On the Religious Frontier

Tsarist Russia and Islam in the Caucasus

Firouzeh Mostashari

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781784539184
• eBook ISBN: 9781786722584
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: Social Sciences

Modern Russia's turbulent relations with its Muslim frontiers date back centuries. Indeed the nineteenth century, when the Muslim Caucasus first came under Russian rule, witnessed many of the historical antecedents to today's violent confrontations. With this in mind, On The Religious Frontier examines the history of Muslim Azerbaijan under Christian Orthodox Russian imperial rule and the attempts of the Russian administrators of the Caucasus to integrate the region into the empire. Drawing on original archival research from across Azerbaijan and Russia, Firouzeh Mostashari considers the formation of a Russian colonial administration in the Muslim Caucasus; subsequent social, political and economic developments; and the local responses to conquest, military rule and Russification. From 1804 to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, On The Religious Frontier offers a fascinating and timely insight into both the period itself and the ways in which the seeds of recent conflict were sown in tsarist Russia. This is important reading for all scholars of the history and politics of the Caucasus, as well as those with an interest in imperial Russia and its relationship with minority groups.

PART I

The Muslim Caucasus: Colony or Province?

1

THE “CIVILIZING MISSION” AND RUSSIAN CONQUEST OF THE CAUCASUS, 1804–1828

Romantic Perceptions of the Caucasian Conquest

Since the early nineteenth century, the motives and reasons for Russian expansion into the Caucasus and beyond had attracted the attention of both Russian and European historians, travelers and the public.¹ The Caucasus excited the imagination of the Russian public through its romantic depiction by leading Russian writers, including Pushkin, Bestuzhev-Marlinski, Lermontov and Tolstoy.² In 1821, Pushkin wrote the poem “The Captive of the Caucasus,” after his travel to the region the previous year. Pushkin almost single-handedly forged an exotic, sentimental and nostalgic image of the Caucasus for the mind’s eyes of literate Russia. Through poetic depiction the Caucasian campaigns had been made “comprehensible and assimilable to the Russians.”³ As Belinskii had observed:

The grandiose image of the Caucasus, with its warlike inhabitants, for the first time was reproduced by Russian poetry—and only in Pushkin’s narrative poem for the first time was Russian society acquainted with the Caucasus, already known in Russia by arms.⁴

Not only the public, but historians also were infected with Pushkinian romanticism. General V. A. Potto, the chronicler of the “Caucasian wars,” epitomized this romantic view of the conquest of the Caucasus:

The Caucasus! Which Russian heart could refrain from responding to the sound of its name, connected to us by the tie of blood and with the historical and intellectual life of our homeland, telling of immeasurable sacrifices but also of poetic inspiration?⁵

Potto, a military historian, naturally saw the Russian conquest as “historically inevitable” and “required by the state needs of Russia.” While conscious that the task at hand was formidable, he considered the imperatives of conquest to be formulated on a “natural and inescapable” although “uncon-scious and instinctive” level. Potto extolled the Russian soldiers and generals in the Caucasus as “ancient heroes” and the personification of lofty moral standards. These “ancient heroes” were no other than Tsitsianov, Ermolov, Kotliarevskii and other generals notorious for their cruelty but, in the eyes of Potto, romantic warriors. Of them he wrote, “It is not for nothing that they inspire the Russian poets.”⁶

Romanticism beclouded the analytic abilities of some writers, leading them to erroneously dismiss the volatile consequences of Russian military activity. One amateur historian, M. Vladykin, for example, naively believed that all of the injuries and violence of the war would be forgotten and forgiven within hours after both sides had made their peace. He wrote:

The Russians have always been magnanimous to their vanquished enemies and have shown proper respect to the latter’s dignity and courage. . . . Russians, based on their kind-hearted Slavic nature, fight without harboring hatred, and our soldiers, as soon as they have accomplished bloody duties, are ready to forget the past and love yesterday’s enemy from the depths of their hearts. The mountaineers, unlike the fanatic Asiatics, also have a great soul.⁷

The Civilizing Mission

Imperial historians such as V. I. Velichko echoed Pushkin and Belinskii’s idea that Russia had bought the Caucasus with the valuable blood of its young soldiers.⁸ Poetry had legitimized Russian territorial claims to the Caucasus, creating a yearning for a land that most Russians had never seen and never would see. Russia had paid dearly to “civilize” the region, and therefore the Caucasians’ loss of statehood seemed most natural. Velichko’s Orientalist argument, which reduced the Caucasians to helpless children incapable of self-government, was crowned by the following circular statement: “In the Russian empire tribes are plenty, but it may be that only one nation [Russia] exists, because nationhood is determined by having a flag, that is, the symbol of statehood.”⁹ Stressing the civilizing mission of the Russian armies, which were “a unique school of responsibility and honesty,” Velichko justified the army’s Caucasian conquests by reverting to the familiar Orientalist argument that the Caucasus is located in the East, between the Persian and Ottoman “Asiatic despotisms,” and is therefore “half-civilized, and a hearth for social infection.”¹⁰

Military historians, writing on the Caucasian wars, made extensive use of the pretext of “civilizing” the East. Comparing Russian conquest to that of the French in Algeria, they proudly boasted that the Russian mission was more challenging, as the Caucasian terrain, with its mountainous pockets, aided the independence-seeking natives.¹¹ The campaigns were rationalized as inevitable, and following a moral dictate harking back to the Westernizing efforts of Peter the Great. Furthermore, in the Caucasus the Russians could become the bearers of civilization as Europe had presumably been for Russia. One Colonel Romanosov, turned academic, lectured,

Can we deny the salutary influence of the West on our development? Are we not obliged to pay the debt of being civilized, and transmit this influence to the East? If Peter the Great with the founding of St. Petersburg cut a window through which Russia could gaze at Europe, then in our time, the pacification of the Caucasus will cut a window for the whole of western Asia, Persia, Armenia and Mesopotamia, which have been numbed for centuries. Through this window they will be able to glance at Europe, and if they do not benefit, then at least there can be no doubt that Russia has honestly and conscientiously repaid its great debt to civilization.¹²

Russian Orientalism and Islam

One of the questions recently raised by scholars of “Russia’s Orient” is whether Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism can be applied to the Russian empire.¹³ In his seminal work, Said had excluded Russia from his analysis and had concentrated on the overseas colonies of France and Britain.¹⁴ While the Russian empire is different from its European counterparts, Said’s concept of a tex-tual and linguistic differentiation of the “other,” a “style of thought,” still remains a useful conceptual tool. Furthermore, his illustration of the “structure of cultural domination” of colonized peoples and Orientalism as a “system of knowledge” holds relevance to the Russian empire.¹⁵

Orientalism sheds light on the unequal power relations between “East” and “West.” However, in Russia the estrangement of the European from the “Asian” was not quite so absolute. Because its Asian “colonies” were contiguous to the Russian heartland, the cultures of the colonized people were not entirely foreign to the Russians, as their mutual dealings often dated back for centuries. Hence the Russians were ambivalent about their “savages,” often romanticizing them and elevating them in literary oeuvres to the position of the “noble savage,” and especially so in the Caucasus.¹⁶ Russian literary romanticism may have even identified with the mountaineers as victims of the tsarist system, just as the artist was alienated from society.¹⁷ In addition, the Russians themselves doubted the authenticity of their own European character, and could not assume absolute moral superiority vis-à-vis the Muslim highlanders.

Proximity and a shared history with its Muslim subjects had made the Russian empire a more tolerant imperial power. Furthermore, sporadic Russian attempts to convert the Muslims of its empire had by and large ended in failure and resentment. Although Russian imperialists also echoed the hegemonic slo-gans of the British, and alluded to a “civilizing mission” in Asia, their central convictions were not founded on racial supremacy, but rather on cultural and religious distinctions.

Islam was the major identifying factor leading the Russians to label the Azerbaijanis as uncivilized. The Russian State had an acute awareness of religious identity, and religion was a decisive factor in assimilating within the imperial system. Prominent imperial historians of the Caucasus, such as V. N. Ivanenko and N. Dubrovin, used the term “Muslim provinces” of Transcaucasia, rather than “Turkish speaking” or “Turkic,” when referring to Azerbaijan.¹⁸ In fact the vanquished khanates of Eastern Transcaucasia had initially been grouped together as the Muslim provinces.

The leading Russian figures involved in the conquest of the Caucasus saw themselves as bearers of a superior culture, mistrusting and scorning the religion of the vanquished peoples. Islam was rather an obstacle to be tolerated for now and obliterated in the future. As Count Paskevich expressed the official view, the Russian government “generously tolerates Muslims and idol worship-pers, who are in essence enemies of our religion.”¹⁹

In his classic imperial history of the Caucasian conquest, N. Dubrovin offers a more nuanced analysis of Islam, suggesting that it was Shi’ite Islam that most challenged Russian authority.²⁰ The Sunnis were presumably more loyal to the Russian government and interpreted the Koranic command to obey God, the prophet and the political leader as also encompassing the tsar, as long as the Russian tsar did not violate the Sharia. “The Shi’ite on the other hand interpret ‘follow your tsar’ differently—they say that the tsar must be of Muslim faith, and not another, and that Muslims can only follow Muslim rulers, without committing sin.”²¹ Given the above distinction between Sunni and Shi’ite Islam, it followed that the Shi’ite were presumed to be more fanatic, less moral, and even more deceiving and thieving.²²

Nineteenth-century Russian writers made gross generalizations about the characteristics of the empire’s various ethnic groups. The Muslim population, whom they referred to using the generic term “Tatar,” was stereotyped as being lazy, dishonest and conniving—very much in the tradition of European Orientalist writings. It is in this spirit that Dubrovin writes of the “Tatar”: “He always prefers the kind of work which will bring him fast riches without expending much labor, . . . spends all of his time idly and only occupies himself with steal-ing his neighbor’s horse.”²³ Thus, since moral and rational arguments would fail to sway the Tatars, the Russian imperial logic would suggest that the only way to effect change would be to appeal to the population’s self-interest and to use force when all else failed. In the notorious words of General Tsitsianov to Tsar Alexander I: “Fear and greed are the two mainsprings of everything that takes place here.”²⁴

The Caucasus as an Object of Study

By the second half of the nineteenth century, the Caucasians had become an object through which the Russians allayed their own insecurities about their level of civilization, and compensated for their inferiority complex in relation to Europe. Borrowing from the tradition of Western Orientalism and continuing the legacy of Peter the Great’s view that scientific knowledge aided imperial control, curiosity about the cultures of the Caucasus pervaded the Russian administration. Caucasian society became a favored object of scrutiny for the learned as well as the amateur chinovnik (official) turned anthropologist.

After the establishment of regular administrative departments in the Caucasus, the local administration established journals and series devoted to the study of Caucasian culture. Periodical publications such as Sbornik Materialov Dlia Opisaniia Mestnostei i Plemeni Kavkaza, Kavkazskii Sbornik, and Etnograficheskii Sbornik Kavkaza translated native poetry, folklore and stories, offered lessons in the linguistics of the local languages, and carried features on the Caucasian way of life and history. The Russian press was also inundated with travel accounts and memoirs of civil and military personnel in the Caucasus.²⁵ Fiction and ethnog-raphy had come to the aid of the tsarist bureaucracy. In making use of literary romanticism to consolidate newly conquered territories, the Russian empire-builders once more emulated British imperialism.²⁶ Using the imperial idea as it was reflected in literature to garner public support and create a desirable public image, tsarist Russia self-consciously promoted the myth of the civilizing debt owed to it by Asia. The myth, however, was at odds with the sordid reality of the Russian presence, and this discrepancy haunted the Russian conquerors for decades. Indeed, the specter of Shamil is still roaming northern Caucasia.

The Military Conquest: The “Turbulent Frontier”

The Russian empire was the great exception to the European empires of the nineteenth century. Although considered a great power, Russia had no overseas colonies, nor did it overtly have a colonial ministry or colonial school. It did not participate in the international scramble to place the imperial flag on the most remote of tropical islands, nor did the government follow in the steps of merchants and missionaries. And yet, Russia was an ambitious player in the imperialist rivalries of the “Age of Empire.”

Not a maritime power, Russia directed its imperial ambitions towards its Eurasian frontier region, and this pattern of expansion more resembled American continental expansion than the European experience. Orientalism of course justified expansion in moral terms to the larger public.

In 1893, the eminent historian Frederick Jackson Turner had opened his keynote address to the American Historical Association with the provocative and still debated statement, “Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West.” These words paralleled V. O. Kliuchevskii’s famous statement, “The history of Russia is the history of a country in the process of colonization. . . . Migration and colonization have been the basic factor in our history.”²⁷ Clearly, Russia and America shared in certain aspects of the “frontier hypothesis”—both countries occupied what they perceived to be “free lands,” displaced indigenous populations, used the frontier as a “safety valve,” created hybridized and Europeanized cultures on their periphery, and eventually integrated the new territories into the body of the nation.²⁸

Turner also saw the frontier in symbolic terms, as “the outer edge of the wave—t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Maps
• Preface
• Introduction: Russian Colonialism The Case of the Muslim Caucasus
• Part I: The Muslim Caucasus: Colony or Province?
• Part II: The Viceroyalty
• Part III: Russia and Islam in the Last Decades of Tsarism
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography