133 Russification and the Return of Conquestneeded further clarification in an empire unique for its growth of na-
tionalism more advanced among the periphery peoples (Balts,
Ukrainians, Georgians, Armenians) than among the “imperial” peo-
ple. Uslar’s 1881 work on ancient myths about the Caucasus pos-
sessed the vocabularly and assumptions of Danilevskii.^43 He explored
antiquity in order to come to conclusions about the hierarchy of peo-
ples in the present. Peoples and civilizations were not all the same:
“The doctrine of the brotherhood of all peoples is not a doctine about
their equality.”^44 “Negroes,” for example, regardless of their individ-
ual accomplishments or level of education, could never “become
Europeans”; Huns, Turks, and Mongols had been and would always
be “hostile to any human progress,” as they were not among the select
“historical peoples” chosen to play a leading role on the stage of “uni-
versal history.”^45 In Uslar’s view, the mountain peoples were obvi-
ously not “historic peoples,” but they did possess a historic antiquity
that demanded preservation against the weathering impact of time.
But was it obvious to a linguistic specialist on the region that Russia
was indeed the “historical” people when Georgia and Armenia pos-
sessed literary languages from the fourth and fifth centuries? Eastern
languages such as Turkish or Arabic were obviously out of the ques-
tion as potential alphabets for the transciption of mountain languages,
but Uslar and his colleagues were well aware of the fact that the gut-
tural sounds of Georgian made the Georgian script a reasonable candi-
date. Cyrillic, however, might eventually give small peoples access to
the civilization of a “world-historical people.”
the eastern question at home
Militant Pan-Slavism and a belligerent approach to the “Eastern ques-
tion” was an important expression of conservative thought in interna-
tional politics, with major implications for the blurring of the
boundaries between domestic and foreign policy. If imperial identity
was essentially Slavic identity, and if smaller Slavic peoples risked los-
ing their “tribal particularities” if abandoned to the pernicious influ-
ence of other civilizations, then the Russian state had much work to do
in eastern Europe, the Balkans, and maybe even Constantinople.
Ottoman and Muslim influence in the Balkans, for example, according
to Aksakov, severed the ability of small peoples such as the
Chernogortsy, who according to him faced extinction “to the last per-
son” as a result of “pressure from Asian hordes,” to maintain and pre-
serve their links to the past.^46 The Chernogortsy, in his view, were at
the forefront of the battle against Islam and the Turks, in a way similar
to Cossacks within the empire, “pioneers of Slavic freedom!”^47