105 Customary Lawcollection of mountaineer folklore but a compilation of criminal inci-
dents that posed difficulties for the regime’s administration of justice
in the region. The gender question raised the problem of Islam as
well, because imperial readers tended to associate such views and
treatment of women not with indigenous and “natural” custom but
with the heritage of Islam. True “custom” remained sacrosanct. Crim-
inal events were frequent, but they could be explained by other fac-
tors, chief of which was the absence of Russia’s imperial presence in
the region in the past.
These assumptions continued to govern Russian thinking about
mountaineer criminality until the end of the imperial era, with a minor
but interesting exception. By the turn of the century, with Russian cul-
ture and rule no longer novel to the North Caucasus, it was increas-
ingly difficult for Russians to portray Islam as the wrecker of culture
and Russia, by contrast, as its preserver. Some Russians and non-
Russians identified other processes and developments as sources of the
decline and erosion of custom as well. General Mikheev of Terek oblast
criticized new mountaineer habits such as smoking, drinking, and the
wearing of new clothes and jewellery, and noted with chagrin that such
practices were inspired by the exposure of the mountaineers to Russian
culture.^97 The city, source of cultural decline and corruption, was in-
truding into the village, and the irony was obvious that Russian rule
had served to facilitate this intrusion. Ethnographers and travellers
such as A. Krasnov visited Svan villages and were disappointed to find
store-bought rather than handmade clothes.^98 Ossetian contributors to
Russian ethnographic publications such as Dzhantemir Shanaev sug-
gested that Ossetian judicial traditions such as the historic sanctity of
the oath (ard; in Russian, prisiaga) had actually declined with the onset
of Russian rule. The continuing demise of tribal solidarity, Shanaev
maintained in 1873, was eroding a historic tradition that resolved dis-
putes as well as any European manner of administering justice.^99 The
colonizing state that was preoccupied with the preservation of the past
was of course simultaneously responsible for the diverse changes we
generally call “modernization.”
legal russification
More important to the fate of customary law in the North Caucasus
was the statist tradition described earlier. Such views had not disap-
peared. In 1883 Ivan Tukheev, of the Ministry of State Domains,
emphasized the tragedy of the many Russian losses in the course of
the long Caucasus War and advocated the abolition of the special
courts and the special form of military-native rule (voenno-narodnoe