Studies on South East Europe Studies on South East Europe Dominik Gutmeyr In Russia’s cultural memory, the Caucasus is a potent point of reference, to which many emotions, images, and stereotypes are attached. The book gives Dominik Gutmeyr Borderlands Orientalism or How the Savage Lost his Nobility a new reading of the development of Russia’s perception of its borderlands and presents a complex picture of the encounter between the Russians and Borderlands Orientalism the indigenous population of the Caucasus. The study outlines the history of a region standing in between Russian reveries and Russian imperialism. Dominik Gutmeyr is historian at the Department for Southeast European Hi- or How the Savage Lost story and Anthropology at the University of Graz, Austria. his Nobility The Russian Perception of the Caucasus between 1817 and 1878 978-3-643-50788-4 LIT 9*ukdzfeb-m,,v* www.lit-verlag.at LIT LIT Dominik Gutmeyr Borderlands Orientalism or How the Savage Lost his Nobility Studies on South East Europe edited by Prof. Dr. Karl Kaser (Graz) vol. 19 LIT Dominik Gutmeyr Borderlands Orientalism or How the Savage Lost his Nobility The Russian Perception of the Caucasus between 1817 and 1878 LIT Cover image: Kavkazskaja armija – Tipy abchazcev, vyselivšichsja v Turciju In: Vsemirnaja Illjustracija, Illjustrirovannaja chronika vojny, October 1877 Printed with support of Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. ISBN 978-3-643-50788-4 © LIT VERLAG GmbH & Co. KG Wien 2017 Garnisongasse 1/19 A-1090 Wien Tel. +43 (0) 1-409 56 61 Fax +43 (0) 1-409 56 97 E-Mail: [email protected] http://www.lit-verlag.at Auslieferung: Deutschland: LIT Verlag Fresnostr. 2, D-48159 Münster Tel. +49 (0) 2 51-620 32 22, E-Mail: [email protected] E-Books sind erhältlich unter www.litwebshop.de CONTENTS NOTES ON TRANSLITERATION, TRANSLATION, AND DATING 7 INTRODUCTION 9 1 CONQUERING THE CAUCASUS 25 2 LOCATING RUSSIA’S ORIENT 63 3 IMAGINING THE CAUCASUS 95 4 RESEARCHING THE CAUCASUS 135 5 FRAMING THE RUSSO-OTTOMAN WAR OF 1877–1878 169 6 MILITARY WRITING ON THE CAUCASUS FRONT 203 7 PRESS COVERAGE OF THE CAUCASUS FRONT 239 CONCLUSION 271 ABBREVIATIONS 281 GLOSSARY 281 BIBLIOGRAPHY 285 ILLUSTRATIONS 313 NOTES ON TRANSLITERATION, TRANSLATION, AND DATING When writing about a region so complex in its ethnic and linguistic diversity, finding an adequate way to accommodate the many languages in a consistent system of transliteration is no easy task. Furthermore, the extraordinary richness of the languages in the North Caucasus in particular went hand in hand with the fact that they did not have a written form until the late 19th century, or even into the 20th century, which meant that the region and most importantly its inhabit- ants were for many centuries exclusively described in foreign languages. Speakers of almost a dozen of these foreign languages, including Arabic, Ar- menian, Georgian, Greek, Latin, Persian, Russian, (Ottoman) Turkish, and later also English, French, and German, described the Caucasus, all of whom addi- tionally had other ideas of how to transliterate alphabets they did not use them- selves. Taking the example of the capital city of today’s Kabardino-Balkar Re- public in southern Russia, one could refer to Nalchik, Naltschik, Naltchik, or Nalˈčik, before even trying to Romanize the Northwest Caucasian language of Kabardian in that case. The latter is a language that knows 47 consonants and two sonants and still stands in the shadow of the famous (and extinct) Ubykh, which boasted an impressive 84 consonants. Romanizing these phonetic re- finements unknown to a speaker of a European language inevitably leads to a myriad of apostrophes and accents above and below every letter, as they differ from language to language. Therefore, it is hardly possible to come up with a solution to the immanent question of how to spell names and places related to that area, if it weren’t for the acceptance of Russian as the region’s lingua franca. Except for a handful of already well-established forms in English (e.g. Moscow, St. Petersburg, Yere- van), the spelling of all names and terms in the present study therefore follows a Romanization from the Russian as set out by the ISO 9 transliteration standard. No political dimension is thereby intended, only heightened reading fluency and pragmatics—and may the alert reader condone one or other inconsistency. In references and direct quotes, the original spelling is, however, preserved, occa- sionally leading to alternating versions of the same name. Furthermore, I have decided to properly integrate all names and terms coming from the Georgian into the English orthography, with the obvious consequence that Georgian names and terms are spelled with capital letters despite the “Mkhedruli” being a unicameral script. Some terms closely connected to the history of the Caucasus region are just as problematic as the attempt to address its linguistic diversity. It starts with the 8 BORDERLANDS ORIENTALISM OR HOW THE SAVAGE LOST HIS NOBILITY term “Caucasian,” which I have opted not to use, for thanks to the German an- thropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840), it is used as a racial category, which is why I prefer to consistently use “Caucasus” as an adjective as well, as in “Caucasus War,” “Caucasus peoples,” and “Russo-Caucasus rela- tions.” Also, I have decided to use “South Caucasus” rather than “Transcauca- sus” [Zakavkazˈe] as the latter implies a distinctly Russian vantage point. An- other disputed term comes with the translation of vostok from Russian. Since Orientalism usually no longer refers to Oriental studies anymore, I have opted not to use terms such as “Orientalist” for academics preoccupied with “the study of the East/Orient,” which may give the impression of being derived from Said’s concept, but to translate the Russian vostokovedenie and vostokoved with “Orientology” and “Orientologist” respectively. Vostok in Russian refers to both “east” and the “Orient,” which is why the use of the term “Orient” does not refer to the Saidian Orient but has to be understood in its distinctly Russian context. Furthermore, all translations from the German and Russian are mine unless otherwise indicated. Dates given either follow the Gregorian calendar or addi- tionally refer to the Julian calendar, as the latter was in use in Russia until 1918. INTRODUCTION It was clearly a Chechen-style assassination, the proceedings prove it. […] As it usually happens in the case of Chechen assassinations, there was a tender for two or three groups. They came to Moscow and those, who succeeded first, got the money. Because Chechens never take much time to prepare themselves for a crime, they were quickly captured (Sokolov 2015: 15). Just before midnight on 27 February 2015, Boris E. Nemcov, one of Russia’s most prominent opposition politicians, was assassinated as he was crossing the Bolˈšoj Moskvoreckij Bridge in the immediate vicinity of the Kremlin and Red Square. Immediately, speculation on the background of the murder filled the front pages of newspapers all over the world. However, what struck me most about this speculation was that it did not take long for voices claiming that Nemcov must have been shot by a Chechen to become rather prominent, and this happened not due to the alleged killer’s possible political ties to Ramzan A. Kadyrov, the head of the Chechen Republic, but because of the way Nemcov was killed: he was shot in the back several times, which was clearly deemed to have been “a Chechen-style assassination.” The latter are the words of Sergej Sokolov, a journalist and deputy editor of Novaja gazeta, in an interview with Mateusz Dobrek for the news magazine New Eastern Europe a few weeks after the assassination. Such an accusation and essentialization of Chechens as a uniquely violent people was not an isolated case. In Russian culture and Russian language, stere- otypes about the peoples of the North Caucasus are firmly established. Alt- hough the Caucasus region is one of the world’s most heterogeneous in terms of ethnic groups and languages, its inhabitants are often referred to in a very gen- eralizing way, as “Čёrnye” [‘Blacks’] for instance, while the North Caucasus is perceived as an eternal powder keg: a crisis region not quite ready to be fully pacified. This perception and these attributions never seem to get outdated, nei- ther in Russia—thinking of the Chechen Wars of the 1990s and 2000s or Nem- cov’s assassination—nor in other parts of the world, to which this genuine North Caucasus violence is allegedly exported and where the same narratives are assumed, seemingly finding confirmation in tragedies like the Boston Mara- thon bombing of 2013, conducted by the ethnic Chechen-Avar brothers Džochar and Tamerlan Carnaev. Still, on what basis can one argue that the devious nature of Nemcov’s assas- sination would be typical of an entire ethnic group? And how does such an im- 10 BORDERLANDS ORIENTALISM OR HOW THE SAVAGE LOST HIS NOBILITY age come to be? The Chechen Wars certainly contributed to such an image, and Eva-Maria Auch (2006: 30) stresses that already during the First Chechen War, clichés of “evil Chechens,” “criminal zones,” and “dens of thieves” came to life again and politicians and the media could draw on similar images from the 19th century. Has this always been the case, and what specific images are being evoked, and when were they created? With the tendency of growing nationalism in the Russian Federation, primarily on the backs of peoples from the Caucasus and Central Asia (Coene 2010: 167; Michaleva 2012: 179), it makes sense to take a step back and look for the origins of such recurring images in order to better understand the complex relations between Russia and its southern frontier throughout history and today.