xiPrefaceat different points along the way, and I am grateful to all of them for
their efforts to focus my interests and for their suggestions for im-
provement to the manuscript. Margaret Levey, Philip Cercone, Joan
McGilvray, and the staff at McGill-Queen’s offered much-appreciated
support and guidance through the process of publication. I was espe-
cially fortunate to benefit from the careful and intelligent editorial
work of Elizabeth Hulse. Don Emminger of Academic Technology
Services at Old Dominion University prepared the maps. Various
regional and national conferences of the American Association for the
Advancement of Slavic Studies, the Midwest Russian History
Workshop, the Maryland Workshop, the Berkeley Center for Post-
Soviet Studies, and the Post-Colonial Studies Group and the Faculty
Research Seminar at Old Dominion University offered productive fo-
rums and camaraderie over the past several years. Robert Crummey
and Reginald Zelnik read the work as a dissertation at UCDavis. My
dissertation adviser, Daniel Brower, shared his knowledge of Russia
and other topics as well as his general enthusiasm for scholarship,
travel, and family, and I am lucky to count coffee drinking with Profes-
sor Brower among my other fond memories of Davis, California.
Scholarly work is the product of many happy moments of learning
and exploration, bringing to my mind the presence over the years of
my parents, Paul and Marilyn Jersild, my daughters, Annika and
Kirsten, and especially my wife, Heather.
Portions of chapters 6 and 3 have been previously published as
“Who Was Shamil? Russian Colonial Rule and Sufi Islam in the
North Caucasus, 1859–1917,” in Central Asian Survey 14, no. 2 (1995):
205 –23, and “Faith, Custom, and Ritual in the Borderlands:
Orthodoxy, Islam, and the ‘Small Peoples’ of the Middle Volga and
the North Caucasus,” in the Russian Review 59, no. 4 (October 2000):
512 –29, and I am grateful to the editors for allowing me to reproduce
the material here.21737_mm.book Page xi Monday, January 21, 2002 9:38 AM