149 Conclusionborderland perceptions of the historic clash between Christianity and
Islam were the most important context that produced the discourse
on empire. Russia’s Orientalism was never simply a product of offi-
cial discourse and historiography in StPetersburg. On the other
hand, the general cultural dilemmas familiar to historians of Russia
proper were also significant in the borderlands. The interests of con-
servative thinkers in uniquely Russian traditions resonated among
officials on the frontier accustomed to thinking about Russia’s role in
the world and its relationship to other civilizations. Russia’s famous
dilemmas regarding the West were also especially acute on the fron-
tier, and even shared by non-Russian peoples such as the Georgians.
The rethinking of empire in the wake of the destructive conquest
drew on Russia’s Romantic exploration of its own special spirit, lan-
guage, history, and potential contribution to world civilization. The
purpose of empire was to extend this vision of progress to backward
borderland peoples and to foster and encourage true and authentic
culture liberated from the influence of Islam and the general “sav-
agery” of the past.
Such was the self-professed project of numerous ethnographers,
travellers, geographers, and statisticians of diverse ethnic back-
grounds on the imperial frontier. Linguists such as Petr Uslar empha-
sized that mountain languages were in no way inferior to the
languages of Europe and were capable of expressing ideas of com-
plexity and beauty. He and other linguists, supported by the
Geographic Society and other branches of the administration in the
Caucasus, worked to transcribe mountaineer languages into a script
based on Cyrillic. The regime introduced readers in these mountain
languages into primary schools that it founded for the mountaineers
and encouraged educated mountaineers to work as teachers, serve in
the Russian bureaucracy, and even contribute essays to journals and
ethnographic publications. In such essays, educated mountaineers
usually attested to the importance of education and literacy and to
Russia’s role in allowing the mountaineers access to the world of
“culture.” Uslar visualized a “renaissance” for the mountain peoples,
in the tradition of medieval Europe’s cultural awakening and redis-
covery of antiquity in the early modern era.^18 Ethnographers ven-
tured into mountaineer villages to record the cultural traditions of the
mountain peoples (narody), and the regime even established territo-
rial units for the mountaineers based on what they took to be these
cultural identities.
Historic “custom,” in this imperial view, was the key to mountain
identities in the present. The regime would preserve custom and
thus foster, in the tradition of Herderean Romanticism, the cultural