111 The Russian Shamilthe flight of Shamil, the exchanges between Bariatinskii and the
imam, and the behaviour of Shamil in captivity. The most intriguing
question for Russian readers was his response to the world of Russia
itself. In this encounter between backwardness and civilization, as the
Russians imagined it, the intrigue for them lay in Shamil’s moment of
recognition of the veracity of this contrast. He was to see the future
and, as a result, re-evaluate his own past and self. The encounter was
limited and self-congratulatory for the Russians, in that it merely
served to confirm the assumptions of Russian readers about the dif-
ferences between West and East.
In the former Soviet Union, scholars have devoted little time to this
aspect of the encounter. Soviet scholarship initially treated Shamil as
the leader of a “national liberation” war and then, in a dramatic re-
versal, as one of the many “henchmen” of “Anglo-Turkish agents,” as
S.K. Bushuev wrote during the Cold War.^3 Later Soviet scholars
tended to ignore not only Sufism but also the character of Shamil
himself, and instead attempted to determine the structural changes in
mountaineer society that had precipitated the colonial war. They con-
cluded that the development of the mountaineer “raiding system,”
related to the transition of mountaineer society from a feudal to a
bourgeois economy, had prompted mountaineer attacks upon the ex-
panding Russian presence in the Caucasus. Socio-economic change,
rather than a holy war, in this view inspired mountaineer hostility to
the Russians.^4 Only very recently have post-Soviet scholars in
Dagestan and the North Caucasus begun to rediscover Shamil.^5 In the
West there has been far more interest in the Russian creation of
Shamil.^6
For Russian readers, 1859 marked a dividing line in the imam’s
personal history. His past belonged to the Romanticized world of ex-
otic savagery. Shamil’s relationship to his mother, for example, was
described in a 1859 pamphlet published in Moscow called Shamil: A
Description of His Life, His Capture and Imprisonment and How He
Endured 95 Blows to the Back from a Whip at the Will of the Prophet.^7 This
story described an 1843 effort by the Chechens to abandon the war
and submit to the Russians. They sent four deputies to Shamil to re-
quest further aid or be allowed to end their resistance. Fearful of his
response, they convinced his mother to intercede on their behalf and
offered her a present worth 2,000 rubles in silver for her effort. Like
all mountaineers, A. Kuzanov claimed, she was devoted to Shamil
but suffered from “greed for money.”^8 Shamil somehow deciphered
this state of affairs, however, and retreated to a mosque for three days
to seek guidance from Allah. He finally emerged, his face pale, his
eyes red with tears, to announce the treachery of the Chechens and