Kazakh Oath-Taking in Colonial Courtrooms: Legal Culture and Russian Empire-Building

In November 1875, Biisenbai Kashkynbaev, a Kazakh nomad who wintered near the Ishim River in Akmolinsk province (oblast´) with his father and three brothers, went to the chancellery of the Akmolinsk county (uezd) administration to report that one of his brothers, Diusebai Kashkynbaev, was missing. Biisenbai explained that Diusebai had set off six days before for Lake Taldykul, where he was intending to speak with a trader about renting out his horses for a caravan to Semirech´e province, but Diusebai never returned. The Akmolinsk county administration thus created a case file on Diusebai Kashkynbaev, and it was turned over to county investigators.¹ Over the next several months, they uncovered a few facts about the Kashkynbaev family that cast some suspicion on the brothers, but then the investigation changed course when, in April 1876, first Diusebai's gun was found near the winter home (zimovka) of Satybaldy Talaspaev, about eight versts from the Kashkynbaevs' winter home, and then his corpse was discovered in a ravine near the Ishim River.

The Kashkynbaev brothers accused Satybaldy of murder, and an investigation began. Testimony was taken from the Kashkynbaev brothers and their father, and from Satybaldy and his father and sister (who, the Kashkynbaevs alleged, had at one time been privately engaged to marry Diusebai). Eventually, the entire community was brought in as "witnesses" (svideteli) , but the "majority" of these Kazakhs told county investigators that "they could not positively say who killed Diusebai" and "that they knew nothing about [the case]."² Following Russian imperial judicial procedure formally introduced in the steppe region with the promulgation in 1868 of the Provisional Statute on the Administration of Ural´sk, Turgai, Akmolinsk, and Semipalatinsk Provinces,³ these witnesses took an oath prior to their testimony, vowing that their words would be truthful. The text of the oath was as follows:

I, the below-named, vow and promise before the Almighty Qur'an, not considering myself the equal of Great God, that everything that is asked of me—regardless of friendship, kinship, affinity, enmity, profit, and fear, without indulging any side, without participation, addition, and derogation and without concealment—shall accurately show and say the exact truth in order that I may answer with pure countenance before Almighty God on the Day of Judgment. Billiagi, Vallagi, Tallagi, I will answer with justness and show the very truth, after which as my oath I kiss the word of the Qur'an.⁴

For lawmakers and judicial officials, this oath followed standard style and substance in reform-era court cases. Although it was, of course, on the Christian Bible that most litigants, jurors, and witnesses made a vow, oath-takers of all religions in the empire performed the act as a promise before God, which, when done with a holy book, was meant to impress on them the deeply moral and ethical implications of their words. To Kazakh litigants and witnesses, however, a demonstrative oath that invoked their personal relationship to God symbolized by the Qur'an was not an element of customary legal practice. As I describe below, Kazakh legal actors commonly took cleansing oaths at the end of a court investigation or witness testimony, and the procedure used in this Russian investigation would have challenged Kazakh conceptions of proper judicial practice.

Why did Russians ask Kazakhs to swear on the Qur'an? The answer is straightforward: this was a feature of Russian imperial legal procedure; and Kazakhs who entered that legal system, as the Kashkynbaevs did when they reported to the Akmolinsk county administration that their brother was missing, were expected to conform to its practices. From the reform era of the 1860s, when imperial legal institutions and administrative practices were brought into the Kazakh steppe, until the end...