108 Orientalism and Empireelders who cooperated too closely with the regime found themselves
in great physical danger.^117
The remarkable hostility expressed by many late-imperial officials
toward the different judicial practices and traditions of the mountain-
eer perhaps exemplified their concern, even fear, that the centre
might no longer hold. The “judicial norms” of Russia were the judi-
cial norms of the empire, claimed the chair of the Council of Ministers
in 1913, and a useful and “strong cement for the uniting of the sepa-
rate parts of the state into a single unit.”^118 Commissions continued to
study the possibility of abolishing the courts and military-native ad-
ministration through 1914 and 191 5, but by this time officials in
StPetersburg were distracted by more pressing matters, such as the
prosecution of the First World War and the influx of refugees from
Turkey and Persia into the Russian Caucasus.^119
Opponents of this statist imperial mentality countered with the
logic and patience of the customary law tradition, mixed with a
greater knowledge of the local situation, which led them to question
the wisdom of dictating local affairs in the terms of St Petersburg.
While the oblast governors in Kars and Batumi found Reinke’s ideas
promising, both the military governor of Dagestan and the com-
mander of Zakatal’skii okrug countered his view of the courts and,
more importantly, questioned the implications of these ideas. In their
eyes, Reinke’s ambitious ideas about cultural transformation ap-
peared viable only if undertaken through violent measures. These of-
ficials convinced Vorontsov-Dashkov that such a policy would not
increase respect for Russian rule among the mountaineers.^120 More
theoretically, A.V. Moskalev reminded his colleagues in the Ministry
of Justice in 1913 that “these people possess a legal consciousness of
the 14th or 15th century.”^121 The mountaineers were relics of the past,
he said, with a world view “completely contradictory” to the Russian
judicial system.^122
The imperial regime did not have four or five centuries to spare, and
the debate was quickly overtaken by the events of 1914–17. After the
continuation of the concessionary policies through the 1920s, the Soviet
authorities decisively resolved the matter with the astonishing an-
nouncement in 1927 that both the shari’a and the adat were unaccept-
able guides to the administration of justice in the North Caucasus.^123
Their French colonial counterparts in the Maghrib and other parts of
the colonial world would never have dreamed of such high-
handedness. The new ideology of progress propagated by the Soviet
regime, univeralist in pretension, bore many similarities to the imperial
mentality of Reinke and his colleagues at the Ministry of Justice from
1911 to 1914. Soviet administrators called “backwardness” what