141 Russification and the Return of Conquestmountain communities carried on an active trade on the Black Sea.
Russian officials hoped that imperial rule might even increase fruit
and vegetable produce for export to the capital cities of Russia,
decreasing the need to import such things from Constantinople,
Algeria, or Egypt.^96 In their haste, ignorance, and lack of respect for
their new surroundings, however, early immigrants actually chopped
down the trees in order to gather the fruit more easily. Early in the new
century some 17,000 Russians and other immigrants were reckoned to
be starving or suffering from fever in “that very same region where
the mountaineers lived well and developed advanced agriculture [za-
nimalis’ vysokoiu kul’turoiu] ... How are we to explain this strange and
sad phenomenon?” asked agricultural officials.^97 Given the history of
war, the tragic exile of the Adygei, and now the languishing lands of
the Black Sea littoral, whose “culture” was more advanced? The com-
mander of Kuban oblast answered the question in 1896 when he sug-
gested that many of the new Russian settlers “in fact belong neither
here nor there and have acquired that cut-off character of nomads.”^98
Nomadism, of course, traditionally referred to the frontier and its bor-
derland peoples on the margins of true faith and culture.
The influence of Russian culture might even be negative. The early-
twentieth-century commander of Terek oblast, General Mikheev, heir
to the position of Loris-Melikov, suggested to the tsar in 1909 that the
influence of Russian culture itself was one of the many problems
which complicated the administration of the oblast, an unusual com-
plaint from a Russian general, oblast commander, and Cossack ata-
man.^99 Mikheev explained that “half-savage races” were unable to
distinguish between the positive and negative sides of more civilized
cultures and frequently adopted the less-admirable characteristics
during the initial stages of cultural contact. This phenomenon ex-
plained why more natives were smoking and frequenting restau-
rants, and why native women seemed overly interested in fancy
boots, beaded jewellery, and other luxuries; “in a word, the require-
ments of the household have been transformed.”^100 Exposure to the
world of Russia and greater contact with the institutions and prac-
tices of the empire meant that the mountaineers, he said, were “grad-
ually losing all their best old traditions.”^101 Russian rule, Mikheev
complained, was slowly eroding traditional sources of authority in
mountain villages, leaving the mountaineers without the benefit of
their traditional sources of cohesion. Village elders were seen by the
mountaineers as compromised because of their association with
Russian rule and hence lacked authority and the respect of the popu-
lace.^102 Traditional culture was a source of stability in a time of
difficult social and cultural change.