SUMMARY:

The article tells the story of a series of attempts by Russian imperial authorities to codify the customary law of the Kazakh nomads, from the 1780s to the 1850s. Similar projects were undertaken by other colonial powers of the time seeking to integrate local legal regimes into the imperial legal system, thus strengthening control over the colonies. Unlike more successful Russian experiments with standardizing and codifying customary law (adat) in the Caucasus, in the Kazakh steppe no officially recognized collection of adats was produced. The main reason for this failure should be sought in the very success of the fieldwork produced by Russian Orientalists, assigned the task of studying Kazakh customary law, and the progress of Russian legal expertise. After the 1830s, Russian jurists began differentiating between tribal customs (adats) and Muslim Sharia law as two main sources of local customary law in Asian regions of the empire. The increasingly nationalizing worldview of the regime and the educated society advanced the political agenda of codifying the “national” customs of the Kazakhs while muting the influence of the Sharia as a universalizing ideology – the chief rival to the empire’s own universalizing and assimilating policy. At the same time, scholars working on codification projects had realized that in practice Sharia was inseparable from adats and the entire system of traditional administration of justice in the steppe. This brought them repeatedly into conflict with the authorities. The most spectacular instance of such a conflict discussed in the article in details was one between the author of the most comprehensive collection of the Kazakh customary law, Efim (Iosif) Osmolovskii and his supervisor, a renowned Orientalist himself, Vasilii Grigoriev. Aware not only of the intrinsic interconnectedness of adat and Sharia but also of the futility of attempts to distill some universal single “common law” shared by all the tribal and regional groups of Kazakhs, Osmolovskii produced a complex and nuanced compendium of Kazakh legal norms, sensitive to local variations. Grigoriev had his own highly ideological vision of the prospects of eventual Kazakh Russification, and therefore deemed the work of Osmolovskii extremely subversive for the plans of Kazakh assimilation and de-Islamization. When transferred to St. Petersburg, he purloined the collection – the official document commissioned by the government – and all the preparatory materials, making sure that they would never become available to administrators or scholars. The purely theoretical distinction between the Sharia and adat, and the nationalizing and anti-Islamic drive of the Russian authorities resulted in a peculiar politics of reconstructing the pure legal traditions of the Kazakh people as the foundation of their Russified future.