135 Russification and the Return of Conquestland “like the Nile for Egypt.” Fadeev thought primarily of military
security and the power of the state.
In spite of his conservatism and glorification of the Russian tradi-
tion of conquest in the borderlands, Fadeev used modern means to
promote his vision of the empire. He was a publicist, like Zisserman,
Berzhe, and numerous other figures who rethought the empire and
were determined to educate the emerging Russian public about the
significance of colonial expansion. His goal, however, was a different
one. He opposed state censorship, notes Thaden, because he wanted
to witness the emergence of a public sphere aggressive about ques-
tions of expansion and international politics.^56 Fadeev took to the pen
to remind Russians about the significance of colonial expansion, the
potential of the Russian military, and the importance of a strong state
in Russia and the borderlands. Only the Russians and the French in
Algeria, he wrote, managed to penetrate to the depths of Asia, “to the
depths of barbarian countries.”^57 These belligerent writers were pri-
marily interested in glorious traditions of Russian conquest, rather
than visions of a multi-ethnic imperial community united by a com-
mon set of assumptions about Europe and enlightenment.
memoir and travel writing
Other genres of Russian writing about the North Caucasus and the
Transcaucasus and their history contributed to the conservative turn of
the late nineteenth century. The proliferation of memoir literature in
glorification of the conquest, though not a regime policy of course,
might also be considered as another aspect of this general atmosphere
of “Russification.”^58 While educated society in the 1850s worked to es-
tablish a foundation for imperial rule unrelated to military conquest,
numerous Russian writers by 1900 were committed to maintaining the
myth of the righteous conquest. The sixty-year-long Caucasus War,
wrote the editor of a 1904 collection of essays about the event, “re-
minds every Russian about the glorious activities of his ancestors.”^59
The volume offered not only an introduction to the ethnography, geog-
raphy, and history of the region, but “most importantly, to those heroic
Russian people” who conquered the Caucasus.^60 These numerous “old
Caucasian veterans” and their encounter with “strange wild tribes”
and “constant danger” might finally get a chance to share their story. In
1830 Lermontov had written that “one can only regret that so little of
this is ever put down on paper.”^61 By the late nineteenth century, how-
ever, his Maxim Maximych had come of age.
There were some very important dissenters from this glorification
of conquest, such as Leo Tolstoy. In Hadji Murat Tolstoy returned to