Afterword: Visualizing the
Multi-ethnic Community in
the Soviet Union
We must write our own literature and show our faces
[to the world].
Paranuk Karim (Adygei), 1928The era of transformation and modernity promised by the Russian
Revolution in imperial context meant a repudiation of “Russification”
coupled with an appreciation of “progressive” imperial officials and
their policies, which in the Soviet view at least offered a form of benev-
olent colonialism in the borderlands. The process began in the summer
of 1917, when officials of the Provisional Government began to look
into the possibility of establishing congruence between the region’s
“ethnic composition” and its administrative borders.^1 Soviet officials
granted administrative and territorial legitimacy to the mountain peo-
ples and used ethnic criteria to establish the “autonomous regions,” or
what were often referred to as the eight separate “national regions”
(natsional’nye oblasti) of the North Caucasus.^2 New officials such as
Anastas Mikoian, Armenian and close to the centre of authority like
Loris-Melikov, explicitly contrasted their work to that of oppressive
“Russian tsarist bureaucrats” of the past.^3
In conception and practice, the continuities with the imperial era
were greater than the contrasts, however. In “nationalities” studies,
as in other areas of cultural history, the revolution can no longer be
viewed as “some sort of big bang.”^4 As in the nineteenth century, the
new regime battled illiteracy, the lack of roads that prevented a
greater cultural penetration of mountain communities, the abun-
dance of festivals that reduced economic productivity, or simply the
“remnants of savagery.”^5 The new Soviet officials understood not
only the shari’a but also the adat as obstacles to progress, and they
declared both traditions illegal in 1927.^6 They first Latinized and then