Faith, custom, and ritual in the borderlands: Orthodoxy, Islam, and the "small peoples" of the middle volga and the north caucasus

Russian Review

Volumn 59, Issue 4, 2000, Pages 512-529

  Jersild, Austin ^a  

^a OLD DOMINION UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 58049203606     PISSN: 00360341     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/0036-0341.00139     Document Type: Article

References (114)

1. On Russia as an empire see Andreas Kappeler, La Russie: Empire multiethnique, trans. Guy Imart (Paris, 1994). Kappeler's comprehensive survey of several frontiers and centuries is primarily a story of the impact of the early modern social order upon the process of conquest and incorporation. The issue at hand important to contemporaries that might have been further explored was both a practice and a concept called "poddanstvo" (subjecthood). The Imperial service elite was multiethnic, but we know little about the manner in which non-Russians conceived of the possibilities, privileges, and responsibilities of poddanstvo.
2. On faith and the emergence of a notion of custom in eighteenth-century texts of empire see Yuri Slezkine, "Naturalists versus Nations: Eighteenth-Century Russian Scholars Confront Ethnic Diversity," in Russia's Orient: Imperial Borderlands and Peoples, 1700-1917, ed. Daniel R. Brower and Edward I. Lazzerini (Bloomington, 1997), 27-57.
3. See also Mark von Hagen, "Writing the History of Russia as Empire: The Perspective of Federalism," in Kazan, Moscow, St. Petersburg: Multiple Faces of the Russian Empire, ed. Catherine Evtuhov et al. (Moscow, 1997), 393-410;
4. Boris Nolde, La formation de L'Empire Russe, vols. 1-2 (Paris, 1952, 1953);
5. and portions of Jane Burbank and David L. Ransel, eds., Imperial Russia: New Histories for the Empire (Bloomington, 1998).
6. On Russia and the "small peoples" of Siberia see Yuri Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North (Ithaca, 1994).
7. On empire in comparative context see Karen Barkey and Mark von Hagen, eds., After Empire: Multiethnic Societies and Nation-Building (Boulder, 1997);
8. Michael W. Doyle, Empires (Ithaca, 1986);
9. and Ronald Grigor Suny, "The Empire Strikes Out: Imperial Russia, 'National' Identity, and Theories of Empire," in A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Soviet Union, 1917-1953 (forthcoming).
10. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History, rev. ed., trans. J. Sibree (New York, 1944), 53.
11. A. S. Khomiakov, "O sel'skikh usloviiakh" (1842), in his Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (PSS), 3d ed. (Moscow, 1900), 3:64.
12. Khomiakov, "Ermak," PSS 4:275-388.
13. See also Khomiakov, "Tridtsat' let tsarstvovaniia Ivana Vasil'evicha" (1845), PSS 3:37-48.
14. On the Caucasus see Peter K. Christoff, An Introduction to Nineteenth-Century Russian Slavophilism: A Study in Ideas, vol. 1, A. S. Xomjakov (The Hague, 1961), 33;
15. and Nikolai Berdiaev, Aleksei Stepanovich Khomiakov (Moscow, 1912), 34-37.
16. On the literary imagination of the Caucasus see Susan Layton, Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy (Cambridge, England, 1994);
17. and Harsha Ram, "Prisoners of the Caucasus: Literary Myths and Media Representations of the Chechen Conflict" (Berkeley Program in Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies Working Paper Series, 1999).
18. The important questions of Russian identity and Russia's relationship to the West understandably shape the study of Russian intellectual history. But scholars might give more attention to the impact of empire, so to speak, upon the concerns of even classical Slavophilism, which is beyond the scope of the present study. As Nikolai Berdiaev wrote in the early twentieth century, "Khomiakov never wrote an essay specifically about the nationalities problem, because all of his essays in one way or another are dedicated to this question" (Aleksei Stepanovich Khomiakov, 208).
19. On the Slavophiles see also Alexandre Koyré, La Philosophie et le Problème National en Russie au début du XIX siècle (Paris, 1929), 164-202;
20. L. Strakhovsky, L'Empereur Nicolas Ier et L'esprit National Russe (Louvain, 1928);
21. Nicolas Arseniev, La Sainte Moscou: Tableau de la vie religeuse et intellectuelle russe au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1948);
22. and Nicholas Riasanovsky, Russia and the West in the Teaching of the Slavophiles (Berkeley, 1952).
23. On Vorontsov and his administration see L. Hamilton Rhinelander, Prince Michael Vorontsov: Viceroy to the Tsar (Montreal, 1990).
24. Terence Armstrong, ed., Yermak's Campaign in Siberia (London, 1975), 52, 55, 68, 241.
25. Aleksandra A. Fuks, Zapiski Aleksandry Fuks o chuvashakh i cheremisakh kazanskoi gubernii (Kazan, 1840), 28.
26. V. A. Sboev, Chuvash v bytovom, istoricheskom i religioznom otnosheniiakh (Moscow, 1865), 12, 52-53.
27. N. I. Il'minskii, "O kolichestve pechataemykh v Kazani magometanskikh knig i o shkole dlia detei kreshchenykh tatar" (1866), in his Kazanskaia tsentral'naia kreshcheno-tatarskaia shkola: Materialy dlia istorii khristianskago prosveshcheniia kreshchenykh tatar (Kazan, 1887), 121.
28. Khomiakov, "Mnenie russkikh ob inostrantsakh" (1846), in his Izbrannye sochineniia, ed. N. S. Arsen'ev (New York, 1955), 118;
29. Christoff, Introduction to Nineteenth-Century Russian Slavophilism 1:89;
30. Ivan Kireevskii letter to V. A. Zhukovskii (1845), in I. V. Kireevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, ed. M. Gershenzon (Moscow, 1911), 2:237-38;
31. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Memoirs from the House of the Dead, trans. Jessie Coulson, ed. Ronald Hingley (Oxford, 1983).
32. Pis'ma N. I. Il'minskago k kreshchenym tataram (Kazan, 1896), xix.
33. Scholars such as Jean Saussay and Wayne Dowler tend to emphasize the political concerns and fears motivating Il'minskii and other officials. I do not wish to minimize this, but instead intend to take seriously what I portray here as Romantic views about faith and custom, from Moscow to Tiflis to Kazan. See Saussay, "Il'minskij et la Politique de Russification des Tatars, 1865-1891," Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique 8 (Juillet-Septembre 1967): 404-25;
34. and Dowler, "The Politics of Language in Non-Russian Elementary Schools in the Eastern Empire, 1865-1914," Russian Review 54 (October 1995): 516-38.
35. Pis'ma N. I. Il'minskago k kreshchenym tataram, 122.
36. On baptism and the Mari see Paul W. Werth, "Baptism, Authority, and the Problem of Zakonnost' in Orenburg Diocese: The Induction of over 800 'Pagans' into the Christian Faith," Slavic Review 56 (Fall 1997): 456-80.
37. On native personnel and the Il'minskii system see Robert Geraci, "The Il'minskii System and the Controversy over Non-Russian Teachers and Priests in the Middle Volga," in Kazan, Moscow, St. Petersburg, 325-48.
38. V. Timofeev, "Missionersko-pedagogicheskii dnevnik starokreshchenago tatarina" (1868), in Il'minskii, Kazanskaia tsentral'naia kreshcheno-tatarskaia shkola, 242.
39. E. A. Rozov, "Predstavlenie" (5 December 1866), in Il'minskii, Kazanskaia tsentral'naia kreshcheno-tatarskaia shkola, 300.
40. See also A. Kh. Makhmutova, Stanovlenie svetskogo obrazovaniia u tatar (Bor'ba vokrug shkol'nogo voprosa, 1861-1917) (Kazan, 1982), 23-25.
41. Rozov, "Predstavlenie," 299.
42. N. I. Il'minskii and G. S. Sablukov (9 February 1858), in Agrarnyi vopros i krest'ianskoe dvizhenie 50-70-kh godov XIX v. (Moscow-Leningrad, 1936), 221.
43. Khomiakov, "Zapiski o vsemirnoi istorii," PSS 5:pt.1:25.
44. V. Lebedev, "Simbirskie Chuvashi," Zhurnal Ministerstva vnutrennikh del 5 (May 1850): 311.
45. See also Fuks, Zapiski Aleksandry Fuks o chuvashakh i cheremisakh Kazanskoi gubernii, 132-37.
46. P. K. Uslar, "O rasprostranenii gramotnosti mezhdu gortsami," Sbornik svedenii o kavkazskikh gortsakh, vol. 3 (Tiflis, 1870), 28;
47. Notes of I. Ia Iakovlev to D. D. Shestakov, in Agrarnyi vopros i krest'ianskoe dvizhenie, 333-34.
48. See also Yuri Slezkine, "Savage Christians or Unorthodox Russians? The Missionary Dilemma in Siberia," in Between Heaven and Hell: The Myth of Siberia in Russian Culture, ed. Galya Diment and Yuri Slezkine (New York, 1993), 22.
49. A. Voskresenskii, "Predislovie," Pis'ma N. I. Il'minskago k kreshchenym tataram, xviii.
50. N. P. Gritsenko, Goroda severo-vostochnogo Kavkaza i proizvoditel'nye sily kraia v seredina XIX veka (Rostov, 1984), 75-78;
51. G. A. Vertepov, "Obzor Tverskoi oblasti za 1894 god," Zapiski kavkazskogo otdela Imperatorskago Russkago Geograficheskago Obshchestva (ZKOIRGO), vol. 19 (Tiflis, 1897), 164-68.
52. On Sufi Islam in the North Caucasus see Uwe Halbach, "'Heiliger Krieg' gegen den Zarismus," in Die Muslime in der Sowjetunion und in Jugoslavien, ed. A. Kappeler, G. Simon, and G. Brunner (Cologne, 1989), 213-34;
53. Michael Kemper, "Einige Notizen zur Arabischsprachigen Literatur der Gihad-Bewegung in Dagestan und Tschetsche-Nien in der ersten hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts," in Muslim Culture in Russia and Central Asia from the 18th to the Early 20th Centuries, vol. 2, ed. Anke von Kügelgen, Michael Kemper, and Allen J. Frank (Berlin, 1998), 63-99;
54. and Alexandre Bennigsen and S. Enders Wimbush, Mystics and Commissars: Sufism in the Soviet Union (Berkeley, 1985), 18-20.
55. P. Khitsunov, "O sostoianii nekogda byvshago khristianstva na Kavkaze," Kavkaz (24 August 1846): 135-36
56. Evgenii Markov, Ocherki Kavkaza (St. Petersburg-Moscow, 1887), 177.
57. R. D. Eristov, "O Tushino-Pshavo-Khevsurskom okrage," in ZKOIRGO, vol. 3 (Tiflis, 1855), 95.
58. Nikolai F. Dubrovin, Istoriia voiny i vladychestva russkikh na Kavkaze, vol. 1, pt. 1 (St. Petersburg, 1871), 95.
59. V. Novitskii, "Anapa i zakubanskiia poseleniia," in ZKOIRGO, vol. 2 (Tiflis, 1853), 15.
60. Michael Khodarkovsky, '"Ignoble Savages and Unfaithful Subjects': Constructing Non-Christian Identities in Early Modern Russia," in Russia's Orient, 18-20.
61. Slezkine, "Savage Christians or Unorthodox Russians?" 17.
62. Kemper, "Einige Notizen zur Arabischsprachigen Literatur der Gihad-Bewegung in Dagestan und Tschetsche-Nien in der ersten hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts," in Muslim Culture in Russia and Central Asia 2:63-99;
63. Amirxan A. Isaev, "Die 'Islamische Druckerei' von Muhammad-Mirza Mavraev," and Natal'ya A. Tagirova and Amri R. Šixsaidov, "Abdarrahman Al-Gazigumuqi und Seine Werke," both in Muslim Culture in Russia and Central Asia from the 18th to the Early 20th Centuries, vol. 1, ed. Michael Kemper, Anke von Kügelgen, and Dmitriy Yermakov (Berlin, 1996), 341-54, and 317-40, respectively.
64. For example, in "Rus'" (12 January 1885) in I. S. Aksakov, Slavianskii vopros, 1860-1886 (Moscow, 1886), 606.
65. See also John Doyle Klier, Imperial Russia's Jewish Question, 1855-1881 (Cambridge, England, 1995), 153-56.
66. Kireevskii, "Deviatnadtsatyi vek," PSS 1:104;
67. Khomiakov, "Zapiski o vsemirnoi istorii," pt. 2, PSS, vol. 6.
68. Aksakov, "Den'" (1861) and "Moskvich" (1868), in Slavianskii vopros, 1860-1886, 10-11, 248;
69. Samarin, in 1840-1876: Iu. F. Samarin: Stat'i, Vospominaniia, Pis'ma, ed. T. A. Medovicheva (Moscow, 1997), 60-62.
70. On conservative figures and thought see Edward C. Thaden, Conservative Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Seattle, 1964);
71. and Wayne Dowler, Dostoevsky, Grigor'ev and Native Soil Conservatism (Toronto, 1982).
72. Aksakov, "Den'" (1862), in Slavianskii vopros, 1860-1886, 25.
73. Aksakov, "Den'" (1865), in ibid., 56.
74. S. A. Nikitin, Slavianskie komitety v Rossii v 1858-1876 godakh (Moscow, 1960), 33-39, 82-83, 291.
75. Aksakov, "Moskva" (1867), in Slavianskii vopros; 1860-1886, 148.
76. The reports stored in the military archive in Moscow of the Pan-Slav ambassador to Constantinople, Nikolai Ignat'ev, on Shamil and the Caucasus make for fascinating reading in this regard. See my "Who was Shamil? Russian Colonial Rule and Sufi Islam in the North Caucasus, 1859-1917," Central Asian Survey 14:2 (1995): 205-23.
77. Aksakov, from "Den'" (1867), in Ivan S. Aksakov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow, 1886), 1:175.
78. For other examples see Berdiaev, Aleksei Stepanovich Khomiakov, 22-23;
79. E. A. Dubzinskaia, Slavianofily v obshchestvennoi bor'be (Moscow, 1983), 32;
80. and Iurii Samarin, Okrainy Rossii, vol. 1 (Prague, 1868), 154.
81. V. G. Belinskii, "Obshchee znachenie slova literatura" (1842-1844), in his Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (PSS) (Moscow, 1953), 5:623.
82. Belinskii, "Istoriia Malorossii" (1842), PSS 7:44-65.
83. See also Andrzej Walicki, A History of Russian Thought from the Enlightenment to Marxism, trans. Hilda Andrew-Rublecka (Stanford, 1979), 131-40.
84. On Belinskii and Ukraine see Andrea Rutherford, "Vissarion Belinskii and the Ukrainian National Question," Russian Review 54 (October 1995): 500-515.
85. Even the radicalism of a critic like Nikolai Dobroliubov did not extend to political independence for smaller peoples. See N. A. Dobroliubov, "Cherty dlia kharakteristiki russkogo prostonarod'ia" (1859), in his Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow, 1950), 3:89.
86. To put this in context, however, we might recall that even nationalists like List and Mazzini, as well as other innovative challengers to the nineteenth century order such as Engels, were similarly unable to fathom independence for the small peoples of Europe. See E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge, England, 1990), 30-42.
87. N. Strakhov, Bor'ba s zapadom v nashei literature, vol. 1 (Kiev, 1897)
88. C. H. Van Schooneveld, ed., Slavistic Printings and Reprintings (The Hague, 1969), 138-76 (citation from p. 173).
89. Kappeler, La Russie: Empire multiethnique, 260-78, 341-44.
90. Baron P. K. Uslar, "Dreveishiia skazaniia o Kavkaze," in Sbornik svedenii o kavkazskikh gortsakh, vol. 10 (Tiflis, 1881), 1-552.
91. "Otchet o sostoiami i deistvnakh otdela s 1859 po 1863 god," in ZKOIRGO, vol. 6 (Tiflis, 1864), 9;
92. "Nechto ob azbukhakh kavkazskikh gortsev," Kavkaz (10 March 1863): 124-26.
93. Allen J. Frank, "Islam and Ethnic Relations in the Kazakh Inner Horde: Muslim Cossacks, Tatar Merchants, and Kazakh Nomads in a Turkic Manuscript, 1870-1910," in Muslim Culture in Russia and Central Asia 2:211-42;
94. Thomas M. Barrett, "Crossing Boundaries: The Trading Frontiers of the Terek Cossacks," in Russia's Orient, 227-48;
95. Willard Sunderland, "An Empire of Peasants: Empire-Building, Interethnic Interaction, and Ethnic Stereotyping in the Rural World of the Russian Empire, 1800-1850s," in Imperial Russia, 181-85.
96. "Izvlechenie iz proekta 1849 g. o tatarskoi missii," in Petr Vasil'evich Znamenskii, Na pamiat' o Nikolae Ivanoviche Il'minskom (Kazan, 1892), 331-35.
97. Kappeler, La Russie: Empire multiethnique, 238.
98. K. P. Pobedonostsev i ego korrespondenty, vol. 1 (Moscow, 1923), 79, 276, 350-51.
99. Konstantin P. Pobedonostsev, Reflections of a Russian Statesman, foreward by Murray Polner (Ann Arbor, 1965), 140, 154, 184.
100. K. P. Pobedonostsev, Moskovskii sbornik (Moscow, 1896), 67, 151.
101. Mark D. Steinberg and Vladimir M. Khrastalev, eds., The Fall of the Romanovs: Political Dreams and Personal Struggles in a Time of Revolution (New Haven, 1995), 15-21.
102. K. P. Pobedonostsev i ego korrespondenty 2:547.
103. Marc Raeff, The Well-Ordered Police State: Social and Institutional Change through Law in the Germantes and Russia, 1600-1800 (New Haven, 1983).
104. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1979), 16-17.
105. See also the introduction to Brower and Lazzerini, eds., Russia's Orient, xi-xx.
106. See Willard Sunderland, "Russians into Iakuts? 'Going Native' and Problems of Russian National Identity in the Siberian North, 1870s-1914," Slavic Review 55 (Winter 1996): 806-25.
107. For a notable exception see Isabelle Kreindler, "A Neglected Source of Lenin's Nationality Policy," Slavic Review 36 (March 1977): 86-100;
108. and idem, "Nikolai Il'minskii and Language Planning in Nineteenth-Century Russia," International Journal of the Sociology of Language 22 (1979): 5-26.
109. Alexandre Bennigsen et Chantal Lemercier-Quelquejay, La presse et le mouvement national chez les musulmans de russie avant 1920 (Paris, 1964), 278.
110. For recent work on the formation of the Soviet state see Ronald Grigor Suny, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford, 1993);
111. Francine Hirsch, "The Soviet Union as a Work-in-Progress: Ethnographers and the Category Nationality in the 1926, 1937, and 1939 Censuses," Slavic Review 56 (Summer 1997): 251-78;
112. and Yuri Slezkine, "The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism," Slavic Review 53 (Summer 1994): 414-52.
113. N. G. Volkova, Etnicheskii sostav naseleniia severnogo Kavkaza v xviii-nachale XX veka (Moscow, 1974), 223.
114. See Terry Martin, "The Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing," Journal of Modern History 70 (December 1998): 813-61.