128 Orientalism and Empiremountain customary law, and of course, mountaineers often took
matters into their own hands and resolved them beyond the court
system anyway. Mountain peoples were generally exempt from mili-
tary service, and families were slow to respond to the educational ini-
tiatives of the regime. The absence of an ecclesiastical administration
in the North Caucasus left regime officials unable to monitor the ac-
tivities of Sufi murids and their followers, and Sufi-inspired rebel-
lions continued throughout the imperial era. Even the captive Shamil
and his family proved recalcitrant, immune from what Russians took
to be the cultural wonders of StPetersburg and Kaluga. He preferred
Mecca, and his son Kazi-Magomet maintained Sufi contacts in the
Ottoman Empire and North Caucasus and returned to fight the
Russians in 1877. Vedeno, famous during the Caucasus War as the
residence of Shamil, whence he fled during his final retreat and cap-
ture in the summer of 1859, remained relatively untouched by
Russian rule.^12 Conservative frustration with such cultural and ad-
ministrative challenges at the fin de siècle was common throughout
the colonial world. French colons in Algeria, for example, such as
Eugène Étienne of Oran, the deputy to the French Chamber, pre-
sented themselves as champions of French culture in a hostile,
Muslim land. They attacked the Muslim courts and educational sys-
tem, and portrayed Algerian Jews and even other European settlers
as unreliable and untrustworthy.^13
Russification collided with new forms of regionalism and even na-
tionalism from the frontier, which were themselves partially the out-
growth of imperial policy. Native language instruction for missionaries
in the 1850s meant access to the Gospel, but the climate had changed
several decades later. Even the Georgians, long-time contributors to the
discourse on empire, were frustrated by the apparent limits on their ac-
cess to culture. The theatre established by Vorontsov, explained a com-
mentator in 1882, was a sign of the “strengthening of our national
conscience and the awakening of our motherland.” “I want a theatre,”
he continued, “– only a Georgian theatre.” “I want schools – [but]
Georgian schools.”^14 Georgian scholars such as G. Kipshidze took their
cue from Petr Uslar and his respect for antiquity and native tradition as
they outlined plans to recover ancient manuscripts and cultivate a na-
tional memory.^15 It was now conceivable that non-Russians might em-
ploy their newly written languages, the lessons of the Russian
educational system, or the notion of civilization to criticize the regime.
For later officials, increased literacy was not necessarily progress, and
by the turn of the century the regime was in the business of restricting
writing rather than promoting it. Russian officials such as Governor-
General A.M. Dondukov-Korsakov, newly arrived from the western