41 The Society for the Restoration of OrthodoxySlavists, and other conservative Russians belligerently continued to
bring attention to this issue throughout the imperial era.^21
Educated society and officialdom on the frontier made their own
contribution to the ideas of intellectuals and empire-builders in
StPetersburg and Moscow. Russians and Georgians throughout the
nineteenth century depicted Muslim Turks as the source of “oppres-
sion and violence,” and viewed the Russian conquest of the Caucasus
as an opportunity to counter the historic rise of Islam in the Mediter-
ranean and Black Sea regions. “Yes! We live in a wonderful place /
Our warlike Kavkaz,” sang Iablochkina at the Tiflis Theatre on
21October 1853, “Protecting Kavkaz is Orthodox Rus’.”^22 She used
the medieval designation (Rus’) to refer to Russia and performed in
front of eight dragoon squadrons and numerous officers and other
representatives of the Russian military, in honour of yet another war
with the Muslim Turks, the Crimean War of 1853–56. The Russian
military thus promoted religious conversion, and the assumptions
that informed the missionary efforts of the regime reflected an acute
awareness of the historic encounter between an expansive Islam and
a retreating Christianity. Eventually the mountaineers would learn
Russian, emphasized Aleksandr A. Begichev of the Ministry of War
in 18 46, and “beyond the Kuban unfrightening Cherkes” would
stand in prayer before an image of Christ.^23
The distant and unique setting of this imperial frontier, however,
also a borderland region in the global encounter between Christianity
and Islam, produced an unusual set of ideas about the North
Caucasus and its mountain dwellers. The ideas of missionaries and
sympathetic officials were shaped by a powerful set of assumptions
about identity, tradition, and Eastern Orthodoxy. Mountaineers, some
of whom would contest Russian infidel rule for some thirty years,
were apparently not Muslim at all. The colonial context of French offi-
cials and scholars in Algeria, who were similarly opposed by hostile
Berber mountaineers from rugged mountains in the northeast, Sufi
orders, and a powerful emir, offers a helpful comparative example.
Proponents of what is since known as the “Kabyle myth” held that
this rugged and isolated Berber existence had left the mountaineers
free of the influence of Islam brought by the expanding Ottomans.^24
In its most extreme form, French administrators and scholars claimed
that the Berbers even had a common past with the French, that of the
ancient Roman Empire. French colonial administrators attempted to
divorce contemporary Berber identity from the history of Islam. The
secret to the colonial future lay in the distant past.
Educated society in the Caucasus also hoped to “restore” the histori-
cal faith of the North Caucasus and hence create a more promising