7 The Discourse of EmpireRussian (rossiiskoe) lands” pose a series of contrasts to the European
experience. For good reason, scholars of the history of Russia as an
empire have explored the impact of geographic “core areas” in strug-
gle for control of “frontier zones,” the importance of social structure
and its impact upon the process of the incorporation of a multi-ethnic
service elite, and the role of crucial borderland administrators such as
Mikhail S. Vorontsov in Odessa and Tbilisi.^20 Along with nineteenth-
century scholars of the “Eastern question” such as Sergei Zhigarev,
these scholars possess a keen sense of the way in which affairs on the
steppe frequently blurred the boundaries between foreign and do-
mestic policy.^21 Soviet scholarship was somewhat different, with oth-
erwise competent scholars continuing the nineteenth-century
tradition of writing about the “Caucasus War” (Kavkazskaia voina) but
stifled by an institutional setting that demanded attention to a series
of narrow socio-economic questions regarding its history.^22
The traditional story of tsarist military conquest and colonial ex-
pansion, presented in positive terms by nineteenth-century Russian
historians but then as one of conquest and rapacity by scholars as di-
verse as John Baddeley in 1908, Soviet historians, and Moshe
Gammer more recently, does not do justice to the complexity of inter-
ethnic relations and the shared nature of many of the ideas and
assumptions of colonial discourse.^23 This book addresses numerous
instances of Russian and non-Russian cooperation in the construction
and making of empire in the Russian Caucasus. Georgian educated
society was a world of discussion and debate similar in important
respects to Russian worlds of educated society throughout the
Caucasus, which themselves were always multi-ethnic (rossiiskii
rather than russkii). Like Russians in StPetersburg from the 1830s on,
Georgians were proud of their emerging press and vibrant commu-
nity of numerous “educated readers,” who were increasingly inter-
ested in Georgian plays, Georgian books, and Georgian history.^24
And again as in the capital cities of Russia, Georgian intellectuals in a
time of new ideas about civic participation and the nation worried
about their distance and estrangement from the lower orders and the
people of the countryside. In the wake of the ten-year anniversary of
the Georgian newspaper Droeba in 1876, the editors chose to bring at-
tention to the continuing problem of the distance of Georgian edu-
cated society from the people, a problem of “ignorance” that was also
a “weakness” which inhibited the process of national development.^25
Some Georgians blamed the imperial system itself, which offered a
little too much comfort to the Georgian upper classes.^26 Traditional
Russian social dilemmas were evident throughout the lands of the
empire, as were cultural terms of debate, themselves appropriated by