93 Customary Lawble.^26 The North Caucasus was thus similar in this respect to other
parts of the empire, such as Siberia and the Kazakh steppe, where the
regime decreed, with some exceptions, that judicial conflicts could be
resolved according to local traditions of customary law.^27
Such tolerance was not simply born of fear or administrative real-
ism, but was an important component of the set of concerns that
shaped the making of the empire on the frontier. Judicial practices of
the empire varied from region to region, officials of the regime con-
ceded, but they did not understand this as a permanent situation. Dif-
ferent peoples possessed different levels of judicial consciousness.
Less-developed peoples, Russian officials concluded, might progress
in time and make the general application of the rule of law feasible
for the entire empire. Governor-General A.M. Dondukov-Korsakov,
the grand duke’s successor, reminded officials in Tbilisi and St Peters-
burg that mountaineer societies were still “similar in social organiza-
tion to the barbaric peoples of Europe at the beginning of the Middle
Ages.”^28 Russian practices and forms of rule, he emphasized for the
benefit of officials who thought otherwise, were frequently inappro-
priate for borderland peoples such as the mountaineers or the Kyrgyz
(Kazakh) of the Small and Middle Hordes. The language, the tradi-
tions, the nature of the charge, and the fact that the mountaineer
“does not know or understand” the attorney of the crown left moun-
taineers, Dondukov-Korsakov argued, suspicious and uncomfortable
in Russian courts. Bureaucratic uniformity, from St Petersburg to the
isolated valleys of mountainous Dagestan, would in any case only be
“illusory,” he continued. “The mentality of a people [sklad narodnago
kharaktera] cannot be changed simply through circulars, commands,
or laws.”^29
Problematic “mentalities” could be changed, however, and the
courts were understood by Russians as a means toward the achieve-
ment of such a goal. Ethnographers, of course, were self-proclaimed
experts on the “character” of a people (what they termed narodnyi
kharakter), and the regime frequently promoted their work in the
Caucasus and throughout the empire, as we discussed in the last chap-
ter. Dondukov-Korsakov turned to historical ethnography in his de-
fence of administrative innovation in the North Caucasus before his
many critics in the ministries of St Petersburg. Ethnographic study, he
suggested, revealed the continuing presence of ancient tribal forms of
administration and allegiance among the mountaineers. Each tribe in
Dagestani villages, he explained, sent two or three representatives to a
village meeting (the dzhamaat), which issued decisions called maslagat.
The villages elected elders, who were helped by other respected fig-
ures. Justice, Dondukov-Korsakov emphasized to the minister of the