7 Russification and the Return
of Conquest
The colonization of the Caucasus by the native Russian element
will create in this rich borderland a firm bulwark in support of
the state, and will link [the region] more closely to the other parts
of the empire.
Holy Synod report, 1900^1“Russification” in the Caucasus was not so much a particular policy
as a broad series of trends, explored here in regard to intellectual his-
tory, memoir writing, international competition, and colonization
policy, which challenged the ideologies of a multi-ethnic empire de-
veloped by educated society from the 1840s on. They emerged in a
belligerent way at the turn of the twentieth century in response to ba-
sic Russian dilemmas about its simultaneous identity as both nation
and empire, but they were of course never far from the surface.^2 For
some military officials, it was simply a return to the long Caucasus
War, which in their view had never ended; for others, it was a com-
forting resurrection of the traditional symbols of empire. When Tsar
Alexander iii and his family travelled to Vladikavkaz in 1888, in the
tradition of a monarchy aware of the “ceremonial possibilities of
travel,” as Richard Wortman writes, his purpose was to illustrate im-
perial power and benelovence to provincial and borderland regions
far from StPetersburg.^3 The tsar approached a young Ossetian pupil
supported by the Society for the Restoration of Orthodoxy. “Do you
understand Russian?” “I understand, Your Imperial Highness,” the
boy replied, and the tsar was visibly pleased. In Vladikavkaz the im-
perial family was greeted with a rendition of “God Save the Tsar”
from the choir of the Ossetian Girls’ School.^4 Tsar, Orthodox
Christianity, and Russian culture and language still served in his
mind as the basis of empire. The “national myth,” emphasizes
Wortman, stood as the foundation of empire for Russia’s last two
tsars and their advisers.^5