84 Orientalism and Empirethe power of God, and the virtues of sitting “quietly during les-
sons.” Literacy and hard work apparently offered the opportunity of
upward mobility, as was evident from the story of the poor peasants
whose progress in their studies eventually enabled them to help
their parents out of poverty.^181 Bartolomei’s reader was also in-
tended to acquaint Russians with Abkhaz language and culture, and
it included a collection of Abkhaz proverbs.^182 Bartolomei also
worked on a Chechen Reader which was sponsored by the Restoration
Society and contained similar lessons about the importance of native
education and literacy, as a counter to the Arabic of the mullas.^183
Ossetians such as Vasilii Tsoraev and Daniel Chonkadze used
Uslar’s alphabet to publish collections of Ossetian folk tales and
proverbs.^184 Russia’s Orientalists equipped mountain peoples with
written versions of their spoken tongues.
drawing borders
Ethnographers, geographers, linguists, and other scholars who attrib-
uted a culture and a potential cultural and intellectual life to the
mountaineers presented a picture that was still fairly controversial at
the mid-nineteenth century. As Uslar hinted in his defence of his
work, not all Russians in the Caucasus were comfortable with the im-
plications of comparative linguistics. Officials in St Petersburg and
the Caucasus, convinced of the virtues of empire-wide administrative
consistency and of the universality of Russian customs and forms of
rule, routinely objected to the special concessions of military-native
administration (voenno-narodnoe upravlenie) and the special mountain
courts. The views of ethnographers and other scholars discussed here
were especially contested by administrators and military officials pre-
occupied with mountaineer affairs in unstable regions such as Terek
oblast. Captain Zolotarev advocated mass exile for the mountaineers
of Terek oblast in 1863 as a “final resolution” to the problem of ad-
ministration, and he stressed the need for firm colonial control over
the North Caucasus in light of the “inevitable war with the European
powers.”^185 Like Europeans, Russians grew increasingly intolerant of
ethnic and national differences as the century wore on, and the tradi-
tion of conquest and exile continued to pose an alternative attractive
to many Russian officials and members of educated society. Yet the
vision of empire suggested by ethnographers and other scholars left a
powerful legacy to the modern era.
By the late nineteenth century, all Russians in the Caucasus associ-
ated the mountaineers with particular cultural traditions, languages,
histories, and a bounded territory. A narod, Russians assumed, was