57 The Society for the Restoration of Orthodoxyempire, in particular for the imperial family, high officials, and many
Russians in the military. Georgia’s own struggles to maintain its
historic Christian identity in the face of Islamic threats served as an
important example and guide in the region. Georgians themselves
worked as teachers, missionaries, and officials in the society, and they
frequently contributed to the official, newspaper, and scholarly
discussions.
Missionaries in the schools founded by the society associated the
waning of Christian tradition and the rise of Islam in the region with
intellectual stagnation among dormant, backward, and “Eastern”
peoples. The absence of written scripts, literacy, and a literate tradi-
tion contributed to the making of a culturally stagnant frontier.
Mountaineers who could read, they reasoned, had access to the en-
during textual truths of the Christian tradition; those who could not
were left to suffer the ravages of time and the backwardness of their
culture. Knowlege of texts offered continuity with the heritage of
Orthodoxy and civilization itself, while oral traditions and illiteracy
promised confusion and a belief system that served to deny access to
that heritage. The Russian imperial and Orthodox community, in the
view of these missionaries, was a literate one, united by common as-
sumptions about the character of civilization and the relationship of
Orthodox Russia to its growth and development. “Literacy is the ba-
sic foundation of history,” wrote Khomiakov; “therefore enlightened
peoples who have forgotten their writing were reduced to a forgetful-
ness on a par with savages.”^119 Literacy allowed for access to the mes-
sage of the Gospels and a genuine and heartfelt Christianity that
would make one immune from the temptations of other traditions in
the borderlands. The restoration and recovery of the past was crucial
to the imperial future, as well as to the maintenance of the true faith
and its rituals.
The work of the Restoration Society serves as an illustration of the
impact of a series of conservative concerns about the practice and
maintenance of the correct faith. This matter was an especially deli-
cate question in borderland regions influenced by Islam and close to
Muslim empires. The society’s work also serves as an example of a
form of empire-building that stressed religious conformity as a kind
of imperial identity while sanctioning linguistic diversity. The North
Caucasus also reveals that the extent and reach of the “Il’minskii
method” and the imperial concern about “apostasy” went beyond
the eastern borderlands of the Middle Volga and Central Asia. The
method emerged from some of the basic concerns of Russian intellec-
tual history and transcended the famous Il’minskii. The encourage-
ment of native literacy and education also had implications not yet