95 Customary LawImperial educated society envisioned the courts as a site where
mountaineer conflicts, complex and often incomprehensible to re-
gime officials, might be resolved in the traditional terms of historic
custom. They were for mountaineers only. Conflicts that included
Russians or other nationalities, or those that included an accusation
against a mountaineer from any “person not of native origin,” or
even conflicts that required the presence of a non-mountaineer as a
witness, were sent on to district or oblast Russian courts.^35 Murder
was also handled in the higher courts, as well as armed robbery for a
significant sum of money and, of course, actions that officials took as
a direct challenge to their authority.^36 Questions that the Russians
identified as belonging to the realm of “custom,” however, were to be
resolved by mountaineers themselves. The sud’i (deputies) and qadi
(Muslim judges) who sat on the courts were indirectly elected by the
local populace, in that each tribe was allowed to choose two candi-
dates to attend a conference to choose the deputies and judges for the
district court. The process was carefully controlled by imperial offi-
cials, however, as the final list of choices was reviewed by the district
commander or the Cossack section (otdel) ataman and then sent to the
oblast commander, who possessed the final privilege of appointment.
Any figure found inappropriate by the Russians could be arbitrarily
removed from the list.^37 Muslim law was relegated to family matters
of marriage and inheritance, for which the qadis were consulted.^38 As
in other parts of the colonized world, customary law was codified by
the regime in order to compel the mountaineers to follow their own
“custom.” “Custom became a resource of the instruments of govern-
ment, rather than a resource of the people,” writes Martin Chanock of
central Africa.^39 Each case was recorded in a casebook (nastol’nyi
zhurnal), as a written precedent that might in subsequent cases serve
as a guide.^40
These guides then sometimes took precedence over the wishes of
villagers themselves, presumably the real makers of “custom.”
Elders, mullas, and other “respected figures” from a village in
Kazikumukhsk district in Dagestan, for example, saw their ideas
about transforming the resolution of horse thievery and other issues
rejected by the military governor of Dagestan in 1907. The villagers
apparently viewed adat as a flexible and fluid means of resolving
conflict and village disputes. The military governor, however, was be-
holden to officials in Tbilisi, who were reluctant to change previously
codified adat compilations or encourage too much administrative
and legal variation in the already complex region.^41
The regime was thus the protector of mountain customary law,
which put it in the odd and ironic position of promoting the process