Captive and the Gift : Cultural Histories of Sovereignty in Russia and the Caucasus / Bruce Grant

The Captive and the Gift To view this image, please see the printed book. Prometheus Bound by Peter Paul Rubens. Philadelphia Museum of Art, purchased with the W. P. Wilstach Fund, 1950. The Captive and the Gift Cultural Histories of Sovereignty in Russia and the Caucasus Bruce Grant Cornell University Press Ithaca and London A volume in the series Culture and Society after Socialism edited by Bruce Grant and Nancy Ries A list of titles in this series is available at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. Copyright © 2009 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2009 by Cornell University Press First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 2009 Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Grant, Bruce, 1964 – The captive and the gift : cultural histories of sovereignty in Russia and the Caucasus / Bruce Grant. p. cm. — (Culture and society after socialism) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8014-4304-6 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8014-7541-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Caucasus—Civilization. 2. Caucasus—Relations—Russia. 3. Russia—Relations—Caucasus. 4. Caucasus—Relations—Soviet Union. 5. Soviet Union—Relations—Caucasus. 6. Sovereignty— Social aspects—Caucasus. 7. Sovereignty—Social aspects— Russia. 8. Sovereignty—Social aspects—Soviet Union. I. Title. II. Series: Culture and society after socialism. DK509.G724 2009 947.5—dc22 2008052552 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fi bers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. Cloth printing 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Paperback printing 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 For Jean-Vincent Enchainment is a condition of all relations based on the gift. Marilyn Strathern, The Gender of the Gift Contents Preface ix Acknowledgments xix 1. Promethean Beginnings 1 2. Histories of Encounter, Raidings, and Trade 19 3. Noble Giving, Noble Taking 43 4. Rites of Encounter: Brides, Brigands, and Fire Bringers 63 5. Captive Russians 91 6. Caucasian Refl ections 124 7. From Prometheus to the Present 156 Glossary 163 References 165 Index 185 Preface “We gave them so much” (Stol'ko my im dali ). A Ukrainian friend with whom I had once studied in Moscow wrote me a few years back to describe her return to a seaside resort in Abkhazia, in the Republic of Georgia, on the Black Sea coast. She had spent time there as a child in the early 1970s and was taken aback by the declining state of basic infrastructure after years of post-Soviet economic stress, exacerbated by the struggle between breakaway Abkhaz and central Georgian forces. “We gave them so much, and yet, everywhere you looked, you could see what they had done with what we gave them. It was clear how things turned once they decided that we were no longer needed.” She underlined the word “we” in a familiar and genuine turn of phrase that I heard spoken this way more than once in Russia, to distinguish the Slavic majority from a Caucasus region that seemed to show little re- morse for the collapse of the USSR. Twenty years earlier, “we” signaled all Russians, Ukrainians, Abkhaz, and Georgians under a shared Soviet project. Yet for all its remarkable internationalism, it was a project that x Preface never entirely convinced most populations at the Abkhaz and Georgian ends of the list that they were full partners alongside the rest. The “we” in the letter I held in my hand was a different kind of iteration, casting as spurned givers those of purportedly superior civilization and economy, whose efforts to better the lives of others were no longer appreciated. So- viet political rule had ended, but for my correspondent, so too had the mandate for cultural supervision that went with it, a cultural supervision that was widely understood, as in this letter, as a form of generosity, a form of giving. For all the intense forms of belonging generated in the USSR, however, this kind of giving is one that has of course been regularly ques- tioned by most non-Russian peoples. In scholarship, Russia’s relations with the Caucasus are most conven- tionally expressed through politics, in works that focus on how treaties were drawn up, wars were fought, and lands were surrendered or annexed. This is easy enough to understand, as rapid political shift in the Caucasus was the order of the day at both the opening and the close of rule by imperial Russia and its Soviet successor, from the opening of the nineteenth century to the close of the twentieth. But as so many cases of imperial rule and its reincarnations around the world have shown, individual leaders and those who follow them more often than not legitimate sovereign rule on grounds of altruism rather than pure force. Claiming sovereignty over another entails the burden of giving. This is the gift of civilization, or, in a phrase that I believe better captures the political importance of this gesture in the Russian nineteenth century, “the gift of empire.” The investment of Russian imperial and later Soviet centers in the Caucasus region may have been variously motivated, but no one disputes that the time, money, and soldiers committed to the cause were consider- able. Investment and sacrifi ce in this context were clear. But as the letter in my hand reminded me, this kind of gift comes not only from calcu- lated gain but from a self-perceived noblesse oblige. It is the gift of social advancement. Montesquieu was among the fi rst to identify this as a mission civilisatrice, a civilizing mission. But in Russian this became better known as a kul'turnaia missiia, a cultural mission, a project of advancing those under one’s dominion. “We gave them so much,” and look at how things turned out. The effective message was, they never really understood what we were offering. Or perhaps, they took what we gave, but they took inappropriately. Preface xi As I sat with letter in hand, I thought about a remark made to me a few years earlier by one of the fi rst people I had met in the small city of Sheki, a regional center of northwest Azerbaijan, where I had gone to do archival and fi eld research on the experience of one mountain com- munity across the Soviet period. This man was brushing off the garden- variety sympathies I had extended after hearing that all of the city’s silk factories—the backbone of the local economy—had sat idle since the close of the USSR. “Naturally we would like to see everyone back at work,” he said as we motored up the roadway to the Palace of the Khan, an obliga- tory stop for the visitor. “The only time our city ever boomed was in the ninth century, with all the trade from the Silk Road. We’ve been going downhill ever since.” He could no doubt read the polite look on my face as I strained to picture a ninth-century paradise. He smiled broadly and drilled his fi nger into the air. “We were at our zenith in the ninth century, when Russia was just a glimmer in the eye of Kievan Rus'. But what will Russians tell you? That they were the ones who came to civilize us!” In- deed, just who was the more distinguished civilization in Russia’s long encounters with the many peoples of the Caucasus was a question laid before me more than once. The Caucasus region, a diverse land mass of some 175,000 square miles stretching from the south of Russia to just north of Iran and wedged in between the Black and Caspian seas, has been home to dozens of civilizations over its extended history—others have gone further by arguing, in turn, that it demonstrates a shared civilizational structure of its own, one evolved from solidarities forged after years of conquest.1 The Caucasus area is most commonly divided into North—encompassing Adygheia, Kabardino- Balkaria and Karachai-Cherkessia (which are the homelands of peoples commonly referred to in English as Circassians), alongside North Ossetia, Ingushetia, Daghestan, and more famously today, Chechnya—and South, embracing the contemporary territories of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and 1. This fi gure includes the three South Caucasus republics of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, with the North Caucasus territories of Chechnya, Ingushetia, Daghestan, North Ossetia, Adygheia, Kabardino-Balkaria, Karachai-Cherkessia, Krasnodar Krai, and Stavropol' Krai. While the Russian Federation includes Rostov Oblast' in its North Caucasus Economic Zone, only small parts of Rostov Oblast' are traditionally included in the Caucasus, and those populations have not been factored in here. xii Preface Georgia.2 Historically, when “the Caucasus” (in Russian, Kavkaz) has been spoken of most pejoratively, the reference is most often to gortsy, the high- land peoples of the northern fl anks of the Great Caucasus mountain range, whose allegiances to the Ottomans, to the Crimean khan, or more often, simply to themselves made them among the fi ercest opponents of Russian annexation and some of the most diffi cult for the Russians to understand. The South Caucasus polities, by contrast, were relatively more accessible given the organization of small, centralized, semi-independent khanates that functioned through the decline of Persian rule after the death of Nadir Shah in the mid-eighteenth century, and thus were understood by Russian offi cials as relatively further along on civilizational scales.

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