56 Orientalism and Empirenon-Russians themselves as not entirely useful, an odd situation that
perhaps parallels the otherwise very different contemporary debate
in the American Southwest over Spanish language instruction for
Hispanics.
Conservative critics alarmed by the implications of concessions to
native language instruction on the frontiers of the empire were in-
creasingly vocal in the later nineteenth century. Proponents of
“Russification” looked for imperial administrative conformity and
were suspicious of diversity and innovation in method and practice
on the frontier. By 1885 the Restoration Society could claim credit for
the construction of 52 churches, the restoration of 24, the support of
137 church parishes, the building of 46 primary schools for mountain
children, where in some cases enrolment reached 65 students, the
founding of the Aleksandrov Men’s Teaching Seminary and the
Ossetian Vladikavkaz Girls’ School, the support of some 70 students
in institutions of higher education, support for the writing of moun-
tain languages, and the translation of the Bible and religious litera-
ture into mountain languages.^116 In search of administrative
uniformity, however, Konstantin Pobedonostsev in that year cur-
tailed the activities of the society and made it subordinate to the Holy
Synod by placing it within the Georgian Exarchate. He objected to its
continuing autonomy and administrative distance from the concerns
and practices of St Petersburg.^117
The notion of faith and its relationship to the preservation of the past
that informed the work of the Restoration Society granted the
Russian state and the educated community in the Caucasus an impe-
rial purpose and mission of world-historical significance. Russians
found themselves in continuity with the great imperial heritage of
Orthodox Christianity, the builders of the “Third Rome” and the suc-
cessor to Constantinople. As a result of their expansion into the
southern borderlands, Russians could congratulate themselves on
their new-found ability to counter the historic decline of Christianity
in its confrontation with Islam. Pan-Slavists, such as Ivan Aksakov,
who drew on the Slavophile tradition posed a similar problem for
Russia regarding the Balkans, where small peoples needed the
Russian “hand of salvation” against “Muslim barbarism and tyr-
anny” and “Asian hordes” in order to maintain their Orthodoxy and
recover a glorious past.^118 In the North Caucasus the “Eastern
question,” so to speak, could be pursued within the borders of the
empire, and the preservation of the past was the chief means of coun-
tering the strength of Islam and the Ottomans. Orthodoxy and the re-
covery of tradition facilitated the conquest and served as the basis for