82 Orientalism and Empireaccommodate the guttural mountain sounds.^166 He insisted on the
use of Cyrillic for the new alphabet, even while admitting at the 18 61
Caucasus Department meeting that Georgian would provide a more
suitable alphabet. Uslar started with Abkhaz in 1861, Chechen in 18 62
(with the help of two Russian-speaking Chechens who lived in
Tbilisi), and Kabard with the help of Kazi Atazhukinym. He eventu-
ally worked on Avar, Lak, Dargin, and other northeast Caucasus lan-
guages and composed a linguistic map of all the languages of
Dagestan oblast.^167
Uslar had many native helpers in his work. Early pioneers were
usually the sons of prominent princes who had been educated in a
privileged setting in St Petersburg. Khan-Girei, for example, left his
influential Bzhedug (Adygei) family for Tbilisi and then the St Peters-
burg Cadet Corps. His manuscript, “Zapiski o Cherkesii” (Memoran-
dum on Cherkesia), written at the behest of Russian military planners
and read by General A.A. Vel’iaminov and Baron G.V. Rozen, told the
story of the “Cherkes” people.^168 Their past was a time of savagery,
he argued, an insignificant prelude to the real beginning of Adygei
history, which coincided with the arrival of Russian colonial rule. He
hoped the Russians would help the Adygei develop a written script
for an Adygei alphabet. “The Cherkes do not have books in their own
language,” he wrote, “and have been deprived of the best means of
attaining human reason – writing.”^169
Others from among this growing cohort of educated and bilingual
mountaineers helped transcribe North Caucasus languages, served as
teachers in Restoration Society schools and small schools founded by
Uslar, and even contributed ethnographic essays about their respec-
tive peoples for readers of Russian. Aideemir Chirkeev taught Avar
children in Khunzakh, and Abdulla Omarov conducted lessons in
Lak at Uslar’s school in Kumukh. Omarov shared his personal his-
tory for readers of Sbornik Svedenii o Kavkazskikh Gortsakh. This was a
story satisfying to imperial educated society – a personal struggle in
search of education and a progressive future, in which he sur-
mounted the obstacles presented by mountaineer backwardness, rule
of the khans, and Muslim medresses.^170 His father was even a Sufi
adept.^171 Omarov noted that his descriptive material referred to just
one tribe (the Lak), but “all the same the Dagestanis are so similar
that, based on the life of the Laks, one can arrive at a picture of the
Dagestani way of life in general.”^172 By the time he moved to the
“new world” of Tbilisi in the 1860s, he was part of a growing collec-
tion of educated non-Russians who participated in one way or an-
other in Russia’s rule of the Caucasus.^173 With the voice of “native”
authenticity, they affirmed the importance of Russia’s work in the