Heretics and Colonizers: Forging Russia’s Empire in the South Caucasus by Nicholas B. Breyfogle, and: Herrschaft, Recht und Islam in Daghestan. Von den Khanaten und Gemeindebünden zum рihād-Staat by Michael Kemper (review)

517 Ab Imperio, 1/2007 Wim van MEURS Nicholas B. Breyfogle, Heretics and Colonizers: Forging Russia’s Empire in the South Caucasus (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2005). 376 pp., ill. Maps, Index. ISBN: 0-8014-4242-7. Michael Kemper, Herrschaft, Recht und Islam in Daghestan. Von den Khanaten und Gemeindebünden zum рihād-Staat (Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag, 2005). 480 S., 2 maps. (=Caucasian Studies; Vol. 7). ISBN: 3-89500-414-6. By the mid-1990s, when interest in the post-communist transition in Eastern Europe and especially in the former Soviet Union was waning, Russian studies at Anglo-American and German universities seemed doomed. Since then, a spate of highly sophisticated studies has been published, opening up new fields of enquiry. One of the most prominent new fields is the study of Russia’s borderlands and the encounters between locals and immigrants. These authors no longer understand “area studies” as the privilege to ignore theoretical insights from the political and social sciences. At the same time, they have made good use of the opening up of archives, not only in Moscow and Petersburg, but (in the case of the two monographs under review) also in Tbilisi and Makhachkala .Although Breyfogle’s footnotes are full of references to archival and other unpublished sources, the actual text hardly offers the reader an inkling of the sources’ content: most of the lengthy quotes are from official documents after all. Nicholas Breyfogle and Michael Kemper share a bottom-up perspective . They are both interested in nineteenth century Russian empire building, but avoid the bias of the official Petersburg perspective by focusing on the realities of daily life in the imperial periphery of the Caucasus: “embed[ding] people and their communities in the most abstract of historical processes without losing sight of what it was like to live through those processes” (Breyfogle, P. 7). Breyfogle looks at Slavic heretics (non-Orthodox Christians) who were used as colonists , ironically becoming the face of tsarism for the indigenous Islamic populace, and thereby playing their part in the consolidation of the empire that failed to tolerate them in the core regions of the state. Conversely , Kemper looks at Islamic forms of indigenous social organization and interaction with the interfering Russian colonial power. Although both authors sympathize with their object of research as underdogs in fated defiance of the Russian Empire , the grey zones of local realities rather than the ex post construction of bilateral confrontation between Russian colonial agents and local 518 Рецензии/Reviews resistance determine these studies. As Breyfogle argues: “[W]hether they supported or opposed tsarist power, the sectarian settlers … performed a range of military, economic and administrative functions essential to Russian empire-building – sometimes unwittingly” (P. 3). In sync with recent studies of Western nineteenth century colonialism, his assumption is that metropole and colony/periphery co-produce each other. In fact, the tsarist policy of “heretic colonization” actually produced the heretic communities by concentrating the scattered groups from all over the empire in a fairly small region. Kemper for his part demonstrates that the various forms of societal organization and rule in Dagestan prior to Russian conquest were by no means static or primitive – debunking the typical view of a civilizing colonial power. The argument is well stated, even though two hundred pages and a historical narrative starting with the earliest recorded political histories from the seventh and eighth centuries may be somewhat overdone with regard to demonstrating the dynamics of autochthonous developments and the role of Islam.1 Strictly speaking , Kemper’s argument, that this golden era was later used to legitimze new rulers and regimes, does not very convincingly explain two hundred pages worth of historical reconstruction. “What actually happened ” is essentially irrelevant for a better understanding of the later instrumentalization of historical legitimization (Kemper, S. 65-66). Kemper also underlines that in Dagestan (unlike in the Southern Caucasus) the dynamic relations between princedoms and free communities were not swept away by the Russian conquest of 1750 – 1828, but rather redefined: for some rulers the Russian advance proved to be the right opportunity to restore authority over unruly communities (S. 211-216). Breyfogle’s choice of the heretic colonists is partly...