137 Russification and the Return of Conquest“native” guide.^68 Lermontov was a historical icon and guide to later
writers, but mountaineers were neither noble nor savage.^69 During
Filipov’s trip along the Georgian Military Road, his guide explained
the significance of the occasional crosses visible from the highway.
These were places of death as a result of either crime, accident, or a
natural catastrophe. The region again spoke of its dangerous past to
the Russian reader. And suddenly, “as if from underground,” a group
of Ossetian youths appeared alongside the road. Now, however, their
presence was more pitiful than threatening: ‹What do they need? –
Iturn to our coachman. ‘They’re asking for money.› Filipov tossed
some copper coins out behind him onto the road.^70 The waning of the
Romantic vision of historic recovery and restoration in the region had
left behind languid and even pitiful “natives” to haunt the colonial
imagination of the fin de siècle.
colonization
Imperial policy in the age of Russification coincided with the hostile
attitudes common to conservative writers and the producers of travel
literature. If mountaineers were “savages” or “ethnographic mate-
rial” or languid natives who obstructed imperial progress, they might
best be replaced by energetic and productive Russian settlers. Impe-
rial policy on the question of colonization evolved in this direction
from roughly 1850 to 1900.
For the proponents of conquest during the long Caucasus War, set-
tler colonialism was the logical complement to the exile of the indige-
nous population. As Grand Duke Mikhail Nikolaevich made plans
for the final “cleansing” of the North Caucasus in 1863, he assumed
that his work was preparation for the eventual arrival of Russian set-
tlers.^71 But in fact the regime had been surprisingly open-minded in
its notions of colonization on the North Caucasus frontier. From the
183 0s to the 18 50s it encouraged “Little Russian” (Ukrainian)
Cossacks, Germans, Greeks, Armenians, and Old Believers and other
sectarians from Russia to emigrate to the North Caucasus.^72 For most
officials, the ethnic origin of the new immigrants was inconsequen-
tial. As late as 1857, important officials such as Bariatinskii still con-
ceived of the North Caucasus as a distant frontier that might even
serve the internal provinces of the empire by relieving them of sectar-
ians and as a place welcome to any economically productive per-
son.^73 Other officials, however, were beginning to wonder about the
political consequences of potentially unreliable settlers on the fron-
tiers of the empire. The commander of Chernomorsk district raised
the “Russian question” to his colleagues in 1868. “Might we not