150 Orientalism and Empiredevelopment of the mountain peoples. The special courts estab-
lished by the colonial regime in the moutain regions were primarily
based on the adat, or customary law, instead of the shari’a, or
Muslim law. To a certain extent this practice was politically self-
serving, of course, since the regime intended to counter the influence
of Islam and the mullas, the Muslim religious leaders. But it was far
more than politically manipulative and was an important compo-
nent of this set of ideas about Russia’s relationship to the historic
customs and traditions of the non-Russians. As in Russia, where cus-
tomary law was portrayed as an attribute of a unique folk culture
passed on through the generations, Russian ethnographers and
other students of mountain customary law believed that they offered
insight into the history of the mountain narody. The regime could
codify the customs of the non-Russians and hence contribute to the
recovery of “indigenous” history. Like customary law, identity en-
dured through the centuries, and the contribution of Russian eth-
nographers was to clarify its authentic character. Fyodor
Dostoevsky’s discovery of his “Russian” heart, which accompanied
the “regeneration of [his] convictions” after his return from prison
exile in the 1850s, coincided with the general interest from the differ-
ent elements of educated opinion in the moral and spiritual values
and way of life of the Russian peasant.^19 The expansion of the
Russian state meant the extension to the borderlands of the interests
and assumptions of Russian educated society about the importance
of peasant custom and its relationship to identity.
Russification in the borderlands was a product of more assertive
yet frightened imperial administrators in the last decades of the tsa-
rist era. With renewed efforts, officials worked to achieve administra-
tive uniformity and end the diverse and heterogeneous practices of
the frontier. Non-Russians were not necessarily to “become Russian”
(obrusenie), but borderland institutions, schools, regulations, and di-
rectives ideally were to correspond to practices at the centre. The
push for administrative conformity was accompanied by the increas-
ingly hostile climate of competitive nationalism and imperialism that
also shaped European culture of the fin de siècle. Major thinkers in the
big cities of Russia were explicit about the relationship of small peo-
ples (“ethnographic material”) to the Russians (the “great people”),
as Danilevsky and Dostoevsky wrote. Some borderland officials in-
stinctively welcomed these warnings about the dangers of other
“alien spirits” and instead preferred Russia’s historic identity of tsar,
church, and army. Alexander iii liked to travel to borderland out-
posts such as Vladikavkaz to query Ossetians about their knowledge
of the Russian language and to hear the Ossetian Girls’ School sing