142 Orientalism and EmpireRussian settlers in the early twentieth century were suspect not
only as models of high culture and economic productivity. Old Belief
presented an additional dilemma, reminding us that the imperial pre-
occupation with the maintenance of cultural tradition and authentic-
ity was applied to both Russians and non-Russians. The influence of
sectarianism among settler communities suggested to regime officials
that institutional reminders of the nature of Orthodoxy were sorely
needed. Cossacks, the Terek oblast commander warned in 1890, in
particular were in need of greater access to the rituals and literature
of Orthodoxy. The presence of Old Belief threatened to erode the pri-
mary source of stability for the regime in the precarious mountain re-
gions of the North Caucasus. In 1890, 6,621 new members of different
sectarian groups moved into Terek oblast alone. Kizliar otdel con-
tained 20,407 Old Believers in that year. The Terek oblast commander
suggested that sectarian proselytizing be made illegal in Cossack set-
tlements, that funds for Orthodox religious education be increased
for the Cossacks, and that special lists of sectarians be compiled in or-
der to identify and counter their activities. “Religious-moral educa-
tion,” he warned, was crucial to containing the spread of such
deviance.^103 Russian peasant settlers in the borderlands also faced the
risk of religious and cultural “apostasy.”
Missionaries, in particular, but officials generally also blamed Old
Believers for providing an inadequate religious example to non-
Russians populations and hence contributing to the expansion of
Islam. In the Middle Volga, Nikolai Il’minskii partially attributed the
return of many “baptized Tatars” to Islam to this failing on the part of
Orthodox settlers.^104 In the Caucasus the difficulties and trials of set-
tlement, the many threats posed by the mountaineers, and the unfa-
miliar climate and geography of the region, Governor-General
Golitsyn informed the Ministry of the Interior in 190 1, left new
Russian settlers particularly in need of reminders of their Russian
past. Small and temporary prayer houses were not enough, he ar-
gued; they were unable to provide the “moral strength” offered by a
vast and well-built cathedral.^105 Immigrants needed symbolic re-
minders of the importance of Orthodoxy as well as religious support
in the face of the temptation presented by the many sectarians who
were populating the North Caucasus. Golitsyn wanted greater atten-
tion from the government and the Holy Synod to the construction
and maintenance of Orthodox churches in newly settled villages. Of
fifty-four new immigrant villages in the Caucasus in 1902, only six
had churches, while five possessed temporary prayer houses. Thirty-
year waits for the construction of churches, he wrote to Pobedonost-
sev, left Russian peasants in the “obscurity of religious ignorance and