124 Orientalism and Empirehistory related to the Caucasus. Memoir writers made heroes of
themselves and the Russians who had fought the mountaineers, and
ignored the conflict of faiths and cultures in favour of a glorification
of combat and battle against the savage mountaineers.^96 Other writ-
ers reminded Russians that they were the first citizens of a colonial
power by sharing stories of the inadequacies of hotel service and the
difficulties of transport, of amusing stories and local colour provided
by “native” guides, of conversations with aging mountaineers who
claimed to have fought for Shamil, and of begging Ossetians along
the Georgian Military Road.^97
Magomet-Shefi was quick to compliment Zakhar’in’s work and
favourably compared it to the “fabrications” published by Pavel
Przhetsslavskii.^98 The former pristav drew the ire of several Russian
writers as well.^99 True to his diary reports prepared for the Ministry
of War, Przhetsslavskii had published a series of essays in Russkaia
Starina in 1877–78 that emphasized the importance of Islam to the
character of Shamil.^100 He challenged the version of the civilized
Shamil presented to Russian readers in 1859 and raised a series of
difficulties, not only for the Russian reading public but also for
Russian administrators in the Caucasus. While in Kaluga,
Przhetsslavskii publicly pointed out, Shamil was consistent in his
desire to leave and flooded his pristav, various military command-
ers, and the tsar himself with a barrage of requests to be allowed a
trip to Mecca. Talk of “holy places” was never far from Shamil’s
mind, Przhetsslavskii wrote, and if denied a trip to the lands of the
sultan, the imam hoped as a second choice to be relocated from
Kaluga to either Crimea or Kazan.^101 In Przhetsslavskii’s story the
far reaches of the empire were present as places of significant cul-
tural and religious difference, in contrast to the 1859 image of Shamil
well known to Russians.
The presence of Magomet-Shefi in Russia instead reminded
Russians that exposure to Russia might make educated “natives”
out of misled and uninformed mountaineers. Culture in the service
of conquest created colonial elites throughout the colonized world in
the nineteenth century. The regime founded schools for Muslim and
mountaineer children in the larger cities of the region, which eventu-
ally produced students willing and able to participate in the edu-
cated colonial community in the Caucasus, sometimes as teachers,
translators, and administrators for the regime. While Russian suc-
cess stories such as Magomet-Shefi received prominence in the
Russian press, less attention was devoted to the fact that the primary
source of education in places such as Dagestan remained the Muslim
primary and secondary schools.^102