92 Orientalism and Empirehealthier the society, and the more original and richer will be the de-
velopment of law.”^19
Khomiakov hoped to see Russia draw from its own native soil,
and by the mid nineteenth century he had access to a rapidly devel-
oping Russian ethnography that offered numerous catalogues of the
customary legal practices of the Russian peasantry. The Imperial
Russian Geographic Society, for example, initiated an ambitious
project for the study of the judicial conceptions of the Russian peas-
antry in the eighteen different provinces of the empire. P.S. Efimenko
completed one such study in 1869 in Arkhangel’sk. He prepared a
“program” for the study of customary law, covering issues related to
marriage, family relations, the authority of the father, and concep-
tions of crime, which he hoped to see employed by scholars through-
out the empire.^20 The question of Russian identity was first among
his interests. Were Russian peasant cultural practices part of a “gen-
eral Russian” tradition, adopted from somewhere else (chudskii), or
local to Arkhangel’sk?^21
The ideas and administrative experimentation of the Great Reform
period were easily compatible with the military expansion of the em-
pire into the southern and eastern borderlands. While borderland of-
ficials and colonial communities were increasingly reluctant to justify
their colonial rule according to the statist tradition of Russian impe-
rial law, everyone could agree that notions of legality were to be
found in the West rather than the East. The reformed Russian state
might serve as the harbinger of zakonnost’ to lands with long histo-
ries of proizvol, or “arbitrariness.” The experience of the long
Caucasus War, however, had taught military officials several impor-
tant lessons. Earlier efforts to administer mountaineer regions accord-
ing to Russian laws, such as in Dagestan in 1843, only intensified
mountaineer opposition to the Russian presence.^22 Officials began ex-
perimenting with the use of customary law courts in Kabarda in 1822,
in Ossetia in 1847, and in parts of Chechnia in 1852.^23 As the war
against the mountaineers of the North Caucasus wound down in the
early 1860s, some administrators hoped to introduce Russian courts
in the region, but they were warned by officials such as General
Boguslavskii in 1866 that such a measure would be “inconvenient
and even dangerous.”^24 The military committee formed to address
administrative issues in what were now Terek and Kuban oblasts af-
firmed that purely Russian forms of administration would provoke
“at first discontent and then straightforward rebellion.”^25 The
“mountaineer courts,” announced by Viceroy Grand Duke Mikhail in
186 9, were regulated by “temporary rules” to be used “until the total
introduction of the judicial decree of 20 November 1864” was possi-