not something that Russian officials could easily dismiss or deny.
Atarshchikov’s story became even more intriguing when, four months after his escape, he chose to return to Russia and ask for pardon. When his petition reached the imperial desk in St. Petersburg, the Russian emperor, Nicholas I, convinced by the assurances of General Zass, agreed to sign a pardon. But imperial pardon from the charges of treason was not synonymous with imperial trust. Nicholas I, who came to power in the tumultuous atmosphere of the December 1825 uprising, saw sedition and treachery everywhere. The imperial decree ordered Atarshchikov to be transferred to a Cossack regiment – in Finland.
Perhaps the emperor’s suspicions were not entirely unfounded, for shortly before his transfer, Atarshchikov again fled to the mountains. This time he converted to Islam, married the daughter of a local noble, and actively participated in raids across the Russian frontier. In 1845, during one such raid, Atarshchikov’s raiding companion, a fugitive Cossack Fedor Fenev, treacherously shot Atarshchikov, who was asleep. Fenev had decided to surrender to the Russian authorities, and betraying Atarshchikov, who had become one of the most notorious and dangerous raiders, offered Fenev the best hope for a pardon. Shortly after the party of Cossacks arrived to seize him, Semen Atarshchikov died from his wounds.
Semen Atarshchikov’s dramatic life and its tragic end were inseparable from the sense of romance and mystery associated with the Caucasus that by the early nineteenth century became at once Russia’s “Parnassian sanctuary and a bloody battlefield.”^[1] Here, the lives of some of Russia’s best writers, inducted into the military and banished to the region for their opposition to monarchy, came to a similarly abrupt and early end. Aleksandr Bestuzhev-Marlinskii, Russia’s best-selling author of stories set in the Caucasus, was killed there in June 1837 during the disastrous landing expedition at Adler on the Black Sea coast.
Four years later, another Russian writer, Mikhail Lermontov died in the infamous duel of July 1841 in the North Caucasus town of Piatigorsk. Both duelists were enamored of the local culture: Lermontov romanticized the Caucasus in verse and prose, while his opponent, N. S. Martynov, emulated the region’s martial traditions and preferred a distinct mountaineer’s tunic, a woolen hat, and a large dagger to a Russian officer’s uniform. In fact, Lermontov’s mocking of Martynov, whom he called “le chevalier des monts sauvages,” and his sartorial trappings eventually provoked the fatal duel. Imagination and reality in the Caucasus often blended into frontier exoticism.
But the story of Semen Atarshchikov is different and far more complex. For in the end, this model Russian officer also turned out to be a native son of the Caucasus. Indeed, his is the story of the Caucasus itself: a region of seductive landscapes, exotic languages, diverse peoples, ancient customs, tangled identities, and divided loyalties. Semen Atarshchikov’s life is illustration of an encounter between the worlds of the colonizers and the colonized, and of those who, like him, were caught in between.^[2]

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The realization that creating a loyal indigenous elite was best achieved through Russification was not new, yet the increasing calls of Russian administrators that schools be founded for the sons of the local elite remained unanswered. In the 1770s, the Astrakhan governor Krechetnikov suggested that this was the best way to introduce the natives to the Russian way of life and “then no longer there will be a need to take hostages and the natives will convert to Christianity.”^[3] In 1838 the commander of the Special Caucasus Corps, General E. A. Golovin recommended to War Minister A. I. Chernyshev “to create as many Muslim schools as possible to be able to influence the [native] people,” and thus to weaken the hold of Islam.^[4]
But the opening of the regional schools was painfully slow. The first secular school for hostages opened at Fort Nalchik in 1820 but lasted only a few years. In the wake of the 1836 Decree Concerning the Military Schools of the Caucasus Army, several schools for natives were founded in the Russian military regiments to train the sons of indigenous officers and officials in Russian service. The curriculum included math, Russian language, elementary history, geography, singing, and various trades. In 1837, the Stavropol all-male gymnasium and the Derbend secondary school (uchilishche) opened their doors to students. Yet it was not until 1849 that the Stavropol gymnasium began to admit a small number of children of the local elite into a special boarding school founded within the gymnasium for this purpose.
In 1841 Shora Nogmov, a Kabardin scholar and at the time the secretary of the Kabardin Provisional Court, petitioned the Russian military authorities in the Caucasus to open a school for children of the Kabardin nobles in Nalchik. The petition was circulated, and – with the exception of recommending that the teaching of Turkish and Arabic languages be excluded from the curriculum – was quickly approved by various relevant military authorities including War Minister Chernyshev. The petition only needed the approval of Nicholas I, but when it reached his desk, the emperor chose to kill the project. His argument was simple: the assimilation of the native youth is best achieved by placing them among the Russian school children and not by creating a special school for the natives. The native youth, Nicholas pointed out, should be recruited into the Russian military and educated there just as the cantonists were, or sent to the schools founded in the Cossack regiments stationed along the frontier. Thus, the project for the native school at Nalchik ended.^[5]
A major change in the government’s effort to shape the regional elite through Russian education began in 1846 with the arrival in the region of a newly appointed Viceroy, Prince M. S. Vorontsov. Two years later, Vorontsov founded the Transcaucasian educational district. The curriculum was adjusted to local needs, and the school officials at the Stavropol and Ekaterinodar gymnasiums replaced the study of Latin and Greek with instruction in local languages (Adyge and Turkish) and Russian laws and court system. In 1849, a new school for Muslims opened its doors in Derbend to admit 60 children of the local elite.^[6]
The pace of educational activity was slow, hampered by the usual lack of resources and shortage of teachers. In 1848 Vorontsov permitted opening a school at the Cossack settlement of Ekaterinograd; it was finally opened in 1851. The slowest to grow were the schools in local villages and towns. Here, unenthusiastic support of the local population, which was expected to foot the bill for a school, resistance of the ulema, and competition from the mektebs (Islamic elementary schools) served as a powerful barrier to the spread of Russian education. By 1891 there were only five elementary schools in the Adyge lands. These schools taught writing, reading, arithmetic, singing, and, as a nod to the local conditions, offered a course in Islamic theology.
Yet the number of native children enrolled in the Russian schools continued to grow steadily. Throughout the nineteenth century, the Stavropol and Ekaterinodar gymnasiums remained the main educational centers for the indigenous population of the North Caucasus. By 1850, the first group of 11 native students was accepted into the Stavropol gymnasium. In the years 1850–1887, out of 7,181 graduates of the Stavropol gymnasium, nearly a quarter or 1,739 students were from among the indigenous population.^[7]
Somewhat apart stood the Ossetian seminary, which opened at Vladikavkaz in 1836. Theoretically, its 34 students were to become Orthodox priests, but many, in fact, became teachers in public schools. Among the seminary’s graduates were the Ossetin scholars: B. Tsoraev, the first collector of Ossetin folklore, and S. Zhuskaev the first Ossetin ethnographer. It is important to note that throughout the nineteenth century the schools for the sons of the native elite remained under the auspices of the military and ecclesiastical ministries and not the newly formed Caucasus educational administration.^[8]
By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the regional schools were producing a new educated class from among the natives. But in the early nineteenth century, the acculturated indigenous elite was forged in the imperial capital. While constituting different degrees of Russification, acculturation was not always synonymous with assimilation. After all, a fully assimilated native – typically a young convert to Christianity, educated in Russian who also looked and acted Russian – could have commanded little authority in his native society. While the assimilation was always preferred, in the second half of the nineteenth century the Russian authorities became increasingly interested in a different type of acculturated native – one who could represent Russian interests and also remained influential in his own society. He might have worn a Russian military uniform or the civilian dress of a Russian administrator but he would remain a part of his native society, speaking the local language and practicing Islam. In other words, the Russian empire needed a greater number of cultural interlocutors, who could serve as the conduit for transferring the Russian legal, political, and cultural idioms into the indigenous environment.
Let us consider the paths traveled by two individuals whose life and work were among the first to exemplify the Russian influence in the emergence of the ethnic and historic consciousness among the Adyges – Shora Nogma (Russified Nogmov) and Khan-Giray. They were to become the founding fathers of the modern Adyge historical and literary tradition.
Shora Bek-Mirza Nogma was born in 1794 in a small Kabardin aul near Piatigorsk (Beshtau). Shora was prepared to be a mullah, and after studying at a local mekteb, he was sent to pursue religious learning at the prestigious medrese in the town of Enderi in Central Dagestan. After graduating from the medrese in 1812, he returned to his native aul to work as a mullah. After a few years he was chosen as secretary (defterdar) at one of the two Kabardin princely courts (mekhkeme), which later, in 1822, General A. P. Ermolov would merge into one Kabardin Provisional Court based at Fort Nalchik. The position implied a knowledge of Russian, which Nogma began to study with great enthusiasm. Nogma’s linguistic talents caught the attention of the Russian authorities, and after having served as an unofficial interpreter in the Russian army, in 1825 he became the official scribe and interpreter of the First Volga Cossack regiment.
At this time, he already had a good command of five languages apart from his native Kabardin: Arabic, Kumyk, Abaza, Persian, and Russian, and was working to create an alphabet for the Kabardin language. Eager to reach the imperial capital where he could expand his interests in languages and history, in 1828 Nogma petitioned to join the newly formed Circassian Guard. His plans were thwarted by the deportation of his village further south to make room for Russian towns and spas in the present region of the Mineral Waters. After setting up a household at a new place on the Malka river, in 1829 Nogma was appointed as a teacher at a school for native hostages at Fort Nalchik. In 1830, a new opportunity came along when several members of the Circassian Guard returned to the region to recruit young local nobles. Nogmov received an invitation from the commander of the Circassian Guard, S. A. Mukhanov, to teach the members of the unit to read and write in several languages. The Russian authorities, however, preferred chivalrous Circassian horsemen who excelled in martial arts to someone like Nogma whose pursuits were literary. He was allowed to leave but given no travel money. Determined to come to the imperial capital, in April 1830 Shora Nogma departed for St. Petersburg at his own expense to become an arms bearer (the rank-and-file among the nobles) in the Circassian Guard.
As a new member of the Circassian Guard, Shora Nogma found himself under the command of a prominent Adyge prince, Khan-Giray. He was the descendant of an illustrious lineage, the Giray ruling house of the Crimean khans, as was well attested by his full name, Krym-Giray-Muhammed Giray Khan-Giray. Throughout the centuries, the Crimean khans sent their princes to collect slave tribute and to rule the Adyges of the northwest Caucasus. Some of these princes settled there, assimilated, and became a part of the Adyge clan structure. Indeed, Khan-Giray’s father was one of the chiefs of the Khamysh (Khmish) clan of the Bzhedug tribe, a subdivison of the Adyge people residing on the left bank of the Kuban river east of the newly founded Russian fort of Ekaterinodar (presently Krasnodar). Sometime in the early 1800s, Khan-Giray’s father, Muhammed-Giray, attracted by offers from the Russian authorities, decided to cross the Kuban river, which separated the Ottoman from the Russian borderlands, and settle on the Russian side. In 1816, Muhammed-Giray was rewarded for his loyalty to Russia: he was formally enlisted in the Black See Cossack Host and given one of the highest ranks, the Host Captain (voiskovoi starshina). Following the established practice among the native peoples of the North Caucasus, Khan-Giray was sent away to spend his adolescent years in the family of his atalyk, an old and distinguished notable of the Shapsug tribe of the Adyges. There, in a mountain aul, Khan-Giray was groomed to be a leader, studied Arabic, the Quran, and Islamic laws, and imbibed the martial spirit of his people. In January 1830, Khan-Giray joined the Circassian Guard as a highly decorated lieutenant of the Russian army who had already distinguished himself in Russia’s wars against the Persians and Ottomans between 1826 and 1829. An impeccable officer and well-educated charming socialite, Khan-Giray was welcomed in the literary salons of the capital where he became personally acquainted with many Russian men of letters, including Alexander Pushkin.
Shora Nogma too had vigorously pursued his intellectual interests: establishing close ties with several professors at the St. Petersburg University, studying languages, and devoting much of his time to the writing of the first Kabardin grammar. Upon his return to Kabarda in 1838, he was appointed secretary of the Kabardin Provisional Court and was in a position to choose native candidates for studies at the military institutions in the imperial capital, the Stavropol gymnasium, and the Circassian Guards. Throughout this time Nogmov continued working on the Kabardin grammar and alphabet based on the Cyrillic as well as collecting and translating Adyge legends and tales. Five years later Nogmov died during his visit to St. Petersburg. While his grammar remained incomplete, his collection of Adyge tales was published in Russian in 1861 under the title A History of the Adyge People.
In the late 1830s Khan-Giray completed his treatise “Notes on Circassia,” compiled the Circassian alphabet on the basis of the Cyrillic script, and began to write down Adyge folklore, stories, and history. Nicholas I called Khan-Giray “the Karamzin of Circassia” which later did not prevent him from banning “Notes on Circassia” from publication. Shortly after Khan-Giray’s premature death at the age of 34, his collection of historical tales appeared in publication under the title Circassian Legends and Tales.
In the late imperial and early Soviet period in particular, Khan-Giray was considered as founder of the historical and literary tradition of the Western Adyge, the Circassians, and Shora Nogmov as founder of that of the Eastern Adyge, the Kabardins. It is not as if other options in constructing local traditions and identities did not exist. For instance, the first attempts to compile the Adyge alphabet and to translate the Quran into Adyge were made in the early 1820s by the Efendi Muhammed Shapsugov and Notauk Sheretluk. But any such efforts were firmly opposed by the ulema for whom the only written language was Arabic – the sacred language of the sacred book.^[9] Likewise, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, several prominent Muslim jurists in northern Dagestan made important contributions to the study of the Sharia and Islamic discourse, but made no attempt to create alphabets for local languages or to consider the issues of local history and culture.^[10]
The task of constructing ethnic identities fell on the Russified local elite and Russian scholarly and government officials. After all, ethnicity was a western concept brought through and from Russia. The ironies of the empire were often inescapable, as in the case of Shora Nogma, who was greatly influenced by A. J. Sjögren – an ethnic Finn educated at a Swedish gymnasium at the time when his homeland was part of Sweden and who later continued to write in Swedish. Shortly after Finland was annexed to the Russian empire in 1809, Sjögren became a conduit of Western ideas in the Russian imperial periphery and was bestowed membership in the Russian Academy of Sciences. It was a Russified Swedish Finn who brought the modern ideas of ethnicity, philology, and historiography to the North Caucasus!
Constructing ethnicity was a multifaceted project requiring, first of all, a consolidation of cultural and historical identity, but also a defining of communal boundaries based on their socioeconomic activity and political affiliations. It was a colonial project to the extent that ethnicity meant prevailing over tribal differences in order to respond to outside demands and expectations, in this case those of the Russian empire. And while different group identities existed before the modern age and the Russian invasions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they were fundamentally reconceptualized and institutionalized as ethnic identities through contact with the Russian imperial structures. In other words, modernity arrived in the form of ethnicity nurtured within the Russian colonial empire.
The most potent force working against the emergence of ethnic identities in the North Caucasus was Islam, which attempted to unify the peoples of the region on the basis of an Islamic identity against its main antagonist, the Russian empire. With the collapse of the Russian empire, the Soviet antireligious and ethnicity-building or nation-building policies were part of the same dual process. The real construction of ethnic identities took place in early Soviet times, and has been the focus of several excellent studies.^[11]

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The Russian empire in Asia included a vast expanse of land populated by very different peoples and societies, inevitably resulting in different regional dynamics of imperial rule. In Siberia, for instance, the majority of the native population consisted of small and relatively primitive societies that could be easily brushed aside by the consecutive waves of Slavic colonists. Siberia became a place of refuge for those seeking religious or personal freedom and a dumping ground for the empire’s political exiles and criminals. As such, Siberia was similar to the British colonies in North America and Australia. It is no wonder that some nineteenth-century government officials and Siberian intellectuals tried in vain to have Siberia considered a colony of Russia.^[12]
The conquest of Central Asia in the second half of the nineteenth century confronted the Russian authorities with a different challenge. The arable lands of the region were densely populated, agriculture was highly developed, the population was thoroughly Muslim, and the urban centers were much older than any in Russia itself. Much like the British experience in India, Central Asia could not be easily colonized and transformed into Russia’s image. Instead, it had to be administered delicately by a variety of means. Russia’s first governor-general of the region, General Konstantin von Kaufmann, tried unsuccessfully to convince St. Petersburg that Central Asia was Russia’s colony. Instead, the region was regarded as an inseparable part of the empire, even as it was administered by the Asiatic Department of Russia’s Foreign Ministry – de facto Russia’s Colonial Office.^[13]
The open expanse of the enormous Eurasian steppe from Southern Siberia to the Lower Volga basin was a pastureland of various Turko-Mongol nomadic peoples, most significantly the Kazakhs and Kalmyks. The human and physical geography of this region presented a special challenge to the expanding empire. Here there were no urban centers to conquer and no decisive victories to win against the people, who were perpetually on the move with all their herds and belongings. The region had to be colonized incrementally through the construction of the Russian limes, the fortification lines that continued to advance into the steppe. By the early 1800s, most of the steppe nomads found themselves cut off from the vital pastureland, impoverished, and dependent on the Russian authorities. In this region, Russia’s mission to civilize included the task of settling the nomadic population and turning a nomad into a peasant.
Finally, Caucasia, an area between the Black and Caspian Seas, consisted of two distinct regions divided by the high mountains of the Caucasus Range: the South and North Caucasus. In the south, the mountains, valleys, and fertile plains had long been settled and subjected to the influences of the ancient Greek and Persian civilizations. By the nineteenth century, the towns and agricultural communities of the Christian Armenians and Georgians populated the southwest and central parts of the South Caucasus, while the villages and cities of the Shi’a Muslim Azeris dominated the southeast. The Armenians and Georgians stood out among the peoples of Asiatic Russia as the only Christians and the heirs to the former sovereign monarchs and kingdoms. Here too, calls to treat the region as a colony were rejected by St. Petersburg, and the South Caucasus was placed squarely within the Russian administration.
The political geography of the North Caucasus stood in sharp contrast to that of the South Caucasus. Exposed to the vagaries of life on the edge of the great Eurasian steppe, the North Caucasus was only intermittently subjected to the influences of great civilizations and monotheistic religions, and did not give rise to any sustainable sovereign political entities. It combined the characteristics of several regions: the steppe occupied primarily by the nomadic Kalmyks and Nogays, the foothills of the Caucasus with the numerous Kumyk, Chechen, and Adyge villages practicing both agriculture and animal husbandry, and the villages and hamlets of the high mountains protected by the forbidding terrain of the Caucasus Range. Accordingly, St. Petersburg relied on a panoply of policies during the military conquest of the region: construction of the fortification lines, seizure of the pasturelands, expulsion of the native villagers, settling of Slavic and other Christian colonists, wholesale destruction of the mountain villages and crops, and, finally, massive deportation of the natives to the Ottoman empire.
Despite the differences between the regions of Asiatic Russia, Russia’s Asian territories had in common a lack of sovereign monarchies and states with defined boundaries. The reality was somewhat more complex than Moscow assumed, but this was how Moscow perceived the world east and south of its capital, and perceptions, of course, are known to create a reality of their own. From the seventeenth century onward, the Russian imperial vocabulary continuously reinforced the divide between the Russian state and the nonstate organized societies. What the native peoples often believed to be a peace treaty, the Russians claimed to be an oath of allegiance to the tsar. The native settlements were referred to as villages, their military activity as raiding, and their resistance to the Russian invasion as rebellion against the state. The Russian authorities preferred to ignore the inconvenient facts that some of the native settlements were larger than the neighboring Russian towns, that their “raids” could include up to 10,000 horsemen, and that the “rebels” (miatezhniki) had first to become a part of the empire before they could rebel.
At the same time, Russia’s own raids by a small mobile troop were referred to as “military expeditions,” just as the military conquest of the region was cast in terms of geopolitics and progress. It is as if Napoleon’s invasion of Russia a few decades earlier had been considered a march of progress and civilization, while the Russians were deemed to be ungrateful and wayward rebels. A double standard indeed, but one that is easily accepted when applied to the disparate non-Christian societies.
If the lack of sovereign states and monarchs in Asiatic Russia helped to articulate Russia’s civilizing mission, it did not explain how to rule different regions, peoples, and religions. The Russian authorities refused to concede that theirs too was a colonial empire. Instead, the imperial subconsciousness continued to revolve around the ideas of a universal monarch and civilization, and a belief that someday the non-Russians would become Russian. Myth and reality could not be easily reconciled, however, which resulted in that particular Russian hybrid of a hyper-accentuated empire and underemphasized colonialism.
Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the grand imperial ambition demanded the ultimate integration of the empire’s diverse human landscape into the Russian Christian imperial identity. But the reality on the ground defied this long-term vision, requiring instead tactics and policies that could be adapted to the specific circumstances. With the exception of the late eighteenth century, when Russia’s policy was to sow divisions between the indigenous elite and the commoners, the imperial authorities preferred to rely on the local secular elite, and, when necessary, religious elite as well. Economic and political carrots and sticks intended to ensure the cooperation and loyalty of the elite, while the courts, administration, schools, and missionary work meant to pave the road toward broader integration of the non-Russians into the empire.
Among the variety of specific policy tools used in ruling Russia’s non-Russian subjects, one remained constant throughout the period: to govern the multitudes of the empire’s peoples, tongues, and religions, Russia depended on individuals who possessed an intimate knowledge of both Russian and their own societies and were thus able to serve as intermediaries between the imperial authorities and the native peoples.
In the Muscovite empire, such go-betweens were usually employed as interpreters. Some were new converts, but most were former Slavic captives who claimed to have learned the native language and mores during their long captivity. But because almost all of them were illiterate, they knew little of the language and culture in which they claimed expertise.
As Russia’s involvement with the various non-Russian peoples deepened, the authorities increasingly relied on the natives who, for various reasons, had been exposed to the Russian way of life. Only in the middle of the nineteenth century, a slowly modernizing Russia began to train its own small groups of Slavic experts, who studied the native languages, societies, and religions. Russia never had an equivalent of the British Colonial Service, but the Russian universities offered courses in the non-Russian languages and cultures of the empire for the benefit of scholars and future government officials alike.
Throughout the entire period of Russia’s imperial past, the great majority of the empire’s cultural interlocutors came from the native societies. Many of them, like Semen Atarshchikov’s father, were surrendered to the Russian authorities as hostages, or, like one of Russia’s best portrait painters, Petr Zakharov-Chechenets, were seized as captives at a young age. Some left for Russia of their own will to seek better opportunities and often ended up as converts to Christianity.
From the late eighteenth century onward, the Russian authorities began to demand that the members of the native elite send their sons to the imperial capital to be educated at the emperor’s court or Russia’s prestigious military schools. The formation of the special non-Russian units of the Imperial Guard in the 1820s intended to serve the same purpose – to educate and acculturate the young men who were from the distinguished indigenous families and were expected to become conduits of Russian influence after returning to their kin. In other words, the former hostages were to become a colonial elite.
Dozens of them would come from different parts of the empire and return to their own people as different men: in a Russian officer’s uniform, with a strange accent in their native tongue, with outlandish ideas in their heads, and often, with a tiny cross on their necklaces. Above, the reader encountered some of these intermediaries from the North Caucasus: the Kabardin Shora Nogma, the Western Adyge Khan-Giray, and, of course, Semen Atarshchikov.
They were certainly not the only ones but they did represent a variety of personalities who in different ways were linked to both their own and Russian societies. While all of them were educated in Russia and Russified to different extents, they chose to identify themselves in different ways. Some retained their basic attachment and loyalty to the imperial authorities (Khan-Giray and Shora Nogma), while others resolved to change sides by defecting to the native highlanders (Semen Atarshchikov) or joining the Ottomans (Sefer-beg Zanoko).
Perhaps the most famous among the members of the North Caucasus elite, who switched sides during the Russian conquest, were Hajji-Murat, Daniyal-beg, and Musa Kundukhov. Immortalized by Leo Tolstoy in the story of the same name, Hajji-Murat was an influential Avar notable who served the Russian interests until local political intrigues and the highhandedness of the Russian administration forced him to join Shamil in 1841. A few years later, disappointed by his new ally, Hajji-Murat fled back to the Russians. Likewise, antagonized by the Russian military administration, the pro-Russian ruler of the Lesghin principality of Elisu, Daniyal beg, also defected to Shamil in 1844. Fifteen years later, shortly before Shamil’s surrender, he returned to Russia claiming his innocence and successfully seeking a pardon. Somewhat different was the story of Musa Kundukh (Kundukhov) who came from a family of Ossetin nobles, joined the Russian army as an officer, and rose through the ranks to become a highly decorated major-general. With Shamil’s defeat and Russia’s policies of dispossessing and replacing the native population with the Slavic settlements, Kundukh decided to organize a massive immigration to the Ottoman empire. In 1865, together with 451 people, his ship docked at the Ottoman port on the Black Sea. Later, Musa Kundukh was given the Ottoman title of Mirliva (major-general), and served with distinction in the Ottoman wars against the Russians.
The story of Semen Atarshchikov combined the strands of various native interlocutors who in different ways tried to bridge the indigenous and Russian cultures. They followed an uneasy path in negotiating the space of the indigenous societies within the Russian empire and, by extension, searching for their own place and identity. All of them remained marginal personalities, and like typical immigrants throughout history, they remained torn between two different cultures and identities, the traditional society into which they were born and the modern society in which they were schooled. The push and pull between the two was always a tormenting experience, but all the more so at the time of war, which forced the intermediaries to take sides and left little room for psychological compromise. Even Semen Atarshchikov, the first-generation Russian, could not escape the stark existential dilemma.
Russia’s newly formed indigenous elite were typical marginal social groups searching for their identity between the old and new, traditional and modern, the East and West. Perhaps, in the end, they were not so different from the Russian elite who, uncertain of their own identity, had searched for centuries to locate Russia’s own place between the West and East, the modern and traditional, the nation-state and colonial empire. It seems that today, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, that search is far from over.