Negotiating Imperial Spaces: Gender, Sexuality & Violence in the Nineteenth-century

Dissertation

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Doctoral Degree of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

By

Kristin Collins-Breyfogle, B.A., M.A.

Graduate Program in History

The Ohio State University

2011

Dissertation Committee:

Nicholas Breyfogle, Advisor

David Hoffmann

Alice Conklin

Jennifer Suchland Copyright by

Kristin Collins-Breyfogle

2011 Abstract

The nineteenth-century Russian imperial state was relatively less transformative in shaping gender, controlling sexuality, and implementing change in and life in the Caucasus region of the tsarist empire than comparative Western

European imperial projects in Asia and Africa. In spite of (and in distinct contrast to) tsarist writers’ condemnations of violence and the subordinate positions of Caucasian women and children in Caucasian family life, tsarist agents who implemented policy and oversaw cases of and children tended not to intervene in such incidents but rather to leave Caucasian communities to adjudicate matters based upon their own legal systems. While the discourse of empire justified tsarist control as a means to transform the lives of women in the region, in practice women and children in the Caucasus often found the touch of empire to be relatively light on their lived experience. Even when they turned consciously to the tsarist legal and gendered systems for assistance they largely found themselves turned away.

My research rethinks how we understand the form and function of tsarist imperialism and unveils its limits and parameters. Traditional literature focuses on the

Caucasian wars and sees the as heavy handed and invasive. In contrast, by examining the social and cultural history of the Caucasus through themes of gender,

ii sexuality (adultery cases), (bride stealing and ), and familial structures (blood vengeance, domestic/familial violence, challenges to marriage unions), my work reveals an empire that was largely hands off.

This dissertation finds a new side of Russian empire -- one characterized largely by tsarist officials reticent to implement change when it came to the position of

Caucasian women in society, to sexuality, and to Caucasian family and married life. The

Russian empire championed the use of its legal system to change and reform what it saw as the “uncivilized” Caucasians. In practice, however, it imposed its policies in an inconsistent, haphazard, and halting manner due to a variety of factors which included a fear of inciting local elites, an administrative system that limited the abilities of its officials to implement change, and cultural misunderstandings and ignorance. This dissertation argues that conceptions of gender, sexuality, honor, violence, and justice shaped interactions between Caucasian indigenous peoples and tsarist officials

(indigenous elites included) and determined the outcomes of those interactions, often leading to inaction or compromise on the part of tsarist officials, few alternatives for indigenous populations, and little change in Caucasian family life.

iii Dedication

Dedicated to Annie and Jon for all the missed nights

And to dad (I finally finished)

iv Acknowledgments

Completing my dissertation and doctoral degree has been a long journey and I could not have done it without the encouragement and support of a great many people. I am grateful to my advisor Nicholas Breyfogle for the great deal of patience, guidance, and support he gave me in this undertaking, and for introducing me to the Caucasus. I sincerely appreciate all the reading of drafts, the advice, and quick responses even from overseas. My dissertation committee, David Hoffmann, Alice Conklin, and Jennifer

Suchland all deserve my thanks for their support and help in navigating the ins and outs of dissertation writing. Many friends have also encouraged me throughout the years and

I want to thank Denice Fett, Jessica Gerard, Mark Soderstrom, Glenn Kranking for listening, advice, and reading drafts. I would especially like to thank all of the people who made my trips to Tbilisi, not only more productive, but also welcomed me with generous hospitality. My family has always encouraged me even if they wondered why I was still in school -- A special thanks to my mother for always listening and encouraging me. My husband has supported my work even when it meant separations for months at a time, missing anniversaries and sadly even his graduation from law school. I am grateful for his continued support, the long hours of entertaining and taking care of our daughter Annette when mommy was writing, and his companionship.

v Vita

1994…………………………………………………..B.A. University of New Hampshire

2001…………………………………………………..M.A. Florida State University

2003…………………………………………………..M.A. The Ohio State University

Fields of Study

Major Field: History

vi Table of Contents

Abstract...... ii

Dedication...... iv

Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………..v

Vita...... vi

List of Maps...... viii

Chapter 1: Introduction...... 1

Chapter 2: A Discourse of Violence, Gender, & Religion: Caucasian Women and Men in Nineteenth-Century Tsarist Print...... 22

Chapter 3: Crime, Violence and Honor Defined: Notions of the Masculine in Customary and Tsarist law...... 43

Chapter 4: A Place to Turn: Religious and Secular Tsarist Officials’ Authority over Caucasian Marriage & Family...... 71

Chapter 5: The Undoing of Tsarist Rhetoric: Tsarist Secular Authorities’ Approach to Bride Stealing and Familial Violence...... 94

Chapter 6: Negotiating Honor and Deciding ‘Justice’: Cases of Rape and Adultery...... 126

Chapter 7: Conclusion: Russian Gender and Empire in Comparative Perspective...... 162

Bibliography...... 171

vii List of Maps

Map 1: Caucasus...... 12

viii Chapter 1: Introduction

“Women are neither delicate, nor full of promise, nor a threat.”1 – Proverb

“A woman without a man is like a horse without a bridle”2 – Azeri Proverb

Tsarist writers and educated elites—both Russian and non-Russian—justified colonial rule through a condemnation of Caucasian family life and women’s subordinate position in Caucasian societies. They argued in state-sponsored journals and newspapers through articles and collections of statistics that Caucasian societies and Caucasian men exposed and incited women and children to violence, wrought violence upon them, and

“advocated…that the main duty of women” was to “serve men.”3 Russian publications about the Caucasus were filled with endless examples. In 1849 Ali Avdo ogly threw a rock at his ’s head and killed her.4 One year later, Arabke Guluce killed his illegitimate child.5 In May 1870, in the Kurin region of the Caucasus, “Gagii Kemkiatl attacked and inflicted light injuries on his wife during a fight with her.” 6 In 1871, in

Avaria, when a villager offended his daughter, “Isup Ali ogly stabbed and injured him in revenge.” In that same year in the Dargin district of , when Khan-Magomy

1 Sultan Abul’-Girsk, “Cherkess Zhena,” Kavkaz, 15 March 1847. 2 N. D. Kalashev, “Poslovitsy shirvanskikh Tatar,” Sbornik’ materialov’ dlia opisaniia mestnostei i plemen’ Kavkaza, SMOMPK, (1898): 25. 3 N. L’vov, “Iz’ puteshestviia po Dagestanu,” Sbornik svedenii o Kavkazskikh gortsakh (SSKG), (1870): 3- 5. 4 Sak’art’velos saistorio c’entraluri saxelmcip’o ark’ivi (SSC’SA), fond 4, opis’ 1, delo 1095. 5 SSC’SA, fond 4, opis’ 1, delo 2486. 6 “Iz gortsi kriminalistiki,” SSKG, (1870): 79.

1 Kurban ogly caught his daughter and her groom in a sexual bond before their marriage, he stabbed both killing his daughter. Again in 1871 on March 25 in the Andii region of

Dagestan, Mukhammed Marago Mikvas ogly injured another villager, Khalilia Musulasul ogly, after catching him “eye to eye with his wife” having a conversation, which Marago

Mikvas ogly viewed as an offense to his family’s honor.7 Violence in the nineteenth- century Caucasus, tsarist agents and indigenous educated elites claimed, revolved around women and sexuality.

The cases of domestic/familial abuse, fights, and murder that filled the pages of tsarist-era publications speak to defining characteristics of nineteenth-century Russian imperial control in the Caucasus region. They reveal the ways in which gender, violence, and sexuality defined both the politics of imperialism and the lived experiences of the . When the Russian state undertook colonization of the Caucasus in the nineteenth-century, it hoped to use its legal system as a way to both “civilize” and impose control over the diverse populations. Tsarist writers—which included both

Russian and indigenous educated elites—used cases that involved violence8 against

Caucasian women and children, who tsarist observers perceived as weak and in need of protection, to illustrate the need for tsarist intervention in the region. While tsarist

7 “Iz gortsi kriminalistiki,” SSKG, (1875): 4, 10, 26. 8 Some works on Violence: Nancy Armstrong, The Violence of Representation: Literature and the History of Violence, edited by Leonard Tennenhouse, (Routledge, 1989); Karen Throsby, Gender and Interpersonal Violence: Language, Action and Representation, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Veena Das et. al., Violence and Subjectivity, (University of California Press, 2000); Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary, (University of California Press, 2006). The peoples of the Caucasus and tsarist officials defined violence in widely different ways. For instance, Caucasian communities and practiced blood vengeance, the basis of a familial/community based justice system. When a member of a Caucasian family murdered, raped, or injured the member of another family, the victim’s family had the right to declare blood vengeance, pursue the offender and kill them. Tsarist officials, however, saw the practice of blood vengeance as a crime – murder, not a system of justice.

2 commentators had nothing but derision for Caucasian gender politics, they championed

Russian treatment of women and children as a model, emphasizing companionate , a peaceful family life, and the benefits of a peaceful Christian religion –

Orthodoxy.

Yet, in spite of (and in distinct contrast to) tsarist writers’ condemnations of violence and the subordinate positions of Caucasian women and children in Caucasian family life, tsarist agents who implemented policy and oversaw cases of violence against women and children tended not to intervene in such incidents but rather to leave

Caucasian communities to adjudicate matters based upon their own legal systems. They showed a clear willingness to compromise with Caucasian and generally proved reticent to implement any sort of imperial change. There was, then, a substantial disjuncture between tsarist rhetoric and policy. The disjuncture occurred because few of the tsarist writers who created the discourse of empire also implemented policy and vice versa. At the same time, tsarist officials, whether religious or secular, conceived women’s proper place in family and society as and mothers, which ultimately compelled them to accept local practice, permit early , and sanction unions between abducted brides and their kidnappers. The goal of tsarist rhetoric to implement higher marriage ages and dissolve unions created through bride stealing fell victim to issues of greater moral concern: How could tsarist authorities dissolve marriages between brides and grooms who consented to the marriage, which after all was a sacrament to which the couple took an oath? The gap between rhetoric and practice occurred for more sympathetic reasons as well. Some tsarist officials accepted a certain

3 amount of legal diversity within their imperial domains and even encouraged the acceptance of certain “harmless” Caucasian customs. Finally, the implementation in the

Caucasus of standard tsarist administrative practice, which placed issues of marriage under the purview of religious authorities (both Muslim and Georgian Orthodox), slowed change in Caucasian marriage practices and all but ended any influence for tsarist officials among the Muslim populations.

The dissertation also tells the story of Caucasian gender and sexuality through the lens of empire. My work is among the first English-language endeavors to analyze the critical ways in which gender and sexuality defined Caucasian social, cultural, family life, and imperial connections. The existing literature on Russian imperial history in the

Caucasus has tended to downplay or ignore such vital areas of human history as family, honor, gender, and sexuality, having focused to date almost singularly on the topic of war in the Caucasus. The result is an incomplete view of the structures and ideologies of empire in the region.9 I borrow the definition of gender from Annette F. Timm’s and

Joshua A. Sanborn’s work which defines it as both the “perceived differences between

9 W.E.D. Allen, A History of the Georgian People, (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner & co., 1932); John Baddeley, The Russian Conquest of the Caucasus, (New York, Longmans, Green and Co., 1908); Moshe Gammer, Muslim Resistance to the Tsar: Shamil and the conquest of Chechnia and Daghestan, (Frank Cass & Co. LTD, London, 1994); Paul Henze, “Circassian Resistance to ,” in The barrier: the Russian advance towards the Muslim world, ed. Marie Bennigsen Broxup, (New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1992); Marie Bennigsen Broxup, “The Last Ghazawat: The 1920-1921 Uprising,” in The North Caucasus barrier: the Russian advance towards the Muslim world, ed. Marie Bennigsen Broxup, (New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1992) Austin Jersild, Orientalism and Empire: North Caucasus Mountain Peoples and the Georgian Frontier, 1845-1917, (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), 89-109; Anna Zelkina, In Quest for God and Freedom: The Sufi Response to the Russian Advance in the North Caucasus (New York University Press, New York, 2000); Michael Khodarkovsky, Russia’s Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500-1800 (Indiana University Press, 2004).

4 the sexes” and the “primary way of signifying relationships of power.”10 Through a study of gender, sexuality, family, and violence my work provides a glimpse of the inner workings of Caucasian communities. It offers a critical appraisal of what it meant to be a tsarist Russian colonizer as well as a member of the colonized living and experiencing life in the wake of, and often apart from, Russian empire-building.

My research changes how we understand the form and function of tsarist imperialism and unveils its limits and parameters. Traditional literature focuses on the

Caucasian wars and sees the Russian empire as heavy handed and invasive. In contrast, by examining the social and cultural history of the Caucasus through themes of gender, sexuality (adultery cases), sexual violence (bride stealing and rape), and familial structures (blood vengeance, domestic/familial violence, challenges to marriage unions), my work reveals an empire that was largely hands off. My work goes beyond an examination of hotbeds of resistance or Islamic brotherhoods, and instead reveals much more complex, internally diverse (and internally confrontational) communities, and a much wider range of imperial encounters.

Law, Empire, Gender

As scholars of the legal theory and crime have argued, legal rules, categories, and arrangements define what constitutes crime and determines when and how to pursue judicial cases. In the process, legal structures create power differentials, and offer a means for scholars to translate and compare the socio-cultural discourses that overlapped

10 Annette F. Timm & Joshua A. Sanborn, Gender, Sex and the Shaping of Modern Europe: A History of from the French Revolution to the Present Day (Berg, 2007): 8-9.

5 and clashed behind and beyond empire.11 A study of the interactions of tsarist Russian legal structures and Caucasian customary law through the lens of gender explains the place of men and women in family and society, and the contrasting understandings of honor, violence, and justice. An awareness of the values and core beliefs that influenced tsarist Russian agents and Caucasian indigenous populations changes how we understand the power dynamics of the tsarist empire.

An investigation of the interactions of tsarist Russian law, Caucasian customary law, and Sharia law—especially where social discourse overlapped and where it was riddled with contention—is fundamental to our understanding of the nature of Russian empire-building, particularly since the outcomes in Imperial courts differed considerably from those that remained at the village level. Compilations of customary law -- customs accepted as law and as rights and obligations regulated by members of a community

--and tsarist Russian law provide a window into how the peoples of Imperial Russia and the Caucasus region created categories, related to one another, and shaped gendered identities through a colonial encounter that itself, if haphazardly and haltingly, reshaped

Caucasian and tsarist societies.12 Alongside imperial courts, Caucasian communities and

11 Among others, the following scholars discuss the role of law/society in producing social discourses and creating gendered and sexual categories/identities: Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Vol. 1, (Vintage Books, New York, 1990); Nicola Lacey, “The Constitution of Identity: Gender, Feminist Legal Theory, and the Law and Society Movement,” in The Blackwell Companion to Law and Society, (Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 471-86; Sally Engle Merry, “Colonial and Post-Colonial Law,” in The Blackwell Companion to Law and Society, (Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 569-88; Joan W. Scott, “AHR Forum: Unanswered Questions,” in American Historical Review, (December, 2008): 1422- 29; Joanne Meyerowitz, “AHR Forum: A History of “Gender,” in American Historical Review, (December, 2008): 1346-56; Brenda R. Silver, “Periphrasis, Power, & Rape in A Passage to India,” in Rape and Representation, eds. Lynn A. Higgins and Brenda R. Silver, (Columbia University Press, 1991), 124. 12 Nicola Lacey, “The Constitution of Identity: Gender, Feminist Legal Theory, and the Law and Society Movement,” in The Blackwell Companion to Law and Society, (Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 471-78; Sally Engle Merry, “Colonial and Post-Colonial Law,” in The Blackwell Companion to Law and Society, (Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 575.

6 villages continued to administer justice in accordance with their distinct notions of family and marriage, gender, honor, and violence according to adat law (customary law) and

Sharia law (in terms of marriage). 13 Caucasian customary law continued to function even when Islam was well entrenched in the Caucasus. Austin Jersild has argued persuasively that the compilation of Caucasian customary law into a codex of laws was a

Russian invention designed to reduce the perceived power of Islam.14 The goal to reduce the power of Islam is paradoxical, since the tsarist administration brought Islamic religious leaders into the imperial system and gave them the autonomy to run their own affairs.15

Methodology, Sources, and Historiography

I initially became interested in exploring questions of family, gender, law, and violence in the tsarist empire after studying European empires, in particular Britain and

Germany. I believed that I would find tsarist Russian authorities, maybe even their wives or at least women missionaries, in the Caucasus who actively carried out policies that changed Caucasian customs and actively intervened in Caucasian family life, issues of sexuality, and marriage questions, much like in these Western European cases. I

13 Anna Zelkina, In Quest for God and Freedom: The Sufi Response to the Russian Advance in the North Caucasus (New York University Press, New York, 2000); Beskhanum Ragimova, “Legal Status of Women in Traditional Dagestani Society (Nineteenth-Early Twentieth Century), Iran & the Caucasus 6, no.1/2 (2002). 14 Austin Jersild, Orientalism and Empire: North Caucasus Mountain Peoples and the Georgian Frontier, 1845-1917, (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002): 89-109; Virginia Martin, Law and Custom in the Steppe: The of the Middle Horde and Russian Colonialism in the Nineteenth Century (Routledge, 2001): 85-113. 15 Robert D. Crews, For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia (Harvard University Press, 2009): 30-36.

7 perceived the imperial project as one where male imperial officials, women missionaries, feminists, and female nurses actively sought to “remake” their colonies. I was not initially prepared to find the very dissimilar case in the Russian Caucasus that I investigate in this dissertation

The Russian state was relatively less transformative in shaping gender, controlling sexuality, and implementing change in marriage and family life in the Caucasus than comparative Western European imperial projects in Asia and Africa.16 Tsarist agents often left cases of domestic/familial violence, bride stealing, rape, and adultery to the gendered norms of local populations’ legal codes. Here then, while the discourse of empire justified tsarist control as a means to transform the lives of women in the region, in practice women and children in the Caucasus often found the touch of empire to be relatively light on their lived experience. Even when they turned consciously to the tsarist legal and gendered systems for assistance they largely found themselves turned away.

In writing this dissertation, I draw upon a variety of theories and methodologies including studies of the subaltern, gender and sexuality studies, women’s and cultural history, colonial/post-colonial studies, and anthropology.17 Archival records (from the 16 Laura Stoler, “Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, (University of California Press, 1997), 198-237; Antoinette Burton, At the Heart of the Empire, (University of California Press, 1998); Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865-1915, (The University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Mytheli Sreenivas. Wives, Widows, and Concubines: The Conjugal Family Ideal in Colonial India, Indiana University Press, 2008; Elizabeth Thompson, Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege, and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon, (Columbia University Press, 2000). 17 Bruce Grant, The Captive and the Gift: Cultural Histories of Sovereignty in Russia and the Caucasus. (Cornell University Press, 2009); Marilyn Strathern, “One man and many men,” in Big Men and Great Men, eds. Maurice Godelier and Marilyn Strathern, (Cambridge University Press, 1991); Cynthia Werner, “Women, Marriage and the Nation-State: The Rise of Nonconsensual Bride in Post-Soviet ,” in The Transformation of Central Asia: States and Societies from Soviet Rule to Independence, ed. Pauline Jones Luong, (Cornell University Press, 2004); Annette B. Weiner, Inalienable

8 archives in Tbilisi, Georgia) such as court reports, petitions, decrees, personal letters, and nineteenth century newspaper articles and ethnographic journals offer glimpses of the lived experiences of the bureaucrats in the pay of tsarist Russia and of the indigenous families whose lives sometimes crossed paths with each other in the wake of blood vengeance, challenges to the validity of marriage unions, domestic/familial violence, bride stealing, rape and adultery.

My dissertation offers a story as told by the participants who lived the experience

“on the ground”—a distinct perspective in the Russian history field, which largely tells its history from the central corridors of power. In recent years, historians such as Robert

Crews, Charles King, Nicholas Breyfogle, Thomas Barrett, Anna Zelkina, Austin Jersild,

Susan Layton, and Michael Reynolds have given increasing attention to the Imperial, religious, and multiethnic dimensions of Russian history in the Caucasus. They have explained the ways in which religious unification facilitated resistance against Russia, the impact of Orientalism and nationalism on the Russian civilizing mission, the role of gender in the creation of an imaginary/literary Caucasus, and the roles of indigenous

Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving, (University of California Press, 1992); John Colarusso, Nart Sagas from the Caucasus: Myths and Legends from the , Abaza, Abkhaz, and Ubykhs, (Princeton University Press, 2002);Eve Levin, Sex and Society in the World of the Orthodox Slavs, 900-1700, (Cornell University Press, 1989); Jennifer Suchland, “On the Transnational trouble with Gender: The Politics of in Russia,” Ph.D. Dissertation, The University of Austin, Texas, 2005; Denise Riley, “Am I that Name?: Feminism and the category of woman in history” In Feminisms, eds. Sandra Kemp and Judith Squires, (Oxford University Press, 1997); Joan Scott, “Gender: a useful category of historical analysis,” in Gender and Politics of History, (Columbia University Press, 1988); Nancy Kollman Shields, “Women’s Honor in Early Modern Russia,” in Russia’s Women, Accomodation, Resistance, and Transformation, eds. Barbara Evans Clements, Barbara Alpern Engel, Christine Worobec, (University of California Press, 1991), William Wagner, Marriage, Property, and Law in Late Imperial Russia, (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1994); Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, (Routledge, New York, 2006); Daniel Kaiser, “He Said, She Said”: Rape and Gender in Early Modern Russia,” in Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Spring, 2002): 197-216.

9 peoples, colonists, and officials in creating empire.18 My research builds off of this scholarship. I go beyond exploring conceptualizations of empire and its justifications and instead take the next step to examine how these conceptualizations operated in daily life.

In particular, I add to Austin Jersild’s fundamental examination of crime and how it was used to justify rule in the Caucasus, especially the plight of women and children. My examination of crime, in contrast, compares Russian and indigenous writers’ understanding of tsarist discourse to tsarist agents’ implementation of practice to uncover the ways that notions of gender and sexuality influenced tsarist authorities and Caucasian elders’ judgments and interactions.

Despite the Russian state’s generally hands-off policy, the arrival of the tsarist empire (which was one in a long list of invaders of the Caucasus, from Arab to Mongol to

Persian and Ottoman) resulted in a certain amount of change in questions of marriage and family among Caucasian populations. The Russian imperial regime both hindered and encouraged Caucasian customs, and offered alternatives to some Caucasian peoples, such as women who sought to override their head of house’s marriage choice, young men and women whose parents refused to permit them to marry, and petitioners who informed on

Christian bigamous marriages to name just a few. Each chapter examines these changes

18 Robert D. Crews, For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia (Harvard University Press, 2009); Nicholas B. Breyfogle, Heretics and Colonizers: Forging Russia’s Empire in the South Caucasus (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005); Thomas Barrett, At the Edge of Empire: the Terek and the North Caucasus frontier, 1700-1860 (Westview Press, 1999); Anna Zelkina, In Quest for God and Freedom: The Sufi Response to the Russian Advance in the North Caucasus (New York University Press, New York, 2000); Austin Jersild, Orientalism and Empire: North Caucasus Mountain Peoples and the Georgian Frontier, 1845-1917 ( Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002); Susan Layton, Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy (Cambridge University Press, 1994); Charles King, The Ghost of Freedom: A History of the Caucasus (Oxford University Press, 2008), Michael Reynolds, “Myths and Mysticism: Islam and Conflict in the North Caucasus” (Kennan Institute, 2004).

10 and their intersection with Caucasian family hierarchies, Caucasian customary law, and imperial agents and law. My research finds that indigenous populations took the initiative and forged connections with tsarist agents. Indigenous populations, especially

Caucasian women, used the Russian legal system to circumvent their own systems of law and family patriarchs to get the results that they wanted. But many Caucasian peoples found their way blocked in their efforts to obtain greater tsarist assistance because tsarist agents were reluctant to intervene, despite the rhetoric published in the newspapers and journals. My work reveals the crucial place of women, gender, sexuality, family, violence and local community life take in understanding the nature of contact between

Caucasians and , how both the diverse peoples of the Caucasus and tsarist empire changed practices as a result of this interaction, and the limits of imperial change.

Situating the Caucasus: A Crossroads

An area rich in its own cultural diversity, the Caucasus sits at the crossroads of world civilizations and religions (at the meeting point of Christianity and Islam, and of

Russian, Turkish, and Iranian peoples and cultures). Situated between the Black and

Caspian seas, the mountainous region (refer to the map 1 on the following page) known as the Caucasus includes numerous peoples of varying ethnicities. My dissertation discusses only a handful of these peoples including the mountaineers of the Northern

Caucasus (including the peoples of Dagestan, such as the , , , and

Lezgins, the peoples of , the Ingush, and the Kabardins), and the peoples of the

South Caucasus including , (including the Svan, , and the

11 peoples of Imeretii), , and the Azeri’s (often described as “Tatar” by Russian authors).

Map 1: The Caucasus region today

I refer to the region as the Caucasus and even describe peoples as “Caucasian,” however the peoples I discuss comprised numerous different ethnicities, spoke different languages and practiced different religions – the “Caucasian” peoples I investigate are far

12 from uniform. The mountainous geography and the cultural diversity of the Caucasus region resulted in “mutual influence and exchange” among Caucasian peoples and with outsiders as well, and it demanded skill in multiple languages. Shepherds from the

Caucasus Mountains interacted with farmers from the South, Chief elders from the North

Caucasus and kings from the South vied for power with each other, khans, emirs and even Russian tsars.19

In spite of some foundational differences like language and religion, the

Caucasian communities that I examine also possessed some cultural and social commonalities. For instance, they used varying systems of adat or customary law to deal with issues of criminality (even in Muslim societies)20, and sought to uphold familial honor and maintain order in Caucasian societies through the use of blood vengeance.

The Caucasian peoples I discuss in my work, despite language and religious differences, understood family as a large familial network and attributed to both women and men the duty to defend their familial networks. I used these commonalities as a basis for examining and analyzing Caucasian communities with each other and with their tsarist conquerors to uncover the lived experience of Caucasian peoples under tsarist rule. I neither conceptualize the peoples of Caucasus as a uniform group nor do I see the region as uniform.

19 Charles King, The Ghost of Freedom: A history of the Caucasus (Oxford University Press, 2008): 11-12. 20 In cases involving marriage Muslim societies used Sharia law.

13 Chapter Overview

In chapter one, “A Discourse of Violence, Gender, and Religion: Caucasian

Women and Men in Nineteenth-Century Tsarist Print,” I explore the writings of tsarist authors, both Russian and indigenous educated elites, who painted an image of Caucasian society, family, and marriage practices as flawed. I find that tsarist authors, both Russian and indigenous, put forth different agendas often based on ethnicity and religious background. Empire offered indigenous educated elites the opportunity to “civilize” their own people. For Russian and indigenous writers “civilizing” the natives might mean making certain Caucasian populations more like Russians and Europeans who they saw as more advanced. Yet some indigenous writers took the opportunity given to them by

Russian colonization and championed a purely Caucasian agenda founded on transforming and merging certain groups of Caucasian peoples judged inferior into

Caucasian populations deemed superior. Most apparent, however, was that the tsarist writers who produced this imperial rhetoric possessed different goals from the tsarist agents and religious authorities (Orthodox and Muslim) who administered policy in the

Caucasus. The disparate goals of the participants of empire in the Caucasus had far reaching consequences. The result was policy-making that lacked appeal either for tsarist writers or for those Caucasian peoples who desired change in Caucasian familial relations and marriage practices.

In my second chapter, “Crime, Violence, and Honor Defined: Notions of the

Masculine in Customary and Tsarist Law,” I examine tsarist authorities’ efforts to end the practice of blood vengeance, which had only mixed success. Blood vengeance acted as

14 the basis of Caucasian customary law, which gave injured Caucasian families (the men of those families) the choice to redeem their honor by pursuing and killing wrongdoer(s) and/or their closest family members.21 Tsarist authorities lacked the insight to see the interconnectedness of Caucasian customs (especially justice, honor, masculinity, family, social power, and violence) and offered no competing definition of masculinity that would have reduced the appeal of the practice of blood vengeance. They also did not understand how such cultural interconnectedness might hinder their efforts to end the practice of blood vengeance and the blood feuds caused by the practice. For instance, I discuss how in the late nineteenth-century tsarist authorities compelled the starshchina

(village elder) of an Ossetian village to arrest a man who was staying at his home as a guest, which forced the village elder to act against Caucasian rules of hospitality and make a blood enemy of his guest and his family.22 Tsarist authorities unwittingly caused blood feuds by compelling indigenous peoples to act against their customs and hindered their own efforts at ending the practice.

Caucasian conceptions of manhood and familial honor existed in close concert with the practice of blood vengeance. Thus the tsarist administration’s choice to make blood vengeance illegal led to the idolization of Caucasian men by Caucasian youth and their communities who continued the practice in the face of tsarist reprisals.23 Caucasian communities’ championed elaborate risk-taking feats in which young Caucasian men participated such as raids against nearby villages, stealing of brides, or even more

21 V.O. Bobrovnikov, ed., Musul’mane severnogo Kavkaza obychai pravo nasilie, (Moskva, 2002), 56-7. 22 John F. Baddeley, The Rugged Flanks of the Caucasus (Arno Press, New York, 1973), II: 136-7. 23 The tsarist administration outlawed the practice as early as the 1820s in the North Western Caucasus and again in 1859 when Viceroy A.I. Bariatinskii made it illegal.

15 impressive murdering Russians. Caucasian societies and families expected Caucasian men to participate in these risk-taking behaviors in order to claim their manhood and maintain or improve familial honor and reputation. Caucasian families who gave up the practice of blood vengeance made themselves open to reprisals from other stronger

Caucasian families who refused to give up the custom.

In spite of the difficulties confronting tsarist authorities, the tsarist presence gave

Caucasian families’ alternatives to customary law. Families who desired to avoid carrying out blood vengeance sought out tsarist justice. Tsarist agents even moved families at risk of blood vengeance to different areas in the empire (usually still in the

Caucasus). However, and most importantly, tsarist law provided no alternative for

Caucasian families to redeem familial honor beyond continuing blood vengeance, and tsarist agents found that moving Caucasian families threatened by blood vengeance did not stop blood enemies from searching for their foe and carrying out attacks and reprisals.

My third chapter, “A Place to Turn: Religious and Secular Tsarist Officials’

Authority over Caucasian Marriage and Family,” examines petitions from indigenous peoples concerned about the validity of certain unions and marriage practices such as early child marriage, issues of consent and coercion, , , and bride stealing. Under the Russian administration any questions dealing with marriage came under the purview of religious authorities since marriage was a sacrament. Tsarist secular authorities played the role only of enforcers and informants since they enjoyed no jurisdiction over religious questions and marriage. In the Caucasus this meant that

Georgian Orthodox authorities and Muslim religious authorities became part of the

16 imperial institutional apparatus by monitoring the marriage practices of their adherents.24

Such administrative practice in the tsarist empire reflected an uniformity throughout

Russia’s various imperial projects. At the same time, it allowed for a certain amount of autonomy among religious authorities, who like tsarist secular authorities had different goals in mind than tsarist writers who created a discourse based on condemnations of

Caucasian family life.25 Orthodox and Muslim authorities implemented policies that tended to maintain marriage, which they based on religious tenets and the shared notion that the only proper societal role of women was as wives and mothers. Thus, when confronted with cases of early child marriage and bride stealing (both contrary to tsarist familial law), both Orthodox and Muslim authorities tended to leave marriages intact

(even if improperly or illegally entered into). However, Muslim religious officials allowed polygamy since Sharia law supported the custom, while Orthodox religious officials never permitted marriages to stand in cases of bigamy and polygamy. Each faith defended its actions with its religious texts.

Both chapter four and five, “The Undoing of Tsarist Rhetoric: Bride Stealing and

Familial Violence,” and, “Negotiating Honor and Deciding ‘Justice’: Cases of Rape and

Adultery,” examine criminal cases of domestic/familial violence, bride stealing, rape, and adultery that came before tsarist secular authorities (who were responsible for such legal

24 Robert D. Crews, For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia (Harvard University Press, 2009): 32-34. 25 Paul Werth, “Imperial Russia and the Armenian Catholicos at Home and Abroad,” in Reconstruction and Interaction of Slavic Eurasia and Its Neighboring Worlds, ed. Osamu Ieda (Sapporo: Slavic Research Center, 2006), 203-35. Muslim religious authorities in the Caucasus enjoyed a great deal of autonomy; however the same cannot be said of Georgian Orthodox officials who were overseen by Russian Orthodox authorities. Despite that, in the Caucasus Georgian Orthodox authorities monitored all Christian populations, not just Orthodox peoples. Georgian Orthodox authorities, however, tended to bow to the different practices among the various Christian denominations they encountered.

17 cases). These cases usually included serious physical violence, causing permanent injury or death, or involved a child, which by tsarist standards included boys and girls less than sixteen years of age. Tsarist authorities based their decisions on certain gendered and religious beliefs such as the notion that women (Caucasian or Russian) were extensions of men, that women needed male guardianship, that rape ruined women’s honor and made them unsuitable for marriage, and that women’s moral frailty led them to commit adulterous acts.26 Consequently, in an effort to “protect” and look after the woman involved, tsarist authorities tended to make decisions that maintained marriage in domestic/familial abuse cases, even in cases of adultery, and permitted marriage in cases of bride stealing and rape, as long as the “ruined” woman agreed.

Tsarist officials applied these beliefs across the empire, thus imperial law possessed a certain amount of cross-empire consistency. However, what this meant in practice in the Caucasus was that they handed down relatively light sentences (often less than a year of prison time) to Caucasian men who injured their wives in familial disputes.

In cases where Caucasian wives committed adultery and were subsequently injured by their husbands, tsarist officials took their wives’ infidelity into consideration and gave lighter sentences (again often less than a year of prison time) to the guilty men. Tsarist courts in the Caucasus, however, encountered problems specific to the imperial context in the southern borderlands. They found it necessary to consider Caucasian customary law when sentencing defendants, even justifying altering punishments from earlier decisions

26 William Wagner, Marriage, Property, and Law in Late Imperial Russia (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1994): 67, 160; Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in fin-de-siecle Russia (Cornell University Press 1992): 36, 51-3, 123.

18 for Caucasian men guilty of violent crimes, like bride stealing. Officials willingly took appeals and overturned previous sentences (except in extraordinary brutal cases), which they justified due to the indigenous Caucasian man’s “backward customs” and lack of understanding of imperial law.

Caucasian peoples, however, possessed a very different interpretation of women and their role in Caucasian familial structures. For instance Caucasian societies believed that girls became women anywhere from the age of twelve to seventeen depending upon the ethnic group (in comparison to age 16 in Russian law). Therefore a wide range of

“proper” marriage ages for brides (and bride-grooms) existed in the Caucasus. When confronted by cases of rape or bride stealing where the victim was less than sixteen years of age, tsarist authorities labeled the raped girl as a child, which could result in higher penalties for the abductor since tsarist society believed that the child would not be able to marry and fulfill her duties as wife and mother. If the family of the underage victim accepted a proposal of marriage from their daughter’s attacker they then needed to petition and ask the tsarist court to consider their people’s customs, and tsarist officials usually agreed.27

Caucasian communities viewed women and all members of Caucasian families as part of an extended familial unit, not a nuclear family as in the case of Russian families.

Caucasian women were not extensions of their husbands and fathers, but of their families.

Caucasian societies and families understood Caucasian women’s lot in life as one that included marriage, but kidnapping and rape did not necessarily “ruin” Caucasian

27 Tsarist authorities would compromise and allow early marriages, but they would not allow a marriage if the victim did not agree to marry her rapist or kidnapper.

19 women’s chances of finding another suitor as it did in Russian society. To be sure, some

Caucasian communities expected victims of kidnapping and rape to marry their attackers.28 However, in instances of kidnapping or in cases where the victim’s family or the victim refused a marriage proposal from her abductor, many of the Caucasian societies I studied did not see the girl as ruined and unable to find another suitor

(especially if she had shown valor in fighting back). Tsarist courts never fully comprehended this fact, which encouraged their tendency to accept marriage arrangements when victims accepted them and hindered their ability to implement change in Caucasian marriage practices.

Caucasian families measured the worth of their members by the loyalty they demonstrated to their families. They held all members responsible for maintaining, defending, and improving familial honor. They expected Caucasian women to fight back

(and with and power—components of “femininity” in the Caucasian case), whether in cases of bride stealing, rape, or assault. Tsarist courts also expected women to fight back in these situations, but for reasons rather different from Caucasian communities. Tsarist courts considered fighting back as evidence that the rape, attack, or kidnapping occurred. Fighting back when under attack also demonstrated to Caucasian communities that the event happened, however it had much more significance to the victim’s Caucasian family, which considered women who fought against their attackers’ loyal family members who defended familial honor. Women who successfully fended off attackers or fought valiantly against their foe (but lost) succeeded in defending

28 Some villages in Dagestan expected girls’ victim to kidnapping and rape to marry their attackers (although this was not the case if the kidnapper took an oath saying that he did not rape the victim).

20 familial honor, which was by far the greater measure of their worth than whether or not her attacker took her virginity. Caucasian women might have held subordinate positions in Caucasian familial structures, but Caucasian society did not view them as passive or unable to defend themselves or their families.

21 Chapter 2 A Discourse of Violence, Gender, and Religion: Caucasian Women and Men in Nineteenth-Century Tsarist Print

Tsarist writers, those authors who wrote for state-sponsored newspapers and journals who criticized Caucasian customs and religious beliefs, included Russians and educated non-Russian elites, military men, and ethnographers to name just a few. They justified their condemnations of Caucasian customs in four ways: through a criticism of practices of violence that they considered unacceptable, the powerful role of men in the

Caucasian patriarchal structure, the secondary position of women and children in

Caucasian society, and the practice of Islam. For instance, N. Petrusevich, a nineteenth century writer (Russian General) for the state-sponsored journal Sbornik svedenii o

Kavkazskikh (Collection of Information about the Caucasus -- SSKG), used the violent murder of a mother and her illegitimate child in the Northern Caucasus district of Avaria as an opportunity to condemn Caucasian customary law and the practice of blood vengeance. The ex-husband of the unnamed Avar woman stoned his former wife’s newborn child with the help of his friends. Then, “without her agreement, he raped her” and beat her to death. The author described the murders as “veritable” and as “evidence of the devotion of [Caucasian] mountain men to commit violence in accordance to their

22 customary laws,” which Petrusevich equated to “mob law” (k samosudu) or no law at all.29 The problem as the writer saw it “manifested itself due to the self-serving [nature of] the mountain men, who in our view are criminals, but in the view of their adats

(customary law) act correctly according to custom.”30

Tsarist courts sentenced the men responsible to twenty years of hard labor – an outcome that did not stop Petrusevich from utilizing the murders of mother and child to condemn Caucasian customary law. Villages in Avaria, like the one described by

Petrusevich, adhered to a law that banished unmarried pregnant women from their communities, and allowed them to return only after one year in addition to paying a fine.

Customary law in Avaria did not permit the murder of unmarried women, mothers of illegitimate children, to go without punishment.31 Instead, it left the decision of pursuing the murder of unwed mothers and their children to their families, who had the right to take vengeance. However, Petrusevich saw blood vengeance as perpetuating a cycle of murder and he championed the use of Russian law and administration as a means to break the cycle of violence, something to which he hoped that the Caucasian populations would

“slowly submit.”32 Petrusevich noted with disgust that the murdered woman’s family demanded blood vengeance, not “Russian law which would convict the criminals” but

“murder.”33 He was far from the only writer who argued for a greater role for Russian law, custom, and administration in Caucasian societies based upon evidence of violence against women and children and their secondary positions in society.

29 “Iz gortsi kriminalistiki,” in SSKG, (1870): 63. 30 Ibid.,52. 31 F.I. Leontovich, Adaty kavkazskikh’ gortsev’ (Odessa, 1882), II: 485. 32 “Iz gortsi kriminalistiki,” in SSKG, (1870): 52. 33 Ibid., 64.

23 When authors who contributed to state-run newspapers and journals offered alternatives to Caucasian traditions and law, they argued that the “morally depraved” status of Caucasian parents, Muslim religious authorities, and the violent behavior of

Caucasian men resulted in early marriages, coercion into marriages, polygamy, bride stealing, suicides, , rape and murders. First, authors emphasized what was “wrong” with Caucasian practices, much like Petrusevich when he condemned

Caucasian customary law, particularly its basis on blood vengeance. Second, tsarist propagandists sometimes claimed that the adoption of Russian law, administration, and tradition would improve Caucasian women’s lives and tame Caucasian men. 34 Writers’ and ethnographers’ arguments centered on the benefits of Russian family life and

Orthodox Christianity, and more often than not held Muslim traditions to blame for the ills of Caucasian family life and society in contrast to customary, or adat practices. Their judgments often, if indirectly, supported tsarist policy aimed at overcoming the threat of

Islam in the Caucasus.

Critiques of Islam and violence in the Caucasus are not unique to family and marriage practices. For example, Moshe Gammer, an Israeli historian, discusses the use of Islam to rally Caucasian mountaineers to fight against their Russian foe in Muslim

Resistance to the Tsar. In Quest for God and Freedom Anna Zelkina takes a similar approach and examines the rise of the Sufi Naqshbandi order in Dagestan and Chechnya and its use of Islam to form a unified political movement against Russian incursion in the

34 State-sponsored newspapers and journals such as the following provided an abundance of information: Kavkaz, Novoe Obrezrenia, Kaspii, Kavkazskii Kalendar’, Kavkazskii sbornik, Kavkazskii Vestnik, Russkaia musl’, Sbornik materialov dlia opisaniia mestnostei i plemen Kavkaza, Sbornik statisticheskikh svedenii o Kavkaze, Sbornik svedenii o Kavkaze, Sbornik svedenii o Kavkazskikh gortsakh, Tiflisskii vestnik, and the Georgian-language droeba.

24 Caucasus. In Susan Layton’s Russian Literature and Empire she takes a different path and examines the role of nineteenth-century Russian literature in the making of a civilizing mission in the Caucasus, which justified Russia’s incursion in the Caucasus through a critique of Islam and violence (wrought especially by Caucasian men). 35 My cultural/social of Russian and indigenous educated elites’ ethnographic work details

Caucasian familial and marriage practices and adds to these works by focusing on a critique of violence through the lens of gender and family.

Russian ethnographers championed a movement called nativism, which called for respect for native customs and indigenous cultures, but then they chose the customs they deemed authentic, which did not include blood vengeance, bride stealing, or even the .36 The role of tsarist officials and Caucasian elites in the Caucasus would transform the Caucasian peoples by eliminating the non-native (especially Islamic) customs– or so tsarist writers argued, even if through indirect means. Tsarist authorities possessed policies that might transform Caucasian family life and put an end to marriage practices considered offensive by tsarist observers (early marriage, coercion, polygamy, and bride stealing) and domestic violence, rape and murder, but they only implemented some of them and often compromised with local populations.

However certain educated Caucasian mountaineers also contributed a great deal to tsarist rhetoric and formed an elite, which included among many others Dzhannat’-Bagi,

35 Moshe Gammer, Muslim Resistance to the Tsar: Shamil and the Conquest of Chechnia and Daghestan (Portland, OR: Frank Cass., 1994); Anna Zelkina, In Quest for God and Freedom: The Sufi Response to the Russian Advance in the North Caucasus (New York University Press, 2000); Susan Layton, Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy (Cambridge University Press, 1994). 36 Austin Jersild, Orientalism and Empire: North Caucasus Mountain Peoples and the Georgian Frontier, 1845-1917, (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002): 59-61.

25 Abdulla Omarov (Lak), and M. Sagaradze (Georgian), who advanced agendas of their own. They drove tsarist discourse with their condemnations of their co-ethnics and co- religionists lack of civilization. Dzhannat’-Bagi, Omarov, and Sagaradze condemned the aggressive role of the family patriarch and the subordinate role of women and children in

Caucasian families. However, Dzhannat’-Bagi championed the acculturation of Russian customs in his writings (one of the few who directly called for change), while Omarov’s ethnographic work sought to demonstrate that Caucasian tribes like the Laks (his tribe) and the Avars were really Dagestani. M. Sagaradze sought to “civilize” the Imeretians by making them into “Georgians”. The people making policy, tsarist authorities, took a lesser role in creating discourse which might explain the disjuncture between a discourse created largely by natives and practices produced by tsarist administration and officials.

These authors argued that tsarist Russian custom and family life were not as burdensome for women. They depicted Russian families as less patriarchical because they emphasized marriage through companionship, and less violent because Russians followed Orthodox Christianity. The authors of these diatribes were often natives like

Dzhannat’-Bagi, who saw problems with their own societies and looked hopefully to

Russian society to correct abuses. Empire gave certain natives, an educated elite, the opportunity to challenge practices they did not like.37 For instance, in an article in the state-run newspaper Kavkaz, Dzhannat’-Bagi, wrote that “to compare Russian women’s lives to [Caucasian] Muslim women’s lives was a sin” because “Russian women were

37 Jersild, Orientalism and Empire, 60-2; Adeeb Khalid, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia, (University of California Press, 1998): 80-82.

26 friends and helpers to their husbands,” whereas “[Caucasian] Muslim women were their husbands’ slaves.”38 A Russian woman’s life was more satisfactory than the Caucasian

Muslim woman’s life, Dzhannat’-Bagi claimed, because of the companionship she shared with her husband, her family life with her children, and her belief in Christianity and its peaceful tenets.

Family Life and the Role of Family Patriarchs in Caucasian Societies: A Critique by Tsarist Writers

Writers proposed tsarist life as an alternative to Caucasian society, which they saw as compromised by depravity and violence, without offering many specifics about what tsarist society might offer beyond broad generalizations about companionate marriages and a less violent society. Specifics were not needed. In the minds of these writers, tsarist society was what Caucasian society was not. Their arguments vilified the unbending family patriarch, the violence and manipulation he used against his wife and children, and the drudgeries that comprised Muslim and Christian Caucasian women’s lives. Ethnographers and authors sometimes claimed that tsarist society protected its subjects from the wrongs they saw so prevalent in Caucasian society, but the majority of writers instead focused their condemnations exclusively on Caucasian practices without providing plans for change.

Writers for state-sponsored newspapers and journals argued that the strong position of men in Caucasian family life, especially among peoples of the Muslim faith, perpetuated domestic violence. Domestic violence as envisioned by tsarist writers

38 S. Dzhannat’-Bagi, “Detoubiistvo v’ musul’manskikh’,” Kavkaz 9-10 August 1878.

27 included physical violence and mental abuse perpetrated by the family patriarch or other male members of the family circle against the women and children who comprised their household. In actual lived experience, sons, wives, mothers, and even daughters and sisters certainly perpetrated physical violence and mental abuse in Caucasian households as well. However, tsarist writers centered on the role of the head of household as both the aggressor and power wielder. For instance, Dzhannat’-Bagi’s lambast against the drudgery of Muslim Caucasian women’s lives tells how, “She enters his family [her husband’s family] not as a member, but as a worker. She is her husband’s slave and if she makes even a small mistake he could divorce her.”39 Omarov emphasizes the fear he felt just living in the same home as his father. He “felt free when his father left the house,” and he “hated his tyrant father, and loved his mother.”40 His hatred was further fanned by his father’s physical abuse of his mother. Omarov further condemns the practices of

“husbands beating wives, and brothers beating sisters.”41 The family patriarch and any older male in Caucasian family life in Dzhannat’-Bagi’s and Omarov’s estimations possessed an unlimited amount of power over his familial unit. A hierarchy based on gender and age determined family members place in Caucasian familial structures. They described Caucasian fathers and husbands as violent and tumultuous, who in the authors’ views, failed to rein in their passions. They represented murderers, wife beaters, child beaters – nothing more than barbarians and monsters who incited fear in their wives and children. Caucasian family life among Muslim Caucasian populations, the authors

39 Dzhannat’-Bagi, “Detoubiistvo v’ musul’manskikh. 40 Abdulla Omarov, “Domashniaia i semeinaia zhizn’ dagestanskikh’ gortsev’,” SSKG , (1870): 4-5; Leontovich also shows that this is the case among Kabardin’s women in, Adaty kavkazskikh’ gortsev. 41 Ibid.

28 argued, shackled women and children to their husbands and fathers without any means for escape other than suicide or less frequently murder.

Each author envisioned Caucasian women and children as victims of the family patriarch, who incited fear, terror, and beatings at the slightest whim.42 For instance,

Maksim Kovalevskii, a nineteenth century Russian historian, claimed that Ossetian husbands’ power over their wives had only one limitation, “he was neither able to sell her or give her to another.”43 M. Sagardze, a Georgian, condemned the way that Imeretian husbands and fathers treated their wives and daughters. He spoke of the ways that

Imeretian women experienced life under their husband’s will, who “considered himself unquestionable in his right of superiority over women, whose responsibility was raising children and housework.”44 A prolific writer, Omarov, in another article, “Kak zhivut

Laki,” (How the Laki Live) wrote that “everyone was endangered by familial demands.”

If a husband came home and his children had not finished their chores, or his wife prepared a bad dinner, he would punish them.45

According to contributors of the state-run newspapers and journals Muslim and

Imeretian wives bore a burdensome existence in comparison to Russian and Georgian women, respectively. Their condemnations suggested a need for change. The lives of

Russian women, and Russian gender relations, were the aspiration that these authors hoped tsarist imperialism might bring for Caucasian women (yet, in reality, of course,

42 U.U. Karpov, “Zhenskikh lik Kavkaza” in Rossiia i Kavkaz istoriia, Religiia, Kul’tura (Saint Petersburg, 2003): 44-5, 57-8. 43 Maksim Kovalevskii, Sovermennyi obychai i drevnii zakon: obychoe pravo Osetin’ v istoriko- sravnitel’nom osveshchenii (Moskva, 1886) I: 255. 44 M. Sagaradze, “Obychai i verovaniia v Imeretii,” in Sbornik’ materialov’ dlia opisaniia mestnostei i plemen’ Kavkaza, SMOMPK, (1899): 5. 45 Omarov, “Kak zhivut Laki,” SSKG, (1870): 4.

29 Russian society bore many of the same troubles which in practice led to a certain amount of complacency). For instance, Dzhannat’-Bagi, argues that there was no comparison between Russian and Caucasian Muslim women’s lives.

“If a Russian woman’s life is difficult, at times she still finds happiness. Her husband belongs fully to her, but they also have separate lives…she is able to caress and encourage her children and no one can take them away from her.”46

For Muslim women, this was not the case, the author explains, a Muslim wife “is never separated from him [her husband].”47 Once married, Dzhannat’-Bagi continues, if her husband divorces her “the children stay with the man and his family. She is a mother one day and childless the next.”48 By providing a comparison to Russian women, Dzhannat’-

Bagi makes quite plain his desire to see change in the Caucasus, especially among the

Muslim populations. Similarly, in his article, “Obychai i verovaniia v Imeretii” (Customs and beliefs in Imeretiia) Sagaradze indirectly suggests change through his criticism of

Imeretian women’s subordinate position in their families. He demonstrates for readers that Imeretian women suffered in much the same way as Muslim Caucasian women. He criticizes the treatment of Imeretian wives in comparison to Georgian women, who were

“entirely deprived of any acquaintances or friendships with men outside of their families.” Sagaradze describes Imeretian women’s limited interactions as “always under the power of a male, with “only close relatives of their husbands’ choosing.”49 Like

46 Dzhannat’-Bagi, “Detoubiistvo v’ musul’manskikh” 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid. 49 Sagaradze, “Obychai i verovaniia, 5-12.

30 Dzhannat’-Bagi, Sagaradze advances the notion that his co-ethnics and co-religionists mistreated their wives.

Ethnographers (whether Russian or indigenous educated elites) used instances of violence against women and children, and between Caucasians, to demonstrate the

“barbaric practices” of the Caucasian mountaineers.50 For instance, the ethnographers who compiled Iz gortsi kriminalistika (Mountaineer’s Criminal Statistics) in SSKG rarely provided any analysis or gave the reader the court’s sentence. Instead they proffered bare outlines of events, always violent in nature. For example, compilers included the following cases of abuse in the Mountaineer’s Criminal Statistics to call attention to the violence wrought by Caucasian husbands and fathers. When Sheikh Gasan ogly had a fight with his wife, he injured his wife’s left hand with his kinzhal51 when she tried to flee

– the compilers offered nothing more. Even in cases that included murder and shocking violence, like when Khan-Magomy Kurban ogly caught his daughter and her groom in a sexual bond before their marriage, and stabbed both— injuries from which his daughter later died—compilers offered no sense of what happened to Kurban ogly.52

Ethnographers who compiled the Iz gortsi kriminalistika neither directly condemned each case, nor did they provide analysis detailing the causes and outcomes of domestic violence in the Imperial courts.53 Rather, they championed an agenda that showed the failings of Caucasian society and family life. The compilers’ goal for publicizing cases of violence against women (and children) in state-run newspapers and

50 “Iz Gortsi Kriminalistiki,” SSKG (1870): 1. 51 A short sword or dagger. 52 “Iz gortsi kriminalistiki,” SSKG (1875): 10. 53 If desired, ethnographers could have provided information and analysis regarding domestic abuse cases that came before Imperial courts because the compilers pulled these cases from court records.

31 journals served multiple purposes – to condemn the violent demeanors of Caucasian men and the customary laws that they followed, to champion Russian customs, and among native writers to promote their own agendas often to “civilize” peoples of ethnicities which they saw as similar to their own (again through condemnations of Caucasian men).54

Civilizing Caucasian Marriage Practices: Native Writers Criticisms

Tsarist writers claimed that the influence of Islam, the role of the patriarch, violence, and the subordinate role of women and children in Caucasian society polluted

Caucasian marriage practices. In particular, ethnographers, historians, and other tsarist authors condemned marriage customs they deemed “unlawful” such as marriage before the age of sixteen,55 marriage agreements that did not take into consideration the bride’s or groom’s wishes, polygamy, and bride stealing. In most cases, writers still continued to lay blame for customs they considered immoral on the Caucasian male head of house

Proper marriage age, an arbitrary number that represented when a girl became a woman ready for marriage, determined for tsarist writers the boundaries between the

“civilized world” and the “uncivilized world.” Why? Marrying young women too early threw them into the torturous life that only “women bear” under the rule of husbands, who expect their “wives and children [to] submit completely to the will of husbands” and fathers.56 Under tsarist law girls became women at sixteen, the accepted proper marriage

54 Jersild, Orientalism and Empire, 59-88. 55 It became law in 1830 (although apparently not in the Caucasus). 56 Nikolai Kalashev, “Mestechko Sal’iany: dzhevadskago uezd’, Bakinskoi gubernii,” SMOMPK, (1886): 131.

32 age (by the 1830s this was Russian law), and tsarist writing on the topic reflected a desire for a higher marriage age among Caucasian societies, where marriage age showed great disparity – some Caucasian communities married their children as young as ten or twelve, and others as late as seventeen.57 For example, an anonymous writer from Baku condemned the Muslim practice of marrying girls as young as thirteen in an article in

Novoe Obezrenie entitled “Po adresu musul’manskago dukhovenstva” (Concerning

Muslim Clergy). He began his treatise by designating early marriage as a religious issue specific to Islam. Muslim religious leaders, he claimed, committed “scandalous crime(s) against moral principles by [following] Muslim marriage practices.”58 With disgust, the anonymous author condemned “the deeds of the Mulla(s),” whose “criminal actions” allowed “these marriages (underage marriages).” He did not stop his censure with the

Mulla(s), but criticized “the ignorance and greed of the parents, who prepared to give their underage daughter(s) away, despite the moral proclivities involved.” 59 Allowing such marriages, the Baku writer exclaimed only demonstrated the lack of care for the underage Caucasian girls, whose “marriage(s) could be characterized as torturous and who would be unable to give birth to healthy children.”60 The Mullas and the girls’ parents lacked the necessary moral capacity, the author argued, to choose the “civilized measures” of their Orthodox Christian colonizers.

57 For marriage in Caucasian societies refer to: O. Mtavriev’, “Prostonarodnaia svadba v Kakheti,” SMOMPK (1902): 149; Luzbetok, in Marriage and The Family in Caucasia: A Contribution to the Study of North Caucasian ethnology and Customary Law (Studia Instituti Anghropos, 1951): 67 cites the age for girls as fifteen; V.V. Vasil’kov’, “Ocherk byta Temirgovtsev’,” SMOMPK (1901): 89; D. Il’in’, “Svad’ba u pravoslavnykh’ Cherkes’” Kavkaz 22 September 1868: 3; Religioznye obriady Osetin’, Ingush’ i ikh soplennikon’, pri raznykh’ sluchaiakh’, Kavkaz, 13 July 1846: 112. A. Zakharov’, “Domashnii i sotsial’nyi byt’ zhenshchiny u zakavkazskikh Tatar’,” SMOMPK, (1894): 117. 58 “Po adresu musul’manskago dukhovenstva,” in Novoe Obezrenie, December 17, 1895, 3 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid.

33 Caucasian parents, whether Muslim or Christian married their children when they considered them women and men, which in the Caucasus meant that they married their children at relatively young ages. For instance in the late nineteenth-century/early twentieth-century, among the Georgians in Kakheti, who followed Christianity, the minimum marriage age was about fifteen or sixteen, for females and males, respectively.61 Among the Cherkess in the same period, some followed Christianity while others practiced Islam but both married females at the age of sixteen or seventeen.62

Like the Cherkess, the Ossetians in the mid-nineteenth-century also followed Christianity and Islam depending on the community, but marriage age was as young as twelve or fourteen.63 The same can be said of the Ingush, who followed Islam during the same time. A. Zakharov, an ethnographer for Sbornik materialov’ dlia opisaniia mestnostei i plemen’ Kavkaza (SMOMPK) described the Muslim “Tatar,” ( what we would now call

“Azeri”)64 The proper marriage age in the late nineteenth-century/early twentieth-century as young as ten or eleven for girls. Not only was “she already considered a woman at ten or eleven,” but the author saw girls who were mothers as early as twelve or thirteen.65

61 O. Mtavriev’, “Prostonarodnaia svadba v Kakheti,” SMOMPK (1902): 149 (the age provided here reflects the marriage age for grooms not brides). Luzbetok, in Marriage and The Family in Caucasia: A Contribution to the Study of North Caucasian ethnology and Customary Law (Studia Instituti Anghropos, 1951): 67 cites the age for girls as fifteen. 62 V.V. Vasil’kov’, “Ocherk byta Temirgovtsev’,” SMOMPK (1901): 89. D. Il’in’, “Svad’ba u pravoslavnykh’ Cherkes’” Kavkaz 22 September 1868: 3. 63; Religioznye obriady Osetin’, Ingush’ i ikh soplennikon’, pri raznykh’ sluchaiakh’, Kavkaz, 13 July 1846: 112. 64 Russians used the term Tatar to describe Turkic populations. In this case, A. Zakharov is describing the lives of Azeri women. Audrey Altstadt, The Azerbaijani Turks: Power and Identity under Russian Rule (Hoover Institution Press, 1992): 15-26. 65 A. Zakharov, “Domashnii i sotsial’nyi byt’ zhenshchiny,” 117.

34 Writers’ criticism against marrying girls at young ages focused on the practices of

Muslim populations despite the fact that religious affiliation had little to do with the practice. Marriage age differed by ethnicity and community in the Caucasus, sometimes even by village. Despite the data available to them, ethnographers and authors often wrote differently about Christians and who practiced the same customs. A good example comes from an article detailing the lives of Christian Ossetians in the newspaper

Kavkaz. In stark contrast to the condemnation of Muslim marriage practices, the author instead admitted that “at first, the Ossetians adhered to a custom of marrying their children at very young ages – as early as eight years old for boys.” The writer applauded the, “now strict governance that monitors this [practice], which was entirely driven out by the Christians.”66 Only a couple sentences later, the same author noted that “among the rich [Ossetians], children are married at fourteen, again at young ages,” but the poorer

Ossetians married later because they could not afford the bride price.67 In just these few sentences the author demonstrated that Christianity had little influence on the age that the

Ossetians married their children. Rather, high bride prices resulted in a situation where

Ossetians of wealth could marry their children at younger ages, while those of less wealth had to wait and save (or steal a bride). The author offers no rebuke despite his note that fourteen was also too young to marry. He desired only to demonstrate that Christianity improved the lives of the Ossetians, whether he possessed evidence to prove his case or not.

66Religioznye obriady Osetin, Ingush', i ikh soplemenikon, pri raznikh sluchaiakh. Praznikhi” Kavkaz, 13 July 1846: 111-112. 67 Ibid.

35 Writers for state-run journals and newspapers argued that the lack of marriage choice Caucasian parents gave their children in marriage arrangements encouraged the treatment of children as property and demonstrated the almost total control Caucasian fathers had over their families. Tsarist writers in the case of marriage choice accepted the issue as one concerning the Caucasus in general, irrespective of religion. The author, who examined the customs of Christian Ossetians noted with sadness that in the

Caucasus, parents gave their daughters away to become “workers and servants through their [the parents] prior arrangements.”68 He implied that the happiness of Caucasian brides and bride-grooms mattered, which showed a certain amount of progressive thought for the time – the mid-nineteenth century – particularly taking into consideration that among the peasantry in Russia at the same time this was hardly the case.69 Caucasian brides’ happiness, their “loves and delights are not guided by their choices,” nor the choices of the groom, who could only “see the bride by stealth.”70 Ossetians’ life revolved around the father of the family to the point that sons lived their lives according to their fathers’ desires.71 Dzhantemir’ Shanaev’, a contributor to SSKG shared a similar opinion of the role of Ossetian parents in marriage choice. He argued that daughters “did not have the right to challenge the wishes and desires of their parents in regard to marriage choice…” therefore, “their parents did not ask for their opinions.”72 Writers

68 Ibid.; “Narodnoe pravo Osetin’” SSKG (1872): 189. 69 Beatrice Farnsworth, “The Litigious Daughter-In-Law: Family Relations in Rural Russia in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century,” ed. Beatrice Farnsworth & Lynne Viola, Russian Peasant Women (Oxford University Press, 1992): 89-106; Barbara Alpern Engel, Women in Russia, 1700-2000 (Cambridge University Press, 2004): 89-90. 70 Religiozney obriady Osetin, 111-112. 71 “Narodnoe pravo Osetin’” SSKG (1872): 189. 72 Dzhantemir Shanaev, “Svad’ba u severnykh’ Osetin,” SSKG (1870): 7-8.

36 envisioned Muslim populations in the same way. For instance, in Zakharov’s study of

Muslim “Tatar” women and men, he complained that “in all cases, the father chose his son’s bride, and his son did not contradict him.”73 Questioning his father’s choice was considered “unseemly and improper.” Fathers also “organized [their daughters] according to their own will, and their daughters did not contradict [their fathers’] will.”74

Ethnographer Nikolai Kalashev agreed with Zakharov’s findings among the peoples he called “Tatar” in the Baku district, where “wife and children submitted completely to the will of the husband/father.”75

Ethnographers and writers argued that Caucasian men and women, who lacked the right to participate in the matchmaking process, all too often committed suicide to escape the marriage plans their parents or guardians made for them. Writers based their claims on state-run journals like SSKG, where criminal statistics provided ample evidence. For instance, in 1870 in the Northern Caucasus a fifty-year-old widow, named

Zalma Shekhsha kizy killed herself because her brother was forcing her to marry a man against her will.76 Zalma’s brother had taken over his father’s duty—about which so many tsarist writers complained—to find his sister another husband. In a separate example, a different suicide that occurred in the Dargin district demonstrates the difficult position young men were put in as well. A mother would not allow her son, Alai

Akhmed’-ogly, to marry the girl of his choice, and he committed suicide.77 Authors

73 A. Zakharov, “Domashnii i sotsial’nyi byt’ zhenshchiny,” 125. 74 Ibid., 126; Kovalevski, Sovermennyi obychai i drevnii zakon, 174 75 Nikolai Kalashev, “Mestechko Sal’iany: dzhevadskago uezd’, Bakinskoi gubernii,” SMOMRK (1886): 131. 76 “Iz gortsi kriminalistiki”,SSKG (1870): 83. 77 “Iz gorskoi kriminalistiki,” SSKG (1869): 7-8.

37 criticized what they saw as the cause of these suicides – the “custom where daughters agree to their parents’ will.”78 A. D. Eritsobyi condemned the same practice among the

Armenians where a daughter was “subject to her father’s will and his power,” to the point where “he was able to sell her without her agreement.”79 Family members’ independent will, the authors argued, fell victim to the power of parental figures and guardians and subsequently resulted in suicide. Their work did not include any direct discussions about how Russian or European marriage practice might prove better than Caucasian marriage practices.80

Young men, tsarist authors claimed, stole brides, even raped them, due to the reverence of violence in Caucasian society, the lack of choice native parents gave their children in choosing marriage partners, and the inability among poorer Caucasian families to pay the kalym (bride-price). Zakharov, for instance, argued that when “Tatar” parents refused to allow their children to marry according to their desires, young men often “carried [their beloved] off with the help of [their] friends.”81 Young women,

Zakharov noted, also organized their own bride stealing to avoid unwanted marriages.

He relates a harrowing experience to make his point. He “saw a fight” where a “half- dead young woman, who was in a complete frenzy [was] bloodied by her father and brothers,” who would “not permit her to run to her beloved.”82 True to his goal,

78 V. Chim, “Ocherki Dagestanskikh’ nravov,” Kavkaz, 27 & 30 October 1860, writes of the similar position of daughters in regard to marriage choice. 79 A. D. Eritsobyi, “Istoricheskii i sovremennoe polozhenie Armianskoi zhenshchiny, v’ sviazi c’ istorieu nravstvennosti armian’, Kavkaz, 17 April 1874: 3-4. 80 Christin Worobec, add later. 81 Zakharov, “Domashnii i sotsial’nyi byt’ zhenshchiny,” 130 82 Ibid.

38 Zakharov demonstrated how the lack of marriage choice engendered violence by simply recounting the story. He offered little more in the way of analysis.

Writers also argued that high bride prices, the money the groom’s father paid to the bride’s family, caused bride stealing. For example, J. Baddeley related his Ossetian friend’s explanation of the “burdensome kalim” and noted that “a poor man could not marry on account of the 500 roubles wasted in this way, so [he] carried off his bride in the old fashion [bride stealing].”83 Like Zakharov, Baddeley let his descriptions make the argument against bride price and bride stealing. Neither made any suggestions for how

Russia might improve the situation, yet their position against the practices came out clearly.

The practice of polygamy, considered by tsarist writers as a Muslim problem, also led (so the discourse went) to divorce and unhappy, depressed women who committed suicide to escape the barbarism of their unhappy lives.84 Dzhannat’-Bagi argues in another anti-Muslim article centered on the killing of female infants in the newspaper

Kavkaz that Muslim women had no recourse to escape any of their husbands’ actions, including polygamy. He concludes that her husband might love her, “but he also might have two or three other wives,” who he might also love. As nothing more than her husband’s slave, the Muslim woman, Dzhannat’ Bagi argues, “cannot offer any dispute

[to her husband’s actions].”85 The structure of the Muslim family, did not allow for her voice and he claimed, that this “explained why [Muslim women] murdered their newborn

83 Baddeley, Rugged Flanks of the Caucasus, 1: 75. 84 D-ra. Pfafa, “Narodnoe pravo Osetin,” SSKG (1871). 85 Dzhannat’-Bagi, “Detoubiistvo v’ musul’manskikh”

39 daughters” – they saw no life for them. N. G—n’, a writer for Novoe Obezrenie, also criticized the continued practice of polygamy among Muslim populations, but focused predominately on the laws that governed family life. He maintained that the practice was specific to Muslim believers because “the Koran says that they can have as many as four wives.”86

Even those writers who uncovered Christian populations who practiced polygamy tended to lay blame, at least indirectly, on the influence of Islam. For instance, the author who wrote about the Christian Ossetians in the Kavkaz newspaper in July of 1846, related to readers that those “governing have not been able to eradicate (iskorenit’) the custom of polygamy among the Christianized Ossetians and Ingush.”87 The author argues that

“their acceptance of the religion [Christianity] is in its infancy (mladenchestva), and they do not understand their crime.” He continues to explain that the Christianized Ossetians and Ingush believed that if they have “the means to support (prokormit’) two or three wives” that the censure against polygamy was not valid. Newly Christianized populations, he argued, mixed Christian and Muslim beliefs, thereby corrupting the

Christianity that they practiced. As the author saw it the immoral tenets of Islam resulted in depraved practices among Christian populations, like polygamy.

Similar to their arguments against the lack of marriage choice, tsarist writers argued that the practice of polygamy led to a high rate of suicide among Caucasian women. For instance, E. Stalinskii, a nineteenth century ethnographer for SSKG, claimed that Caucasian women committed suicide more often than women in Europe (Prussia and

86 N. G—n’, “Polozhenie musul’manskoi zhenshchin,” Novoe Obezrenie, 15 April 1892: 3. 87 Religiozney obriady Osetin, Ingush',, 111.

40 France are the two countries that the author cites) due to the existence of “polygamy and which resulted in passionate protests,” against their limited power in society – thus resulting in suicide.88 The author offers suicide statistics from 1860 to 1871 to show that suicide among Caucasian men and women were about equal (whereas in Prussia and

France the author argues that more men committed suicide than women). During this eleven year period in Tiflis, for example, fifty-eight men committed suicide compared to sixty women.89 Russian and non-Russian ethnographers saw the dramatic suicides of the

Caucasian peoples as further support of the tainted influence of Islam, and the unrestrained and chaotic cultures of the Caucasus. Statistics like these indirectly called for the tsarist state to tame of the wildly passionate Caucasian men, who needed Russian tutelage to learn how to properly treat the women with whom they took marriage vows.90

Conclusions

Ethnographers, historians, other writers for state-sponsored print media, and both

Russian and non-Russian elites envisioned the peoples of the Caucasus and themselves through images of what they saw and would like to see, (i.e. higher marriage ages, companion marriages, marriage for love, the “peaceful” benefits of Christianity). They all sought to point out the failings of the numerous Caucasian peoples and ethnicities, especially in regard to family and marriage customs. But, they possessed different agendas, which included ending what they saw as the corrupting influence of Muslim

88 E. Stalinskii, “O samoubiistvakh’ na Kavkaz’ i za Kavkazom’,” SSKG (1871): 272-5. 89 Ibid., 270-5. 90 Ibid.

41 practices in Caucasian everyday life, the assimilation of Russian (or Christian) customs

(few tsarist writers directly made this suggestion, but most indirectly suggested it), and the “civilizing” and reimagining of Caucasian ethnic groups. Caucasian elites like

Abdulla Omarov and Dzhannat’-Bagi wrote some of the most caustic diatribes against

Muslim Caucasian populations and their purported violence. Only rarely did authors offer even general directions for authorities to pursue change. Instead the majority of writers developed their arguments around three main issues: 1) the nefarious influence of

Muslim practices on Caucasian marriage and family life, which writers saw as responsible for the continuation of polygamy and early marriage, 2) the belief that certain uneducated Caucasian men possessed violent natures, which resulted in inflexible aggressive patriarchs and customs that venerated violence like bride stealing, and 3) they envisioned Caucasian women and children, especially those who adhered to the Islamic faith, as victims of Caucasian men, who controlled their lives, decided who they would marry, and beat them if they showed any resistance. Tsarist writers painted an image of

Caucasian society, family, and marriage practices as flawed and they indirectly sought to promote change through the venue of state-run newspapers and journals.

42 Chapter 3 Crime, Violence and Honor Defined: Notions of the Masculine in Customary and Tsarist Law

In 1830, Toka Bekoev, an Ossetian from the village of Kadgaron was taken captive “tied to a pole,” gagged, “taken to Dagestan, and sold into .” His nephew,

Dzage Koraev searched for him, offered rewards, and learned that Tsits and Gmi Esiev from a neighboring village were behind the abduction. Koraev never found T. Bekoev.

Bekoev’s son, Saban, a young boy at the time of the kidnapping, grew up with his father’s relations, who forever pushed him to find the perpetrators of the crime. Saban considered the men who stole his father “his mortal enemies” and “he not only considered it his right to pursue blood vengeance [against them], but [considered] it an obligation.” In 1865, “he set out under the pretext of taking work in the home of Gmi

Esiev.” After two days, G. Esiev “sent his twelve year old son, Sarakhmet, to the fields with a meal for the workers.” Saban chose to take the blood of the boy as payment for the loss of his father. He “followed him, and thrust his kinzhal into [the boy’s] heart, killing him on the spot.” S. Bekoev waited thirty-five years to seek an opportunity for revenge and fulfilled his obligation to his father and family by killing not the accused, but his son. He claimed his right to do so through blood vengeance. When the Village Court reviewed S. Bekoev’s actions it decided that “his guilt depended upon the actions of Gmi

Esiev and his brother Tsits,” who the court asked to provide six oath takers to confirm

43 that they “did not sell Saban’s father and that they do not know who sold him.”91 If none of the oath takers refused to take the oath then Gmi Esiev could demand blood money for his son’s death from S. Bekoev. However, “many of the oath takers refused to take the oath” and “the affair seemingly vanished.”92 The court supported S. Bekoev’s claim to fulfill blood vengeance for the abduction of his father. He owed G. Esiev nothing for taking the life of his son. Rather S. Bekoev fulfilled a debt to his family and his actions proved him worthy of kinship and inclusion in his community. His extended family and community would have seen him as weak and cowardly if he had not fulfilled his duty – finding his father’s kidnappers and enacting vengeance had no expiration date in

Caucasian life.93 Participation in and fulfillment of blood vengeance was an obligation for male relatives of wronged families and the basis of customary law (adat) – a way of maintaining order in society, keeping the peace, and proving one’s manhood.

Saban’s revenge against his father’s kidnappers is one among countless cases of blood vengeance that reveal the central role that this custom played in everyday

Caucasian life and justice. The system of justice for actions considered criminal by

91 D-ra. Pfafa, “Narodnoe pravo Osetin,” SSKG, (1872): 318-9. 92 Ibid. 93 Pfafa, “Narodnoe pravo Osetin,” SSKG, (1872): 258-64; For examples of blood vengeance among other Caucasian communities refer to: “Nechto o Chechne,” Kavkaz, 9 December 1859; Babich, Irina, Evolutsiia pravovoi kul’tury Adygov (1860-1990-e gody), (Moskva, 1999), 56-61; on the Kabardins --“Etnograficheskii ocherk’,” Kavkazskii Sbornik’ (1900): 117-121; N. Grabovskii, “Ingushi: Iz zhizn’ i obychai,” SSKG, (1876): 77; “Iz gorskii kriminalistiki,” in SSKG, (1870): 9, 78, 80-1; John F. Baddeley, The Russian Conquest of the Caucasus, (Longman’s Green and Co., New York, 1908), 246-7; John F. Baddeley, The Rugged Flanks of the Caucasus, (1973), I: 154-5; Austin Jersild, Orientalism and Empire: North Caucasus Mountain Peoples and the Georgian Frontier, 1845-1917, (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002): 100, 104; Emil Souleimanov, “Chechen society and mentality” Prague Watchdog, 25 May 2003: 5; “Adaty uzhno-dagestanskikh’ obshchestv’,” SSKG, (1875): 1, 9-10, 20-22, 25-6, 33; Leontovich, Adaty kavkazskikh’ gortsev’, (Odessa, 1882), I: 138-140, 165-169; Komarov, “Adaty i sudoproizvodstvo po nim’,” SSKG, (1868): 23-29; Maksim’ Kovalevskii’s, Zakon’ i obychai na Kavkaz, (Moskva, 1890), II: 4, 216-50.

44 Caucasian communities was based, in the words of historian V.O. Bobrovnikov, on

“responsibility, founded on honor, social opinion, and demand[ed] blood for blood.”

Caucasian customary law placed the “responsibility of satisfying vengeance on all male relatives of the victim.” Fathers told their children that “they must carry-out blood vengeance without fail” and by doing so they satisfied the “highest honor.”94 Blood vengeance acted as the foundation of customary law for S. Beloev’s Ossetian peoples and many other Caucasian populations as well.95

Blood vengeance gave injured Caucasian families the ability to redeem their honor by pursuing and killing wrongdoer(s) and/or their closest family members.96

Caucasian families utilized the practice through the guidance of their communities. They implemented it in cases of murder, kidnapping, rape, forced sodomy (defined here as pedastry or the rape of a male child), adultery, bride stealing, insulting words and actions, theft, and in land and business disputes.97 Any of these actions “left a stain of dishonor

94 V.O. Bobrovnikov, ed., Musul’mane severnogo Kavkaza obychai pravo nasilie, (Moskva, 2002): 56-57. 95 N. Grabovskii, “Ocherk’ suda i ugolovnykh’ prestuplenii v’ Kabardinskom’ okrug’,” SSKG, (1871): 42- 3; “Adaty uzhno-dagestanskikh’ obshchestv’,”.SSKG, (1875): 9, 26, 38, 44-5, 48, 55, 61, 68; “Adaty Darginskikh’ obshchestve’,” SSKG, (1873): 20, 38, 51, 65, 77, 91, 107; “Adaty zhitelei Kumykskoi ploskosti,” SSKG, (1872): 15; N. Grabovskii, “Inguishi (uz’ zhin’ i obychai),” SSKG, (1876): 56-7; A.V. Komarov, “Adaty i sudoproizvodstvo po nim’,” SSKG, (1868): 55; I. Ia. Sandrygailo, Adaty dagestanskoi oblasti i zakatal’skago okruga, (Tiflis, 1899): 24, 94-5, 120-1, 141-2, 163-4, 183-4, 206-7; Maksim Kovalevskii, Zakon’ i obychai na Kavkaz’, (Moskva, 1890), II: 119. 96 V.O. Bobrovnikov, ed., Musul’mane severnogo Kavkaza obychai pravo nasilie, (Moskva, 2002), 56-7. 97 Inap.Emil Souleimanov, “Chechen society and mentality” Prague Watchdog, 25 May 2003: 5; “Adaty uzhno-dagestanskikh’ obshchestv’,”.SSKG, (1875): 1, 9-10, 20-22, 25-6, 33; Leontovich, Adaty kavkazskikh’ gortsev’, (Odessa, 1882), I: 138-9; Pfafa, “Narodnoe pravo Osetin,” SSKG, (1872): 258-264; Komarov, “Adaty i sudoproizvodstvo po nim’,” SSKG, (1868): 23-29; Babich, Irina, Evolutsiia pravovoi kul’tury Adygov (1860-1990-e gody), (Moskva, 1999): 55-62; Beskhanum Ragimova, “Legal Status of Women in Traditional Dagestani Society (Nineteenth-Early Twentieth Century), Iran & the Caucasus 6, no.1/2 (2002): 91, 96-101; On rape among the and blood vengeance in Dagestan refer to the following sources, Maksim’ Kovalevskii, Zakon’ i obychai na Kavkaz, (Moskva, 1890) II: 37. 216-250; P. Przhevlatskii, “Dagestan, ego nravy i obychai,” Viestnik Evropy, (1867): 179-181; “Etnograficheskii ocherk’,” Kavkazskii Sbornik’ (1900): 117-121; N. Grabovskii, “Ingushi: Iz zhizn’ i obychai,” SSKG, (1876): 41, 58, 71-77; “Adaty zhitelei Kumykskoi ploskosti,” SSKG, (1872): 5, 9, 13-16; V.O. Bobrovnikov, ed., Musul’mane severnogo Kavkaza obychai pravo nasilie, (Moskva, 2002): 55.

45 not on separate men, but on his relatives” as well.98 Caucasian families and communities administered their right to blood vengeance through a system of justice based upon exclusion, meaning that Caucasian villages banished guilty parties from their communities. They banished wrongdoers for an agreed upon period (sometimes permanently) during which time injured families were afforded the right to “wash away the dishonor” by taking a “single act of revenge” against the guilty party or even

“destroy[ing] the guilty clan.”99 Lesser offenses afforded lesser penalties including the payment of fines through blood law, such as those Gmi Esiev desired from S. Beloev for his son’s death, and shorter periods of blood vengeance, after which guilty parties might rejoin their families and communities.

Tsarist officials and elites saw blood vengeance as a deviation from the authentic

Caucasus past – one that should not be part of adat (customary) law. Instead, they conceived of it as a leftover from the Islamic influence of the Persian and Ottoman empires and outlawed the practice as early as the 1820s in the Northwestern Caucasus

(again in 1859 by Viceroy A.I. Bariatinskii).100 Due to these conceptions and the view that blood vengeance only caused more violence and crime, tsarist administrators sought to excise it from Caucasian practices. Thus, the ethnographer who related T. Beloev’s fate and his son’s actions included the account in the tsarist state-sponsored ethnographical journal SSKG with the intention of making a statement against the

98 V.O. Bobrovnikov, ed., Musul’mane severnogo Kavkaza obychai pravo nasilie, (Moskva, 2002): 56-7. 99 Ibid. 100 Ibid., 66.

46 custom.101 The author who described S. Bekoev’s vengeance assumed that his readers understood that S. Bekoev’s justification of taking G. Esiev’s son’s life through the custom of blood vengeance illustrated the moral depravity that tsarist writers saw as characterizing Caucasian men. The refashioning of the Caucasus region into an imperial borderland invariably meant teaching the natives their “real” (in this case, non-Islamic) past – the conquerors and their collaborators, of course, decided what this past constituted.

Historian Austin Jersild argues persuasively the central role that the threat of

Islam and the proximity of the Persian and Ottoman empires had on guiding imperial policy in the Caucasus.102 However, another important element influenced the ways that tsarist officials and non-Russian elites viewed and dealt with blood vengeance. Their understandings of honor and masculinity were fundamental in the ways tsarist officials, judges, and investigators made policy, viewed, and adjudicated cases of blood vengeance.

Where Caucasian societies considered blood vengeance a means of social monitoring, maintaining order, proving manhood, and redeeming, maintaining and improving familial honor, tsarist authorities saw the tradition as proof of the native man’s untamed and rash persona. In the eyes of tsarist authorities these rash actions only served as proof that

Caucasian society lacked a system of justice at all and needed the guidance of its conquerors.

101Novoe obezrenie, another state-sponsored newspaper, for instance, also has multiple examples of blood vengeance. 102 Austin Jersild, Orientalism and Empire: North Caucasus Mountain Peoples and the Georgian Frontier, 1845-1917, (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002).

47 An examination of blood vengeance is vital to understanding the dialogue between tsarist officials and Caucasian society due to its central place in Caucasian customary law and its status as criminal among tsarist officials. Even a simple question – what is crime? – became a contested issue and sign of resistance of or support for imperial power. According to Russian and non-Russian tsarist officials, indigenous men who practiced blood vengeance lacked honor and manhood – their actions went against accepted imperial notions of individual honor and masculinity. Caucasian men who continued the practice, by contrast, not only upheld their societies’ accepted notions of familial honor and proper masculine behavior, but their very actions also contested, often unwittingly, the power of imperial law and imperial notions of honor/masculinity. One society’s notion of the criminal was the other’s idea of justice.

This chapter begins with a discussion of Caucasian conceptions of honor and masculinity and argues that they are fundamental to understanding how Russians and non-Russians alike approached blood vengeance and other acts considered by tsarist authorities as criminal. Like Jersild’s work, my work builds on a growing scholarship that has investigated the conceptualizations used to justify empire – it adds to these imperial conceptualizations and examines how they played out in everyday Caucasian life. However much fear of Islamic power guided imperial directives and how it emboldened Russian conquerors and collaborators to hold onto, create, and uphold those policies – the threat of Islam alone does not explain how tsarist officials, non-Russian elites, and unseen (but well imagined) Caucasian village men coped with, accepted,

48 rationalized, and contested imperial directives. An examination of honor and masculinity brings a story of policy to the very foreground of everyday experience – the personal.

Tsarist Russia’s success in excising blood vengeance and “civilizing” local

Caucasian populations was mixed at best, and hampered by its authorities’ inability to see the interconnectivity between Caucasian customs, visions of manhood, and blood law – and their failure to grasp how tsarist imperial actions and judgments might even encourage revenge type actions. When confronted with the practice or threat of its implementation, tsarist authorities routinely tried to defuse the situation – often through compromise with the local populace. They were, however, less willing to dismiss such cases and leave them in the hands of the indigenous peoples as they often did in cases of a sexual nature involving women. Instead they worked with village elders, respected members of the community in question, and the participants of the dispute, to find an agreement suitable to the aggrieved family in an attempt to avoid blood vengeance.

When compromise failed, as was often the outcome, tsarist officials allowed their negotiations with the locals to break down but did not leave the dispute in Caucasian hands. Instead they directly involved themselves in those cases. They forced agreements between families and peoples of varying ethnicities and arrested those men who brazenly continued to practice blood vengeance. Tsarist Russia’s stance against blood vengeance unveils the more rigid and active side of tsarist law and authority in the Caucasus. Yet more often then not, tsarist officials modified imperial law to local law i.e. creating a hybrid form of law which considered blood vengeance cases as something different from regular murder cases.

49 Indigenous Caucasian Populations: Whose Honor?

Definitions of familial honor, manhood, and crime and violence overlapped and guided everyday life in Caucasian society. In another instance of blood vengeance from

February 1870, the actions of the young man closely resemble those of S. Bekoev – one need only switch the names, the behaviors of the two men so resemble each other. A young Dagestanii man named Kuli Molla-ogly shot and killed another villager named

Kurban Makhmud’-ogly in the Kataig-Tabasaran region. Under interrogation Molla-ogly confessed to the deed, which he explained as his responsibility to revenge the murder of his father. Fifteen years before, “Makhmud’-ogly’s father had murdered Molla-ogly’s father.” The administration of Kaitag knew about the situation and had ordered the colonel of the guard, Akhmed-khan-bek, to find a solution before either family took action i.e. agree on a blood price that would be acceptable to Molla-ogly’s relatives.103

But Molla-ogly refused to negotiate a blood price, “even though the murder occurred when he was a young boy.” Like S. Bekoev, he believed that he had a duty to take vengeance for his father’s murder – it did not matter if he was a child when the murder took place.

The central place of familial honor in Caucasian life meant that it was not unusual for young men to take vengeance for a crime that occurred many years before against one of their family members. There was no “statute of limitations” to such an act. Honor was not seen as one man’s honor or an individual woman’s honor or even a nuclear

103 “Gortsi kriminalistiki,” in SSKG, (1870): 78.

50 family’s honor – but instead as familial honor within a greater kinship unit.104 S.

Bekoev’s and K. Molla-ogly’s actions directly influenced the prestige or lack thereof of their familial network. Neither man could ignore the offense done to their kin – doing so would mean rejecting what it meant to be a Caucasian man. Part of being a male member of a Caucasian kinship unit meant demonstrating one’s prowess to add to family affluence – either through goods (blood price) or through reinforcing a reputation of fierceness. They had a duty to make an advantageous agreement for their families either through an agreed upon sum of blood money (or goods) or by seeking retribution by killing the aggressor or (one of) his male relatives. Different Caucasian societies that practiced blood vengeance differed in who they permitted to participate (the entire male line, just the father’s male line, or just the mother’s male line), the lengths of time of banishment and period of pursuit.105

Families and communities played the role of peacemakers and justice givers due to the lack of an overarching state institution which would oversee a more unified justice

104 “Adaty zhitelei Kumykskoi ploskoski,” SSKG, (1872): 6, 15-16; “Adaty uzhno-dagestanskikh’ obshchestv’,”.SSKG,(1875): 9, 24, 36-38, 44, 48, 50, 54, 60, 67; V.A. Dmitriev, “Kul’tura adaty i Sharia u kavkazskikh gortsev,” in Rossiia i Kavkaz: istoriia, religiia (Saint Petersburg, 2003): 107-127; Abdulla Omarov, “Kak zhivut’ Laki,” SSKG, (1870): 19-21; A.V. Komarov, “Adaty i sudoproizvodstvo po nim’,” in SSKG, (1868): 53-54; Pfafa, “Narodnoe pravo osetin’,” in SSKG, (1870): 318-321; I. Ia. Sandrygailo, Adaty dagestanskoi oblasti i zakatal’skago okruga, (Tiflis’, 1899): 22-24; Alexander Grigola, “Custom and Justice in the Caucasus: The Georgian Highlands,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1939, 66-69; Religioznye obriady Osetin’, Ingush’ i ikh soplennikon’, pri raznykh’ sluchaiakh’, Kavkaz, 13 July 1846: 112; Zakony Vakhtanga V, 88-90, 93, 97-98; Maksim’ Kovalevskii, Sovremennyi obychai’ i drevnii zakon’ (Moskva, 1886): 249-250, 263, 312-313, 355-356, 408-409, 464, 485-486, 513-514, 532-534; Letters from the Caucasus and Georgia, (London: John Murray, 1823): 51-53; V.O. Bobrovnikov ed., Musul’mane severnogo, 55-7. 105 Pfafa, “Narodnoe pravo Osetin,” in SSKG, (1872): 258-64; Emil Souleimanov, “Chechen society and mentality” on Prague Watchdog, 25 May 2003: 5; “Adaty uzhno-dagestanskikh’ obshchestv’,”.in SSKG, (1875): 1, 9-10, 20-22, 25-6, 33; Leontovich, Adaty kavkazskikh’ gortsev’, (Odessa, 1882), Vol. I, 138-9; Komarov, “Adaty i sudoproizvodstvo po nim’,” in SSKG, (1868): 23-29; Babich, Irina, Evolutsiia pravovoi kul’tury Adygov (1860-1990-e gody), (Moskva, 1999), 55-62; Maksim’ Kovalevskii, Zakon’ i obychai na Kavkaz, Vol. II, (Moskva, 1890), 222-224; Add other page numbers of kov – on mothers line.

51 system. Therefore men like S. Bekoev and K. Molla-ogly, village elders, and other respected members of Caucasian communities meted out justice. Justice served through extended family and community levels took on more fluidity than tsarist Russian law i.e. it was dealt with on a case by case basis, and was founded upon an honor code that shaped all parts of society. 106 Families and communities decided who pursued justice.

They looked out for themselves and “took justice” sometimes of their own accord and other times through networks of village elders or distant relatives, through agreements or through vengeance. S. Bekoev and K. Molla-ogly, for instance, laid in wait for their enemies and created opportunities to extinguish them – others might make agreements or allow aggressors to pass without taking action. One point is clear, however, the meek would leave themselves open to future attacks and abuse. Caucasian families, who chose or could not act on their own behalf, would not receive justice.

Caucasian families took seriously the decision to pursue aggressors according to blood vengeance or to let offenders pass by without retribution. Vengeance aided families in protecting family members. It provided safety by marking and killing enemies and by establishing a reputation from which other families and kinship groups would give ground. Caucasian families who let insults and dishonors pass or chose to negotiate left enemies lurking and attracted others. Some Caucasian peoples, like the

Adyghe believed that an insult should never be forgotten and saw the acceptance of

106 Michael Reynolds, “Myths and Mysticism: Islam and Conflict in the Caucasus,” Kennan Institute, Washington, DC, 2004: 6-12; Anna Zelkina, In Quest for God and Freedeom: The Sufi Response to the Russian Advance in the North Caucasus, (New York University Press, 2000): 2-13; Jersild, Orientalism and Empire, 4; Moshe Gammer, Muslim Resistance to the Tsar: Shamil and the conquest of Chechnia and Daghestan (Frank Cass & Co. LTD, London, 1994): 18-22.

52 monetary compensation for an insult as cowardly.107 Allowing dishonors to stain family reputation exposed Caucasian families to outside threats.

Detailed in the journal SSKG in the section “Mountaineer Criminal Statistics,” where accounts from the Caucasus Mountain Administration were published almost verbatim from court records, a Dagestanii family decided not to pursue the man,

Murtuzali Kazali-Shikh’-ogly, who kidnapped and raped a female family member.108

Kazali-Shikh’-ogly offered to marry the girl and “her family agreed.” The girl, Batta, however, “refused to enter into marriage with him” due to the “dishonor” he committed against her family.109 Her family supported her right to refuse the marriage proposal, and

Kazali-Shikh’-ogly “was sentenced to punishment by adat law.” According to

Dagestanii customary law, the accused likely paid a fine since Batta’s family did not pursue blood vengeance.110 Batta and her relations believed that the affair was over.

However, when Batta entered into marriage with another man, Ustar-khana Amir-ogly, she “incited jealousy in Murtuzali,” who “sought an opportunity to take vengeance on

Ustar-khana” and “threatened to kill Ustar-khana Amir-ogly if he married Batta.” On the day Kazali-Shikh’-ogly killed him, Batta’s new husband boldly sought out his wife’s rapist meeting him on his way back from Kubachi, where Kazali-Shikh’-ogly worked as a shepherd.111 Kazali-Shkih’-ogly “shot him with his gun, and then stabbed him with his kinzhal four times.”112 Amir-ogly died on the spot. Caucasian families, like Batta’s

107 Babich, Irina, Evolutsiia pravovoi kul’tury Adygov, 55. 108 Jersild, Orientalism and Empire, 99. 109 “Gortsi kriminalistiki,” SSKG, (1870): 77. 110 “Adaty uzhno-dagestanskikh’ obshchestv’,”.SSKG, (1875): 26. 111 “Gortsi kriminalistiki,” SSKG, (1870): 77. 112 Ibid., 78.

53 relations, who permitted a dishonor to pass instead of pursuing their right to blood vengeance risked their reputation and safety.

Caucasian societies possessed a very different notion of what constituted crime and violence than their imperial counterparts: how should justice be handled, who should receive justice, and who should pursue “justice?” The inhabitants of the Caucasus did not see blood vengeance as a particularly violent act, nor did they see it as denoting anything near a criminal act like their conquerors. Instead, they saw blood vengeance as fair and necessary. Killing the man who killed, kidnapped, or raped a family member bolstered not only the redeemer’s manhood, but also (and more importantly) made public the strength of the familial network. A reputation of strength, influence, and self- sufficiency proved central to continued existence in the Caucasus – it might have saved the life of Ustar-khana Amir-Ogly. The centrality of the practice gave Caucasian families more than the ability and power to mete out justice in their communities, it also permitted continued livelihood and organized society. Existence in the Caucasus was characterized and colored by distinct notions of manhood, defense of the familial network, and a self- sufficiency that accepted and even expected shows of violence (the best defense is an offense) as part and parcel of everyday survival.

Thievery and Brigandage: A Test of Honor Makes the Caucasian Man

Shows of violence demonstrated Caucasian men’s courage, prowess, and cleverness – in short, their manhood. Acts of daring were not necessarily criminal in

54 nature, but instead functioned as arenas that measured male worth.113 Families based the value of their male children upon their ability to successfully showcase their prowess in raids and in bringing home both material wealth and enhanced reputation. Their success or failure determined not only their position within family and community, their livelihood, but also their marriage prospects. Participation in raids, stealing horses or goods from a neighboring village (even better from Russian colonizers), or as we will see in a later chapter, stealing brides, and sometimes even killing another person (especially a

Russian) included only a few outlets for Caucasian masculinity.114

Manhood and honor were measured through a man’s cleverness, bravery, and ability to outsmart his foe, qualities that in the Caucasus necessitated survival and status.

Families encouraged these qualities in male children. For instance, among the Kabardins more experienced men took the youngest males out on their first raid when they turned sixteen. If the youths proved valuable to the raid, “by guarding the horses and foodstuffs” the elders invited them on subsequent forays. Continued participation meant that the youth could “make a name” for himself and bring respect and honor to his family.115 A man who did not steal was not deserving of respect.116 Raiding forays represented a kind of coming of age ritual for young men – and those men who excelled at daring possessed a sought after commodity – potential to take care of, protect, and defend their families.

113 “Etnograficheskii ocherk’,” Kavkazskii Sbornik’ (1900): 121-125; A. Lilov, “Ocherki byta kavkazskikh’ gortsev’,” Sbornik’ materialov’ dlia opisaniia mestnostei i plemen’ Kavkaza (1892): 3-6, 35. 114 Theft within one’s own village was punished severely and was considered dishonorable. 115 Leontovich, Adaty kavkazskikh’ gortsev’ (Odessa, 1882), I: 169-71. 116 Ibid.

55 A youth’s success or failure in raids held consequences for marriage prospects and good relations with family and community networks. For instance, one community in Dagestan refused to “give [their] daughter[s] or sister[s] in marriage to a suitor who had not at least one Georgian right hand or arm nailed to the wall of his dwelling.”117 The

Inguish apparently held similar views. John Baddeley recounted the beliefs of the

Inguish whose girls “won’t marry her lover till he has killed five men and stolen one hundred sheep or the equivalent.” 118 Women among the Kabardins also preferred the

“daring youth, to the rich and handsome one.”119 A passive man, one who exhibited no daring, was no man at all and not worth having as a husband or including in the kinship unit.

Nart sagas120 (folklore), stories, and legends, which functioned as moral lessons for Caucasian children, further reveal how central the raiding life was to the creation of

Caucasian manhood. For instance, in one story, a maiden’s society accepted her choice to leave her husband to find another more honorable one due to her present husband’s diminished raiding abilities. Qaydukh, the maiden, considered her husband’s raiding on nearby peoples as a courageous way of live. In fact, along with his strength, bravery and cleverness, she saw his ability to bring home large amounts of booty as part of what made him a great man. When he fell from her good graces and refused to admit how much she assisted him in obtaining their largesse, she still sought after those same qualities, only in

117 John F. Baddeley, The Rugged Flanks of the Caucasus (Arno Press, New York, 1973), II: 81. 118 Ibid., 13; Pfafa notes the same type of actions among the Ossetians in “Narodnoe pravo Osetin,” 277- 283. 119 Leontovich, Adaty kavkazskikh’ gortsev’, 169-71. 120 The Nart sagas are a series of tales and epic songs originating from the North Caucasus detailing the heroic actions of a race of giants. The stories shed light on Caucasian culture and belief systems, especially of antiquity.

56 another man.121 Through feats of daring, young Caucasian men proved to their prospective wives’, wives and their families that they were worthy of inclusion and would not only defend and protect their families, but bring them glory.

Russian imperialism added another component to defining at least one version of

Caucasian manhood – the duty to thwart, brigand, and kill Russian soldiers and administrators. For example, on their way to Grozny a Russian officer and his son were shot and killed by two natives. When asked why they committed the crime, the

Caucasian men replied that they dared each other to try and make the shot – and so they did.122 John Baddeley, the scholar who recorded this event, saw it as further proof of

Caucasus lawlessness. The event, however, is much more demonstrative of Caucasian men taking vengeance against known Russian enemies than it is about lawlessness. Their actions might not have been as overt as this man in the next example, but they still contested Russian dominance nonetheless. An outlaw known for his successful raiding became a popular hero after being surrounded by Russian dragoons and killed.123

Outsmarting his quarry so many times before being memorialized as a regional hero – he came to personify one version of Caucasian masculinity for youth to imitate. In both instances the participants put on a display of daring and showed a willingness to fight for vengeance (in one case to the death, the other into the arms of Imperial law). Caucasian perceptions of how men should act and who should enact justice were at the center of such interactions. These actions reveal men willing to take risks for which their societies

121 John Colarusso, Trans., Assembler, Annotator, Nart Sagas from the Caucasus: Myths from the Circassians, Abazas, Abkhaz, and Ubykhs (Princeton University Press, 2002): 249-255. 122 Baddeley, The Rugged Flanks, 5 123 Ippolitif, “The Teaching of Zikr and the Zikrists’,” SSKG, in John F. Baddeley, The Rugged Flanks, 13.

57 groomed them. They show not a system without justice as proposed by Russian imperialists, but instead a system of justice and culture at work against the Russian occupation – distinct and apart from Russian notions of law and society, but no less real and genuine.

Justice against their Own

Blood vengeance did not stop at outsiders who wronged a kinship group, but also included an obligation among fathers, husbands, sons, and even among distant relatives to fulfill blood vengeance against their own family members (women were also expected to monitor others). Instances of straying outside of accepted decorum usually centered on monitoring the actions and behaviors of female family members, but also included the observation of male family members. While gender determined which sex society more closely monitored, familial honor remained at the center of social and cultural concern.

Men and women took an active role in watching for wrongdoing.

Caucasian men and women alike took aggressive measures (following custom) to sever ties with any family members who risked familial honor through actions that society considered depraved – thus protecting the moral health and strength of the family.

For instance, in 1870, in the Dargin village Usishi, “Suzum’ Magomed’-kizy, her son

Molla Chakhu-ogly and daughter Patimat’ caught the wife of Suzum’s brother having sexual intercourse with a stranger near their home.”124 Suzum showed neither sisterly love for her sister-in-law, nor appeared to sympathize with her predicament. Instead, she

124 “Gortsi kriminalistiki,” SSKG (1870): 77.

58 and her children dragged her off to the stable, tied her, and branded her with a scorching iron on her back side.125 Suzum, however, acted in a fairly benign manner and she did not herself take vengeance on her sister-in-law, but instead held her for her brother’s vengeance, which the writer did not divulge in this particular instance.

Men committed grave acts due to a system that prized familial honor over the individual members of familial units. The gender of the family member considered guilty of adultery (in these cases) also played a role. The female sex suffered more severe penalties than their male compatriots due in part to a patriarchical system that awarded men a more dominant position in controlling family members’ actions and duties. For instance, Surakat’ Mukhamadil’-vas, a man from the village of Ashal in the Andii region stabbed his sister with a kinzhal after learning that she had an illegitimate child.126 In

1872, when Salmakh’ Khan’ Omakhan’ Ogly found his sister, Gulum’ Aga, in a lovers’ union with another villager, Ramazan’ Ramazan’ Ogly, he stabbed her four times with a kinzhal.127 In the same year, in the village of Batsadi, Magoma Omar-ogly made the same choice as Salmakh’ Khan Omakhan’ Ogly when he caught his sister in an adulterous liaison with another villager -- she died from her injuries.128 Even sons took their duty to their families seriously. When thirteen-year-old Nika of a Dargin community found his mother in an adulterous relationship, he attacked her.129 Caucasian men went to great lengths to fulfill the obligation of blood vengeance for the honor of their families even against their own sisters and mothers.

125 “Gortsi kriminalistiki,” (1870): 77. 126 “Gortsi kriminalistiki,” (1875), 26. 127 Ibid.,16. It is unclear if the woman survived. 128 Ibid., 16. 129 “Gortsi kriminalistiki,” (1870): 80.

59 The high value of familial honor and the social scrutiny suffered by Caucasian women meant that they sometimes acted on their own initiative to squelch any ill rumors about their womanhood. For instance, in 1869, in the Avar village of Igali, Patimat’

Sultan’-kizy killed another villager, Kurban’-Magom Magom-ogly with her kinzhal after he spread a rumor that she was in an illicit relationship with him. Patimat’s actions to protect both her and her family’s reputation demonstrate her acceptance of Caucasian women’s more subordinate position in society. Conversely, Patimat’s act of killing her offender shows a notable side of accepted Caucasian womanhood – the right (and duty) of Caucasian women to actively fight against anyone who might insult their honor (and in turn their familial honor).130

When men jeopardized familial honor or offended another family member, like women, they too suffered reprisals. For instance, in 1869, in an Avar village, Gamzat’

Labazan’-ogly injured his brother with a kinzhal when he caught him in bed with his wife, Patimat’ Mutalilov’-kizy.131 No account exists of how Gamzat’ punished his wife, but the betrayal of his brother was not an offense that could pass. His brother’s actions put Gamzat’s manhood into question and he had to act to protect his position in the family. In a less serious case that took place in 1871, in the Kaitag-Tabasaran region of

Dagestan, Kadachi Khizri-ogli injured his brother after he assaulted Kadachi’s wife.

Kadachi, much like Gamzat’ had an obligation to act to protect his manhood, particularly if he believed his wife in the right. Sex did not determine allegiance i.e. brothers did not

130 “Gortsi kriminalistiki,” (1870): 13-14. 131 “Gortsi kriminalistiki,” (1869): 19.

60 necessarily stick together, nor did sisters – or men and women members of extended family units. The rotten weeds were plucked for the health of the whole.

The cases discussed above are only a few examples of many from SSKG, which ethnographers reported in an effort to demonstrate just how much Caucasian peoples needed tsarist justice and tutelage. But they speak to more than just the tsarist imperial agenda. They illustrate how seriously Caucasian family members took their obligation to protect familial honor and they demonstrate once again how fundamental the reputation and perceived strength of familial units were in Caucasian everyday life and how interconnected they were with other Caucasian customs.

A Challenge to Imperial power? – The Custom of Blood Vengeance

Tsarist authorities and ethnographers diminished the results of their campaign to civilize the Caucasus by ending blood vengeance. Tsarist authorities showed willingness to compromise with local inhabitants by implementing not tsarist law, but a softened form of Caucasian law. Officials’ goal was to avoid instances of blood vengeance, but their actions also unknowingly encouraged its practice. Despite tsarist authorities’ goal to remove blood vengeance from Caucasian cultures, Caucasian men continued to practice the custom and challenge imperial authority by implementing it throughout the nineteenth century. The following instances of blood vengeance are demonstrative of the very active tsarist involvement to try to control the outcome of such dealings.

The attempt to excise blood vengeance by tsarist authorities was not just an attack on a custom that they deemed unfit for Caucasian culture due to the influence of Islam.

61 Tsarist authorities used their campaign against Islamic influence to further their assault on all of Caucasian culture, not necessarily knowingly. Therefore, by identifying blood vengeance with Islam, tsarist agents assaulted not just this practice, but also all the practices tied to it such as, raiding and marriage practices, Caucasian manhood,

Caucasian hospitality, Caucasian social decorum, and especially Caucasian family organization and criminal law. Tsarist agents’ offensive against blood vengeance chipped away at the vision of Caucasian men as risk taking heroes, justice givers, and protectors of their families. Linking blood vengeance to Islam and categorizing it as a

“phony” custom, however, also set inflexible parameters which tsarist authorities could not overcome. The imperial agenda resulted in only mixed success due to authorities who were unable to see Caucasian custom as a whole interconnected and multi-faceted, even effective, socio-cultural system.

In the face of mixed success, Tsarist authorities often stepped in to end blood feuds especially when they included whole villages and peoples. For instance, in 1846, the Besleneevskii prince, Adil’girei Kanokov’, killed the Kabardin prince Magomet

Atazhukin due to a long standing blood debt. During the fight that ensued, fourteen men lost their lives including Atazhukin. As both sides armed for war, tsarist authorities stepped in and compelled the peoples involved to reconcile through blood price.132 The actions of Russian officials in this case were not just in response to what they considered the use of an uncivilized practice, or even a direct attack on Caucasian manhood and

132 “Ethnographicheskii Ocherk’ cherkesskago naroda,” Kavkazskii Sbornik (1900): 116-118.

62 familial honor, but instead included practical political concerns – maintaining relative peace and order between large groups of Caucasian peoples.

The next case appears out of place in a discussion about blood vengeance, but the victim and tsarist authorities categorized it as a case of vengeance, not simple murder, arson, or robbery. When two men attacked and stabbed the merchant Vavilov on his way home one night in November 1890, the dying man attributed his aggressors’ actions to

“the Novorossiski merchants,” who took vengeance on him for ruining them.133 Tsarist authorities began an investigation and learned that before the two men described as

Persian attacked Vavilov, one of the butcher’s stores was burnt down the month before.

In a statement, authorities explained “that the fire was arson.”134 Not long after building a new store Vavilov was attacked on the street in front of his home and incurred injuries from which he soon died. Authorities learned that Levana Abuladze and Khristo

Burkhanova, two fellow butchers, hired the Persian men to murder Vavilov since the butcher’s business practices “ruined the rest of the butchers” causing “them all to lose business.” Abuladze lost eleven thousand rubles and Burkhanov more than eighteen thousand rubles. They hired Alibeka to locate and hire some men to kill Vavilov – he hired Aga-baba-khanut and another man (who did not show up) for the job. The Tiflis court agreed with Vavolov’s assessment and claimed “that under these circumstances they cannot categorize the murder of the store owner as a robbery but [murder] from vengeance.”135

133 “Sudebnoe Khronika: Tiflisskaia sudebnaia palata,” Novoe Obezrenie, 5 October 1891: 1. 134 Ibid. 135 Ibid., 2.

63 The men involved in Vavilov’s murder received harsh penalties due to the identification of the crime as one of vengeance. The Tiflis court took a strong stance against the continuance of vengeance type crimes among Caucasian populations.

Therefore, the court sentenced both Burkhanov (who later appealed his conviction and was released having pinned the entire responsibility on his co-conspirator -- Abuladze) and Abuladze twenty years in a labor camp in Siberia. Alibeka received fifteen years and

Aga-baba-ogly received twelve years.136

Tsarist officials involved themselves again and again in smaller feuds between

Caucasian families. But when the participants were from the nobility like in the next instance of blood vengeance, tsarist officials made their presence known and followed the case closely. For instance, tsarist agents forced the family of a Beslenevskii noble who was murdered by the Nogai prince Karamurzina in 1847 to reconcile through blood price.137 They actively participated in the reconciliation and did not bring charges of murder against the aggressor – one’s social estate made a difference. Nonetheless, forced reconciliation was at best a stop-gap solution given that Caucasian families honor depended upon the implementation of blood vengeance when other families sullied their reputations. Many aggrieved Caucasian families sought to avoid agreeing to a blood price as forced to do in this case. Doing so might risk the safety of their families – remember Ustar-khana Amir-Ogly, the man who was killed because his new wife’s family failed to take vengeance on her rapist.

136 Ibid. 137 “Ethnographicheskii Ocherk’ cherkesskago naroda,” Kavkazskii Sbornik (1900): 118.

64 When they could not persuade Caucasian participants to agree to a blood price and end a feud, tsarist agents used exile as a way to avoid further entanglement. For instance, when a Jewish man quarreled with a fellow villager, who later died of his injuries, tsarist authorities exiled the man to another city in the Caucasus. They did not sentence him to hard labor in Siberia because the court saw the death of the other man as accidental.138 Baddeley suggested that “the Russians adopted this system of exile as a punishment for homicide when severer measures were not called for in order to get the survivor out of reach of the blood-avenger.”139 The tsarist court’s decision, however, was still little more than a stop-gap measure. By not permitting the aggrieved family to take vengeance, tsarist authorities likely encouraged a blood feud between the families (even if the Jewish man’s family was re-located). Their emasculation of the Jewish man and his family, however, had some advantages for fulfilling the imperial agenda. The Jewish man essentially gave up his manhood for the safety offered by tsarist authorities. Instead of protecting his familial network and bringing them glory, Russian authorities guarded him from attack by the aggrieved family. By making the Jewish man and his familial network reliant upon tsarist authorities for protection, they weakened this particular families’ ability to continue to conform to Caucasian practices – especially blood vengeance. The Jewish man’s tsarist protectors encouraged the antithesis of Caucasian bravado, and whether knowingly or not, encouraged challenges to this attack on

Caucasian manhood.

138 Baddeley, The Rugged Flanks, II: 72-3. 139 Ibid.

65 Some Caucasian men charged ahead openly contesting imperial power by implementing blood vengeance despite imperial laws against the tradition. For instance, when a Georgian Svan was sentenced to hard labor in Siberia for murdering a member of another family, the “kin of the slain man followed him to Siberia in order to accomplish their duty – to avenge the death of his kin, by killing the offender.”140 The kin of the slain man openly challenged imperial law, but not just by carrying out an act seen by imperial authorities as illicit. By honoring Caucasian tradition, the family member of the murdered man who tracked his assailant to Siberia, acted the part of the “daring

Caucasian man.” His actions were not only those of the hero, but the type of man that

Caucasian women and families desired in their cohort – the risk-taker and protector.

Other Caucasian men challenged tsarist authority in a less active manner – leaving the more overt challenges to the children that they reared. For instance, when Barek

Tortchinov stabbed to death Dzhambolat Iueseeyev in a quarrel in 1887, the Russian court sent Tortchinov to Siberia for twenty-two years. Iueseeyev’s relatives did not follow Tortchinov to Siberia in an obvious challenge to the Russian court’s decision.

Instead they reared the dead man’s sons to know their familial enemies, and much like

Saban or Kuli, when Tortchinov returned to the village twenty-two years later,

Iueseeyev’s sons took vengeance for their dead father.141 The native court had set a blood price, but the young men wanted nothing to do with it. Instead they proved their worth to their family by taking the life of their father’s murderer. These were the type of

140 Grigola, “Custom and Justice,” 144. 141 Baddeley, The Rugged Flanks, II: 124.

66 Caucasian men tsarist authorities sought to “temper” and “civilize” – or protect from themselves.

Rendering Hospitality: A Custom of Honor and Manhood

Like the customs of blood vengeance and demonstrations of daring, hospitality among Caucasian communities held a fundamental place in maintaining and making familial reputations and in forging connections with relatives, visitors, neighboring villages. It also acted as a measure of the host’s manhood. Guests evaluated their hosts based on their generosity, ability to fulfill their requests and protect them from harm.

Hosts enhanced the reputation of their familial networks by successfully fulfilling their visitors’ requests, and providing their guests with good food, horses, and other necessities.142 The two customs blood vengeance and hospitality were linked.

Inhospitable hosts or those who failed to protect their guests risked making blood enemies, or in some unlucky happenings the host’s home became “ground zero” for old grudges and the making of new enemies.

Familial honor and the host’s manhood were inextricably intertwined – a good host maintained his familial reputation, even enhanced his status among his relations and community, by providing well for his guests. When Vladimir Vill’er’ de Lil’-Adam, a

Frenchman, stayed with a family in the Dargin region of Dagestan he remembered his host with fondness. He described the family as not rich, but generous nonetheless. They possessed a couple tea kettles, some dishes, a clay pot, two or three guns, and a few

142 The following peoples are considered in this section – the Kabardins, Adyghes, Chechen, Kumyk, Ossetian.

67 kinzhals. Despite their modest situation, he ate lamb, cheese, lard, pelmeni, bread, and even some honey.143 Even poor hosts went out of their way to provide well for their guests.

Working with tsarist authorities and upholding local custom often came into conflict due to competing visions of justice and honor. An account from a starshina of an Ossetian village demonstrates how dangerous the duty of entertaining could be for the host, especially, with tsarist interference. As village elder, Ourousbi had a duty to entertain guests who passed through his village or otherwise petitioned him for help. The excellent salary for the time -- 150 rubles a year -- to allay the costs of entertaining simply did not overcome, however, the overlapping responsibility he had to both his guests and tsarist authorities. He gave up the position after he hosted a man suspected of murder, who tsarist authorities ordered him to arrest. The starshina could not turn away the man suspected of murder, who under rules of hospitality was now under his protection. Tsarist authorities, however, expected Ourousbi to arrest the man despite the fact that doing so would force the starshina to break Ossetian rules of hospitality, thereby making a blood enemy.144 Acquiescing to the tsarist authorities’ request, Ourousbi arrested the man, who typical of tsarist justice was almost immediately freed by tsarist authorities. By doing so, Ourousbi gave a serious insult to his guest and his family, risked his life and manhood (and that of his male relatives). He challenged his society’s custom of hospitality and honor in order to please tsarist authorities’ sense of justice and chose to

143 Vladimir Vill’er’ de Lil’-Adam, “Dve nedeli v’ Darginskom’ okrug’,” SSKG, 1875: 4-6. 144 Baddeley, The Rugged Flanks, II: 136-7.

68 give up the position as starshina to avoid putting himself or his family in the position again.

Despite the goal of tsarist agents to civilize the Caucasus by stridently opposing and countering the implementation of blood vengeance, the premise that they worked from – the counterfeit nature of the custom to Caucasian tradition – hindered their efforts to eradicate its use. By dismissing the link between blood vengeance and Caucasian hospitality Russian authorities likely contributed to the making of blood enemies in this next case, for the injury incurred by the host and his family was seen as a particularly grave offense among most Caucasian communities. An unknown writer reported the next case in the newspaper Novoe Obezrenie. In the village of Kvaloli in October of 1892 a local priest I. Khogolava agreed to accept some guests from Novo-Seneki. He did not realize that the two parties included two men who had become blood enemies while in tsarist custody in Siberia. When the noble L—a (the newspaper withheld the names of the participants) learned that a young prince M—dze, a Georgian, accompanied prince Ch

—a’s party he requested that the young man, who had mutilated him years earlier in

Siberia, leave. Prince M—dze refused and challenged him to a contest of bravery.

During the challenge a peasant called “Tamashu” was killed and the host and his son received serious injuries.145 The young prince, years earlier in Siberia despite being in tsarist custody, continued to act in a manner that he saw befitting the “daring” Caucasian man – when threatened he defended himself and his manhood, and marked his enemies.

Tsarist authorities ignored the intricate connections between Caucasian customs and

145 Novoe Obezrenie, 14 April 1892: 3.

69 assumed that people under their custody, like the young prince, would leave their customs behind in the Caucasus. And in turn, they encouraged a feud between the two parties.

Conclusion

The inflexibility among tsarist agents and ethnographers to accept the basis of

Caucasian law – blood vengeance – as authentic resulted in its continuation, not just from

Caucasian men who sought to challenge Imperial authority, but by tsarist authorities whose summary dismissal of it lacked any plan to hinder its application. Familial honor and blood law both guided and bound other Caucasian customs together, like rules of hospitality, proving one’s manhood through daring, and of course, rectifying dishonors.

By identifying blood vengeance as a deviant tradition tsarist agents attacked not just the custom they deemed unworthy of civilized society, but they also attacked Caucasian culture, honor, and the daring Caucasian man – the Caucasian vision of manhood that challenged Imperial authority. Nevertheless, the attack was diminished by tsarist officials’ inability to see the significant role blood law played in Caucasian everyday life.

Ironically, tsarist authorities who charged their agents to work with local authorities to avoid blood vengeance, like in Kuli’s case, unknowingly encouraged the practice in other situations, like Ourousbi’s and I. Khogolava’s where they did not see a direct correlation between the custom of hospitality (and other Caucasian customs like the notion of the daring Caucasian man) and blood vengeance.

70 Chapter 4

A Place to Turn: Religious and Secular Tsarist Officials’ Authority over Caucasian Marriage & Family

When it came to marriage Georgian Orthodox and Muslim religious authorities monitored the marriage practices of their adherents for the tsarist administration in the

Caucasus.146 The following early child marriage case demonstrates how little power the tsarist empire assigned its secular officials when it came to questions of marriage. When in 1838 a case concerning early child marriage involving a Prince Eristov and Princess

Anni (Melikova) became known to tsarist secular officials, they promptly passed it on to the responsible religious authorities. The Georgian Exarch, who notified the high commissioner of the Caucasus, Gregor von Rosen, suggested that Eristov “report to the

Imperial Georgian Synod, explain why he married the underage girl and sign a statement,” and secular officials agreed.147 The Exarch included tsarist secular authorities in the process by sending a report to them, but he did not need their approval. According to tsarist administrative practice when secular authorities passed the case on to the synod they had completed their duties. The tsarist administration did not charge secular tsarist authorities with administering marriage policy. It reserved that right for

146 Robert D. Crews, For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia (Harvard University Press, 2009): 32-34. 147Sak’art’velos saistorio c’entraluri saxelmcip’o ark’ivi (SSC’SA), fond 16, opis’ 1, delo 5757.

71 religious authorities, and therefore secular tsarist agents rarely involved themselves in altering Caucasian marital affairs.148

Throughout the empire, the imperial Russian administration saw marriage as a religious issue, a sacrament, which gave Georgian/Russian Orthodox and Muslim religious leaders in the Caucasus an authority over marital concerns that tsarist secular administrators lacked. The oversaw Georgian Orthodoxy and retained jurisdiction over marriage and divorce well into the nineteenth-century, whereas

Catholic and Protestant Churches in most Western European countries rendered control of marriage and divorce during the same period, at least in part, to secular authorities. 149

The Georgian Imperial Synod possessed the responsibility to judge the validity of

Christian marriages in the Caucasus (whether Orthodox or a different, recognized

Christian denomination) -- likewise for Muslim authorities over their co-relgionists.150

Secular tsarist officials acted as middle men, just as they did in Eristov’s case when secular officials passed the Exarch’s petition to the proper religious authorities. More often secular tsarist authorities enforced Orthodox leaders’ decisions and monitored

Muslim religious authorities’ judgments, but they did not make judgments about the validity of marriages except to decide if petitioners’ concerns deemed notifying religious authorities.

148 With the exception of bride stealing cases that came under tsarist secular authority when the stolen bride and her abductor had not yet married and/or when the victim’s kidnapper inflicted serious physical injury. See the following chapter for a full treatment of the question of bride stealing. 149 Gregory Freeze, “Bringing Order to the Russian Family: Marriage and Divorce in Imperial Russia 1760-1860, The Journal of Modern History 62, no. 4, (Dec. 1990): 709. 150 Crews, For Prophet and Tsar, 32-34; Austin Jersild, Orientalism and Empire: North Caucasus Mountain Peoples and the Georgian Frontier, 1845-1917, (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002): 16, 36; Anna Zelkina, In Quest for God and Freedom: The Sufi Response to the Russian Advance in the North Caucasus (New York University Press, 2000): 40-7.

72 Religious officials decided what constituted legal or illegal marital practices.

Among Christian populations, Russian Orthodox authorities considered marriages legal if the bride and groom had reached the age of sixteen,151 had a voice in marriage arrangements, and agreed to the marriage. Orthodox officials characterized illegal marriage practices as those that relied upon coercion, the practice of polygamy, bride stealing, spouses who committed bigamy and adultery,152 or married a relation.153 They defined polygamous relationships as instances where a man married multiple women and lived as husband and wives, while in bigamous relationships men married more than one woman, usually unknown to the women involved. The Orthodox Synod judged

Caucasian Christian populations’ marriage practices against these guidelines, with some flexibility.

Orthodox authorities implemented policies that tended to maintain marriage among Caucasian Christian populations due to their belief that marriage was a sacrament, as supported by the Bible, and due to conceptions of women as extensions of their male guardians.154 Georgian Orthodox authorities tasked to make decisions by Russian

151 As noted in chapter two, the earliest accepted marriage age among Orthodox believers in tsarist Russia was sixteen (made law in 1830, but not implemented in the Caucasus). Orthodox religious and secular tsarist authorities in the Caucasus used sixteen as a guideline when reviewing cases; even though Christian populations in the Caucasus did not abide by this “unwritten” rule, and the Orthodox authorities in the Caucasus made concessions to Christians who married their children at earlier ages.. Muslim authorities accepted early marriage ages as well -- as early as twelve. 152 The Georgian and Russian Orthodox Church’s considered adultery a crime, but they rarely dissolved marriages over it. 153 Freeze, “Bringing Order to the Russian Family, 723; William Wagner, Marriage, Property, and Law in Late Imperial Russia (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1994): 62-7, 160; Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in fin-de-siecle Russia (Cornell University Press 1992): 36, 51-3, 123. 154 Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness, 32, 75; Laura Engelstein, “Gender and the Juridical Subject: Prostitution and Rape in Nineteenth-Century Russian Criminal Codes,” Journal of Modern History, 60 (September 1988): 461-2;; Rebecca Friedman, Masculinity, Autocracy, and the Russian University, 1804- 1863, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005): 102-105; Nancy Shields Kollmann, “Women’s Honor in Early Modern Russia,” Russia’s Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation, eds. Barbara Evans Clements,

73 Orthodox administrators made judgments according to the above beliefs.155 At home and in the periphery, tsarist religious and secular officials understood the position of women as attached to men. Russian husbands’ power over wives and parents’ power over children structured family life for every family member. The 1857 imperial civil code states that “[a] wife is obligated to obey her husband as head of the family, to live with him in love, respect, and unlimited obedience…”156 The Synod’s and tsarist society’s belief that women needed male supervision manifested itself in Orthodox religious policy. Thus in cases involving problem marriages, Orthodox Church authorities tended to try to find an answer that allowed them to legalize the union in question, whether adherents followed Georgian Orthodox Christianity, Armenian Christianity, or another

Christian denomination. 157

When confronted with cases of early child marriage and bride stealing, Georgian

Orthodox authorities tended to leave these marriages intact. They saw marriage, after all, as a sacrament and the participants, whether children or young Caucasian men and women who planned an abduction so that they could marry (circumventing their parents refusal), took an oath to honor their spouse and the sanctity of their marriage. Neither age nor abduction, outright, undid the marriage oath taken by the bride and bride-groom.

As long as the bride and bride-groom desired to enter into the union, Orthodox authorities

Barbara Alpern Engel, & Christine D. Worobec, (University of California Press, 1991): 61. 155 Firouzeh Mostashari, “Colonial Dilemmas: Russian Politics in the Muslim Caucasus,” Robert P. Geraci and Michael Khodarkovsky, eds., Of Religion and Empire: Missions, Conversion, and Tolerance in Tsarist Russia (Cornell University Press, 2001). 156 Svod Zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii, 1857, vol. 1, part 1, article 107, in Wagner, Marriage, Property, and Law, 62. 157 Freeze, “Bringing Order to the Russian Family,” 722; Wagner, Marriage, Property, and Law, 67. Freeze argues that the Orthodox Church rarely dissolved marriages in the nineteenth-century due to a backlash from the Napoleonic era.

74 permitted the marriage. If Orthodox officials doubted either party’s agreement to the marriage they ruled it illegal and demanded a separation. Besides, Orthodox authorities saw Caucasian women’s role as that of mother and wife. Undoing the marriage put

Caucasian women’s proper role in society and family at risk. The Georgian/Russian

Orthodox Church judged cases of bigamy, polygamy, and cases involving coercion illegal, again finding support for their actions in the Bible. They viewed adultery as a crime but they rarely dissolved marriages over infidelity. By leaving Caucasian marriages intact in cases of early marriage and bride stealing, Orthodox authorities maintained the gap between the visions put forth by writers of tsarist rhetoric who condemned early marriage and bride stealing, and Georgian Orthodox authorities’ practices that were geared at preserving marriages.

Muslim religious authorities maintained their own affairs in the Caucasus and continued the practices, such as polygamy and early marriage, which Orthodox authorities and tsarist rhetoric deemed amoral. By giving Muslim authorities the responsibility to oversee their own followers, the tsarist administration took an

“opportunity” for imperial transformation out of the hands of secular officials and

Orthodox authorities, who could do nothing more than oversee and monitor the decisions of Muslim religious leaders. Muslim religious leaders decided the validity of Muslim marriages. They considered marriage legal between the ages of twelve among some populations (like the Azeris), and as late as seventeen (among the Cherkess).158 Muslim

158 Luzbetok, Marriage and The Family in Caucasia: A Contribution to the Study of North Caucasian ethnology and Customary Law (Studia Instituti Anghropos, 1951): 67; V.V. Vasil’kov’, “Ocherk byta Temirgovtsev’,” SMOMPK (1901): 89; D. Il’in’, “Svad’ba u pravoslavnykh’ Cherkes’” Kavkaz 22 September 1868: 3; A. Zakharov’, “Domashnii i sotsial’nyi byt’ zhenshchiny u zakavkazskikh Tatar’,” SMOMPK, (1894): 117.

75 religious leaders accepted polygamy, but considered bride stealing (when the bride did not desire the match) and forced marriages as invalid.159 Like Orthodox authorities,

Muslim leaders showed some flexibility with bride stealing cases. They deemed marriages that formed from bride abductions as valid as long as both parties agreed to the marriage. The tsarist administration in the Caucasus brought Muslim authorities directly and officially into the tsarist administration just as they did with Georgian Orthodox officials (and just as they did with Muslim authorities around the empire), despite tsarist writer’s Imperial discourse that placed blame on Islam for poisoning Caucasian marriage and family practices.

Caucasian petitioners turned to Imperial law sometimes to avoid their village or religious elders’ rulings when it came to marriage practices. However, their expectations were still based on Caucasian customs, therefore they expected to find in Imperial law an alternate system of justice that would provide them with sentences similar to customary law, or when applicable, Sharia law. Petitioners’ motives varied. For instance, some

Caucasian petitioners desired to avoid declaring blood vengeance on family members, or they knew that a community elder opposed them and hoped tsarist authorities might rule in their favor, or they believed that tsarist law would provide expediency that their own justice system lacked. Yet, tsarist religious and secular authorities did not consider what

Caucasian petitioners might want from them. Instead they either dismissed petitioners’ cases believing that their concerns carried no judicial validity in tsarist law, or forwarded

159 N. A. Karaulov, “Osnovy musul’manskago prava,” Sbornik’ materialov’ dlia opisaniia mestnostei i plemen’ Kavkaza (SMOMPK) (1908): 56-61; N. Derzhavin, “Svad’ba u Guriitsev’-musul’man’ v okrestnostiakh’ Batuma,” (SMOMPK) (1902): 168-76.

76 the marriage cases to religious authorities. If Christian petitioners’ concerns fell in line with Orthodox authorities’ goals of maintaining marriages and/or ending coercion, bigamy, and polygamy, then the case might turn out the way they hoped. Otherwise,

Christian Caucasian petitioners found their concerns such as the role of parental authority in contracting marriages or the defense of familial honor, dismissed. Dismissals only encouraged the continuation of Caucasian customary law – outcomes that the writers of tsarist rhetoric spoke against.

So Far Removed From Theory: Governing Caucasian Marriage Practices

Different notions about what constituted justice, proper social roles for women, and the use of an administrative system supplanted from the metropole to the periphery inhibited tsarist administrators’ ability to implement change in Caucasian marital affairs.

An analysis of the following archival cases demonstrates the chasm between tsarist writers’ rhetoric and tsarist practice. It underscores the limited supervisory role of tsarist secular officials, and highlights the divisions between Caucasian and tsarist definitions of legal versus illegal marriage and how each viewed justice in those cases. These legal cases represent only a handful of petitions from the tsarist period sent to secular authorities largely by local Caucasian peoples concerned about the validity of Caucasian marriages. For instance, in 1845, two male relatives petitioned tsarist authorities begging them to redeem their family’s honor by rendering illegal the marriage of a female relation named Sofii, who married a village elder not of their choosing. In 1828, a local official, prince Chelokaev alerted tsarist authorities of a villager, named Zhas, who married two

77 women. In 1855, a Muslim man, named Usta, notified tsarist authorities about a woman he believed was coerced into marriage, and specifically asked for secular tsarist authorities’ involvement. In 1856 a village priest named Nikolai asked tsarist authorities to investigate the marriage of an illegitimate Mingreli prince and his abducted bride.160

Each case speaks to the variety of reasons why local populations turned to tsarist authorities, how the limited involvement entrusted to secular tsarist authorities inhibited their ability to encourage cultural modification among indigenous populations (even those who sought it), how the emphasis on maintaining marriage taken by Orthodox religious authorities offered only a narrow area of opportunity geared primarily against practices they attributed to an Islamic influence, and how the tsarist administrative system allowed Muslim religious leaders a great deal of autonomy to continue their practices within the tsarist administration and without intervention.

Indigenous peoples, whose marriage and family practices ethnographers and tsarist writers sought to change, approached secular tsarist authorities hoping that imperial law would help them circumvent some of their own laws (while enforcing others), settle personal grudges, and/or create a new vision of Caucasian life. They petitioned secular tsarist officials often, and had some of the same concerns as the authors who wrote for state-sponsored journals and newspapers such as early child marriage, coercion, a lack of marriage choice, bride stealing, polygamy and bigamy. However, they also brought uniquely Caucasian concerns to the attention of secular tsarist officials, often in contradiction with tsarist practices, such as issues of familial honor and how to

160 SSC’SA, fond 16, opis’ 1, delo 5757; fond 4, opis’ 3, delo 891; fond 4, opis’ 3, delo 575; fond 4, opis’ 3, delo 786.

78 redeem it. Perhaps most importantly, tsarist authorities did not give the indigenous populations the justice they sought and hoped for from the imperialist power. Tsarist authorities let their petitioners down due to simultaneous policies that proved too rigid-- such as the goal to rid customary law of the practice of blood vengeance without providing alternatives—and policies that proved too flexible and compromising such as leaving issues that dealt with women and violence almost completely to local Caucasian communities, except in cases of extreme violence or murder.

Familial Infighting: Consent, Age, and Familial Insult Tiflis

The following case illustrates how little Caucasian petitioners understood what secular tsarist authorities could do for them. Two male relatives, Armenian Christians, a

Metropolitan Bagdasar Gassan Dzhalamian and J. Madatov, petitioned secular tsarist authorities in 1845 to render illegal the marriage of a female relative, Sofii Madatov who with the agreement of her mother, Mina-Khanumi, married Chief military elder Mirzoev in 1843. Dzhalamian and J. Madatov, Sofii’s uncle, had planned to betroth her to T.G.

Karabagskii Armichiskii Bek, the man her father arranged for her to marry before his death.161 A fight between relatives for and against Sofii’s marriage to Mirzoev ensued, with secular tsarist authorities standing in as referees, so to speak.

When Dzhalamain petitioned tsarist authorities over the question of marriage choice, he assumed (incorrectly) that tsarist marriage law supported unions arranged by

161 SSC’SA, fond 4, opis’ 3, delo 891.

79 the male head of family over the bride’s and groom’s agreement to marry. His petition to the Caucasus Viceroy, Mikhail Vorontsov, begged him to rule the marriage between Sofii and Mirzoev illegal, due to the fact that Mina-Khanumi failed “to fulfill [her] deceased husband’s wishes,” by allowing their daughter to marry Mirzoev instead of the man her husband had planned for their daughter to marry.162 Metropolitan Dzhalamain adhered to

Armenian marriage custom where “the parents chose for the bride,” and even the groom

“knew only [the girl’s] name, and if she was pretty.” Like his fiancé, the groom “was obliged to rely upon the choice of his parents, and if they were absent, then [he relied] upon his closest [male] relatives” to arrange a match for him.163 Dzhalamain believed that as a close relative and a male head of household he (as Mina-khanumi’s father and

Sophie’s grandfather) had the right to make sure that his daughter remained true to her dead husband’s wishes and marriage plans for Sophie. However, Orthodox marriage law to which secular tsarist authorities conformed described a valid marriage as one where the bride-to-be and groom agreed to the union (a rule which Orthodox authorities rigidly imposed).164 Dzhalamain’s petition only verified that he and Sofii’s uncle desired to force Sofii to marry a man not of her choosing. The Metropolitan’s petition resulted in nothing more than an investigation on the part of secular officials who sought to decide if the situation warranted forwarding onto Orthodox religious authorities.

162 Ibid. 163M. Maisurova, “Svadebnye obriady Armian’,” Kavkaz, 15 July 1856: 221-2; M. Patkanov’, “Svadebnye obriady Armian’,” Kavkaz, 25 February 1872. 164 Freeze, “Bringing Order to the Russian Family, 722, 729-30; William Wagner, Marriage, Property, and Law in Late Imperial Russia (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1994): 109, 217; Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in fin-de-siecle Russia (Cornell University Press 1992): 102, 115.

80 Madatov turned to tsarist authorities for justice instead of pursuing blood vengeance just as writers of tsarist discourse hoped, and yet his claims possessed no worth under tsarist law. Sofii’s uncle argued that Mina-Khanumi and his niece “brought shame upon their family,” by not honoring the first marriage agreement. He asked

Vorontsov to “give his family satisfaction by judging the marriage illegal,” thus confirming that Mirzoev acted “dishonorably” and “was legally responsible,” for the dishonor he brought on the Madatov family.165 The claim to redeem the Madatov family’s honor resonated in Caucasian customary law, where male family members possessed a responsibility to implement blood vengeance against Mirzoev, Sofii, and her mother to set right the dishonor wrought on the entire family. But, it had no equivalent in Imperial law, where tsarist men saw insults as touching only an individual man’s worth. J. Madatov’s petition demonstrates how familial honor, the duty of Caucasian men to uphold it, and blood vengeance influenced Caucasus customs such as marriage, but also shows that the tsarist administration offered Caucasian populations no viable alternative to “redeeming” familial honor through Imperial law.

Dzhalamain, like J. Madatov, turned to tsarist authorities instead of pursuing reprisals against his daughter Mina-Khanumi, Sofii’s mother. He related to her in a letter that she need not be afraid of reprisals, he would “not remove you [her] from your [her] home, your [her] kind relatives, or your [her] inheritance.”166 He sought to persuade his daughter to follow what he saw as the right path and hoped that if his persuasion failed tsarist authorities would rule in his favor. Neither Madatov nor the Metropolitan

165 SSC’SA, fond 4, opis’ 3, delo 891, 15. 166 Ibid.

81 understood that their arguments that Sofii, Mina-Khanumi, and Mirzoev offended the

Madatov family by ignoring the dying wishes of Sofii’s father carried little weight among tsarist authorities, who sought only to ensure that the case merited forwarding to the

Orthodox synod. Tsarist secular authorities considered the following when making that determination: did the bride and groom agree to the union; did they meet the age requirements (sixteen), did they commit bigamy or polygamy by entering the union, and were they related by blood?167 They pursued issues considered familial offenses by

Caucasian populations only when they took on a criminal nature like with blood vengeance and bride stealing, not in cases where male relatives sought to force a female family member to marry against her will.

Tsarist authorities questioned only one charge during the investigation of

Mirzoev’s and Sofii’s marriage – her uncle’s claim that she was underage (fourteen) when she married her groom in 1843. However, a Major-General vouched for the Chief military leader’s good conduct and argued that Mirzoev “entered into a legal marriage with the deceased Lieutenant-Colonel Madatov’s daughter” and he claimed that Mirzoev possessed documentation that, “the girl was sixteen [at the time of their marriage], and the widow Mina-Khanumi and Sofii agreed,” to the marriage.168 Unfortunately Mirzoev’s case ends with the Major-General’s petition, so it is unknown if tsarist secular authorities forwarded the case to Orthodox officials or dismissed it. However, if Mirzoev and Sofii had documentation that proved Sofii of age at the time of her marriage (or even of age

167 Freeze, “Bringing Order to the Russian Family, 722, 729-30. 168 SSC’SA, fond 4, opis’ 3, delo 891, 10.

82 during the investigation) Orthodox authorities were unlikely to pursue the case (both

Sophii and her husband both agreed to the marriage after all).

Sophii’s case demonstrates one of the boundaries to which Orthodox authorities almost always adhered – brides and bride-grooms must give their consent to marry.

Madatov and the Metropolitan’s arguments flew in the face of one of the main tenets

Orthodox authorities held dear even among followers of other Christian religions – the right for the bride and groom to agree to the marriage. In cases that dealt with issues of consent, the tsarist state imposed its views of marriage on the local population. In the

Madatov case, by not taking action tsarist officials forced Sophie’s uncle and grandfather to think about marriage in a different way, and allowed Sophie and her mother to circumvent the authority of their male guardians. Despite the rather different agendas of tsarist writers and Orthodox religious officials when it came to the issue of marital consent both agreed.

Nonetheless, Sophii’s case also reveals the difficulties that Caucasian families encountered when they approached tsarist authorities for alternatives to the custom of blood vengeance. J. Madatov and Dzhalamain did not see Sofii’s marriage as a marital issue per say. They saw it as a familial problem and based their arguments on familial honor, custom, and customary law, not religious tenets. Sophii’s uncle and grandfather both sought a way to avoid taking vengeance on Sophii, her new husband, and her mother for betraying the Madatov family and the family of the man to whom Sophii’s father originally betrothed her. J. Madatov and Dzhalamain promised that they would not take action against Sophii, her new husband, and her mother, but they could not speak for T.G.

83 Karabagskii Armichiskii Bek, her originally betrothed. Tsarist law gave tsarist officials the right to dismiss J. Madatov and Dzhalamain’s concerns—which had no place in the imperial justice system—but the tsarist authorities dismissal also might have encouraged yet another blood feud.

Too Many Wives: The Orthodox Church Makes Policy Telavskii Uezd The Village of Kulishaur

Tsarist writers showed that both Christian and Muslim populations practiced bigamy and polygamy, and attributed their existence to the influence of Islam. Orthodox authorities came much closer to implementing a central component of tsarist discourse, which sought the end of bigamy and polygamy as based on the Bible.169 The Georgian

Orthodox Synod only considered the first marriage valid in cases of bigamy and polygamy. Theory met practice, however, in a movement against Islam. The Orthodox

Synod’s less flexible policies aimed at ending practices like bigamy and polygamy enjoyed some success among the Christian populations Orthodox authorities monitored.

However they had no control over Muslim religious followers or the Muslim religious leaders who accepted the practice.

The bigamy case of Zhas Berinavili demonstrates the active role the Orthodox

Church took in monitoring and ending practices that it associated with Islam among

Caucasian Christian peoples.170 It also illustrates how tsarist secular authorities played

169 Freeze, “Bringing Order..,” 725-7; Maksim Kovalevskii, Sovermennyi obychai i drevnii zakon: obychoe pravo Osetin’ v istoriko-sravnitel’nom osveshchenii (Moskva, 1886) I: 286. 170 Orthodox leaders did not explain the transference of polygamy and bigamy from Islam to Christianity.

84 the role of enforcers for Orthodox Church authorities. Tushinskii police-officer (pristav’) prince Chalakaev informed Telavi Circuit Court administrators that a year after Berinavili married Bana in 1826, he “drove her out [of his home] for no reason,” and in 1827, “he married the daughter of Veshagur’villi,” a woman named Maro. According to Orthodox

Georgian and Russian marriage law, Berinavili, had no right to take a second wife after he married Bana. In December of 1828, the Georgian Imperial Synod asked Telavi officials to “instruct Zhas Berinavili to stop living in wedlock with his second wife,

Maro, and send her to her father’s home,” since “he entered into an illegal marriage with her [Maro] as his second wife.”171

The local police official, Prince Chalakaev, played a central role in carrying out

Exarch Iona’s orders from the Georgian Orthodox Synod, but like other secular tsarist authorities he possessed too little authority to do more. The case file neither offers a petition directly from the local police official, nor did tsarist officials give any sense of

Chalakaev’s motivations. As a local official he may have seen his actions to inform

Telavi authorities as part of his job. He followed up on the case and informed Telavi administrators when Maro “separated from Berinavili and returned to her father’s home.”172 He also informed his superiors when he learned that Bano, Berinavili’s first wife, was sick, which permitted the Exarch to give her more time to return to her husband’s house. Chalakaev provided an essential function for the Telavi administration and the Georgian Orthodox Synod, first by informing authorities of Berinavili’s

171SSC’SA, fond 16, opis’ 1, delo 3846, 5-7. 172 Ibid., 7.

85 bigamous marriage, then by keeping them informed when Berinavili and his wives fulfilled their orders.

The Georgian Orthodox Synod’s commitment to ending the practice of bigamy and polygamy among Caucasian Christian populations provides a good example of an area where tsarist rhetoric and policy possessed the same goals. Georgian Exarch Iona showed his commitment to ending the practice of Caucasian Christian men marrying more than one woman, whether they committed polygamy or bigamy, by forcing

Berinavili to “separate from Maro,” his second wife.173 The Exarch explained his actions by noting that a Christian man could not marry two women, as stated in the Bible.

The Exarch and the Orthodox Church based their views on not only religious precepts, but also on their view of women’s proper role in society. They supported the patriarchal structure of tsarist society which included support for women’s domestic role, and men’s more public position. Orthodox religious leaders saw women not as individuals in their own right, but instead as extensions of their male guardians, who at once provided companionship and guidance to them, defended their honor, and expected their virginity before marriage, measured their worth through their domestic abilities, and expected their obedience.174 Anything contrary to that vision in the Caucasus proved

173 Ibid., 5. 174 Kollmann, “Women’s Honor” in Russia’s Women, 72; Barbara Alpern Engel, Women in Russia, 1700- 2000, 3; Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness, 32, 75; Laura Engelstein, “Gender and the Juridical Subject: Prostitution and Rape in Nineteenth-Century Russian Criminal Codes,” in Journal of Modern History, 60 (September 1988): 461-2; William Wagner, Marriage, Property, and Law, 62-5; Rebecca Friedman, Masculinity, Autocracy, and the Russian University, 1804-1863, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 102-105. Nancy Shields Kollmann, “Women’s Honor in Early Modern Russia,” in Russia’s Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation, eds. Barbara Evans Clements, Barbara Alpern Engel, & Christine D. Worobec, (University of California Press, 1991), 61; “Narodnoe pravo Osetin’” SSKG, (1872): 189; Maksim Kovalevskii, Sovermennyi obychai i drevnii zakon: obychoe pravo Osetin’ v istoriko- sravnitel’nom osveshchenii, (Moskva, 1886), I: 255.

86 anathema and in the view of both tsarist rhetoric and Orthodox authorities placed women at risk to the debauchery of Islam.

Tsarist Orthodox religious law and policy as implemented in the Caucasus reveals the boundaries of Orthodox judgments – Orthodox officials consistently ruled against bigamy and polygamy among their Christian populations since it went against Bible teachings. Their actions implemented change to Caucasian practices and corrected what they saw as the errors of their followers. Local and tsarist officials, such as the local police official Chalakaev, played a secondary role to Church officials by carrying out their policy. While tsarist secular authorities lacked the power to implement change on their own in Caucasian marital affairs, in cases of bigamy and polygamy, their actions brought tsarist discourse and Orthodox marriage policy in line. Tsarist Orthodox authorities controlled how Zhas Berinavili’s case progressed and its outcome, always ruling the first marriage as valid among Christian populations.

Turning to Empire: Muslim Authorities’ Autonomy over Marriage Shemakha district

The following case brought to tsarist secular authorities in 1857 by Usta Gusein

Aga ogly illustrates the autonomy that Muslim religious figures possessed in the tsarist administration in regards to marriage. Tsarist secular officials played a limited supervisory position in Muslim marital affairs, providing the same enforcer/informer role that they did for Orthodox authorities. Usta asked officials to follow Islamic law and secular authorities did just that. They forwarded the petition to Muslim religious

87 authorities. They stayed in the background and followed the lead of Muslim authorities, who followed Islamic law – Sharia marriage law in this case.175 Gusein Aga Ogly wanted tsarist authorities to rule his son’s marriage to Tukhphi Gadzhi as an illegal union. He claimed that Tadzhi Mustafa Efendi and Gadzhi Meraphilii Efendi, who arranged the 22 year old girl’s marriage, coerced her to “live in common with his son, Aga,” since 1855 due to a disagreement over bride price (kebin). “Without the fulfillment of the kebin act

…she [Tukhphi] should remain in her father’s house under the Sunni sect’s laws,” Gusein

Aga Ogly contended.176

Gusein Aga ogly sought an alternative to local Muslim officials due to the delay he encountered when in 1857 “three [of the local [Muslim] religious men] found the marriage of the underage Aga (twelve) to Tukhphi fully legal” while one member recognized the marriage as unlawful, and the other two gave no decision.177 The boy’s father turned to tsarist secular authorities only after the six local Muslim religious men failed to come to a conclusive decision about Aga’s marriage, and secular authorities handed it back to Muslim authorities given that Gusein Aga ogly followed Islam. Tsarist secular officials had neither control over the decision nor jurisdiction in marriage cases over Muslim religious officials’ adherents. “Since she (Tukhphi) was betrothed to him

(Aga) under the rules of Sharia law” the local Muslim religious leaders also turned to tsarist authorities and requested that they (tsarist officials) “hand over the affair for

175 Tsarist secular officials did not distinguish between Sharia law and adat law in this particular case. Gusein Aga ogly asked authorities to follow Islamic. 176 SSC’SA, fond 4, opis’ 3, delo 575, 10. 177 Ibid., 5-6.

88 judgment to higher Muslim spiritual authorities.”178 Tsarist secular authorities neither offered Gusein Aga Ogly a more expedient end to the case nor an alternative legal system

– administratively they could not. Rather they forwarded the affair to the proper tsarist religious officials and monitored the outcome, fulfilling their duties.

The limited supervisory role played by tsarist secular officials in questions of

Muslim marriage effectively nullified any alternative that imperial law might have provided the petitioner. Indeed, the duties attributed to the various branches of tsarist administration meant that tsarist secular authorities played a supervisory role that gave

Muslim religious authorities the autonomy to judge their own affairs. Tsarist imperial discourse condemned the very policies that tsarist law permitted Muslim religious authorities to implement. Members of the Muftiia Omarov’ sect, to whom tsarist officials forwarded the case, did not consider the unfulfilled kebin at all. They “came to the decision that the marriage was lawful” and argued that Gusein Aga Ogly “had no right to question the age of the bride or groom,” who both agreed to the marriage. 179 The higher

Muslim authorities approached the case in a way quite similar to Orthodox rulings regarding brides and bride-grooms who consented to a marriage union. Consent translated into a valid union. In addition, Sharia law saw a boy of twelve as a man fit for marriage and Tukhphi, who was at least sixteen, of marriage age “as was explained in the

Sharia book.” Muslim religious authorities possessed the right to decide when manhood began for male Muslim followers and the proper age for them to marry. Tsarist secular authorities possessed different duties from the Orthodox and Muslim religious officials

178 Ibid., 5. 179 Ibid., 17.

89 who judged when young men and women came to the appropriate marriage age. And writers of tsarist discourse, who condemned early marriage as a “depraved” Muslim practice represented only one side of the imperial equation.

Usta Gusein Aga ogly’s case illustrates the supervisory role that tsarist secular authorities carried out in Muslim marriage affairs and emphasizes the autonomy that tsarist rule granted Muslim religious authorities in the Caucasus. Muslim petitioners found that tsarist officialdom had little to offer them, whether they desired an alternative from Sharia law or expediency like Gusein Aga Ogly. Tsarist officials shifted Muslim petitioners back to Muslim leaders. Tsarist secular and Orthodox officials remained outside of Muslim marriage affairs and the fact remained that even if Orthodox authorities had enjoyed jurisdiction over Muslim marriage questions they too often permitted early marriage among the Caucasian Christian populations they supervised, especially those of different creeds and when the bride and bride-groom agreed to the union. When it came to early marriage, practice came far from fulfilling tsarist rhetoric.

Disobedience: A Hindrance to Orthodox Policy A Bride Stealing in Mingreli, Georgia Near the village of Otopo

Orthodox religious authorities tended to legitimize marriages even when

Caucasian men stole their brides as long as both of the participants agreed to the marriage.180 Preserving marriage, and therefore proper subjects loyal to the tsarist government, played a central role in Orthodox authorities’ decisions, despite the

180 Often times, the stolen bride planned her own kidnapping.

90 condemnations of the custom by writers of tsarist rhetoric. Orthodox religious officials presided over bride stealing cases when the abduction came to their attention after the abductor married his kidnapped bride. They then had the responsibility of judging the validity of the union.

The following case from 1856 played out quite differently from traditional bride stealing cases due to the aggressive way the abductors treated a village priest. Priest

Nikolai Nadoregshvili turned to his Orthodox superiors out of fear after Prince Alexander

Pagava and illegitimate Prince Burdga Pagava tried to force him to marry B. Pagava to

Eka, a girl they abducted, and threatened “to strike him with his [A. Pagava’s] kinzhal” – a fight that villagers “freed him [the priest] from by intervening.”181 Nadoregshvili

“rebuked them because they did not belong to his parish,” and he refused to marry B.

Pagava to his abducted bride.182 The Princes mistreatment of the priest not only led to a rebuke from Nadoregshvili, but also brought the kidnapping to the attention of the Bishop

Theophan, who “ordered Pagava and the abducted girl not to marry.”183 B. Pagava ignored the order and “entered into marriage with the abducted girl anyway… and lived with her in wedlock.”184

Burdga Pagava’s and Eka’s decision to ignore Bishop Theophan’s decree prompted the Georgian Exarch to call for a formal investigation led by the same Bishop who the pair disobeyed. He demanded the date Burdga Pagava and Eka married, “the

181 SSC’SA, fond 4, opis’ 3, delo 786, 3. 182 Ibid. 183 Ibid. 184 Ibid.

91 name of the priest, and witnesses,” all information B. Pagava withheld.185 He would not cooperate with authorities. After almost four years the Metropolitan Isadora, to whom the Bishop reported, ruled that “B. Pagava separate from the abducted girl.”186 He gave no reasons, but the reports and petitions suggest that B. Pagava’s refusal to cooperate with religious officials might have influenced the Metropolitan’s decision, especially since he did not cite even the abduction as the reason for his decision.

Burdga Pagava’s abduction of Eka suggests that Orthodox authorities dropped their policy to maintain marriages when confronted with recalcitrant followers, who challenged religious officials’ right to judge their marriage, treated them with irreverence, and refused to acknowledge their authority.187 The Bishop and the Metropolitan required only that the illegitimate prince and his bride provide proof of a legal marriage and their refusal to do so left Orthodox religious officials with no alternative but to rule the marriage as invalid. B. Pagava’s refusal to deal with religious authorities forced

Orthodox authorities to go against their usual practices of legalizing marriages of abducted brides who agreed to marry their abductors.

Conclusion

The different branches of tsarist administration in the Caucasus possessed different goals and duties. The authority that Islamic and Orthodox religious authorities held in marital affairs surpassed that of tsarist secular officials, who preformed a rather

185 Ibid. 186 Ibid. 187 It is also possible that Orthodox authorities knew something not readily available from the archival file. For instance, maybe Eka was forced to marry.

92 passive function in acting as informers and enforcers in these messy marital disagreements. Orthodox authorities’ desire to preserve marriages (unless there was criminal violence) and provide women with male guidance compelled them to compromise with local Caucasian populations in cases of early marriage, but remained quite rigid in regard to consent. They came closer to meeting the visions of writers’ tsarist discourse, with their movement against bigamy and polygamy. Orthodox authorities’ policies, however, remained limited since they affected change only upon the

Christian followers with whom they enjoyed a great deal of authority. Their lack of jurisdiction over Muslim populations meant that they could not implement change among

Caucasian Muslim populations in the Caucasus as they could among Caucasian Christian populations.

93 Chapter 5

The Undoing of Tsarist Rhetoric: Bride Stealing and Familial Violence

“The love of a Tatar woman is terrifying,” wrote A. Zakharov, in the journal

Sbornik materilov’ dlia opisania mestnostei i plemen’ Kavkaza, when he provided the following example of a failed bride abduction.188 The young lovers, deemed “Tatar” by the writer, planned the kidnapping due to opposition from the maiden’s family who refused to accept his proposal.189 The plan proved risky, since the kidnapped woman’s relatives possessed the right through blood vengeance to pursue the kidnapper and kidnapped woman, and if caught, kill them both. The young man seized his sweetheart, flung her over his steed, and dashed away. Desperate to regain their family’s honor, the young woman’s brothers gave chase. All hope of reconciliation crumbled as the pursuers caught the runaway lovers and exercised their right to blood revenge, killing their sister’s kidnapper. In desperation, the young woman, “killed her two brothers, pierced her breast with a kinzhal and collapsed on the corpse of her beloved.”190 Tragically, the young lovers’ efforts failed and instead the abduction turned into a type of familial violence.

188 A. Zakharov’, “Domashnii i sotsial’nyi byt’ zhenshchiny u zakavkazskikh Tatar’,” SMOMPK (1894): 130. 189 Zakharov does not give a reason for the maiden’s parents refusal. His goal was to show the terrifying “nature” of the “Tatar” – Azeri – woman. 190 A kinzhal is a short dagger. A. Zakharov’, “Domashnii i sotsial’nyi.., 131.

94 But if the two had succeeded and managed reconciliation with the young woman’s relatives, they would have obtained not only the permission they needed to marry, but also the community’s respect and awe.191

Zakharov’s description of the young woman’s actions, especially the killing of her brothers, illustrates fundamental differences in conceptions of gender roles, family, and violence between Caucasian societies, on one hand, and their Russian conquerors, on the other. Bride stealing occurred among both Christians and Muslims of the region and the reasons that Caucasian youths partook in the custom ranged anywhere from a refusal of a marriage proposal (whether by the prospective bride or her family), to revenge for an insult to one’s family, a desire for notoriety, as proof of manhood, or to the inability to pay the asking bride-price (kalym).192 The kidnapper’s actions gravely insulted the bride’s family, but if successful at outmaneuvering his foe, his actions commanded respect. Caucasian societies did not relegate women to roles characterized by passivity to the same extent as Russian society. Kidnapped women, much like the “Tatar” woman above, might help plan their abduction. If they did not plan the abduction, the abducted woman would fight back against her kidnapper, not just rely passively on her family for protection. Their actions against their families demonstrate the expected, aggressive role

191 “Adaty zhitelei Kumykskoi ploskoski,” SSKG (1872): 6, 15-16; “Adaty uzhno-dagestanskikh’ obshchestv’,”.SSKG (1875) 9, 24, 36-38, 44, 48, 50, 54, 60, 67; V.A. Dmitriev, “Kul’tura adaty i Shari’at u kavkazskikh gortsev,” in Rossiia i Kavkaz: istoriia, religiia, 107-127; Abdulla Omarov, “Kak zhivut’ Laki,” SSKG (1870): 19-21; A.V. Komarov, “Adaty i sudoproizvodstvo po nim’,” SSKG (1868): 53-54; D- ra. Pfafa, “Narodnoe pravo osetin’,” SSKG (1870): 318-321; I. Ia. Sandrygailo, Adaty dagestanskoi oblasti i zakatal’skago okruga, (Tiflis, 1899): 22-24; Alexander Grigola, “Custom and Justice in the Caucasus: The Georgian Highlands,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1939, 66-69. 192 Most of the peoples of the Caucasus had some form of this tradition. Most used the Kalym to pay for part of the bride’s family’s marriage expenses, and the cost of accruements to run a household. But some also required a payment either of money or kind to offset the loss of a worker.

95 that Caucasian women sometimes played, along with men, in Caucasian family life and familial violence.

Caucasian societies defined family not as an insular unit comprised of mothers, fathers, and their offspring, but instead by an extended system of family members who formed communities and even whole societies. For instance, one author described his father’s pride in his extended family, which included “40 cousins, who were able to come armed to his father’s assistance, when necessary.”193 Each member of an extended family irrespective of gender worked for and defended the aggrandizement and honor of the whole, and policed wrongdoers.

As such, domestic violence in Caucasian societies—the second topic of this chapter along with bride stealing—existed in a more extensive form of familial violence intricately connected to familial honor, the customs and criminal acts that threatened that honor – like bride stealing, rape, assault, murder, to name only a few— and the declaration of blood vengeance to right dishonors. The patriarch-driven aggression, domestic abuse perpetrated by the head of household, that characterized Russian family discord comprised only one piece of familial violence in the Caucasus.194 Male family members played a central role in familial violence in the Caucasus. However, Caucasian family members policed each others’ actions and any family member – husbands, fathers, sons, grandfathers, grandmothers, uncles, wives, sisters, daughters, aunts, cousins, sisters-

193 “Domashniaia i semeinaia zhizn’ dagestanskikh’ gortsev’,” SSKG, (1870): 2-3; We see the same type of family organization among Georgians in Maksim’ Kovalevskii’s, Zakon’ i obychai na Kavkaz, II: (Moskva, 1890): 4; A. Lilov, “Ocherki byta kavkazskikh’ gortsev’,” in SMOMPK, (1892): 3-5, 6; 194 Jennifer Suchland, “On the Transnational trouble with Gender: The Politics of Sexual Harassment in Russia,” Ph.D. Dissertation, The University of Austin, Texas, 2005, 77, 112-119; Marcelline J. Hutton, Russian and West European Women, 1860-1939: Dreams, Struggles, and Nightmares (New York, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, (2001): 3, 12-18, 23-26.

96 in-law, and brothers-in-law—might use violent means against another much as the above anecdote demonstrates.

Caucasian populations petitioned secular tsarist officials less often in instances of violence, such as familial violence and bride stealing, than in cases where they questioned the validity of marriage unions (discussed in the previous chapter). Due to the long-standing and widely accepted familial and vengeance based system of justice that shaped Caucasian society, Caucasian families often looked out for themselves and did not consider the tsarist system of justice to be of much use in these sorts of situations. On the occasions when Caucasian petitioners did turn to tsarist secular officials to intervene in criminal cases they usually possessed a goal to circumvent customary law or the power of the family patriarch. Needless to say, Caucasian women tended to write (or have a translator write) these petitions. If their goals matched tsarist officials’ tendencies— which were to allow abducted brides to marry their abductors and to protect women if their Caucasian husbands or other male relations tormented them and inflicted serious injury—they found their hopes realized. Otherwise, and most often, tsarist law dealing with domestic violence and bride stealing had little to offer petitioners.

Tsarist authorities approached domestic violence and bride stealing in the

Caucasus in much the same way they dealt with rape and assault (discussed in the next chapter). They considered how much force the aggressor (usually a male, often husbands and fathers) used against the victim (usually a female or a child) – Was the victim maimed or scarred, or even killed? In bride stealing cases, if the abductor made clear his desire to enter into marriage with his stolen bride and if the abducted bride

97 agreed to a union, tsarist authorities willingly curtailed defendants’ sentences and permitted unions. They did so for a variety of reasons. They followed the precedent of

Orthodox authorities, believing that the Caucasian woman, now ruined by the abduction, would never find another suitor. They also believed that as a female the abducted woman needed some type of male guardianship (a husband was seen as better than a father because as a wife, women fulfilled their duty to their families and country). On rare occasions secular tsarist officials showed a certain amount of sympathy for the

Caucasian inhabitants and pushed for their superiors to consider Caucasian customs (over tsarist laws) in making determinations.

Secular tsarist officials then decided how much time the aggressor should serve in prison or in a labor camp. When deciding the punishment, tsarist secular authorities took other factors into consideration, which might increase or decrease the attacker’s sentence such as the aggressor’s temperament. Did he often abuse his wife and children? If the aggressor was in the military did he have a good record? Did his wife commit adultery or was she “cold”195 to her husband? A good military record might result in a lesser sentence for the defendant, but if his attorney besmirched the moral character of the accused’s wife implying that she committed adultery, tsarist officials always handed-out relatively light sentences (often less than a year).196 If witnesses, especially neighbors, spoke up for the victim of domestic violence or bride abduction and confirmed a story that characterized her husband, father, or abductor as ill-tempered, and abusive tsarist

195 The use of the term “cold” is really asking if the woman was affectionate to her husband, even to the point of questioning if she had sexual relations with him. 196 It is possible that tsarist officials handed-down relatively short sentences to abusive husbands thinking that a longer sentence would only put his wife and family in jeopardy.

98 officials gave longer sentences (more than a year).197 Officials approached bride stealing cases in much the same way as they did cases of familial violence. Did the stolen maiden plan the abduction with her abductor? Where the bride helped to organize the abduction, they also gave lighter sentences.

In cases of bride stealing and domestic violence, tsarist secular officials possessed an opportunity to implement change in Caucasian family life since they had a responsibility to consider criminal cases that affected Caucasian families, which they could not do in non-criminal marital affairs. Their agenda (to keep families together, maintain marriages, ensure Caucasian women had male guardians, for instance) differed from the imperial goals of the writers who created tsarist rhetoric and condemned the abuse wrought upon Caucasian wives, daughters, and sons by their husbands and fathers.

Yet, secular tsarist officials sympathized and agreed with the conclusions put forth by the writers of tsarist rhetoric. They mentioned the violence in their reports to their superiors:

“the girl was violently abducted” or “raped against her will” and “afraid that her abductor might kill her.”198 Tsarist secular authorities sought to maintain Caucasian family life just as they did at home when they dealt with Russian cases. They based their decisions on certain gendered and religious beliefs such as the notion that women (Caucasian or

Russian) were extensions of men, that women needed male guardianship, that rape ruined

197 Sending a stolen bride back to her father’s home was also an option, although it was not often sought out. 198 Sak’art’velos saistorio c’entraluri saxelmcip’o ark’ivi (SSC’SA), fond 16, opis’ 1, delo 2647.

99 women’s honor and made them unsuitable for marriage, and that women’s moral frailty led them to commit adulterous acts.199

Consequently, tsarist secular officials often left dealings with domestic abuse in the hands of Caucasian families with the exception of serious physical injuries and murder. They hesitated at breaking apart families and marriage unions and at taking the power away from the head of house. They tended to make decisions that maintained marriage in domestic/familial abuse cases, even in cases of adultery, and permitted marriage in cases of bride stealing and rape, as long as the ruined woman agreed. In spite of their more active role and jurisdiction over criminal cases, tsarist secular officials still came quite far from fulfilling tsarist discourse, in which writers vehemently criticized bride stealing and domestic violence.

A Lesson in Compromise and Measuring Violence: Tsarist Secular Authorities role in Bride Stealing Cases

An analysis of the following bride stealing cases demonstrates the chasm between

Russian rhetoric and tsarist practice. The first case occurred in 1846, when a man named

Aibaz Ali Mustafa-ogly abducted a young girl named Anakhanumy. Riddled with violence, the second instance of bride stealing failed when a man named Abduragim

199 Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness, 32, 51-7, 76-9; William Wagner, Marriage, Property, and Law, 62- 5; Barbara Alpern Engel, Women in Russia, 1700-2000, 20-1, 63, 94-5 ; Rebecca Friedman, Masculinity, Autocracy, and the Russian University, 1804-1863, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005): 102-105; Nancy Shields Kollmann, “Women’s Honor in Early Modern Russia,” Russia’s Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation, eds. Barbara Evans Clements, Barbara Alpern Engel, & Christine D. Worobec, (University of California Press, 1991): 61.Jennifer Suchland, “On the Transnational trouble with Gender: The Politics of Sexual Harrassment in Russia,” Ph.D. Dissertation, The University of Austin, Texas, 2005, 77, 112-119; Marcelline J. Hutton, Russian and West European Women, 1860-1939: Dreams, Struggles, and Nightmares (New York, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, (2001): 30, 147.

100 Ragim’-ogly stole a young girl named Tul’Sabi. The cases illustrate the parameters of tsarist law by revealing how violence, honor, and age influenced tsarist authorities’ sentencing. The two cases represent a sample of cases that confronted tsarist secular officials, and reveal how tsarist authorities and Caucasian participants understood justice, violence, marriage, honor, and the place of men and women in family and society. Each case sheds light on tsarist authorities’ and Caucasian people’s understandings of crime and violence, and speaks to the central role played by conceptions of women’s proper roles in society and family, and how these views influenced interactions and tsarist decisions in cases of bride stealing.

While tsarist discourse, Orthodox authorities, and tsarist law condemned the practice of bride stealing, tsarist authorities handed out lenient sentences and even permitted abducted girls to marry their kidnappers in abduction cases, except in cases of extreme violence. The cases show a reluctant willingness of tsarist authorities to compromise with local families in cases of underage brides who desired to marry their kidnappers, something to which Caucasian families also usually agreed. Tsarist secular officials reasoned that permitting an abducted bride to marry her kidnapper allowed her to take her proper place in society as wife and mother, since in Russian society no man would have her after an abduction (and likely rape). In Caucasian communities, the issues of abduction and Caucasian women’s marriage opportunities prove more complex and depended on two factors. First, the kidnapped women’s family usually let her decide if she wanted to marry her abductor. Second, if she fought valiantly against her attacker and her actions demonstrated her loyalty to her family, her honorable actions might help

101 her find another suitor more easily. While purity/chastity determined marriage opportunities in Russia, in the Caucasus, brave deeds might, occasionally, trump concerns about purity/chastity.

Circumventing the Patriarch: The Alternatives of Tsarist Law The Theft of Anakhanumy by Aibaz Mustafa Ogly Elisavetpol uezd

In the dead of night in February of 1846, Aibaz Ali Mustafa-ogly abducted

Anakhanumy from her parents’ home in the village of Gogzhalin and fled to the safety of a relative, who lived in a nearby village. “He stayed with her there for five days and during that time had relations with her” in an effort to force her father, who refused his marriage proposal and promised his beloved to another man, to permit the marriage. In his fury to escape with his bounty, Ali Mustafa-ogly injured the girl’s mother (Shakh-

Pari-Orucheboi); despite this and his seduction of Anakhanumy the two families— described by the Tsarist official as “Tatar”—later came to a marriage agreement but were confronted with the Imperial Court System, which imprisoned Ali Mustafa-ogly.200

Tsarist Court authorities based their punishment of the accused upon its conceptions of the appropriate marriage age for a young maiden and the fact that the defendant had sexual relations with a minor. In November of 1847 the court “sentenced

Ali Mustafa-ogly to a convict work factory for four years with an additional punishment of thirty lashings.”201 Tsarist authorities argued that the accused deserved the penalty since he “took advantage of Anakhanumy’s ignorance and stole her innocence,” by

200 SSC’SA, fond 4, opis’ 1, delo 475. 201 Ibid.

102 abducting a ten year old girl and persuading her to have sexual relations with him.202 The

Elisavetpol uezd’ court, however, handed down a relatively light sentence for Ali

Mustafa-ogly’s crime since the 1845 Imperial codex stipulated that the sentence for a man accused of raping a girl less than fourteen years of age was deprivation of his legal rights, a sentence to a labor camp for a period of ten to twelve years, and a lashing.203

Court authorities chose to give Ali Mustafa-ogly a sentence on the lighter side of the punishment for his crime because the accused claimed that he abducted Anakhanumy with her and “her mother’s agreement” and he expressed a desire to marry

Anakhanumy.204 In the eyes of the court, Anakhanumy’s agreement meant little since it considered her too young to make such a decisions. The court viewed Ali Mustafa-ogly’s actions as . Tsarist officials would usually consider marriage, but they remained reluctant to do so because of the abducted girl’s young age, despite the fact that

Anakhanumy’s family, or at least her mother, petitioned for just that. Tsarist officials’ punishment for Ali Mustafa-ogly’s actions remained relatively light, but it acknowledged that the accused committed a crime.

The Elisavetpol’ uezd’ court believed that Shakh-Pari-Orucheboi and her daughter planned the bride stealing with Ali Mustafa-ogly in an effort to thwart the plans of Anakhanumy’s father to marry her to another man. Both women denied any involvement, but tsarist authorities complained that “the women cannot be believed” particularly in light of the fact that Anakhanumy’s “mother did not tell anyone about the

202 Ibid. 203 Ulozhenie nakazaniiakh’ ugolovnykh’ i ispravitel’nykh,’ (St. Petersburg, 1845), article 1998: 514. 204 SSC’SA, fond 4, opis’ 1, delo 475.

103 theft of her daughter until the third day,” after her abduction.205 The likelihood of Shakh-

Pari-Orucheboi and her daughter admitting their involvement in orchestrating the bride stealing remained quite low since it gave her father the right to demand retribution from his daughter, with a punishment of anything from a fine or exile to death.206 If the girl thought her father would react favorably, she might admit her complicity, but in this case her father had already made his position against the marriage known. The court, therefore, took into consideration that Anakhanumy might have agreed to the bride stealing and gave Aibaz the lower side of the penalty for his crime. The case, however, did not end here. Anakhanumy’s mother and a sympathetic official petitioned for an even lesser penalty.

The sympathetic official, a Major-General, argued for a more fitting punishment

(even less than the four years in a labor camp) that took into consideration the customs of

Ali Mustafa-ogly’s people. He wrote from the office of the Tiflis Military Governor to the Elisavetpol’ court on Ali Mustafa-ogly’s behalf arguing that the accused should have

“known better” than to steal a girl of ten years of age and have sexual relations with her,

“even if she agreed.”207 But he continued “the court’s sentence might be too harsh” since

“in the characteristic ignorance of a Tatar” the accused did “not understand the consequences of his actions or the strict laws and punishments that governed his crime.”208 He argued that “it [was] unfair to expose his [Ali Mustafa-ogly’s] actions to a

205 Ibid. 206 A. Zakharov’, “Domashnii i sotsial’nyi byt’ zhenshchiny u zakavkazskikh Tatar’,” SMOMPK (1894): 130-2. 207 SSC’SA, fond 4, opis’ 1, delo 475. 208 Ibid.

104 level of a more educated class of people.” He sincerely believed that Ali Mustafa-ogly’s status as a sub-altern should, if not excuse his crime then lessen the punishment.

The Major-General is a good example of the sympathetic, albeit patronizing, official. Approaching the situation from a tsarist point of view, he believed that Ali

Mustafa-ogly should have known that a ten-year-old girl was not a viable candidate for marriage and that Anakhanumy (due to her age) lacked the years to accept his proposal and sexual advances. In Ali Mustafa-ogly’s society, however, young girls married as early as ten or twelve.209 The accused considered Anakhanumy a woman prepared for marriage, and acted to ensure he acquired her as his wife after her father promised her to another man. Her seduction might have complicated the reconciliation between Ali

Mustafa-ogly and Anakhanumy’s family, but it did not preclude it, and in this case the ravisher managed to let Anakhanumy’s family know that he still desired a marriage agreement. Where Ali Mustafa-ogly’s people celebrated the success of his actions or at least tolerated it, the tsarist court condemned them.210

Throughout 1848 the Major-General sent multiple petitions encouraging the court to review its decision and rethink its sentencing in Ali Mustafa-ogly’s case because the accused “repented his actions, was ignorant, and had already been in custody for a long time.” 211 According to this official, the kidnapper, aroused by envy and desire, acted in the spirit of the local people. Driven by his uncontrollable passion and love for

Anakhanumy, and lacking any understanding of the consequences of his actions, Ali

209 Ibid. A. Zakharov’, “Domashnii i sotsial’nyi byt’ zhenshchiny u zakavkazskikh Tatar’,” SMOMPK (1894): 130-2. 210 SSC’SA, fond 4, opis’ 1, delo 475. 211 Ibid.

105 Mustafa-ogly stole the object of his desire and deprived her of her innocence. The

Major-General continued, “He (the accused) repents with a pure heart and only acted because he loves her.” “One must also consider the girl,” the petitioner argued, “who according to her customs could still choose another man,” and yet she did not. The Major

General hoped to illustrate that the tsarist conception that abducted women lacked all possibility of finding another suitor due to their ruined status was not absolute in the

Caucasus. Anakhanumy’s status after abduction did not preclude her from finding another suitor as it might in Russia proper. By pointing out that Anakhanumy also desired to enter into marriage with her abductor, the petitioner argued that the court should show some leniency. Yet, he petitioned for a lesser sentence more so from pity for the “other,” who just did not understand proper behavior, than from any notion that native custom deserved more than ridicule. The court refused to make any changes despite the Major-General’s entreaties.

Without the wherewithal of Shakh-Pari-Orucheboi, Ali Mustafa-ogly might have served his full sentence and Anakhanumy might have married another man. Instead,

Shakh-Pari-Orucheboi, used the tsarist courts as a way to supersede her husband’s desire to marry Anakhanumy to another suitor. She had an official pen numerous petitions appealing Ali Mustafa-ogly’s sentence. Instead of appealing to the court directly like the

Major-General, Shakh-Pari-Orucheboi appealed directly to Viceroy Mikhail Vorontsov’s office. Anakhanumy’s mother wrote that her family “forgave the accused and that the family came to a marriage agreement with him,” thus she begged the Viceroy to release

Ali Mustafa-ogly. Shakh-Pari-Orucheboi continued to send letters to the Viceroy’s office

106 asking for updates from 1847 until 1849. Her petitions succeeded in persuading the

Viceroy’s office to speak on her behalf. The tsarist legal system offered Shakh-Pari-

Orucheboi an opportunity to thwart her husband’s power over marriage choice.

Viceroy Mikhail Vorontsov’s aide-de-camp intervened, petitioning the Senate in

June 1848, arguing that while “the evidence does not fully change the crime attributed to

Ali Mustafa-ogly,” he believed that the Senate should “take into account the local circumstances and notions of the natives for similar crimes,” which he argued would change the defendant’s sentence.212 He suggested that tsarist officials give credence to certain less offensive Caucasian laws and customs. Vorontsov’s aide-de-camp appealed to the Senate to bow to the wishes of Anakhanumy’s family and permit local custom to determine punishment. He sympathized with the Senate writing that “he knew that they ordered the affair back to the local courts and told them to carry out the [original] order, but the girl’s mother asked for an end of the affair so that her daughter could marry the accused.”213 He claimed that “some crimes performed in the Caucasus region are dependent upon local conditions and circumstances, therefore the punishment for such crimes should follow local notions.”214 He acknowledged a need to breach the chasm between native and imperial law by giving some customary laws recognition and suggested that the Senate release Ali Mustafa-ogly and set him up in one of the local villages so that he could marry the girl.215

212 Ibid. 213 Ibid. 214 Ibid. 215 Ibid.

107 The Senate agreed to free Ali Mustafa-ogly in March 1849. His liberty was contingent upon his marrying Anakhanumy. It further stipulated that the police maintain strict supervision over him until Anakhanumy reached legal marriage age, thus enforcing its conception of the proper marriage age on the couple.216 The Senate begrudgingly permitted the marriage and released Ali Mustaf-ogly, but in doing so it compromised with local inhabitants.

Anakhanumy’s case illustrates that the way that tsarist authorities approached bride stealing (and other crimes) included varied perspectives and various levels of compromise, which set ever moving boundaries for imperial law, and for the relationship between imperial law and local legal practice. Secular tsarist authorities reluctantly compromised with local populations, especially when the indigenous peoples showed a certain amount of persistence like Anakhanumy’s mother. The Elisavet’pol’ court handed down what it considered a lenient sentence of four years in a labor camp instead of ten to twelve due to the fact that Anakhanumy and her mother might have helped plan the bride stealing. Despite Anakhanumy’s status as underage, the court still took under consideration her agreement to have sexual intercourse with her abductor. Just as agreement between underage brides and grooms led Orthodox authorities to legalize questionable marriages, the same factors swayed court authorities to give a more lenient sentence to Ali Mustafa-ogly. Tsarist authorities’ more lenient sentence put them at odds with tsarist discourse, in a gray area somewhere between condemning bride stealing and reluctantly compromising with local customs. The Viceroy’s office, on the other hand,

216 Ibid.

108 further widened that gap between tsarist discourse and tsarist practice by persuading the

Senate to bow to local customs, thus freeing Ali Mustafa-ogly and undermining tsarist imperial rhetoric.

A Measure of Violence: The Limits of Tsarist Law Village of Lagicheskii, South Caucasus The Theft of Tul’Sabi by Abduragim Ragim Ogli

Ragim Ibragim Ogly brought the following case to the attention of tsarist authorities in 1851 when Abduragim Ragim Ogly and an accomplice abducted his daughter, Tul’Sabi, “a girl of no more than fourteen years old.” Her assailants, Ibragim

Ogly claimed, abducted, “injured and ruined,” her. Ibragim Ogly turned to tsarist authorities for justice for what he considered a serious familial insult, especially since

Ragim Ogly “took his daughter’s childhood,” and injured him and other family members at home at the time.217 Initially Ragim Ogly admitted to his participation in the crime, but later claimed that he had only sent two villagers to Tul’Sabi to see if she would agree to go with him, but that he did not go through with the kidnapping and he did not rape the girl or injure her relatives. The friend that accompanied him refused to confirm Ragim

Ogly’s changing story. 218

Tul’Sabi’s case demonstrates the parameters that guided imperial law, such as how violence and the age of the victim factored into tsarist authorities’ rulings. The court ruled that “by raping and stealing a girl of no more than fourteen years old from her relatives,” tsarist law stipulated that “the convict work in a labor camp for four to eight

217 SSC’SA, fond 4, opis’ 1, delo 2647. 218 Ibid.

109 years and receive thirty to fifty strikes.”219 However, due to the severity of the crime, the fact that the accused “raped and deceived [the victim],” and “used torture and beatings” the court ruled that the defendant deserved a higher penalty.220 Therefore, the

Shemakha-Baku Uezd Court sentenced Ragim Ogly to sixty lashings and ten years in a labor camp because of the young age of his victim and the extreme violence that the victim experienced at his hands.

The Tsarist officials involved in this court case, whether from the Viceroy’s office, the Uezd court, or the Senate, did not diverge in agreement over the punishment of the defendant. They felt convinced of his guilt because of his changing story, his insincerity, and the lack of petitioners on his behalf. When the defendant changed his story and asked for an appeal, even Vorontsov’s office, long known for compromising with local peoples, ignored his plea.221 The administrators felt that Ragim Ogly’s violent rape and torture of the victim clearly demonstrated his guilt. Ragim Ogly never once apologized for the deed or showed any concern for Tul’Sabi or her family. Even officials sympathetic to native customs could not find fault with the punishment given to the accused.

Hard labor and lashings hardly offered an alternative to Tul’Sabi’s family for regaining familial honor through blood vengeance. Yet, Ibragim Ogly sought out tsarist authorities – Why? Did he desire to avoid blood vengeance or did he try but fail? The archival file gives no real sense of Ibragim Ogly’s motives. Despite the show of unity

219 Ibid. 220 Ibid. 221 Ibid.

110 among tsarist officials, the tsarist penalty was inconsistent with local practices. In response to such a horrible insult most families would enact blood revenge. There is no way to find out what actions the family took after the affair. Court records reveal that since Tul’Sabi’s family was “absent from proceedings, a higher punishment is needed”— revealing the court’s concern that blood vengeance might ensue.222 Indeed, since

Tul’Sabi’s family did not attend the court proceedings, the court might have given the defendant a harsher penalty in hopes of persuading Tul’Sabi’s family from taking the law into their own hands, if they had not already done so, and implementing blood revenge.

In cases like Tul’Sabi’s forced abduction and rape, tsarist officials came much closer to tsarist discourse, which criticized the violent treatment of Caucasian women.

For tsarist officials the penalty handed down to Abduragim served justice, the ravisher received the highest penalty under the law (even higher). In the court’s view, it did everything in its power to protect Tul’Sabi and her family from the defendant by giving him a lengthy sentence. However, tsarist justice limited itself to taking a stand against violence only in cases of obvious malice, like Tul’Sabi’s experience. When tsarist officials’ rulings came closer to fulfilling tsarist rhetoric the gap between tsarist law and

Caucasian customary law widened.

Familial/Domestic Violence

Tsarist writers cited domestic violence cases in voluminous numbers, yet very rarely did they provide findings. As mentioned in chapter two, they possessed an agenda

222 Ibid.

111 centered on highlighting the brutal nature of Caucasian men that made it unnecessary to provide additional information. Thus, I scoured journals and newspapers for domestic violence cases and found only two full cases with judgments, although many partial cases. Needless to say the fewer cases with findings limit my analysis; however, a couple of themes come to the fore in cases of familial/domestic violence. Various family members’ participation (mothers, sons, daughters, brothers among others) in familial violence characterize the nature of domestic violence in the Caucasus area as an occurrence not relegated to the aggressive actions of just family patriarchs and men

(however they still remained at the center of such cases). Together, the partial and full domestic abuse cases suggest that tsarist authorities involved themselves only in instances where extreme violence or murder occurred because they sincerely believed that women (Caucasian or Russian) were extensions of men and that they needed male guardianship. Therefore, they only intervened in cases of domestic abuse that they deemed severe.223

An analysis of the following familial/domestic abuse cases demonstrates how far tsarist authorities came from realizing tsarist rhetoric that condemned Caucasian men’s treatment of Caucasian women (or even trying to realize it), in large part due to an agenda that relegated women to the guardianship of men. An examination of familial

223 Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness, 32, 51-7, 76-9; William Wagner, Marriage, Property, and Law, 62- 5; Barbara Alpern Engel, Women in Russia, 1700-2000, 20-1, 63, 94-5 ; Rebecca Friedman, Masculinity, Autocracy, and the Russian University, 1804-1863, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005): 102-105; Nancy Shields Kollmann, “Women’s Honor in Early Modern Russia,” Russia’s Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation, eds. Barbara Evans Clements, Barbara Alpern Engel, & Christine D. Worobec, (University of California Press, 1991): 61.Jennifer Suchland, “On the Transnational trouble with Gender: The Politics of Sexual Harrassment in Russia,” Ph.D. Dissertation, The University of Austin, Texas, 2005, 77, 112-119; Marcelline J. Hutton, Russian and West European Women, 1860-1939: Dreams, Struggles, and Nightmares (New York, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, (2001): 30, 147.

112 violence also highlights how the extended familial networks that comprised Caucasian societies resulted in domestic/familial abuse that included far more family members than tsarist authorities confronted in the metropole, where a male head of house abused his wife and children.

The discussion that follows examines a series of familial/domestic abuse cases, each of which unveils important characteristics of domestic abuse in Caucasian society and the tsarist imperial enterprise. These cases underscore that a wider definition of domestic violence is more fitting for nineteenth-century Caucasian familial life. Wives defended themselves and sometimes took on the role of aggressor. A large spectrum of family members participated in familial/domestic violence. Cases where patriarchs murdered or injured their wives demonstrate the limits of tsarist law by showing at what point tsarist authorities felt compelled to involve themselves in cases of Caucasian familial violence and why. How much violence incited tsarist authorities to act?

Caucasian Women as Aggressors: Familial Violence The death of Magomed Osman’-ogly Dagestan Kaitag-Tabasaran region

The following partial case from 1870, where “Zarab’-bike shot and killed her husband, Magomed Osman’-ogly, while in bed” reveals that the narrow definition of domestic violence as used by Russians and Europeans loses it meaning when applied to

Caucasian familial life. As Osman’-ogly lay dying he told authorities that “his wife shot

113 him and that he injured her.”224 Osman’-ogly essentially made sure that the authorities knew that while his wife inflicted a mortal wound on him, he also acted aggressively toward her (before or after she struck at him remains unclear). A broader definition of domestic violence characteristic to Caucasian extended family structures and inclusive of women and men more fittingly describes the extensive scope of familial violence seen among Caucasian families. Just as Zarab’-bike assumed the role of aggressor, familial violence in the Caucasus included more than just patriarchs misusing and abusing their wives.

Caucasian society and familial life taught Caucasian women and men to fight back, specifically for their family’s honor. The consequence of grooming Caucasian women to “fight back” for their family honor also taught them how to fight against their husbands and families. Gender neither relegated Caucasian women to passively accept mistreatment from their husbands nor did it stop them from instigating violence against family members, husbands included.

Zarab’-bike’s neighbors supported her actions and tried to explain her deed to tsarist authorities. They told them that Osman’-ogly “had fits of insanity and was very jealous of any attention given to his wife.”225 Unfortunately, ethnographers who included

Osman’-ogly’s case in the criminal statistics of the journal SSKG in 1870 aimed to demonstrate how Caucasian men’s violent nature corrupted Caucasian women by making them violent. In terms of Russian society’s understanding of the female nature,

“corrupted” or violent Caucasian women went against their understanding of a gentle and

224 “Iz gortsi kriminalistiki,” in SSKG, (1870): 77 225 Ibid.

114 passive female nature. Whether they charged Zarab’-bike with murder remains unknown. However, Zarab’-bike’s case reflects how the gendering of the female in the

Caucasian case did not preclude physical strength and violence in the same way that it did in Russian and European culture.

Killing for One’s Brother: A Family Affair The Attempted Murder of Elis Aramiantsa Tiflis

The following case of the attempted murder of Elis Aramiantsa by her brother-in- law from 1893 further illustrates the familial nature of domestic violence in the nineteenth-century Caucasus and highlights the gap that existed between tsarist discourse, which condemned the mistreatment of Caucasian women, and tsarist practice, which allowed abuse to continue by handing out light sentences to defendants. After an evening at the theater with her brother-in-law, Dzhumshud’ Aramiantsa, Elis Aramiantsa invited him back to her home for dinner at which time “the accused shot her with a revolver”226 causing an injury from which she later recovered. The court then sought to learn the reasons for Dzhumshad’ Aramiantsa’s attempted murder of his sister-in-law.

The attempted murder case provides a good example of how domestic violence in the nineteenth-century Caucasus looked quite different than in Russia and Europe. The marriage of Elis Aramiantsa and her husband belonged to a large familial network and every person in that network possessed an interest in each other’s lives, made judgments, and sometimes acted on them. In this case D. Aramiantsa shot his sister-in-law because

226 “Sudebnogo khronika: delo Aramiantsa,” in Novoe Obezrenie, 3 November 1895: 3.

115 he sought “to deliver his brother from his hated wife.”227 The interconnectedness of

Caucasian families, their extended familial nature, meant that family members, like E.

Aramiantsa’s brother-in-law, might become intricately involved in other family member’s affairs – in this case his brother’s unhappy marriage. Customary law in the

Caucasus no more allowed for the attempted murder of a woman than tsarist law, however; in Caucasian communities it would have been up to E. Aramiantsa’s family to declare vengeance on her husband and his brother (if they believed that her husband was indeed involved).228

The prosecution and defense agreed that D. Aramiantsa desired to free his brother from his marriage to E. Aramiantsa, however the write-up in the newspaper Novoe

Obezrenie never quoted her husband nor discussed any testimony that he personally gave to the court. The lawyers appear to have come to their conclusion from talking with the husband’s brother. Still, they debated the role E. Aramiantsa’s husband played in the event, and whether the defendant planned the deed or acted in a fit of anger. If the defendant planned the murder instead of acting in fit of anger the court would have given him a more severe sentence since a pre-meditated crime showed intent. The prosecutor,

Kurmainovit’ argued that “the accused planned the murder beforehand…at the instructions of his brother.” Kurmainovit’ possessed no evidence that D. Aramiantsa planned the attack on his sister-in-law with his brother. The defendant offered little information and his sister-in-law simply could or would not say why he tried to kill her.

227 ibid. 228 It is even possible that E. Armiantsa’s family did declare vengeance on her husband at some point, since it was not unusual for the tsarist justice system to run alongside the Caucasian system of justice.

116 The defense lawyer, G. S. Ter’-Stepanov, dismissed the prosecution’s charge of premeditation and claimed that E. Aramiantsa’s husband was not involved at all. Instead, the defense lawyer attacked the moral character of E. Aramiantsa and claimed that “in patriarchical families maintaining the purity of the [marriage] relationship is significant” and that “no one is indifferent to any violations.” He argued that E. Aramiantsa invited the accused to “spend the night with her in her home…and invited him to her bedroom.”

“How could the accused not be angry?” he asked. In a fit of anger D. Aramiantsa shot his sister-in-law.

Tsarist authorities of the Tiflis Circuit Court gave D. Aramiantsa a light sentence due to their conviction that “something happened between the accused and E.

Aramiantsa,” about which neither deigned to elaborate. Court authorities believed that

“without a doubt the interpretation [of the night’s affairs] should benefit the accused.”

Ter’-Stepanov’s defense of D. Aramiantsa and his attack on E. Aramiantsa’s moral character persuaded the court that “the defendant’s attempt was accomplished in anger” not premeditated. Tsarist authorities possessed no evidence of D. Aramiantsa’s collaboration with his brother to murder E. Aramiantsa. They also held no evidence that

E. Aramiantsa acted inappropriately with her brother-in-law on the night in question.

Nonetheless they chose to believe the defense and only “sentenced D. Aramiantsa to prison for one year and eight months.”229

Tsarist authorities’ gendered notions of women prohibited them from “civilizing”

Caucasian males and stopping them from abusing their wives. Tsarist secular officials

229 “Sudebnogo khronika: delo Aramiantsa,” in Novoe Obezrenie, 3 November 1895: 3.

117 preconceived notions of the fragility of women’s moral condition led to decisions like the one in E. Aramiantsa’s attempted murder case and meant that their practices came far from fulfilling tsarist discourse, which condemned violence against Caucasian women

(with which even tsarist authorities agreed!). Instead of condemning the attack on E.

Aramiantsa’s life, the official tsarist decision and sentencing in many ways condoned and even encouraged it.

The Patriarch’s Prerogative: The Limits of Tsarist Intervention The Murder of Gul-Salim Bairam-kizy Village of Maali Gunib region

The following murder of Gul’-Salim’ Bairam’-kizy by her ex-husband, Abakar

Maralov’-ogly, from 1871 exposes the explosive and dangerous side of Caucasian family life, which tsarist discourse condemned. When Maralov’-ogly and Bairam’-kizy’ married, he “lived with her for a year and a half and gave her a divorce.” Six months later, Maralov’-ogly again became intimate with Bairam’-kizy and they married a second time. He “lived with her for seven months and again gave her a divorce.” Maralov’-ogly left for the mountains after his failed marriage. When he returned, Maralov’-ogly tried once more to reunite with Bairam’-kizy, but she “would not give her consent for him to return to her,” likely not trusting that he would stay.230

Bairam’-kizy’s family supported her decision not to take her ex-husband back, and under Caucasian customary law she had this right. Her family now had the responsibility to protect her from her ex-husband. Maralov’-ogly “wanted revenge on his

230 “Iz gortsi kriminalistiki,” in SSKG, (1875): 2.

118 ex-wife” for rebuffing him and followed Bairam’-kizy, her mother, Narim’-Salim’, and her younger sister, Al’dzha’-kiz when they went to the garden one day.231 Afraid that

Maralov’-ogly might harm Bairam’-kizy, Narim’-Salim “asked him to leave them and take another path.”232 He eventually left the women alone and went to Bairam’-kizy’s home. Her brother, Takhtar, sent him away, but Maralov’-ogly never let go of his intentions to hurt his ex-wife. That evening he returned to Bairam’-kizy’s family home.

Seeing no one home, Maralov’-ogly hid in the house and ambushed his ex-wife, murdering her by stabbing her thirteen times with his kinzhal.

Tsarist authorities remained conspicuously absent from Bairam’-kizy’s murder.

The tsarist writer, who included Bairam’-kizy’s murder case under the Mountaineer

Criminal Statistics section of SSKG in 1875 proffered no evidence of tsarist involvement prior to or after Bairam’-kizy’s murder, nor did he allude to any role for tsarist courts or administrators. Yet, writers of tsarist discourse took accounts for the Mountaineers

Criminal Statistics from the Caucasus Mountain Administration’s court records, thus

Bairam’-kizy’s murder case must have come before tsarist authorities.233

The murdered woman sought out safety through the only avenues available to her

– her family. In Bairam’-kizy’s case her family – her mother, sister, and brother – provided her with support and even fleeting protection from her violent ex-husband. Her sister, Al’dzha-kiz, courageously threw herself upon her sister’s ex-husband in an effort to free Gul-Salim from his killing strikes. Gul-Salim’s brother showed his support by

231 Ibid. 232 Ibid. 233 Austin Jersild, Orientalism and Empire: North Caucasus Mountain Peoples and the Georgian Frontier, 1845-1917, (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002): 99.

119 threatening Abakar and throwing him off of the family’s property. The fact that Al’dzha- kiz and Gul-Salim’s brother failed to protect their sister makes their efforts no less brave or loyal. By custom Caucasian families generally provided their own justice through their familial networks. These networks did not always succeed, as Bairam’-kizy’s case demonstrates. However, Bairam’-kizy’s family would likely pursue vengeance against her killer (her brother specifically and his next closest male relations would likely assist).

Bairam’-kizy’s murder by her ex-husband in broad daylight illustrates some of the boundaries of tsarist law in the Caucasus. Tsarist authorities accepted a certain amount of violence as a typical part of family life at home and abroad. They saw marriage as central to women’s lives and believed that stable families translated into stable societies.

Better to leave battered women with male guardianship than extricate them from their abuser’s clutches and unravel family life.

So Little to Offer: Domestic Abuse and Playing the Morality Card An Attack on Nino Tsereteli Caucasus Military Court

An analysis of Nina Tsereteli’s domestic abuse case, which came before a

Caucasus military court in 1882, illustrates how little protection and recourse tsarist courts offered Caucasian women who fell victim to domestic abuse. When Infantry

Captain Tsereteli returned home from the war of 1877-78, he found that “his wife pushed him away when he wanted to embrace her.”234 He suspected that she was having an affair

234 “Sudebnogo khronika: zasedanie Kavkazskago voenno-okruzhnago suda 18 i 19 marta, po delu o sostoiashchem’ po armouskoi pekhot’ kapitan kniaz P. Tsereteli, obvinianom’ v’ nanesenii uvech’ia zhene” Kavkaz, 23 March 1882.

120 with her sister’s husband Prince Tsulukidze and when he returned home one evening and found N. Tsereteli with Prince Tsulukidze in her bedroom, he “grabbed his sword and attacked [his wife] giving her two injuries” -- an insignificant wound on her mouth and a more serious wound on her left hand.235 The court then had the duty to decide what type of punishment Captain Tsereteli deserved, which it based on the perceived moral condition of the Captain’s wife, and the severity of her injuries.

The Prosecution’s and Defense’s main arguments centered on whether or not N.

Tsereteli committed adultery, and if so, what type of punishment should the court give

Captain Tsereteli. Prosecutor Ornatskii argued that N. Tsereteli endured her husband’s

“rages and continual abuse over trifles and jealously.” Ornatskii dismissed the notion that N. Tsereteli had an affair with her sister’s husband. He asked the court, “How am I able to persuade the court of the sisters’ tender love for each other?” If N. Tsereteli had an affair with Prince Tsulukidze would she be here with her sister?236 The Defense attorney, Shevel’e, on the other hand, attacked N. Tsereteli’s moral character. He implied that N. Tsereteli and Prince Tsulukidze, indeed, had an affair. Why else, he asked was

“Prince Tsulukidze absent from court?” The attorneys, Ornatskii and Shevel’e, based their arguments on whether Captain Tsereteli’s wife had an affair.

Why were the lawyers so concerned about whether Nino Tsereteli committed adultery? Put simply, if the defense could plant the notion that N. Tsereteli participated in an adulterous relationship his defendant would receive a lesser penalty because the court believe that Captain Tsereteli simply could not control himself when he found his

235 Ibid. 236 Ibid.

121 wife with another man. All that the defense attorney needed to do was suggest that N.

Tsereteli was unfaithful. He did not need to prove his assertion particularly since Russian society saw women as less disciplined, more sexual, and more susceptible to the devil’s influence – and indeed more likely to commit adultery. Georgians also saw adultery as a crime of women and showed concern for the wronged husband and his relations – not the wronged wife for whom society withheld compensation of any sort.237 The main difference between the two, Russian and Georgian, was that Russian Orthodox religious officials rarely dissolved marriages due to adultery, yet in Georgian communities husbands could banish their adulterous wives and “receive back what he had paid in kalym (bride-price)” for the dishonor.238 Staying with the adulterous woman in Georgian marriage law showed weakness and invited reprisals. Obviously, the prosecution sought to disprove the defense attorney’s claim that N. Tsereteli had an affair, but once the suggestion came before the court, he could do little more.

The Prosecution and the Defense debated the severity of N. Tsereteli’s injuries.

The prosecution argued that the accused had to strike his wife at least twice to cause the injuries to her mouth and then her hand. He argued that by striking his wife more than once the accused demonstrated his desire to injure and harm his wife i.e. his intent. The prosecution agreed with the defense that Captain Tsereteli lost his temper, but sought to prove that the defendant had “no concern for his wife” and consciously chose to harm her.239 Doctor Gurko, a witness for the prosecution, argued that the “injury on the

237 King Vakhtang’s code; Maksim Kovalevskii, Zakon’ i obychai na Kavkaz’, II, (Moskva, 1890): 37. 238 Maksim Kovalevskii, Zakon’ i obychai na Kavkaz’, II, (Moskva, 1890): 37-38. 239 Ibid.

122 victim’s mouth was superficial, but the injury on her hand was serious,” even life threatening without proper treatment. The defense, on the other hand, claimed that

Captain Tsereteli “wanted to hit Prince Tsulukidze and between them stood the victim.”

He never intended to hit her at all according to the defense. Her injuries, Shevel’e claimed, came from one strike, not repeated beatings, and her injuries the defense countered were superficial.

The Tsarist Military Court agreed with the defense affirming that Captain

Tsereteli never meant to hurt his wife and “sentenced him to four months in prison for inflicting two superficial injuries on his wife, which also included church penance.” By degrading and casting aspersions on N. Tsereteli’s moral character and categorizing the violence she endured at her husband’s hands superficial. When it came to domestic/familial abuse, calls of misconduct against abused wives undermined the tsarist discourse that condemned such treatment of Caucasian women.

Conclusions

The gap between tsarist discourse and tsarist practice in regard to familial violence and bride stealing in the Caucasus remained quite large. Tsarist officials often permitted marriage in cases of bride stealing, but they usually came to these decisions not because they truly sought to compromise with local inhabitants, but instead due to their fear of blood vengeance and their conception of women’s and men’s proper places in society. In extremely violent cases like Tul’Sabi’s abduction tsarist authorities gave sentences that they viewed as harsh (ten years in a labor camp for instance), which they

123 designed to stave off blood feuds and vengeance acts. Yet local inhabitants, the majority of whom still based law on Caucasian custom and blood vengeance, saw tsarist authorities’ “harsh” sentences as lacking in severity and as an affront to familial honor.

The maintenance of familial honor touched and remained connected to almost every facet of Caucasian society and included Caucasian customs such as marriage, bride stealing, hospitality, and criminal deeds such as, adultery, rape, assault, injury, and murder. All family members irrespective of gender participated.

Caucasian society reared Caucasian women and men to uphold the integrity of their families, which makes domestic violence a less fitting term to describe the familial violence that occurred in nineteenth-century Caucasian families. Tsarist officials approach to domestic violence in the Caucasus did not take into consideration the extensive quality that violence assumed in the Caucasus. Violence neither stayed within the nuclear family unit, nor remained only in the hands of the patriarch or male members of society as it usually did in Russia (even if that was a central theme in tsarist discourse).

Yet when confronted with cases of violence against Caucasian women tsarist officials tended to leave those affairs in the hands of the local populations or hand out lenient penalties almost always leaving Caucasian families intact. Defense attorneys used the notions that women needed male guardianship due to their fragile morality on more than one occasion in cases dealing with Christian peoples and their arguments persuaded tsarist courts. Tsarist officials continued to see Caucasian women very much as they viewed Russian women, as passive actors more susceptible to moral corruption than men.

124 Tsarist rhetoric condemned the use of violence against Caucasian women, early marriage, bride stealing, and occasionally even propped up Russian women’s family lives as an ideal, but they did little to change Caucasian family life.

.

125 Chapter 6 Negotiating Honor and Deciding “Justice”: Cases of Rape and Adultery

In an Azeri village in the Southern Caucasus in nineteenth-century tsarist Russia, a man from a neighboring community, Aki, entered the home of Magomed Abdull-ogly whose two wives remained at home while he spent the night in the fields. Aki threatened to rape one of Abdull-ogly’s wives, named Umukusu, if she did not give in to his sexual advances. Out of fear she yielded to him “because she thought he would rape her,” but she brought a knife to bed with her, and after the ordeal succeeded in cutting off Aki’s penis.240 In the wake of these events, Umukusu’s community elder needed to decide how to treat her case – as one of rape or adultery. Customary law defined rape as the taking of a woman’s/girl’s innocence by force, with the additional caveat that she fight valiantly against her attacker. Tradition defined adultery as sex with another man’s wife. The village elder determined that Umukusu’s hesitation to fight and decision to yield to Aki’s advances identified her actions as adulterous, not those of a victim. In the recording of the case by the Russian ethnographer, V. Pvetkov, his description of Umukusu as an adulteress overtakes any details about Aki, who disappears from the story entirely with no account of his punishment. Umukusu’s case of – one of countless cases that never reached tsarist courts, speaks to several defining characteristics of Russian

240 “Iz gorskii kriminalistiki,” Sbornik svedenii o kavkazskii gortsakh (SSKG), (1875): 19.

126 imperial control and reveals the ways in which gender, violence, and sexuality played out in the everyday life of the peoples of the Caucasus mountain region. Similar to domestic/familial violence and bride stealing, but even more so, tsarist authorities largely left Caucasian communities to adjudicate matters of rape and adultery based upon their own legal systems.

Empire in Umukusu’s case remained absent,241 and was instead based upon the customs of her community, where village elders and families administered law. Just as in cases of bride stealing, Umukusu’s community and family expected her to preserve her familial honor – namely by not giving in “out of fear” to her attacker and fighting bravely, with courage, and fierceness. Most Caucasian communities expected Caucasian women to defend their sexual integrity for the “health” and reputation of their family, however, not all communities took it as far as Umukusu’s community, which plainly saw her getting into bed with Aki as consent. Her attack on him did nothing to lessen her community’s derision.

Why did Umukusu’s community see her case as one of consent and therefore adultery, and Tul’Sabi’s community accept that she was raped? 242 Tul’Sabi freely went with her attacker just as Umukusu yielded to Aki (even if it was out of fear) – What explains the widely different decisions (beyond cultural difference)? Age, consent, violence, and the marital status of the women determined their communities’ and tsarist officials understanding of the victims’ respective situations. In the case of Tul’Sabi and

241 We have seen this before, where tsarist authorities seem almost completely absent from the scene. Umukusu’s case of assault (I am defining it as such despite her Caucasian community, which labeled it as adultery) is much like the murder of Gul’Salim described in the previous chapter. 242 SSC’SA, fond 4, opis’ 1, delo 2647. I discussed Tul’Sabi in the last chapter.

127 Umukusu who presided over their cases also made a significant difference in interpretation and judgment. Tul’Sabi’s young age, the physical evidence that she fought back and was injured and tortured by her attacker demonstrated to tsarist officials that she did not desire the union. Tsarist authorities gave Tul’Sabi’s abductor a “harsh” penalty because he “ruined” a maiden and physically injured her. They based their decision on her status as an unmarried woman and evidence of physical injury. Tsarist officials’ believed that Tul’Sabi would have difficulty in contracting a marriage agreement with someone other than her attacker – yet in this case the extraordinary violent behavior of the abductor precluded any possibility of marriage (in both tsarist and Caucasian societies). Umukusu, on the other hand, had no defensive wounds and acted against her attacker only after she had yielded to him. According to her community, it was she who acted out by cutting off the man’s penis, not the man who attacked her. Thus, her elder’s estimation that Umukusu and Aki committed adultery. Umukusu’s status as married also factored into the way her community elder viewed her case. As a married Caucasian woman Umukusu’s family and community expected her to fight for the honor of her family.243 Therefore, her initial decision to yield to her “would be” attacker dishonored her family. Umukusu’s marital status and her own admission that she yielded to her attacker out of fear meant that her community discounted her attack on Aki.

An examination of rape and adultery unveils the limits and parameters of tsarist imperialism and allows us to better understand the gender relations and structures at work

243 Caucasian communities expected more aggressive defensive actions from their married women since they owed their family networks their loyalty. Their married status put more pressure on Caucasian women to “fight back” and defend their families. Unlike unmarried women, married Caucasian women could not wash away the affront to familial honor rendered by an attack by marrying their attackers.

128 in the Russian empire. Tsarist agents often left cases of rape and adultery, just as they did with domestic violence, to the gendered norms of local populations’ legal codes, unless they were cases similar to the brutality experienced by Tul’Sabi and her family.244

When confronted with sexual matters in their courts tsarist agents’ compromised imperial law with the local reality due to their belief that a raped woman could not find a marriage partner other than her rapist and their belief that a woman’s frail nature made her more likely to commit adultery.

Defining Rape in the Caucasus -- The Local Inhabitants

In the summer of 1849, in what is now a Georgian village, Bala Kuz’ was raped by Shik Said Jul ogly. She shot her assailant dead in the right side of the head and throat.245 Similar to Umukusu’s case, Bala’s village elder and community had to decide how to treat her case – as one of consensual adultery (rape) or coerced adultery. Unique to the region, customary law among the Georgians did not separate rape from adultery, but defined the act in two ways.246 In the first category a married woman chose to commit adultery. Her husband, and/or father and brothers could declare blood vengeance and kill her and her beloved with impunity for the dishonor that they caused her family.

Bala’s experience corresponded best to the second definition of adultery, which included victims who were seduced or coerced into sexual relations with a man other than their

244 Tul’Sabi’s case is one of rape and bride stealing, and because of its excessive violence tsarist officials became involved (without ever even suggesting marriage – even they had their limits). 245Sak’art’velos saistorio c’entraluri saxelmcip’o ark’ivi (SSC’SA), fond 4, opis’ 1, delo 2396. 246 Pfafa, “Narodnoe pravo Osetin,” in SSKG, (1872): 275-6; Maksim Kovalevskii, Zakon’ i obychai na Kavkaz’, Tom II, (Moskva, 1890), 119-120; Maksim Kovalevskii, Sovermennyi obychai i drevnii zakon: obychoe pravo Osetin’ v istoriko-sravnitel’nom osveshchenii, (Moskva, 1886), I: 95.

129 husband. In cases of coerced adultery the victim’s family might still choose to kill her, but were more likely to choose banishment. Bala’s decisive actions provided her village elder with the necessary evidence for him to treat the case as one of coerced adultery or seduction (as close as Georgian custom came to acknowledging rape). However, the archival file does not provide information about Bala’s sentence or what happened to her after banishment.

Fighting back provided the necessary evidence of an attack, while hesitation and taking no action afforded proof of complicity. Umukusu’s and Bala’s cases demonstrate the fundamental position defense and retaliation held in Caucasian societies’ systems of justice and the importance that definitions of rape and adultery played in labeling

Caucasian women’s experiences since the penalties for rape and adultery differed greatly.

The requirement to fight back during an attack reflects not only a distinct gendered understanding of the women and men who comprised Caucasian society, but also reveals different understandings of family, violence, justice, and crime from those of the tsarist

Russian state and even from other Caucasian communities. Rape and adultery in the

Caucasus were punished due to the collective harm the acts had on familial honor as opposed to individual honor in the Russian case. Caucasian families reared their daughters to do more than protect themselves – they were expected to fight and remain loyal to their families. No matter how Caucasian communities defined rape (female rape), forced sodomy (rape of male children), or coerced adultery, the act of fighting back during an attack (anything from screaming to causing injury or killing the attacker)

130 proved central to village elders, families and communities classification of cases as rape, consensual or forced sodomy, or consensual or coerced adultery.

Communities and familial networks defined these categories differently often with only small differences between rape and adultery. In cases categorized as sexual assault, two types of blood vengeance existed – families might institute the custom against the rapist and/or the victim of the attack. In any case, the implementation of blood vengeance, usually for a set period of time, against attacker and/or victim gave families the right to pursue and kill them. Victims’ familial networks sought to redeem their honor by severing ties with tainted family members – guilty or not – and killing their attackers. Victims of sexual attacks might avoid blood vengeance by fighting back against their assailants, injuring or even killing them, thereby defending familial honor and demonstrating their loyalty and worth to their familial network. If communities or families declared blood vengeance on victims, they might still redeem themselves in the eyes of their community and familial network by successfully avoiding or outdoing their pursuers – of course, they also might die if caught. Classifications of rape or forced assault provided victims with a better chance to re-enter their families and communities than categories labeled as consensual.

Defining Rape and Adultery

The peoples of the Caucasus defined sexual assault and adultery in a wide range of ways, varying not only by ethnicity and community, but even by familial network.

This section will discuss four broad categories including numerous definitions of 1) rape,

131 2) attempted rape, 3) forced sodomy, and 4) adultery. The section will also discuss those peoples who possessed no category for rape at all, but classified sexual assault under the category of adultery (consensual or coerced adultery). There were three main descriptions of what constituted rape among the peoples examined for this study, although definitions varied by community, which often based its understanding of rape on a combination of the following factors: the use of force, uninvited touch, and among peoples without such categories coerced adultery. Attempted rape was often treated by families and communities as rape, who characterized the act as anything from the touching of a girl’s hand or braid to a failed kidnapping attempt. Caucasian communities possessed fewer definitions for adultery and saw the act as one specific to women, which included both married and unmarried women – fornication was punished as adultery.

Not surprisingly, the tsarist Russian definition of rape as “sexual intercourse achieved against the victim’s will,” failed to satisfy the more nuanced and varied way that peoples of the Caucasus defined rape.247 Tsarist law emphasized the harm that rape victims’ individual loss had on their personal reputations.248 The law was less concerned with the physical and psychological shock that the violent act had on the rape victim

(although this was a factor), but instead focused on the violence or offense done to women’s or children’s honor and how that risked family and married life – by spoiling marital relations for married victims, by a loss of marriage opportunities for maidens.

247 Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness, 75; Laura Engelstein, “Gender and the Juridical Subject: Prostitution and Rape in Nineteenth-Century Russian Criminal Codes,” in Journal of Modern History, 60 (September 1988): 472. 248 Svod’ zakonov’ ugolovnykh’, (St. Petersburg, 1835), chapter 3, articles 675-6, 212; Ulozhenie nakazaniiakh’ ugolovnykh’ i ispravitel’nykh,’ (St. Petersburg, 1845), chapter 6, articles 1998-2007, 514- 517; Laura Engelstein, “Gender and the Juridical Subject: Prostitution and Rape in Nineteenth-Century Russian Criminal Codes,” in Journal of Modern History, 60 (September 1988): 459 467-9.

132 The maintenance and significance of family honor in Caucasian communities resulted in broader definitions of rape than those under tsarist law and included situations of touch and communities which defined attacks on women as adultery. For instance, the

Dargin defined rape primarily through the notion of any unwanted touch, but ethnographical documents do not claim that this act “took the innocence” of the victim like the other communities in Dagestan.249 The way that the Ossetians treated rape comes closer to the way that the Georgians understood the crime – as adulterous sexual intercourse (even if unwanted by the victim).250 Ossetian customs allowed for the victim’s family to banish or even kill her on rare occasions with impunity. 251 No matter which community or family, Caucasian communities punished the crime of taking of an unmarried woman’s virginity or another man’s wife not due to the dishonor done to the woman as in the tsarist case i.e. individual honor, but instead due to the insult to her entire familial network.252

Some of these same societies such as those of Dagestan, Dargin, Ingush, and the

Kumyks classified any unwanted touch (even of a girl’s braids) as the intent to rape or

249 ““Adaty Darginskikh’ obshchestve’,” in SSKG, (1873): 21, 38, 51, 65, 77, 91, 105, 118; “Adaty uzhno- dagestanskikh’ obshchestv’,”.in SSKG, (1875): 38, 44-5, 55, 61; N. Grabovskii, “Inguishi (uz’ zhin’ i obychai),” in SSKG, (1876): 56-7; N. Grabovskii, “Ocherk’ suda i ugolovnykh’ prestuplenii v’ Kabardinskom’ okrug’,” in SSKG, (1871): 41; “Adaty uzhno-dagestanskikh’ obshchestv’,”.in SSKG, (1875): 61; 250 B.V. Pfafa, “Narodnoe pravo osetin’,” in SSKG, (1871): 276; King Vakhtang’s code; Maksim Kovalevskii, Zakon’ i obychai na Kavkaz’, Tom II, (Moskva, 1890), 37. King Vakhtang’s codes; Maksim Kovalevskii, Zakon’ i obychai na Kavkaz’, Tom II, (Moskva, 1890), 37; Pfafa, “Narodnoe pravo Osetin,” in SSKG, (1872): 275-6; 251 Pfafa, “Narodnoe pravo Osetin,” in SSKG, (1872): 276. 252 “Adaty uzhno-dagestanskikh’ obshchestv’,”.in SSKG, (1875): 9, 26, 38, 44-5, 48, 55, 61, 68; I. Ia. Sandrygailo, Adaty dagestanskoi oblasti i zakatal’skago okruga, Tiflis’,(1899): 11, 33, 34-5, 43; A.V. Komarov, “Adaty i sudoproizvodstvo po nim’,” in SSKG, (1868): 55; Beskhanum Ragimova, “Legal Status of Women in Traditional Dagestani Society (Nineteenth-Early Twentieth Century); 97; M.M. Kovalevskii, Zakon i obychai na Kavkaze, Moskva, 1890, Vol. 1, 142; Grabovskii, “Ingushi (uz’ zhin’ i obychai),” in SSKG, (1876): 56-7.

133 attempted rape, but treated the offence as rape itself. The and the Kabardins only gave penalties as severe as those given for rape in instances of attempted rape when the dishonored woman was married or betrothed.253 The Ossetians, on the other hand, only considered attempted rape (characterized as in their customary laws) when the assault caused significant injuries and the crime was characterized by violence.254 Again each community and family punished the crime due to its insult to the familial network.

Despite the differences in the way that tsarist law and customary law defined rape, the peoples of tsarist Russia and the Caucasus came much closer in their understanding of who could be raped. Rape in both cases signified a crime that happened primarily to women and girls.255 Under tsarist gender structure adult men could rape but could not legally be the victims of rape (with the opportunities for legal redress and punishment that such legal standing afforded).256 Tsarist law saw only men as potential rapists much like Caucasian customary law – women, girls and boys were excluded from this categorization. Russian and Caucasian customary law understood that boys could also be

253 ; “Adaty zhitelei Kumykskoi ploskosti,” SSKG, (1872): 14; “Adaty Darginskikh’ obshchestve’,” SSKG, (1873): 21, 38, 51, 65, 77, 91, 105, 118; “Adaty uzhno-dagestanskikh’ obshchestv’,”.SSKG, (1875): 61; Maksim’ Kovalevskii’s, Zakon’ i obychai na Kavkaz, Vol. II, (Moskva, 1890), 271-2. 254 M. Kovalevskii, Sovremennyi obychai I drevnii zakon’: obychnoe pravo Osetin’ v istoriko- sravnitel’nom’ osveshchenii, (Moskva, 1886), II: 94. 255 Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness, 76; Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, (New York), Page #; “Adaty uzhno-dagestanskikh’ obshchestv’,”.SSKG, (1875): 9, 26, 38, 44-5, 48, 55, 61, 68; I. Ia. Sandrygailo, Adaty dagestanskoi oblasti i zakatal’skago okruga, Tiflis’ (1899): 11, 33, 34-5, 43; A.V. Komarov, “Adaty i sudoproizvodstvo po nim’,” SSKG (1868): 55; Beskhanum Ragimova, “Legal Status of Women in Traditional Dagestani Society (Nineteenth-Early Twentieth Century); 97; M.M. Kovalevskii, Zakon i obychai na Kavkaze (Moskva, 1890), I: 142; Grabovskii, “Ingushi (uz’ zhin’ i obychai),” SSKG, (1876): 56-7; N. Grabovskii, “Ocherk’ suda i ugolovnykh’ prestuplenii v’ Kabardinskom’ okrug’,” in SSKG, (1871): 41-2. 256 Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness, 76; Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, (Ballantine Books, 1993): 75.

134 raped (but categorized the event as sodomy) and viewed it as one of the worst possible crimes. Both handed out more severe punishments for forced sodomy (rape of a boy), but Caucasian punishments for the rape of boys were more severe than tsarist sentencing and almost always handed out a death sentence.257 Caucasian and tsarist men, who shaped and formed law, saw themselves as the stronger and more aggressive sex within their societies.

Thus, just as in the case of tsarist Russia, in the Caucasus, rape represented a sex crime particular to women and children but, importantly, did not include adult men as possible victims. Men, the possible assailants, held the reins of power. They made law and meted out justice for the people that society deemed in need of protection. On the surface this system of patriarchy is reminiscent of tsarist Russian structures, but due to a fundamentally different understanding of family and honor it possessed distinct ideas about how to approach crime.

Caucasian and tsarist custom (almost always) saw adultery as a crime of women who they saw as less disciplined, more sexual, and more susceptible to the devil’s influence – and indeed more likely to commit adultery. The customary laws of the people of the Caucasus defined adultery as both sexual intercourse outside of marriage

(i.e. fornication), and sex with another man’s wife not, however, sex with another woman’s husband (tsarist law defined adultery as a sexual liaison committed by either

257 N. Grabovskii, “Ocherk’ suda i ugolovnykh’ prestuplenii v’ Kabardinskom’ okrug’,” SSKG, (1871): 42; “Adaty Darginskikh’ obshchestve’,” SSKG, (1873): 64-5, 77, 105-6; I. Ia. Sandrygailo, Adaty dagestanskoi oblasti i zakatal’skago okruga, (Tiflis, 1899): 25. The Ossetians do not have a law specifically for boys and rape or forced sodomy.

135 spouse, but did not treat it that way under the law).258 For instance, Georgian and

Ossetian traditions showed concern for the wronged husband and relations -- neither mentioned compensation of any sort for a wronged wife.259 Penalties among the Svans also followed this tradition. The husband received first concern, which meant that he should banish his wife and “receive back what he had paid in kalym (bride-price)” for

“inflicting upon him such a great dishonor.”260 Clause seventy of the Georgian King

Vakhtang’s code (continued in use until 1864) explains the recourse available to the husband of married women who were kidnapped (coerced adultery was assumed). 261 “If a man drags away a woman, but the woman does not yield…and her husband or parents report the affair, but do not recover the woman, the kidnapper should answer for the affair as he would for committing adultery.”262 The penalty for kidnapping gave “him

[the husband] half blood money,” in cases where the woman willingly cohabitated with her abductor, and full blood money when she did not.263 While Caucasian customary law often permitted Caucasian men to divorce their adulterous wives, tsarist Russian law almost always sought to maintain adulterous marriages.264 How Caucasian communities

258 Leontovich, Adaty kavkazskikh’ gortsev’, (Odessa, 1882), I: 132,153,252-4; “Adaty uzhno- dagestanskikh’ obshchestv’,”.SSKG, (1875): 8-9, 26, 37-8, 44, 48, 50, 61, 67; “Adaty Darginskikh’ obshchestve’,” SSKG, (1873): 21, 38, 52, 64-5, 77-8, 91-2, 105-6, 118; Adaty zhitelei Kumykskoi ploskosti,” SSKG, (1872):13-5; N. Grabovskii, “Inguishi (uz’ zhin’ i obychai),” SSKG, (1876): 56-7; V.V. Vasi’kov, “Ocherk’ byta Temirgoevtsev’,” SMOMPK, 1901, 102-3. 259 King Vakhtang’s code; Maksim Kovalevskii, Zakon’ i obychai na Kavkaz’ (Moskva, 1890), II: 37. 260 Maksim Kovalevskii, Zakon’ i obychai na Kavkaz’ (Moskva, 1890), II: 37-38. 261 Mikhail Kekeliia, Drevnegruzinskie zakonodatel’stvo, sud i sudebnyi protsess, (Tbilisi, 1986). 262 King Vakhtang’s code, article 70, 89. 263 Ibid. 264 I am building on literature that claims that society is built on a heterosexual foundation and sexual difference and the argument that gender mattered in rape. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, (New York, Routledge, 1999), ix, xiii, 194-5; Jennifer Suchland, “On the Transnational Trouble with Gender: The Politics of Sexual Harassment in Russia,” Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, 2005, 4-7; Jennifer Suchland, “Contextualizing Discrimination: The Problem with Sexual Harassment in Russia,” in Journal of Women, Politics & Policy, Vol. 23, no. 3, 2008: 336- 340; Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siecle Russia,

136 and families defined rape and adultery provides a basis for understanding how they viewed gender and family in their societies, and what constituted a crime.

Saving Family Honor: Options and Methods of Response

When familial honor was sullied through rape or adultery, Caucasian families and communities sought to redeem their reputation through four main methods with some variation and overlap. 1). Injured families saw it as their right to institute blood vengeance without waiting for mediation by community elders. When blood vengeance was implemented with elders’ approval it usually included banishment and it was during the period of exile that Caucasian communities allowed offended families to pursue the wrongdoer and sometimes the victim and kill him/them with impunity. 2). Families sought to sever ties with tainted family members and take vengeance on wrongdoers through killing, abandonment, and exile (banishment might be permanent or for a shorter time). 3). Tainted family members might avoid exile or death by taking decisive action during an attack (in cases of rape and forced sodomy) or if their familial network subjected them to blood vengeance, victims might re-enter their communities by successfully avoiding capture and death during pursuit. At the end of the period (except for those family members under permanent exile), their community might welcome them

(Cornell University Press, 1992), 3, 32, 60; Joan Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man, (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1996), x, 3, 5, 8; Hibra Abugideiri, “Quran: Modern Interpretations” in Encyclopedia of Women & Islamic Cultures: Practices, Interpretations and Representations, Vol. 5: 249-252; Daniel Kaiser, “He Said, She Said: Rape and Gender Discourse in Early Modern Russia,” in Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 3 (2), (spring 2002),: 214-216; Nancy Shields Kollmann, “Women’s Honor in Early Modern Russia,” in Russia’s Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation, eds. Barbara Evans Clements, Barbara Alpern Engel, and Christine D. Worobec, (University of California Press, 1991), 60, 64-69.

137 back. 4). Negotiation was mediated by respected members of the community, like village elders, who made marriage agreements, dissolved marred marriages, and instituted fines and other agreements that might avoid the institution of blood vengeance.

Insulted families sought to act against wrongdoer(s) and their families by initiating blood vengeance sometimes with, sometimes without community backing. For instance, a community in Elisavetpol uezd in 1849 initiated blood vengeance after three infamous attacked and raped two women villagers. The village sent out a “hunting party” to search for the women’s assailants and caught and arrested one of them, Ali

Kaibalai Ogly.265 In other situations families sought out wrongdoers on their own initiative without waiting for village elders or other respected community members’ mediation. For instance, Odzdemir’ Urusbiev’ was caught in Davletmirzy Davletrireev’s

Chechen home attempting to rape Davletrireev’s wife. Despite running to the village elder’s home for sanctuary, Odzdemir’ suffered severe injuries when the relatives of the girl who was insulted, Teki Davletrireev’, saw the man exit from the door of the elder’s home and attacked him with a knizhal five times.266 This type of behavior was not considered another assault, but instead conformed to the independent and self-reliant conduct expected of an offended family, particularly in the more egregious assault of a married woman. Blood vengeance for more serious crimes -- like the rape or attempted rape of a married woman, as in Teki Davletrireev’s case -- or adultery might have no expiration date just the same as murder.267

265 Sak’art’velos saistorio c’entraluri saxelmcip’o ark’ivi (SSC’SA), fond 4, opis’ 1, delo 1095, no. 5/6. 266 “Iz gorskii kriminalistiki,” SSKG, (1870): 85. 267 A raped woman’s dishonor reflecting upon her entire family is not a phenomenon specific to the Caucasus. It also occurs in present day Indonesia. Refer to Linda Rae Bennett, Women, Islam and Modernity: Single Women, Sexuality, and reproductive health in contemporary Indonesia, (New York,

138 Wronged Caucasian families sought to dissolve marred marriage unions in cases of rape and adultery involving married women, and/or sought to cast out or kill any member(s) of the insulted family who were complicit in the act. The two cases of adultery discussed below demonstrate one way this practice played out – wronged husbands severed ties to their adulterous wives by killing them. The act was considered just because by killing the adulterous wife, the wronged husband removed the body from which the dishonor emanated thereby protecting the reputation of his familial network.

For instance, when Kil’ias’-Khan’ Kadi-Khadzhi-ogly, met his wife at the community well in the Temir’-khan’-Shuran district in 1869, he killed her with his kinzhal. The

Dagestan Citizen’s Court determined that Kil’ias took vengeance on his wife for adultery.

The court accepted the husband’s right to kill his adulterous wife as payment for the dishonor she caused the entire family.268 In another case, in the Kazi-kumykskago district, after a fight with her husband, Mariam Shaban’-kizy went to her mother’s home,

Aish’ Mamata’-kizy. Mariam would not return home, and Deit suspected that she was in an adulterous relationship with another villager. First, he requested some villagers to go to Mariam and talk with her about returning home. They honored his request, but

Mariam still did not return. Deit finally approached his wife, but she refused him and he attacked her with a kinzhal and hurt her leg, a wound from which she soon died.269 Diet, just like Kil’ias, believed that he had the right to avenge a perceived dishonor.

London, RoutledgeCurzon, 2005), 24. 268 “Iz gorskii kriminalistiki,” SSKG (1870): 82-3. 269 “Iz gorskii kriminalistiki,” SSKG (1875): 2.

139 Tainted family members might avoid exile or death by taking decisive action during an attack. For instance, some communities, such as those of Dagestan, did not permit blood vengeance on the victims or their families in cases where women killed or severely injured an assailant who intended on raping them.270 In the case of rape that follows, Parida acted decisively to protect her families’ reputation. She lessened the affront to her family by taking vengeance on her assailants and killing them. For instance, when Parida, a maiden, from the village of Bakhlukh’ in the Avaria was raped by a soldier, she went to great lengths to enact retribution for the crime. Even though she could not find the same soldier who assaulted her, she disguised herself by dressing as a man and returned to the place of the crime. Wearing her father’s fur hat, she waited for any soldier from her rapist’s camp to approach. She “killed three soldiers and injured another before she was caught.”271 Her actions conformed to the values that local inhabitants held in high esteem. She showed cleverness and self-sufficiency in her plan for revenge, and upheld accepted social etiquette by taking revenge. Although tainted by rape (she never did kill the wrongdoer), Parida’s family supported her due to her decisive actions following the attack. By seeking vengeance Parida defended her family’s honor.

Marital Status and Punishment

Punishments for rape and adultery varied depending upon marital status.

Caucasian customary law and tsarist law viewed rape of a married woman as a more

270 Beskhanum Ragimova, “Legal Status of Women in Traditional Dagestani Society (Nineteenth-Early Twentieth Century); 91. 271 “Iz gorskii kriminalistiki,” SSKG (1870).

140 serious offense than the rape of an unmarried woman. But where tsarist law based its penalties on the harm the act of rape did to the marriage in question, Caucasian customary law based its laws on the harm the deed had on familial reputation. In the case of tsarist law, authorities sought to maintain the marriage of the raped woman with the understanding that she would not be able to find another suitor. Caucasian customary law, on the other hand, encouraged separation from the ruined woman through divorce, banishment, or death (in an effort to maintain familial reputation). Therefore, Caucasian husbands often killed their wives if an attacker raped them due to the perception that the rape polluted the married woman. The Kumyks, Kabardins, and Dagestanis—like the

Georgians—punished the rape of a married woman as adultery, which allowed for some sort of separation.272

Caucasian rapists also confronted more severe punishments for the rape of a married woman than that of an unmarried one. Kabardin families and communities demanded the death of the man who dared desecrate the honor of a married woman and her family in this manner.273 The Georgian and Ossetian man who kidnapped another’s wife became the blood-enemy of her husband and family, who could kill the offender with impunity until such a time as they reconciled.274 The honor of the familial network came before that of the rape victim and her attacker among Caucasian communities – as ruined family members, raped women’s relatives possessed the right to sever ties with

272 Adaty zhitelei Kumykskoi ploskosti,” SSKG, (1872):14- 15; N. Grabovskii, “Ocherk’ suda i ugolovnykh’ prestuplenii v’ Kabardinskom’ okrug’,” SSKG, (1870): 41. 273 N. Grabovskii, “Ocherk’ suda i ugolovnykh’ prestuplenii v’ Kabardinskom’ okrug’,” SSKG, (1870): 41. 274 D.L. Purtselade, translator and editor, Ulozhenie Georgiia V-go blistatel’nogo, (Tbilisi, 1988): 77, 82.

141 them in some communities by implementing blood vengeance and killing them, in others through banishment.

Nonetheless, not all Caucasian communities opted to kill family members stained by rape (victims and rapists). Instead they sought other means of rectifying familial honor through banishment and re-entry into the community, divorce, and fines. The

Ingush, for instance, allowed the rape victim’s husband to divorce her and send her back to her parents and they obliged the guilty party to pay the victim’s husband twenty-four cows.275 The Dargin instituted similar fines but also expelled the attacker from the community and instituted blood vengeance for a short period of time only against the rapist – anywhere from forty to sixty days.276 By avoiding his pursuers during this time the wrongdoer had a chance to prove himself worthy of community and familial membership. Dargin custom also stipulated that the raped married woman should be removed from the village “until she is reconciled with her husband, even though she is not able to be pursued under blood law.”277 Caucasian families protected their familial reputations before victims of crime. The institution of blood vengeance by Caucasian communities after the rape of a married woman was a common practice, but some societies, like the Dargin, the Ingush, and the Georgians permitted agreements that allayed the dishonor or placed limitations on who was included in blood vengeance.278

275 N. Grabovskii, “Inguishi (uz’ zhin’ i obychai),” SSKG, (1876): 56-7. 276 “Adaty Darginskikh’ obshchestve’,” SSKG, (1873): 21, 38, 51, 65, 77, 91, 105. 277 “Adaty Darginskikh’ obshchestve’,” SSKG, (1873): 51. 278 “Adaty uzhno-dagestanskikh’ obshchestv’,”.SSKG, (1875): 55; Maksim’ Kovalevskii’s, Zakon’ i obychai na Kavkaz (Moskva, 1890): 271-4; Sandrygailo, Adaty dagestanskoi oblasti i zakatal’skago okruga, (Tiflis’, 1899): 316, 534, 551, 581, 591, 600; “Adaty Darginskikh’ obshchestve’,” SSKG, (1873): 21, 38, 51, 65, 77, 91, 105; N. Grabovskii, “Inguishi (uz’ zhin’ i obychai),” SSKG, (1876): 56-7; Adaty zhitelei Kumykskoi ploskosti,” SSKG, (1872):14- 15; N. Grabovskii, “Ocherk’ suda i ugolovnykh’ prestuplenii v’ Kabardinskom’ okrug’,” SSKG, (1870): 41.

142 Unmarried victims of rape had more opportunities than married victims to allay the insult done to their families through marriage agreements, short periods of blood vengeance, and fines. For instance, communities among the Kabardins compelled the attacker to marry the unmarried girl with her agreement, which tsarist law also sought.

However, if the assailant was from a lower estate than his victim, the girl’s family usually declared blood vengeance against him.279 Among the people of Dagestan, the Dargin, and the Ingush the outcome of a rape case might unfold in a variety of ways, such as an agreement of marriage, a fine, or the enactment of blood vengeance.280 The Kumyks possessed a similar tradition, where injured families expected the attacker to marry his victim and pay a blood price.281

Caucasian communities approached adultery involving married women in much the same way that they did rape of married women -- through death, mutilation, divorce, abandonment, banishment, and on rarer occasion’s fines. Caucasian communities focused on expelling adulterers from their families and communities, whereas tsarist law sought to maintain sullied marriages. In cases of adultery, Russian law was much more concerned with the disruption to family relations that the deed caused than any insult to honor (which was what concerned Caucasian families).282 Among the peoples of

Dagestan in the Kurin and Verkhnii regions, custom permitted blood vengeance and the

279 N. Grabovskii, “Ocherk’ suda i ugolovnykh’ prestuplenii v’ Kabardinskom’ okrug’,” SSKG, (1870): 41- 2; Leontovich, Adaty kavkazskikh’ gortsev’ (Odessa, 1882) I: 138-40, 146-7. 280 “Adaty uzhno-dagestanskikh’ obshchestv’,”.SSKG, (1875): 55; Maksim’ Kovalevskii’s, Zakon’ i obychai na Kavkaz, (Moskva, 1890) II: 271-4; Sandrygailo, Adaty dagestanskoi oblasti i zakatal’skago okruga, (Tiflis’, 1899): 316, 534, 551, 581, 591, 600; “Adaty Darginskikh’ obshchestve’,” SSKG, (1873): 21, 38, 51, 65, 77, 91, 105; N. Grabovskii, “Inguishi (uz’ zhin’ i obychai),” SSKG, (1876): 56-7 281 “Adaty zhitelei Kumykskoi ploskosti,” SSKG (1872):14- 15 282 Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness, 38.

143 killing of both participants by the wronged husband. If the guilty man fled, the husband’s and/or woman’s family marked him as an enemy. 283 The Ingush permitted the wronged husband to kill his wife’s beloved and mutilate his wife by cutting off her nose. He also had the right to send his disloyal wife back to her relatives.284 Ossetian customary laws permitted the “defiled family to murder the offender,” although “in most cases they [the adulterer] are deprived of an ear or hand.”285 Georgian laws stipulated that “If a woman couples with a man and commits adultery, if her husband wants to leave her so that he is neither answerable for her in this life or the next...it is in his power to decide.”286 A

Kabardin husband whose wife committed adultery possessed the right to send her back to her parents or even to sell her to her beloved, but if he caught her in the act, the wronged husband had the right to kill her.287 The Georgians possessed this same practice.288

Dishonored families chose mutilation in addition to banishment because it shamed and marked adulterous women as disloyal. The penalty of mutilation and banishment forced adulterous women to struggle for their existence as outcasts without family and community support. More importantly, the act of banishment removed ruined family members from the familial network and redeemed its honor.

In cases of fornication with an unmarried woman customary law among

Caucasian communities again sought to redeem the reputation of the extended family network through marriage agreements, or by removing the guilty parties from the

283 “Adaty uzhno-dagestanskikh’ obshchestv’,”.SSKG (1875): 8-9, 37-8; 284 N. Grabovskii, “Inguishi (uz’ zhin’ i obychai),” SSKG, (1876): 56-7 285 Pfafa, “Narodnoe pravo Osetin,” in SSKG, (1872): 274-5. 286 King Vakhtang’s code, article 67, 87-88. 287 Leontovich, Adaty kavkazskikh’ gortsev’, (Odessa, 1882) I: 153, 254. 288 King Vakhtang’s code, article 42, 75.

144 community.289 In the Kaitag-Tabarsan region of Dagestan, the father of an unmarried daughter could kill her for adultery, but he might reconcile with her beloved, collect a fine, and permit them to marry.290 In the Magal’ Karakaitag, Magal’ Urdzhamul’, and

Magal’ Terekeme’ regions of Dagestan a man who lay with an unmarried woman risked death through blood vengeance, but the community elder tried to mediate with the unmarried woman’s family for marriage.291 Dargin communities’ fined unmarried men and women caught in sexual liaisons (payment in livestock). While it was possible that the above communities might settle upon a marriage in the case of fornication, the

Kumyks alone actively encouraged marriage between fornicators, even to girls who they considered underage292 Kumyk communities forced the seducer to marry the girl when she came of age (fifteen).293 The Azeris of Temir treated unmarried women the same as they did married women involved in adultery. Instead of killing them, they sought to remove them from the community through banishment (there is no mention of marriage or reentrance into the community).294 Through a system of monitoring and exclusion

Caucasian communities sought to protect the “health” of family and community from dishonorable behavior in contrast to tsarist Russian society which sought to maintain even troubled marriages through a system of forced inclusion.

289 Ethnographic compilers placed fornication under the category of adultery. 290 “Adaty uzhno-dagestanskikh’ obshchestv’,”.SSKG, (1875): 26 291 “Adaty uzhno-dagestanskikh’ obshchestv’,”.SSKG, (1875): 48, 50; Sandrygailo, Adaty dagestanskoi oblasti i zakatal’skago okruga, (Tiflis’, 1899): 567, 576, 581, 600. 292 Adaty zhitelei Kumykskoi ploskosti,” in SSKG, (1872):13-5; 293 Louis J. Luzbetak, Marriage and Family in Caucasia: A contribution to the study of North Caucasian Ethnology and customary law, (St. Gabriel’s Mission Press, Vienna-Modling, 1951): 67. 294 V.V. Vasi’kov, “Ocherk’ byta Temirgoevtsev’,” in SMOMPK (1901): 103.

145 Age, Sex, and Punishment

In cases of rape involving children Caucasian communities handed-out penalties based upon the sex of underage victims. Their customary laws made no distinction between rape involving an underage female and one of marriage age. However, in cases involving underage males, they gave their most severe penalties (Russian law also saved its most severe penalties for the rape of boys) – blood vengeance and permanent banishment. Nonetheless, Caucasian communities still expected victims -- whether a females or males, underage or of age -- to defend their families’ honor when facing danger.

The age of the rape victim or the young girl caught fornicating did not change

Caucasian perceptions, which saw the acts as an insult to familial honor. The age of the family member did not lessen her obligation to maintain her family’s reputation. In cases of rape and bride stealing Caucasian families expected the victim to fight back, but fornication meant that the girl voluntarily participated in a sexual act. Her family decided her fate, which might include making a marriage agreement or even death through blood vengeance at the hands of her father or brothers. The girl’s actions and the implementation of blood vengeance “washed away” or at least tempered the dishonor whether the wrongdoer(s) died in pursuit, succeeded and paid a fine, or married his victim or lover (similar to bride stealing).

146 While many of the communities discussed in this study possessed customary laws for consensual sodomy,295 only the communities in Dagestan, Dargin and the Adyghe had laws specifically for forced sodomy performed against young boys (they specifically used the term for sodomy not rape). Caucasian communities saw the act of raping a young boy as one of the worst deeds a man could commit. Almost all Caucasian societies punished the crime with death. Among Dagestani communities, the attacker suffered death at the hands of his victim, but if the victim was unable then his family declared blood law and pursued the attacker.296 Some communities in Dagestan, like the

Usilinskii, permitted the killing of both the victim and attacker by their relatives. The community reasoned that by killing both the victim and the attacker the wronged family severed all ties to the wrongdoer’s actions and the victim’s tainted status.297 The

Mikakhinskii, Sirginskii, and Urakhliskii communities (again in Dagestan) instead used permanent exile as a way to sever families from the guilty party’s actions.

The majority of Caucasian communities refused to negotiate fines or mediate shorter periods of blood law for the man guilty of raping a young boy. Sex determined the more severe punishment since many Caucasian peoples negotiated fines and marriage agreements with men who raped women and girls. While the possibility of death loomed over the man who raped a woman, it was not absolute. In contrast, a man who raped a boy almost certainly risked death (certainly, reconciliation of rapist and victim through marriage was not open to young male victims in the way it was for female victims).

295 Consensual sodomy: Defined as deviant sexual behavior -- in this case specifically meaning two (or more) male adults consenting to sexual intercourse. Women were not generally included in this definition except in cases where a woman was raped anally. 296 Sandrygailo, Adaty dagestanskoi oblasti i zakatal’skago okruga, (Tiflis’, 1899): 25. 297 Maksim’ Kovalevskii’s, Zakon’ i obychai na Kavkaz, Vol. II (Moskva, 1890): 271.

147 Despite this difference, communities in Dagestan and Dargin still expected the male victim to yell and scream to show his resistance to the attack, just as in the case of women and girls.298 When it came to defending family honor Caucasian communities expected nearly the same from females and males (except that males participated in blood vengeance and females did not). For instance, in the Kaitago-Tabasaran region of

Dagestan Baba-Shakhban’ Navryz’-bek-ogly, an adolescent, shot and killed another villager, Safara Siiav’-ogly, because the man tried to rape him.299 A similar attack occurred in the Chechen village of Tsiliti, in August 1870, when a thirteen year old boy,

Aslamurza Kargiev’ stabbed and inflicted serious injuries to a 15-year-old boy who had raped him.300 Navryz’-bek-ogly’s and Kargiev’s actions killed their attackers thereby removing the guilty party and serving justice for their families.

Measuring Harm & the Burden of Proof

Moral character played less of a role in accepting raped women’s complaints of in Caucasian communities than their tsarist Russian counterparts, who viewed debauched women as standing outside of accepted social convention, and raped or not, tsarist authorities understood their position as one outside of justice as well.301

Debauched women under tsarist law had no call to justice whatever the crime. Since tsarist rape law focused on the abstract violence/offence done to honor/virginity of the

298 “Adaty Darginskikh’ obshchestve’,” in SSKG, (1873): 21. Maksim’ Kovalevskii’s, Zakon’ i obychai na Kavkaz, Vol. II, (Moskva, 1890), 271; A.V. Komarov, “Adaty i sudoproizvodstvo po nim’,” in SSKG, (1868): 55-6. 299 “Iz gorskii kriminalistiki,” SSKG (1875): 23. 300 “Iz gorskii kriminalistiki,” SSKG (1870): 86. 301 Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness, 79.

148 woman and not on the physical harm done to the victim, a woman deemed as having no honor before she was raped still possessed no honor after the fact – in essence, there was no dishonor in need of punishment if a man raped a woman already considered debauched. In contrast, more Caucasian communities than not accepted complaints from any woman in spite of her perceived character, but differences occurred at a village level.

Caucasian communities sought out “justice” for women and children due to the disgrace that insults had on their entire family unit. Even among the same peoples each community differed regarding from whom they would accept complaints, and the types of fines and penalties they found suitable. For example, some communities accepted complaints of rape from women considered debauched by their community, while others did not. Communities in the northeast Caucasus in the Dargin region accepted complaints of rape from any woman despite her perceived character without additional witnesses or oaths. Yet other villages only accepted complaints from women of questionable morals if they provided witnesses.302 Despite an acceptance of complaints from even women considered debauched, Caucasian communities still placed a high value on women’s reproductive status and virginity (especially those that followed

Islam).

Justice in instances of rape and forced sodomy among Caucasian societies based their penalties (for victims) upon the victims’ decision to fight back against their attackers. For instance, both Dargin and Dagestan accepted complaints of rape only if the

302 “Adaty Darginskikh’ obshchestve’,” in SSKG, (1873): 77.

149 victim screamed, yelled, and fought back.303 Among the Dagestan community of Magal’

Gamrinskii “if during a rape, a girl does not yell then the guilty is not answerable, but if the woman yells and people run [to her]…” the community permitted family and their relatives to pursue the culprit.304 It was much the same in Dargin communities.305

Among the Dargin village of Akushinskii, for instance, if the woman could not prove her accusation of attempted rape, the community required that the accused compensate her with one bull (a rare example of direct compensation to the woman).306 The Sirginskii community, again in the Dargin region, also accepted these complaints, but demanded that the accused undergo a purifying oath, and if he refused, the community punished him just the same as rape; meaning, of course, that the village banished him from the community and implemented blood vengeance.307 Among the Ossetians, when a woman defended herself from her kidnapper but was injured or killed by him, her relatives received a full blood payment from him (a fine of twenty-five to eighty rubles) or they had a right to vengeance.308 If a kidnapped Georgian woman was recovered, the wronged husband could choose to remain married to his wife or send her back to her parents.309

Since the kidnapped woman was seen as tainted, severing ties with her (sending her back to her parents in this case) better protected the reputation of the injured man’s family.

303 “Adaty uzhno-dagestanskikh’ obshchestv’,”.in SSKG, (1875): 9, 26, 38, 44-5, 48, 55, 61, 68; “Adaty Darginskikh’ obshchestve’,” in SSKG, (1873): 20, 38, 51, 65, 77, 91, 107; Maksim Kovalevskii, Zakon’ i obychai na Kavkaz’, Tom II, (Moskva, 1890), 271-2. 304 “Adaty uzhno-dagestanskikh’ obshchestv’,”.in SSKG, (1875): 55. 305 Adaty Darginskikh’ obshchestve’,” SSKG, (1873): 20. “ 306 Ibid., 38. 307 Ibid., 77. 308 Maksim Kovalevskii, Sovermennyi obychai i drevnii zakon: obychoe pravo Osetin’ v istoriko- sravnitel’nom osveshchenii, (Moskva, 1886),vol. I., 95; Pfafa, “Narodnoe pravo Osetin,” in SSKG, (1872): 275-6 309 King Vakhtang’s code, article 85. page 97-98.

150 Deciding Justice in the Tsarist Courtroom: Cases of Compromise, Appeasement, and Inaction

The appearance of tsarist courts in the Caucasus offered the indigenous peoples alternatives and opportunities to resolve issues in tandem with family and community action, customary law, and Sharia law. Despite the opportunities that tsarist law afforded local Caucasian populations, it appears that very few used them. Cases came before

Russian courts in a haphazard (and infrequent) manner, and were brought in by a variety of people including, Russian officials, local police, and sometimes even the local population. As mentioned before when it came to issues of defending of redeeming familial honor the local indigenous population sought out tsarist courtrooms sparingly largely because Caucasian families based their reputation on their familial honor and running to tsarist authorities would only weaken their status. Caucasian families and tsarist officials defined and approached rape and adultery differently. Tsarist officials’ provided a narrow definition necessitating physical evidence in the case of rape, while some Caucasian communities viewed even the touching of a woman’s braids as rape (not necessarily needed any closer physical contact). Caucasian customs that put suspicion solely on women certainly came closer to tsarist conceptions of adultery, but some

Caucasian communities, like Bala’s and Umukusu’s also treated raped women as adulteresses.310

In spite of the tsarist writer’s rhetoric to “civilize” Caucasian men, tsarist agents implemented very little change when it came to rape and adultery in the Caucasus. In

310 I am building off of Austin Jersild, Susan Layton, and Thomas Barrett’s work on conceptualizations of empire and its justifications in the Caucasus.

151 cases of female rape and adultery the local population was left almost entirely alone. In the three cases that follow that came before tsarist courts – one instance of adultery, and two instances of rape – tsarist agents sometimes took pains to follow local custom, sometimes ignored it – but almost always sought to avoid direct involvement with issues of sexuality and family that came before them.

The theory – to civilize Caucasian populations – did not follow practice when it came to rape and adultery. Tsarist authorities did not challenge local tradition or overtly try to change it, but instead used whatever means provided by local customary and imperial law to avoid dealing with adultery and rape cases. They used the same tactics in the metropole, so the desire to avoid such sensitive matters was probably not just an issue of empire. Tsarist Imperial courts repeatedly dismissed such cases or handed out verdicts that put the cases back in the hands of the local populations – or bolstered the power of

Caucasian family and community groups.

Cases Characterized by Inaction

Tego Tsarakhov’s Adultery Case goes to the Tsarist Court, 1868 Near Vladikavkaz Ossetia

On the 30th of March 1865, in an Ossetian village near Vladikavkaz, Tego Tsarakhov returned home from a trip. Not finding his wife at home, he went to Levana Zomoeva’s house, a neighbor. He found his wife there and suspected the two of having a sexual liaison (although he did not catch them in the act). Very irritated, Tsarakhov attacked

Zomoeva and injured him (lightly) with his kinzhal and set off for home. But he wanted

152 revenge, and to that end went to Zomoeva’s brother’s home and injured him in the left hand with his pistol.311

When confronted with Tsarakhov’s case the imperial court had to decide if it should treat the case as one of adultery, as one of assault, as both, or not wrestle with it at all.

Tsarist authorities inquired about the affair and questioned the people involved.

Subsequently they decided not to pursue either complaint. The court based its decision on the fact that under Ossetian customary law a husband had the right to injure and even kill the man who he found with his wife. Tsarakhova’s attack on Levana Zomoev was acceptable according to this reasoning. Tsarist authorities deferred to local custom, yet they still refused to accept the wronged man’s adultery claim due to his actions against

Levana Zomoeva’s brother.

Customary law justified tsarist authorities’ choice not to pursue either complaint.

They reasoned that Tsarakhova’s attack on Levana Zomoeva’s brother was wrong.

Tsarist authorities pointed to Ossetian customary law, which frowned upon redemption that defiled the family of an enemy by hindering their ability to make a living. They reasoned that by injuring Zomoeva’s brother’s hand, Tsarakhov diminished the Zomoev family’s ability to take care of itself. According to the imperial court, Levana Zomoev acted shamefully with Tsarakhova’s wife (it accepted the adultery claim as a truth), however, Tsarakhova acted dishonorably in his attack on Zomoeva’s brother. Therefore, tsarist authorities reasoned neither Tego Tsarakhova nor Levana Zomoeva deserved

311 D-ra. Pfafa, “Narodnoe pravo Osetin,” SSKG, (1872).

153 satisfaction. Here the Russian imperial courts did not challenge local custom, but instead used it to defend their decision not to get involved.

The Murder of Irina Gladkov: An Adulteress Poti

A Russian, Iv. Gladkov, of the Poti reserve regiment, murdered his wife with a pistol on 1895 May 30 because he believed that she was having an adulterous affair with a warrant officer. Gladkov did not deny his actions and explained to the authorities that

“she was killed by her debauched behavior.” The court agreed with an expert doctor that

Gladkov was not sane at the time of the murder and sent him to Tbilisi for mental evaluation.312

This case is a murder trial, not one about adultery. Yet, the newspaper’s account shows it in a very different light. Irina’s actions were put on trial at her husband’s trial for her murder. The newspaper reporter portrayed Irina as a bad wife, who drove her husband to kill her. To set the scene, he notes that her debauched behavior began only a few months after their marriage, twelve years before, when she fled. The entire article slanders Irina and places Gladkov upon a pedestal. While he entered the military service giving exemplary service, Irina lived a debauched life, although the newspaper supplied no specifics about that time of her life. The newspaper paints Gladkov as a cuckolded husband, besotted and unable to control his wealth of feelings for his wife, who continually rebuffed him. For instance, “Gladkov was very much in love with his wife and wrote to her begging her to join him.” At first his requests went unanswered, but

312 “Sudebnaia khronika: Ubiistvo zheni,” Novoe Obozrenie (August 11, 1895): 2-3.

154 eventually Irina came to him in Poti, where she apparently began a relationship with a warrant officer. According to the reporter, Gladkov could take no more and killed his wife with his pistol.313

No one questioned the character assessment of the dead woman or even questioned why she would flee and hide from her husband. Instead the court and

Gladkov’s superiors accepted that Irina was at fault. The court agreed with an expert doctor that Gladkov was not sane at the time of the murder and sent him to Tbilisi for mental evaluation.314 They saw her as a she-devil getting what she deserved because she allegedly acted outside of accepted social standards. Irina stood outside of justice because she rejected marriage and family – the stalwarts of tsarist Russian society.

Tsarist authorities viewed Irina’s husband as the victim – not the Irina, the victim of murder -- which might account for tsarist official’s reticence to get involved in Caucasian adultery cases.

The rape of Sofii Babanasovoi, 1879 Tiflis Georgia

On a cold winter’s night in 1879, Sofii Babanasovoi fled from what she described as the torture of her parents’ home, where she claimed to endure daily threats, beatings, and starvation after returning from a monastery where she spent the majority of her fifteen years. When passing by the local bakery, she was invited inside, fed and offered shelter for the night. That night a worker raped her, by whom she later found herself

313 Ibid. 314 Ibid.

155 pregnant. Sofii’s mother located and took her daughter home, but after learning about the rape she threw her daughter out. Having no where to go, Sofii went to the police, who gave her shelter and questioned her. After eight days they took her to the hospital. Soon after she married the baker, at whose bakery she was raped (the attacker was not apprehended).315

Sofii approached the tsarist court looking for compensation in the form of goods and/or money from her family.316 She considered her family responsible for her circumstances and sought the help of tsarist courts to set the situation right. The Tiflis

Circuit Court had the responsibility of deciding if Sofii’s family neglected her, caused her to flee – and was therefore indirectly responsible for her rape – and if she deserved compensation.

On 28 August 1879, Sofii and her new husband attended court proceedings at the

Tiflis Circuit Court. The court did not hear from Sofii that day due to her fear of speaking in front of her family. Sofii’s parents and her two sisters denied any wrongful treatment of Sofii and claimed that she was crazy and ignorant. For instance, they claimed that Sofii was prone to wander off late at night even when she attended the monastery. They claimed that Sofii’s propensity for wandering late a night resulted in her rape, not their treatment of her at home. Only a few neighbors and relatives acted as witnesses, whose testimonies proved of little value to Sofii. When questioned by the court about the way that Sofii’s family treated her they replied, “We don’t remember.”317

315 “Na Sud,” Kavkaz (September 2, 1879) no. 193. 316 Ibid. 317 Ibid.

156 A supporter of Sofii, who followed her case and detailed it in the nineteenth- century Kavkaz newspaper, was not surprised by the court’s verdict, which “was the usual acquittal” in cases of this nature dealing with family relations and sexuality. Sofii’s family was cleared of any wrongdoing. The court based its decision on the lack of evidence against Sofii’s family. Some witnesses had failed to appear, the court claimed, without whose testimony made the relationship between Sofii and her family impossible to understand. Sofii’s testimony alone was not enough to prosecute her family, and the court suspected that it might be false.318

In Sofii’s case, the Russian imperial court did not use customary law to defend its decision as it had in Tego Tsarakhov’s adultery case, but instead based its decision on its own laws of evidence. The court’s decision, however, showed a willingness by tsarist authorities to accept the strong role of family over that of the individual in Caucasian life.

By accepting Sofii’s family’s account over that of the individual family member (neither had any hard evidence), and by not interfering when Sofii’s relatives claimed not to remember how Sofii was treated, the Tiflis Circuit Court threw its weight behind the

Caucasian familial network. The imperial court’s decision reflects tsarist authorities’ inclination to leave cases that dealt with family and sexuality in the hands of local families and communities.

318 Ibid.

157 The Attempted rape of Taiama Selim Kiza, 1848 Balazhur Ossetia

When Turan Beka Emin Bek Ogly attempted to rape Taiama Selim Kiza in the village of Balazhur on 2 September 1848, she was tending to the horses. She screamed and found a stick and hit him with it. The village elder, Terebni Usef’ Omin Ogly looked to tsarist authorities for assistance and explained to the chief inspector of Kutaisi

District Court in December of 1849, more than a year after the event, that Turan went to widow Taiami with the intention of raping her. Terebni Usef’ Omin Ogly told the chief inspector that the victim’s brother and five other relatives took an oath supporting

Taiama’s claim. The assailant, however, told the chief inspector that he did not attack the victim and further implied that Taiama was illicitly involved with her neighbor, a man named Ali Revrim’ Ogly. Upon questioning, Taiama claimed that she did house work for

Ali and nothing more.319

Tsarist officials had to decide if they had enough evidence to pursue Taiama’s case. Since the case reached the chief inspector over a year after it occurred, he possessed no physical evidence to support Taiama’s claim and suggested to Mikhail

Vorontsov, the Viceroy to the Caucasus at the time, that the case not be followed up on.

The court dismissed the case on the chief inspector’s suggestion for two reasons. First, too much time elapsed in the case for the court to make a good judgment. Second, tsarist officials lacked evidence and wanted more than a woman’s word with which to pursue a case. Women who escaped an attempted rape had less recourse in imperial courts than

319SSC’SA, fond 4, opis’ 1, delo 3359.

158 even raped or murdered debauched women. The lack of physical evidence in attempted rape cases resulted in inaction among tsarist authorities, who were left with some uncertainty concerning the status of the attempted rape woman’s honor. If the deed had not come to fruition and the woman’s honor remained intact, had a crime been committed? Even imperial lawmakers were slow to consider attempted rape a crime – they did not include it in imperial codes until 1845, which stipulated that authorities punish the attempted crime (rape in this instance) according to the proximity that it came to fulfillment.320 Despite the fact that Taiama’s claim was backed up by her male relatives and her village elder, it was not enough for tsarist authorities because they did not witness the event and generally viewed attempted rape as an a minor assault, not a precursor to rape.

The tsarist court did not waver from its own understanding of attempted rape and chose not to pursue the case without additional evidence. By dismissing the case, the imperial court remained consistent in its treatment of rape and adultery cases. Just as in

Tego Tsarakhov’s and Sofii Babanasovoi’s cases, the tsarist court upheld its practice of dismissing cases that dealt with family and sexuality and leaving them to local family and community action.

Conclusion

The role that family members played in extended family networks influenced the way that families and community elders sought “justice” in the Caucasus. The harm that

320 Ulozhenie nakazaniiakh’ ugolovnykh’ I ispravitel’nykh,’ (St. Petersburg, 1845), article 120, 24.

159 rape and adultery did to marriage prospects/unions in the tsarist Russian case resonated to a lesser extent in Caucasian societies, where the main concern was to maintain or redeem the honor of offended families. Honor in the case of Russian women could not be redeemed, but brave and decisive actions of victims and their families could regain familial honor in the Caucasus. Marriage still represented a valued component of

Caucasian life, even foundational, but society saw it as a smaller piece of a larger family based system. The Ossetians even “consider[ed] themselves the custodians of matrimonial life” – in the Caucasus, however, this meant knowing when to dissolve marriages and when to protect or make marriages for the good of family and community peace and reputation.321 Adultery and rape betrayed not just the Caucasian marriage union or the injured spouse, but all relatives. Caucasian communities valued family honor over family members, who were expected to defend their family’s reputations or suffer expulsion or ordeals such as blood vengeance to prove them worthy of family membership.

The adultery and rape cases examined here reveal the parameters and limitations of Imperial law. They show that when it came to cases that dealt predominantly with women’s sexuality imperial authorities chose not to get involved. In the secular tsarist officials desire to avoid cases like those discussed above, they essentially handed them back to the local people. Tsarist authorities demonstrated this especially in Tego

Tsarakhova’s and Taiama’s cases, where they chose not to get involved in the situations by dismissing them – in essence ensuring that the local populations would deal with them

321 Pfafa, “Narodnoe pravo Osetin,” in SSKG, (1872): 275.

160 in their own way (or not at all). In Tego Tsarakhova’s case tsarist authorities used customary law to defend their decision not to act. Conversely, in Sofii Babanasovoi’s case tsarist authorities sited imperial laws of evidence when they ruled in favor of Sofii’s family. Nonetheless, the Tiflis Circuit Court’s ruling still illustrates its wariness to get involved in Caucasian family matters. Sofii’s case is also a rare example of a member of the indigenous population seeking assistance from imperial courts, and she did not get it.

The courts’ decision failed to challenge or change the local populations’ high esteem and support of familial networks over family members. Tsarist authorities used both customary and imperial law to support their efforts to remain aloof from issues dealing with sexuality and family especially in cases deemed not overly violent.

161 Chapter 7 Conclusion: Russian Gender and Empire in Comparative Perspective

“Take up the White Man’s Burden” – Rudyard Kipling

A wide range of foundational historical studies have explored the ways that

Western and Central European colonial authorities regulated sexuality, have examined women’s place in empire and the place of empire in women’s political and gender struggles, and have uncovered the ways women influenced and implemented change in colonial customs and family life. These authors have demonstrated that while history might have marginalized women, women nonetheless carved out a place for themselves in empire. They used empire as a way to secure rights for themselves in the metropole.

They argued that women had a responsibility as wives and mothers to take part in colonial projects, if for no other reason than to save the purity of their race from native harlots, and they sought rights for indigenous women who did not know they lacked them.

For instance, in Antoinette Burton’s study Burden’s of History: British

Feminists: Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865-1915, she examines how British feminists used the plight of Indian women to help their fight for their own emancipation.

British women became very active in Indian women’s lives due to a not altogether

162 altruistic goal, but they were active nonetheless.322 In Philippa Levine’s work,

Prostitution, Race, and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire, the author examines British colonial legislation aimed at stopping the spread of venereal disease in the colonies and found that the British colonial administration used such legislature to regulate sexual practices in the colony. Colonial officials the author claimed purposely managed prostitution and “interracial” sex to ensure the strength of the

British Empire, nation, and race.323 British officials actively sought to change sexual practices in their colonies. Clare Midgley’s book, Feminism and Empire: Women

Activists in Imperial Britain, 1790-1865, explores British women’s efforts to end the in India, their actions as missionaries, and their efforts against slavery.324 Lora

Wildenthal’s German Women for Empire, 1884-1945 argues that German women had as much responsibility as German men in the “taking up of the White Man’s (Woman’s)

Burden,” in Germany’s colonies. She examines German feminists who sought to “free” their women compatriots and the organizations that German women utilized in order to participate in colonization such as the Women’s Association for Nursing, where German nurses served in African hospitals.325

Russian women did not play vanguard roles in the tsarist empire the way western

European women did in Europe, where Western European empires oversaw

322 Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture (University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1994). 323 Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race, and Politics. Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (New York: Routledge: 2003). 324 Clare Midgley, Feminism and Empire: Women Activists in Imperial Britain, 1790-1865 (Routledge, 2007). Clare Midgley, Feminism and Empire: Women Activists in Imperial Britain, 1790-1865 (Routledge, 2007). 325 Lora Wildenthral, German Women for Empire, 1884-1945 (Duke University Press Books, 2001).

163 interventionist colonial endeavors (much more so than in the case of tsarist Russia). To be sure, tsarist women accompanied their husbands and even lived in the war-torn

Caucasus. For instance, in 1796 Varvara Bakunina went with her officer husband to the

Caucasus during the Persian campaign. She was one of two women allowed to accompany their husbands. 326 In 1809 the daughter of a Russian Colonel requested permission to return to Russia after her mother’s death.327 In 1846 a criminal case regarding the wife of a Russian Staff-Captain who was poisoned by another woman, came before tsarist courts.328 Tsarist Russian women at the very least visited and lived in the Caucasus. Yet I found little evidence of an active group of tsarist women who sought to do anything even remotely similar to the British and German women the authors discussed above. Even the women’s charities in the Caucasus were run largely by indigenous women or foreigners, specifically Germans, who had decided to make the

Caucasus their home. They included the Armenian Women’s Charitable Society, The St.

Nino’s Society (A Georgian Women’s Charitable organization sponsored by the Russian

Tsarina), and a Lutheran Charitable Society organized by women from a German settlement.329 While Wildenthal found that German women took up the “white man’s burden,” and forged their way into Germany’s colonies, tsarist Russian women remained largely separate from empire in the Caucasus.

326 Robin Bisha et al., Russian Women, 1698-1917: Experience and Expression, An Anthology of Sources (Indiana University Press, 2002): 216. 327 Sak’art’velos saistorio c’entraluri saxelmcip’o ark’ivi (SSC’SA), fond 26, opis’ 1, delo 1058. 328 SSC’SA, fond 4, opis’ 1, delo 2128. 329 Information on Armenian charities: SSC’SA, fond 17, opis’ 1, dela 3556, 3005, 2611, 690; fond 36, opis’ 1, dela 1, 7, 14; Georgian charities: SSC’SA, fond 36, opis’ 1, delo 143; Lutheran charities: SSC’SA, fond 1741, opis’ 1, dela 5-13.

164 Russian Empire in the Caucasus looked very different from the imperial endeavors of the European empires of the same period. By centering my research on the culture and laws of gender, family, and violence, I discovered a tsarist empire often wary of intervening in Caucasian customs, domestic violence, familial life, and society. Tsarist authorities refused to dissolve marriages since they believed that women should be mothers and wives, that rape ruined women’s honor and made them unsuitable for marriage, and that women’s moral frailty led them to commit adulterous acts.330 When it came to women, sexuality, and family life in the Caucasus tsarist officials showed a certain amount of reticence and often avoided involvement.

My work offers a glimpse of the lived experiences of the Caucasian populace, for whom I have essayed to unveil the gendered, cultural, social, religious, and familial worlds of the diverse peoples of the Caucasus. The lack of an over-arching justice system, and the development of a system of familial and community defense, resulted in a gendered system where Caucasian families and communities expected both males and females to defend their familial honor. They measured the worth of family members through their actions irrespective of sex. Caucasian women knew more than just defense, their families raised them in a society that revered heroic deeds, measured by the risk to one’s life. It was no wonder that Caucasian women so often organized their own abductions with the man they wanted to marry (if their families refused their beloved).

Their families taught Caucasian women to take what they wanted from life, defend their

330 William Wagner, Marriage, Property, and Law in Late Imperial Russia (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1994): 62, 94; Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in fin-de-siecle Russia (Cornell University Press, 1992): 71-83, 102 ; Barbara Alpern Engel, Women in Russia, 1700-2000: 130.

165 family’s honor, and to fight if attacked. The tsarist empire, however similar to Western

European empires was in the case of the Caucasus very different when it came to gender, sexuality, violence, and family life because it had a much lighter touch. Tsarist policy in the Caucasus interfered very little when it came to Caucasian family life, issues of sexuality, and violence.

Tsarist officials’ wariness did not mean, of course, that they lacked any influence at all on the Caucasian peoples. Even if they were not always aggressive in their attempts to transform Caucasian civilization, the very fact of tsarist authorities’ presence, their laws, and their military power meant that they affected change: outlawing blood vengeance, legislating against the bride price because they believed that it caused young

Caucasian men who could not afford to pay for their brides to steal them, the emphasis on

“consent” in marriage among tsarist religious officials (among Christian populations), and the fact that the tsarist legal system offered an alternative for some local peoples to circumvent Caucasian customary law (even if the consequences were not what those local peoples expected).

Yet very few of the tsarist administration’s policies had the effects tsarist officials desired because imperial officials feared unrest and backlash too much to press cultural change, especially with continued fighting in the Northern Caucasus. The tsarist administration did not want to alienate the indigenous elites who helped rule the

Caucasus, especially with a lack of tsarist agents from the center available to migrate to the periphery to govern the empire. Furthermore, the choice to supplant certain aspects of the tsarist administrative system from the center to the periphery ended up giving

166 religious authorities the ability to rule themselves with little interference from secular tsarist authorities took away one avenue for the tsarist administration in the Caucasus to implement change in marriage customs among its Muslim populace especially – an endeavor that tsarist writers cried out for in almost all their work. Tsarist Russia also had to contend with a complex and durable Caucasian culture, which continued even in the face of imperial authority. Past practices such as bride stealing and bride price continued because of the strength of Caucasian customs. Bride stealing represented a ritual in which young Caucasian men could prove their manhood, and young women could orchestrate some control over their marriage partners by agreeing to (or organizing) their own abductions. In fact, it is quite likely that its illegalization encouraged more of young women since the risks climbed even higher with tsarist intervention.

Secular and religious tsarist officials also set change in motion with the types of decisions that they made in cases of contested marriage unions, familial violence, bride stealing, rape, and adultery. For instance, both religious and secular tsarist authorities only permitted abducted brides to marry their abductors if they both agreed to the union, which meant that young Caucasian men and women who planned abductions to circumvent their parents’ refusals found an alternative source of authority in tsarist law that allowed them to circumvent the power their parents had over marriage. Religious authorities did the same with contested marriages. Petitioners like Metropolitan

Bagdasar’ Gassan Dzhalamian’ and J. Madatov sought out Orthodox religious authorities in hopes that they would rule the marriage of a female family member illegal since the

167 woman’s dead father had arranged a marriage for her before his death. Religious authorities almost always ruled for marriage unions when both participants agreed to the union because officials considered it a sacrament that should not be dissolved. Marriage agreement marks one area where both secular and religious tsarist authorities refused to budge and make room for Caucasian custom because tsarist officials sincerely believed that women needed some kind of male guardian

When it came to domestic violence, adultery, rape, and murder tsarist officials proved more flexible, less invasive, but also offered fewer alternatives to women, who were often the target of these crimes. Their own understanding of women’s place in society, as an extension of their male guardians, clashed with Caucasian views, which demanded that Caucasian family members do whatever necessary to defend their familial honor even women. In domestic abuse cases where the defense besmirched the name of the victim by accusing her of infidelity, tsarist courts often gave relatively lenient sentences (less then a year) to these cuckolded husbands. The Orthodox Church, in particular, made divorce among its followers almost impossible, thus even secular tsarist authorities needed to be careful with their sentences and encourage reconciliation.331

The study of Russian empire in recent years has revealed both uniformity and pluralism in tsarist administrative practices in its periphery. 332 Administrative directives

331 William Wagner, Marriage, Property, and Law in Late Imperial Russia (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1994). 332 Nicholas B. Breyfogle et. al. Peopling the Russian Periphery: Borderland Colonization in Eurasian History (Routledge, 2007); Jane Burbank et. al., Russian Empire: Space, People, Power, 1700-1930, (Indiana University Press, 2007); Daniel Brower, Turkestan and the Fate of the Russian Empire (Routledge, 2003); Mark Bassin, Imperial Visions: Nationalist Imagination and Geographical Expansion in the , 1840-1865 (Cambridge University Press, 1999); Robert P. Geraci, Window on the East : national and imperial identities in late tsarist Russia (Cornell University Press, 2001); Edward C. Thaden, ed. Russification in the Baltic Provinces and Finland, 1855-1914 (Princeton University Press, 1981); Andreas Kappeler, The Russian empire : a multiethnic history (Longman, 2001); Adeeb Khalid, The

168 possessed a certain amount of consistency such as the use of few tsarist officials to man those regions, the use of indigenous elites in Imperial administration, and the autonomy given to religious leaders. Yet, widely diverse populations, both indigenous and colonizer, looked quite dissimilar depending upon geographical place and time. The tsarist empire whether in the Far East, the Baltic region, Poland, Central Asia, or the

Caucasus, oversaw imperial endeavors through the use of similar administrative practices. Tsarist officials wherever they might find themselves in the Russian periphery confronted the same lack of resources, for instance; yet the experiences of the peoples on the ground looked dissimilar. My work also finds an imperial administration characterized by uniformity, which confronted a lack of tsarist officials to put on the ground and brought both secular and religious indigenous elites into the imperial administration. Yet by using the lens of gender and utilizing law in my examination of family, marriage, sexuality, and violence my work reveals a different side of Russian empire – one characterized largely by inaction when it came to changing the position of

Caucasian women in society, and Caucasian family and married life. The answer(s) to why tsarist officials struggled to end the practice of blood vengeance and bride stealing and barely touched the lives of many Caucasian women faced with domestic/familial abuse, charged with adultery, or the victims of rape goes beyond Russian officials fear of

Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia (University of California Press, 1999); Khodarkovsky, Michael. Russia’s Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500-1800 (Indiana University Press, 2002); Virginia Martin, Law and Custom in the Steppe: The Kazakhs of the Middle Horde and Russian Colonialism in the Nineteenth Century (Routledge, 2001); Benjamin Nathans, Beyond the pale : the Jewish encounter with late imperial Russia (Univeristy of California Press, 2004); Slezkine, Yuri. Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North. (Cornell University Press, 1996); Werth, Paul. At the Margins of Orthodoxy: Mission, Governance, and Confessional Politics in Russia’s Volga- Kama Region, 1827-1905. (Cornell University Press, 2002).

169 inciting the local elites and an administrative system that limited the ability of its officials to act - this comprises one piece of the picture. Conceptions of gender, sexuality, honor, violence, and justice shaped interactions between Caucasian indigenous peoples and tsarist officials (indigenous elites included), determined when and if indigenous populations sought tsarist intervention and when tsarist officials compromised with, acted against, or ignored indigenous peoples.

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