Preface
Russia’s relationship to the North Caucasus has again turned violent,
as it has so many times in the past, and a collection of ideas and im-
ages in the Russian press about mountain banditry, crime, and sav-
agery has again emerged to explain and facilitate the war. Federation
troops can do no wrong against the “terrorists” of Groznyi, who,
“[e]ven though [they] by day seem like peaceful inhabitants, at night
are merciless fighters.”^1 The Russian checkpoint at Asinovsk in
Chechnia, reports a Georgian journalist, greets travellers with an
enormous sign in big red letters: “We will cure you of the disease of
terrorism!”^2 “In Russia we will always be outsiders,” complains
Chechen Islam Saidaev, ‹low’ [chernye] people of the second sort.”^3
Even the new president of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin,
has emerged in part because of his belligerent response to the North
Caucasus crisis.^4 An official from the Russian Federal Frontier Service
sounds like a general in the nineteenth-century Caucasus Army when
he explains, “We must not leave places to which previous generations
have made way with sweat and blood.”^5 As this study will show,
contemporary publicists and politicians draw on a long history of im-
perial discourse about Islam, savagery, and the mountain peoples of
the North Caucasus.
To study the formation of the empire on its southern frontier in the
nineteenth century, I have utilized a variety of materials in both the
Russian and the Georgian languages from libraries and archives in
StPetersburg, Moscow, and Tbilisi. In the text and notes I transliterate
Russian according to the standard system employed by the Library of21737_mm.book Page ix Monday, January 21, 2002 9:38 AM