Russia's People of Empire: Life Stories from Eurasia, 1500 to the Present

17 Kutlu-Mukhammad Batyr-Gireevich Tevkelev

Main Mosque in Ufa. Photograph by Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii (1910). Selim-Girei Tevkelev was buried on the grounds in 1885. A predecessor had built the mosque and the adjoining residence in 1830 as the seat of the Orenburg mufti. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs. Public domain. See www.loc.gov/pictures/item/prk2000000797/. •• • 17 Kutlu-Mukhammad Batyr-Gireevich Tevkelev (1850–?) and family CHARLES STEINWEDEL In August 1916, two State Duma deputies, Alexander Kerensky and KutluMukhammad Batyr-Gireevich Tevkelev, traveled to Turkestan to investigate the causes of an uprising against conscription into labor battalions among the region’s native peoples.1 Both men had connections to central Asia. Kerensky had spent part of his youth in Tashkent where his father served as a school administrator. Tevkelev’s great great grandfather, also Kutlu-Mukhammad Tevkelev (1674/75–1766), had traveled to central Asia two centuries before as a translator for Peter the Great. This Tevkelev took the name Aleksei Ivanovich in 1734, served as second in command of Ivan Kirilov’s Orenburg Expedition, and became notorious in Bashkiria for his vigorous use of lethal force to suppress the Bashkir uprising of 1735–39. The Tevkelev family’s five-generation journey from one Kutlu-Mukhammad considered a tsarist “executioner (palach)”2 to another who was an elected leader of the Muslim fraction in the State Duma tells much about the changing possibilities for elite Muslims in the Russian Empire from the seventeenth century until its collapse in 1917. The origins of the Tevkelev family are not well known, but lay among Tatar princely families (murzy) of the middle Volga region. As the Muscovite state expanded eastward, some Muslims whose lands lay in its path chose to change sovereigns from the heirs of Chinggis Khan to the Muscovite tsar.3 Tevkelevs had served as translators for Moscow as early as the late seventeenth century. As tsarist forces moved still farther east, some of these new subjects used their linguistic skills and credibility as Muslims to serve as intermediaries between the tsar and Muslim populations. KutluMukhammad first served under Peter the Great during the Pruth campaign against the Turks in 1711. During Peter’s reign (1682–1725) eastward momentum picked up, as did the possible rewards for being part of it. Ever envious of European powers, Peter sought to go overland to build an empire in Asia that would cut Russia into the Asian trade that had become a source of British, French, and Dutch power in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. As part of this effort, Peter told KutluMukhammad that he would be well rewarded for getting Kazakhs to swear allegiance 190 Charles Steinwedel to the tsar and thus bring the tsar’s influence closer to sources of wealth in the East.4 Peter died before this happened, but not by much. Had he lived another decade, he would have seen Kutlu-Mukhammad convince some Kazakh leaders from the Small and Middle Hordes to become subjects of the tsar. Kutlu-Mukhammad’s proposal to further Russia’s eastward expansion by creating a fortress to help administer Kazakhs was picked up by another protégé of Peter’s, Ivan Kirilov. Kirilov set out in 1734 to build what became not a fortress but the city of Orenburg. In order to take a responsible position in the Orenburg Expedition, though, Kutlu-Mukhammad faced a consequence of Russian policy toward the East. Already in 1680, a decree ordered that servitors convert to Russian Orthodoxy or lose their serfs.5 Peter and his successor , Anna, intensified pressure on Muslim elites. Peter considered Russia a European country and sought to minimize the influence of Islam. Kutlu-Mukhammad took the name Aleksei Ivanovich. Evidence of Kutlu-Mukhammad’s formal conversion to Russian Orthodoxy is lacking, but by taking the name of Peter the Great’s father, the “most pious” Tsar Aleksei, Tevkelev certainly sought to project an outward appearance of having done so. In 1734, at about the same time he took his new name, he received his promotion to colonel and second in command of the Orenburg Expedition. His harsh suppression of Bashkir resistance to the Orenburg Expedition and work as a diplomat eventually did earn him the reward promised by Peter. In the eighteenth century, Kutlu-Mukhammad and his family acquired 216,905 desiatinas of land, making them some of the wealthiest landowners in the region. KutluMukhammad became Russia’s first Muslim General in...