125 The Russian ShamilA vision of empire accompanied and inspired the Russian conquest
of the North Caucasus. Shamil’s long history of “savagery,” Sufism,
and military opposition presented no particular obstacle to his even-
tual imagined participation in the world of imperial educated society.
The former guerilla war leader from the frontier was to be remade.
Russian and Georgian writers and readers believed that exposure to
the world of Western consumerism, technology, and high culture and
to Western conceptions of gender and the family would initiate an
immediate process of profound cultural self-awakening on the part of
Shamil and members of his family. He was to acquire a new “pod-
danstvo” and allegiance to the world of Russia, but inspired by a gen-
uine appreciation and recognition of the virtues of that world. He
was to live as a “Russian” noble (rossiiskaia rather than russkaia) in
Kaluga and sympathize with the cultural interests and aspirations of
this multi-ethnic corporate body. His Kaluga home included direct
references to patristic Orthodoxy. The Russian Shamil was a still no-
ble military leader from the frontier who had left behind his lifelong
association with Sufi Islam.
Even his departure from Russia in favour of the holy lands of Islam
did not deter the hopeful from among Russians, some of whom, such
as M.N. Chichagova, continued even later in the century to reproduce
the 1859 version of Shamil in the process of cultural change and the
many stories that were discredited by subsequent events in both the
North Caucasus and Kaluga.^103 “Shamil very much loved children,”
wrote Chichagova, the wife of yet another official associated with the
imam’s surveillance, “and such a man cannot be evil.”^104 Shamil was
noble at heart, she stressed, generous with his family, admiring of the
tsar, and even impressed by the beauty and pathos of the Christian
faith.^105 Kazi-Magomet, Chichagova claimed, was deeply devoted to
the Russian tsar, but perhaps faltered as a result of the grief caused by
the death of his father. “I simply cannot get used to the idea that Kazi-
Magom[et] was with the Turkish troops in the last war!” she
mused.^106 Islam remained perpetually foreign and even inconceiv-
able for the creators of the Russian Shamil.