69 Russian Ethnographers and Caucasus Mountaineers“classical” antiquity they memorialized was that of the Byzantine
heritage of the Eastern Roman Empire.
Berzhe’s essay on the Chechens, Chechnia i Chechentsy (Chechnia
and the Chechens), published in Tbilisi in 1859 and recently reissued
in Groznyi, set the tone for the general respect for the past over a de-
graded present in Russian scholarship on the region. Chechens in the
ethnography were undoubtedly “savage” in a way familiar to impe-
rial readers: the authority of the father in the family, Berzhe claimed,
is all-powerful until the children reach the age when they too can
wield a weapon, at which point the relationship between “father and
children is shaped by the rights of the stronger”; children also lack re-
spect for their mothers, he wrote, who in turn are reduced to a state of
“slavery” in relation to their husbands, and so on.^69 And his points of
reference were perpetually imperial, meaningful to members of im-
perial educated society. To orient the reader to the Valerik River, for
eample, he refered to the 1839 victory of General Galafeev there and
to the poem written by Lermontov of the same name. In other places
the work reads like a manual for Russian military planners.^70
Primitive peoples, however, in spite of their savagery, might be res-
cued and set straight by imperial rule and its influence. Islam, Berzhe
emphasized, was a recent event, historically alien to Chechnia and
brought only by missionary mullas and, even more recently, the mu-
rids of Shamil. He depicted Chechen customary law (the adat) as a
distinctive aspect of Chechen ethnic identity, historically constituted
by the Chechens in order to free themselves from the domination of
Kabard and Kumyk princes, an indigenous, genuinely Chechen cul-
tural practice, in contrast to the foreign shari’a (Muslim law). Muslim
traditions threatened the indigenous and genuine customs of the
Chechens. Primitive life was thus not entirely negative. Like mission-
aries and educators such as Nikolai Il’minskii on the eastern frontier,
Berzhe thought that primitive expressions of culture and faith were at
least indigenous and hence superior to the foreign influence of Islam,
and the basis for progress along the path toward civilization. Cus-
tomary law was for him the first step in the formation of social life,
which required a firm and stable state to enforce social norms above
the mere individual caprice that ruled in primitive society. The ab-
sence of such a state, he maintained, resulted in the widespread and
pernicious mountain traditions of the blood feud. What the Chechens
needed was guidance and exposure to the “educated peoples,” which
in time would raise them from their present situation of “half-
savagery” to the pursuit of “peaceful civilization [grazhdanstven-
nost’].”^71 Berzhe was even kind in places to Shamil, who was a “ge-
nius” for his efforts to mould a people of primitive instincts and