107 Customary LawThis push for bureaucratic uniformity and centralized rule on the
part of officials in St Petersburg represented a return to the earlier and
statist tradition of thought about the purpose of legal codification. In
contrast to the Romantic tolerance and interest in the discovery of the
unique cultural practices of a “people,” the statist tradition was pri-
marily concerned with the maintenance of order and the strengthen-
ing of the authority of the state itself. This process has perhaps been
misnamed “Russification.” It was not an effort to impose “Russian”
traditions upon other parts of the empire (Russian peasants too had
customary law courts) but an effort to extend the imperial legal
norms of the European-educated bureaucracy to everyone. This tradi-
tion shared similarities with the French colonial notion of “assimila-
tion” to the universal practices of the European Enlightenment. “A
good law is good for all men,” argued Condorcet, and hence Algeri-
ans and other North Africans were to be deprived of the right to prac-
tise their local and customary ways.^111 In the spirit of the Great
Reforms, Vorontsov-Dashkov still referred to “legal consciousness”
(pravosoznaniia), but he and other officials were no longer willing to
wait out the discrepancies of comparative historical development.
They considered the level of mountaineer autonomy over the judicial
process to be too high. Vorontsov-Dashkov probably would have re-
sponded in a similar fashion to judicial questions among Russian
peasants, but it would be senseless to speak of the “Russification” of
Russian peasants. The relationship between educated society (obsh-
chestvo) and people (narod) bore important similarities to the colonial
encounter in the borderlands.
By the early twentieth century, Russian officials had lost patience
with their continuing inability to monitor the administration of justice
in the North Caucasus. Village elders frequently concealed their
knowledge of local crimes from Russian officials;^112 mullas and qadi
maintained the predominant influence over the workings of the courts
and pointedly conducted affairs in Arabic, a language inaccessible to
the majority of Russian officials;^113 and insufficient resources left many
cases for the mountaineers to resolve themselves.^114 In response, the
regime attempted to require each village to maintain within its village
administration a clerk (pisar’) literate in Russian.^115 Colonial officials
were hoping for direct communication with reasonably loyal moun-
taineer figures who possessed no ties to Muslim religious leaders. For
this reason the regime took seriously its appointment of village elders.
Frequently, however, the Russians were manipulated by such figures,
while in other cases mountaineers trustworthy to the Russians turned
out to be “the most mediocre natives” without influence and prestige
in the village, as General Mikheev complained.^116 In times of rebellion,