153 Conclusiontraditions in Saratov province might transform “savages” from
Dagestan into peaceful and productive subjects of the empire. Theatre
might flourish in Tbilisi, accompanied by the emergence of a
“Georgian Molière.” Mountain peoples might learn to cultivate their
“native soil” and, with imperial guidance, develop their true and in-
digenous sources of identity, such as Orthodoxy, narodnost’, and cus-
tomary legal traditions. Georgians and other non-Russians were
regular contributors to these notions of imperial identity. This vision of
Russia in the borderlands as the preserver and restorer of true culture
and tradition was a “Russian” (rossiiskii) contribution to the history of
European Orientalism. While the varied aspects of the vision signified
at the time the virtues of empire rather than the emergence of the na-
tion, it is obvious that the workings of the imperial era contributed to
the transformation of identity in the twentieth century and to the for-
mation of the Soviet ethno-territorial state.
When North Caucasus scholars began to cultivate local ethnic identi-
ties after the revolution, they drew on the work of imperial linguists
and ethnographers. The Abkhaz language, for example, was modified
by Abkhaz philologists but remained based on the Bzyb dialect chosen
by Uslar in the nineteenth century.^35 Ethnographers and museum col-
lectors generally obtained their cultural artifacts themselves from pre-
revolutionary collections. The founders of the Regional Museum of the
North Caucasus Peoples in Rostov-na-Donu in 1926 journeyed to
StPetersburg to acquire artifacts that would allow them to realize their
goal of enabling every mountaineer to enter the museum and find his
own “corner, depicting the life of his people along with the peoples
[narodnosti] of other oblasts.”^36 The purpose of the 1909 exhibit spon-
sored by the Museum of Ethnography and Anthropology, constructed
with the support of the Caucasus Museum in Tbilisi, was identical.
New institutes formed in the wake of revolutionary change were dedi-
cated to the study of the “languages, way of life, and antiquities” of the
Caucasus peoples. The multi-ethnic group of scholars (nine Georgians,
four Armenians, four Russians, and one Ossetian) active at the
Caucasus Historical Archaeological Institute drew on the work of im-
perial institutions and their scholarly predecessors from the earlier
era.^37 The Terek Oblast Museum, which had been founded in 1893 in
Vladikavkaz and which had survived the civil war, was maintained by
the new Soviet North Caucasus Institute of Regional Studies.^38 Revolu-
tionary change meant a return with renewed vigour to the questions of
multi-ethnic community and identity. Nativistic culture-building again
proved to be an important aspect of the vision of progressive officials
and members of Soviet educated society, whose new community was
no longer an “empire” but a “union.”